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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but think part of the technology problem is also caused by budget constraints. Less budget means less actual testing and experimentation and more theoretical planning, work and design. I imagine more real world experience with tests and experiments for those involved would help these problems get solved sooner, possibly before they even come about.

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It is not clear that more budget would make things go faster. 9 women can't make a baby in 9 months, for example. It really depends on how well the project could utilize the extra funding (they probably could do with more, but at some point progress/dollar would have to fall).

It is just like software, actually.

Well in this case it would have. The sub contractors went through multiple stop-work start-work iterations and there is always a loss of efficiency with that as the engineers get shuffled. The ones on the program when it starts frequently aren't the same people as when it was stopped.

Good point: consistency in funding is pretty important, and to manage projects for the long term...also in industry. It would be tough not to know what your budget would be for 5 years on a 5 year project.

"9 women can't make a baby in 9 months, for example."

Very true. However, 9 women and 1 man are more likely to give you a baby in 9 months that 1 women and 1 man.

Don't mean to be pedantic, but I think it's "9 women can't make a baby in 1 month", but they can make 9 babies in 9 months. Bandwidth vs. latency.

I'm sure NASA could speed up the overall project if they had more resources by doing lots of things in parallel. NASA went from having unmanned ICBMs to putting a man on the moon in under a decade when they were given enormous funding.

The Apollo project is historical precedent that shows that precisely this type of project can go much faster, given the required budget and focus.

The second part here is also important, of course. Just pouring more money onto a problem isn't necessarily going to help if e.g. there is more focus on political turf wars than there is on the actual technical challenge.

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