But the Shuttle became what it became for reasons that Starship doesn’t have to deal with. Shuttle had multiple masters (NASA and DoD) driving a bastardized design. The non-assembly line of NASA is a feature, not a bug: by spreading work across many congressional districts it mitigates political defunding risk. Im not defending those, but they are important context for those who pretend the differences are a signal of government incompetence.
not to mention shuttle as we knew it was never supposed to be its final form. the Block 1 Shuttles were more or less intended to be a MVP and they would follow along with Block II orbiters. But of course Block Two never happened, and we just got incremental updates of the block 1s.
I understand what you’re saying, but in a larger sense the fact that distributing labor and increasing costs is necessary as risk-prevention against our own politicians is a sign of a broken system of incentives and representation
Consider this: had they not, NASA may not exist. Considering Musk himself said SpaceX would not exist had NASA not bailed them out, it also means SpaceX likely wouldn’t exist. In other words, SpaceX also needed those distributed wastes, they just were externalities to the company. A broader context of the system is important when diagnosing systemic issues.
I usually agree that the hybrid approach gives the best outcomes. The govt is necessary when the risk is too great for private industry to bear and the private side tends to move faster on innovation.
NASA paid SpaceX for a service, and SpaceX delivered that service on time and vastly cheaper than their competitors who were also paid by NASA (ISS resupply).
In the case of transporting humans to the ISS, SpaceX did it vastly cheaper than the competitor who was also paid by NASA. That competitor has never done what they were paid to do.
If there is anyone or anything to be angry at, it seems mighty strange to be angry at the company who actually did what they were paid to do when another company took much more money and didn’t deliver.
Fair, “bailout” is not a good term for an era where taxpayers give loans to floundering companies.
What Musk admitted to was NASA “saved” SpaceX with a last minute contract to prevent their bankruptcy. I would make the argument that SpaceX would not exist without all those early government contracts. It’s a shrewd business move: use a self-insured entity (the govt) when risk is the highest because it pushes the financial risk to the taxpayer, and gradually move to more privatized customers when risk is lower and insurance costs can make such launches economically viable.
I do agree Boeing CST was not run well and I’ve thrown plenty of ire there way. But that is an entirely different argument and a bit of whataboutism.
Taxpayers did not give a loan to SpaceX anymore than they gave one to any contractor they pay for a service.
The government paid SpaceX for a service, which was delivered as promised. This happens hundreds of thousands of times a year with tons of companies being paid to do things for the government.
I was clear that it was a contract that saved them from bankruptcy. A contract they could leverage for loans, but I clearly said contract. I wish HN would limit accounts that are very new and seem to misrepresent other posts.
There’s a common theme in HN discussions where people mistake understanding a system for evangelizing it. Really nothing could be further from the truth.
this is well and truly common all over the internet -- you explain how some system, something fairly non-technical even, say, a common social failing, some institutional bias or what-have-you, works, and you have a bunch of people go on the offensive as though you've just endorsed the thing. so you have to hedge practically anything with a token virtue-signal, even in communities where it's pretty strongly implied that you're on the same page about considering the thing bad.
if you'll indulge a tangent, i can only chalk up the increase in this phenomenon over the time i've been online to the consolidation of online discussion to a handful of sites that have become ever more adept and efficient at creating filter bubbles. and it's always the sites where that hasn't taken root, where everyone's seeing the same thing, that then catch a reputation for being hellholes full of terrible people, because naturally, the majority of people engage with those sites not directly, but through screenshots shared on the major socials, and those major socials are incentivised to push you content that you engage with. then, as we all know, angry people click more. so of course as a user of one of those major socials, a majority of those screenshots the site pushes you end up being those that depict speech your own filter bubble cohort finds abhorrent. hn is actually subject to this dynamic a little bit.
It’s evidence that they are solving different problems. Does the fact that Musk spends hundreds of millions on election cycles mean he’s incompetent, or he’s trying to mitigate a political risk you and I don’t have to deal with?
As said elsewhere, that simplistic take falls apart when you realize there would not be a SpaceX if there wasn’t a NASA.
[−]servo_sausage · 2026-11-15 Sun 04:38 UTC ·
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I'm not super convinced that the commercial aerospace industry really needed NASA once super high value satellite services came about in the 90s.
The ideal of a good government industry program, is to create a domestic industry, and A: maintain it at a minimum level for whatever goal is in focus (defence, technology familiarity, investment certainty). And B to help it grow to be independent of the government, so the profits and funding can go elsewhere.
