fusor said:
Tom Kalbfus said:
NASA just does what It always does, its not concerned with its budget, just so long as it falls within whatever Congress appropriated for it, the people who work for NASA are happy to have their jobs and also work on something interesting, an no one really seems interested in cutting costs, or I finding cheaper ways of doing things!
Spoken as someone who clearly has absolutely no idea how NASA operates or what the people there are doing. They have to cut costs all the time because the government keeps screwing around with their funding. Frankly it's a testament to their engineering skill that they've managed to have so much success given the lack of resources they're allocated.
When NASA "cuts costs" it simply cancels programs, it doesn't find cheaper ways of doing them. For example, look at its SLS program, when it doesn't get enough money, it simply slows down development, but the rocket they're developing is an updated version of the Saturn V, it is a big dumb booster with expendable parts that are thrown way. SpaceX is trying to find a way to reuse those parts, it has landed a few stages. NASA is still operating on the model of one rocket one launch, and it hasn't departed from that, unlike SpaceX, it is not concerned with profit, the money just keeps on coming from the government, or it does not! If you want another example, look at the Space Shuttle, they've been launching it for 30 years, from 1981 to 2011. It has been more expensive than advertised, but the NASA people didn't mind, the expense was the government's, and the government was willing to keep funding it, because it was their only way to get astronauts into space. The Space Shuttle was not an economical launch vehicle, much of the expense involved launching itself into orbit, and whatever payload capacity it had after that went towards the actual payload, then a lot of work went towards getting the shuttle ready for the next launch, a lot of man hours were involved in that, and NASA people happily worked on the shuttle, the money kept flowing from the government, so it didn't concern them how expensive it was, that expense in part provided them with jobs. No attempt was made to make the Shuttle a commercial success, NASA didn't concern itself with profits, the contractors that worked with NASA made profits out of the funds that flowed from the government, not from anything the Shuttle actually launched into space!
SpaceX on the other hand has to earn its revenue from what it launches, it has to concern itself with the costs of it launch system, NASA did not, the cost of operating the shuttle had nothing to do with whether the funds kept flowing from the Treasury Department, all that was politics, not finance or economic. NASA got a certain amount each year, and NASA would spend that amount.
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