Re:NASA will pay $146M for each SLS rocket engine
by robomartin on Sunday May 03, 2020 @12:52PM
(#23060180)
I am not going to dispute the idea that NASA, just like any government enterprise, isn’t as efficient as private enterprise. Just look at what happened with CDC COVID-19 tests as a data point from another domain.
That said, having experience working both with SpaceX and NASA, I can tell you that companies like SpaceX would not exist without NASA’s research and experience. The simplest example of this that comes to mind, again, having worked with both, is NASA’s decades-long work in materials science for space. The cost of acquisition for such knowledge is absolutely incalculable —some of it measured in lives.
The real cost and development timeline of a FH would be dramatically higher and longer without NASA.
A fair question, then, might be: Why can’t NASA use this knowledge to develop products as efficiently as SpaceX then?
In order to answer this question you would have to have access to documentation spanning at least from MCR to CDR in order to understand what we are comparing against. A rocket isn’t just a tube full of fuel and LOX.
I am not defending anyone, just highlighting context I am privy to within the limits of what I can disclose. I can say we are working on a small portion of the Artemis Mission.
That said, having experience working both with SpaceX and NASA, I can tell you that companies like SpaceX would not exist without NASA’s research and experience. The simplest example of this that comes to mind, again, having worked with both, is NASA’s decades-long work in materials science for space. The cost of acquisition for such knowledge is absolutely incalculable —some of it measured in lives.
The real cost and development timeline of a FH would be dramatically higher and longer without NASA.
A fair question, then, might be: Why can’t NASA use this knowledge to develop products as efficiently as SpaceX then?
In order to answer this question you would have to have access to documentation spanning at least from MCR to CDR in order to understand what we are comparing against. A rocket isn’t just a tube full of fuel and LOX.
I am not defending anyone, just highlighting context I am privy to within the limits of what I can disclose. I can say we are working on a small portion of the Artemis Mission.