To me, most of what NASA did after Skylab are a bit questionable. With most of the high profile stuff being of limited value compare to the RF and solid state electronics projects.
I mean, Musk himself stated SpaceX needed NASA. New entrants especially benefit from a self insured customer because private industry won’t accept that level of risk.
I agree with a lot of your point, but would probably caveat a lot of the JPL work.
You are shoehorning in an entirely different argument. The question is not about whether NASA invested, or loaned, or contracted or whatever other funding mechanism. It is whether their existence is predicated on the existence of the other, and whether they are both dealing with the same problems.
When people fail to acknowledge that, it becomes a vehicle for a digression and creates tired discussions that follow the same well-worn paths.
I mean, considering nothing like it had been done before (or since) kinda proves the inefficient approach worked. I'm not defending gov inefficiency but often it still leads to good results somehow (and also major disasters, sigh)
What does worked mean in this context? A barely reusable craft that risked human lives to launch mundane satellites and was so unreliable DOD stopped using and was so expensive NASA couldn’t afford to keep it running?
With the technology available and the requirements of the missions it was intended to fulfill, that is what was built. You are being stubborn and annoying.
Can see your point, that spreading the constructions sites across different states was necessary in order to get it built, but in terms of pure engineering, this is probably a negative.
Guess the point is that generally speaking, large scale engineering is typically not done at efficient and creative-levels when directed by the government. Governments have too many stakeholders that have needs that have little do with with engineering that need to be satisfied
...And of course, there are exceptions -guessing the Gemini and Apollo programs would be a good examples.
... oh, and am not trying to call you out, just trying to think through this for myself as well.
What makes you think Gemini and Apollo are counterexamples? They were successful, but were also heavily dependent on contractors and occurred when NASA funding was many multiples of today’s budget when measured by percentage of GDP.
Well, they seemed like highly effective government programs as they were able to get people to the moon under a very tight deadline (and also knew they were extremely expensive programs. Kind of crazy the amounts relatively to gdp they were spending).
And, if they weren't, backs up that the government is not typically a good overseer when it comes engineering programs
(although, still seems like when there is a very strong need, governments can be very good partners).
There is nothing inherently wrong with 'government' providing the source of funding for these programs, and there's nothing wrong with spreading parts of the program across different regions. In fact, in a way it can be cheaper. With the Apollo testing facilities in Mississippi, the Apollo program being built out of Huntsville, and the other 7 locations across the US--you can adequately tap higher end talent while moving some components to cheaper locations to work on.
Agree actually. The government basically funded Spacex for Falcon 9 through the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, and probably some of Starship's development too. Yeah, the funding wasn't the question, it's whether the government is a good overseer of programs like this.
Regarding spreading the parts of the development/manufacturing across different regions, am sure there are good benefits to doing this, and cost efficiency is definitely one of them (Boeing's manufacturing is a great example, as well as most auto companies). So yeah, you're right there. But when the government does it, it often is for political reasons, so you wonder if they really do gain cost efficiencies? Hmm...
Personally, my take is the earlier in the development process you are of a product (or vehicle), the better it is to keep everything tight knit (yeah, am a believer in the major concepts of agile development - small, integrated teams working close together, able to iterate fast). And feels like this is also true for design teams in general, no matter what the size of the company. It pays to keep them together as much as possible.
But the more mature a product gets, like a car company that's been building cars for decades, it seems like spreading out manufacturing could be a cost savings.
[−]Alive-in-2025 · 2026-11-15 Sun 06:08 UTC ·
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No, he's trying to bully his way into forcing the government to do what he wants, and he can because he is extremely wealthy. It just happens that in this case, it yields something useful. That is a poor model, the rich should not arbitrarily get their own way.
“Solving different problems” means intentionally creating inefficiencies in an engineering project so that voters can get a little cut of the government funding. It’s a roundabout way of buying votes.
It shows that the government’s incentives are not aligned with the project’s goals and why privatization works better for this type of project.
Said elsewhere, but if NASA didn’t spread their resources around, there likely would not be a NASA. As Musk said, if there was no NASA, there would not be SpaceX. People act like they SpaceX exists in a govt vacuum. They do not.
I don’t take umbrage with the govt/private model when done right. I take issue when people act like one deserves all the credit while ignoring the larger system that is required to bring that success about.
Solving different problems is a good way to put it, but to even be in that position implies they’re trying to meet false objectives and artificial constraints that are beyond the scope of the original endeavor even if there’s some intersection remaining. These extra constraints I imagine have a high likelihood of compromising the original objective by forcing tradeoffs that don’t move the needle and carry costs with ill spent efforts.
