They are acting in self-interest, not doing their job.

The job of a US senator is best expressed by the oath of office they take: “I do solemnly affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.”

The actual day-to-day duties of a Senator are: "Senators, along with members of the House of Representatives, propose, author, and vote on federal legislation that touches upon all aspects of U.S. domestic and foreign policy. Senators provide advice and consent on executive nominations and treaties and conduct oversight of all branches of the federal government."

I realize that few if any senators take their oath seriously, but it's still wrong to say that they are doing their jobs when they do the wrong thing.

http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/F... http://www.senate.gov/index.htm

Senators are there to represent their state's interests, not those of the nation; this is very clear from the fact that it was originally the government of the state that selected the senator, rather than the populace. You are forgetting the "States" part of the "United States of America".

It's expected that the Constitution doesn't contradict a state's longer-term interests (senators serve longer terms than those in congress) and if it does, it will be amended.

Note that's quite different from saying senators should serve the interests of a national government.

Perhaps, but the people who can fire a senator are the voters of his state, not the American people as a whole.

It is worth considering the track record, which even the article alludes to. It may well be worth paying 3x the cost for a higher probability of launch success depending on what the payload is. Launches are not yet commodities, there are major differences in success rates between vendors.

I was thinking about that as well. Depending on the payload, it might make sense to build duplicates of many satellites for redundancy should SpaceX lose a rocket. Cost-wise that could still come out ahead given how much more ULA costs.

Of course, I doubt it'd come as a surprise to anyone that these payloads are likely insanely expensive as they too have gone through the govt procurement system (which seems to make everything cost 100x what it should cost). At which point it makes sense to avoid losing the payload even at ULA pricing.

This would make sense if you could somewhat transparently define why it cost 3x, and what that is buying you in term of assurances. If you just hand wave about reliability, it's not worth much.

We can work out the math easily. Given a 100% success rate for $350 million each for ULA and assuming a SpaceX cost of $100 million and assuming a 95% success rate (I have no idea what the actual rate is) then, per launch, the true cost to put something in orbit per launch is:

$350x1.00 = $350 million for ULA $100x(1/.95) = $105.2 million for SpaceX

The difference is then $245 million or so. So, the government needs to justify why reducing their risk from 5% to 0% on losing a payload is worth $245 million. Purely economically, the payload would need to be worth about $4.9 billion to justify this cost. If we start talking about State secrets, actual production time for the payload on top of the economic cost, redundancy requirements for intelligence gathering, technological advantage over rival powers (China/Russia) that could be lost if another country recovers the wreckage, and the worth of a citizen's/soldier's life on the front line (e.g. - items that are hard to quantify economically) and you can see how easy it is to justify $245 million.

Plus your buddy works at ULA and it would suck if he had to work somewhere else because they went out of business.

You would have to justify not paying SpaceX however much it would cost them to do a launch at 0% risk. If SpaceX could do it for $300m then that's significant saving for the same service.

That isn't what transparency means.

That's a simplistic (and cynical) view, the Senate is intended to be the upper chamber that's more insulated from the popular passions. That's why Senate terms last six years, and why the Constitution originally had Senators elected by state legislatures, not popular vote. Indeed, direct election has removed a layer of state accountability-- the modern Senate is all too happy to shove unfunded mandates onto state governments.