It's more like the cost of the political system we run. Yes, it's not the most streamlined, but it's stable. Quite a number of people yearn for the efficiency of a system under one will of an enlightened monarch. We have a bunch of examples, from Lycurgus and Cyrus back in the day to Mr Putin today; there is a cost to such a system, too.
[−]narnarpapadaddy · 2026-11-15 Sun 05:19 UTC ·
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It’s always entertaining to hear engineers ridicule inefficient government programs while simultaneously setting up a load balancer, backups, or a high-availability db cluster. Completely unable to generalize the lesson that redundancy and overhead aren’t necessarily bad, and that efficiency is in tension with other desirable attributes in every system, political, biological, computational, whatever.
[−]TheOtherHobbes · 2026-11-15 Sun 12:29 UTC ·
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Incorrect. Governments can - and should - have goals beyond simple engineering problems. Traditionally government funds corporate and academic R&D which is then productised and commercialised by the private sector.
This is literally how the computing industry was built.
Ignoring those goals for short-term corporate profit is politically incompetent, and has terrible consequences - as most of us are about to find out.
publicly funded means funded by the people. its not really unreasonable that people demand the economic benefits of investing their money to be spread around a bit.
its not ideal from logistics POV, but it is not what I would take as the prime example of incompetence. its just the government way of doing thinngs.
If the economic benefit summarized as employment, then the goal is wrong. And indeed space conquest oftem just makes our child brains dream, instead of being something useful per itself. So we tout employment and side-effects as a prime benefit of space. Why not create a broken-window factory, it will create more jobs.
[−]TheOtherHobbes · 2026-11-15 Sun 12:34 UTC ·
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A broken-window factory like Microsoft?
Can we stop pretending the private sector isn't a labyrinth of idiocy, opportunism, petty infighting, and inefficiency?
The private sector is very, very bad at thinking strategically in useful terms. Profit is a fool's proxy for progress.
Corporate values have been the single biggest brake on human development since the 1970s. We would be far further ahead on every metric with the kind of smarter strategic management that corporate culture makes unimaginable.
[−]Alive-in-2025 · 2026-11-15 Sun 06:06 UTC ·
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The "government" doesn't make those decisions, it's the political class that chooses to do those choices of putting money in each district.
I think people understand this wrong. The problem with Shuttle was not that they had multiple masters. The problem was that they were not able to experiment and build multiple versions. Many bad choices were already made by the time DoD came in.
People always act as if everything is only because of a few requirements from DoD, but this is just not correct.
The fundamental problem was that they had limited budget and they wanted to build something that could achieve almost absurd spec without building any intermediate steps.
Spreading it around districts was also not really a huge issue because it was such a new program and you had contractors all over the US already, so it was actually sensible. The problem is just that even today they can't change it because they locked it in back then.
The Starship requirements across those missions are generally much more aligned than what NASA vs DoD wanted out of STS. Most of Starlink reqs could be considered a subset of Artemis. I would venture the biggest distort is reliability requirements between crewed/uncrewed missions.
The issue isn’t really how many masters per se, but how competing their respective requirements.
But the Shuttle became what it became for reasons that Starship doesn’t have to deal with. Shuttle had multiple masters (NASA and DoD) driving a bastardized design. The non-assembly line of NASA is a feature, not a bug: by spreading work across many congressional districts it mitigates political defunding risk. Im not defending those, but they are important context for those who pretend the differences are a signal of government incompetence.
NASA paid SpaceX for a service, and SpaceX delivered that service on time and vastly cheaper than their competitors who were also paid by NASA (ISS resupply).
In the case of transporting humans to the ISS, SpaceX did it vastly cheaper than the competitor who was also paid by NASA. That competitor has never done what they were paid to do.
If there is anyone or anything to be angry at, it seems mighty strange to be angry at the company who actually did what they were paid to do when another company took much more money and didn’t deliver.
What Musk admitted to was NASA “saved” SpaceX with a last minute contract to prevent their bankruptcy. I would make the argument that SpaceX would not exist without all those early government contracts. It’s a shrewd business move: use a self-insured entity (the govt) when risk is the highest because it pushes the financial risk to the taxpayer, and gradually move to more privatized customers when risk is lower and insurance costs can make such launches economically viable.
I do agree Boeing CST was not run well and I’ve thrown plenty of ire there way. But that is an entirely different argument and a bit of whataboutism.
The government paid SpaceX for a service, which was delivered as promised. This happens hundreds of thousands of times a year with tons of companies being paid to do things for the government.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50503535
That's not a mitigating factor!
"Before you walk away thinking the government is incompetent, please remember that the government makes bad decisions on purpose" ??
if you'll indulge a tangent, i can only chalk up the increase in this phenomenon over the time i've been online to the consolidation of online discussion to a handful of sites that have become ever more adept and efficient at creating filter bubbles. and it's always the sites where that hasn't taken root, where everyone's seeing the same thing, that then catch a reputation for being hellholes full of terrible people, because naturally, the majority of people engage with those sites not directly, but through screenshots shared on the major socials, and those major socials are incentivised to push you content that you engage with. then, as we all know, angry people click more. so of course as a user of one of those major socials, a majority of those screenshots the site pushes you end up being those that depict speech your own filter bubble cohort finds abhorrent. hn is actually subject to this dynamic a little bit.
The ideal of a good government industry program, is to create a domestic industry, and A: maintain it at a minimum level for whatever goal is in focus (defence, technology familiarity, investment certainty). And B to help it grow to be independent of the government, so the profits and funding can go elsewhere.
To me, most of what NASA did after Skylab are a bit questionable. With most of the high profile stuff being of limited value compare to the RF and solid state electronics projects.
I agree with a lot of your point, but would probably caveat a lot of the JPL work.
When people fail to acknowledge that, it becomes a vehicle for a digression and creates tired discussions that follow the same well-worn paths.
The other system is way better at doing the thing that it was designed for.
And since both of the design goals are important, having both systems is a good thing.
Guess the point is that generally speaking, large scale engineering is typically not done at efficient and creative-levels when directed by the government. Governments have too many stakeholders that have needs that have little do with with engineering that need to be satisfied
...And of course, there are exceptions -guessing the Gemini and Apollo programs would be a good examples.
... oh, and am not trying to call you out, just trying to think through this for myself as well.
And, if they weren't, backs up that the government is not typically a good overseer when it comes engineering programs
(although, still seems like when there is a very strong need, governments can be very good partners).
Regarding spreading the parts of the development/manufacturing across different regions, am sure there are good benefits to doing this, and cost efficiency is definitely one of them (Boeing's manufacturing is a great example, as well as most auto companies). So yeah, you're right there. But when the government does it, it often is for political reasons, so you wonder if they really do gain cost efficiencies? Hmm...
Personally, my take is the earlier in the development process you are of a product (or vehicle), the better it is to keep everything tight knit (yeah, am a believer in the major concepts of agile development - small, integrated teams working close together, able to iterate fast). And feels like this is also true for design teams in general, no matter what the size of the company. It pays to keep them together as much as possible.
But the more mature a product gets, like a car company that's been building cars for decades, it seems like spreading out manufacturing could be a cost savings.
It shows that the government’s incentives are not aligned with the project’s goals and why privatization works better for this type of project.
I don’t take umbrage with the govt/private model when done right. I take issue when people act like one deserves all the credit while ignoring the larger system that is required to bring that success about.
This is literally how the computing industry was built.
Ignoring those goals for short-term corporate profit is politically incompetent, and has terrible consequences - as most of us are about to find out.
The government engineers and scientists that worked on the space shuttle were not.
Also it's trivial to be an armchair expert decades removed from actual events.
its not ideal from logistics POV, but it is not what I would take as the prime example of incompetence. its just the government way of doing thinngs.
Can we stop pretending the private sector isn't a labyrinth of idiocy, opportunism, petty infighting, and inefficiency?
The private sector is very, very bad at thinking strategically in useful terms. Profit is a fool's proxy for progress.
Corporate values have been the single biggest brake on human development since the 1970s. We would be far further ahead on every metric with the kind of smarter strategic management that corporate culture makes unimaginable.
Government issue? Or, let's be more honest, the issue here is with the people expecting government programs to become job programs?
People always act as if everything is only because of a few requirements from DoD, but this is just not correct.
The fundamental problem was that they had limited budget and they wanted to build something that could achieve almost absurd spec without building any intermediate steps.
Spreading it around districts was also not really a huge issue because it was such a new program and you had contractors all over the US already, so it was actually sensible. The problem is just that even today they can't change it because they locked it in back then.
Can you elaborate on this point?
1) Starlink 2) NASA Artemis 3) Mars
Each of these variants will have significantly different designs demanded by different organizations or organizational units.
The issue isn’t really how many masters per se, but how competing their respective requirements.