I mean, one of the reasons the US military is so big is because politicians demand bases to be built in their state. Since the federal gov pays the salary of every uniformed public servant, and those servants use that salary in the local economy, it's basically a year after year windfall for local coffers.

It's not just big government agencies that are vehicles for pork, the whole government's been that way for a long, long time.

I learned this in sim city 2000 when I ran the local economy into the dirt. Didn’t realise the simulation was this accurate though.

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy was developed on a budget roughly equal to 10 days worth of NASA's annual funding.

NASA's budget also includes astronaut training, educational outreach, and a ton of other programs. There's a categorical breakout of the NASA budget here: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/fy2021_...

To mention a few more, the NASA budget includes human operations (ISS), and the entire science enterprise (Earth, Planetary, Astrophysics) - things including Hubble, JWST, Curiosity.

This seems like a pointless comparison. Why should one SpaceX program be compared to all of what NASA does?

It would be like saying "angry birds was developed with 10 days worth of Microsoft's annual budget".

This is a meaningless comparison.

Do you have a source for that? If true, that's absolutely amazing.

This article quoted Musk as saying the falcon heavy cost "over $500 million" and that it had been awarded contracts worth $500-750 million that recouped its investment. So let's pin it at $600 mil for this comparison. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/13/spacex-falcon-heavy-rocket-o...

NASA's 2020 budget of $22.6 billion from here: https://www.planetary.org/get-involved/be-a-space-advocate/b...

22.6 billion * (10/365) = $712 million

In which case, he was in a no-win situation. Choose the economical providers and accomplish the mission on time and budget, or satisfy the porkers and blow the budget and schedule.

Everday Astronaut has a great video "SLS vs Starship"[1] which does a great job of explaining why SLS is designed the way it is.

TLDR: NASA realized that they needed "big rocket" capability. But because they get jerked around by the president, Senate and Congress every 4 years or so, the only way to get it was to design a program that was "unkillable", a program that was both ultra-conservative and spread the pork around widely.

1: https://everydayastronaut.com/sls-vs-starship/

Optimize for the game you're actually playing, not the ideal game you imagine it to be.

Musk plays those games too. That's why you have a factory in Nevada, and a future factory in Texas.

It could possibly be that there is a East coast launch site and a West coast launch site, and its easier to drive these things shorter distances to the launch pad.

This is in no way unique to NASA.

Given the creation of the new Space Force, it's hard to justify NASA on defense related stuff, and given the build up of the private space industry, it's probably going to be even less important. Deep down, I personally want NASA to still be important, I still think exploration has value. But that has always seemed like a side benefit from working on the "important" stuff.

> Given the creation of the new Space Force, it's hard to justify NASA on defense related stuff...

The "new Space Force" is just a renaming of existing assets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_Space_Command). Hell, it's still under the Department of the Air Force and its Secretary.

Space Force budget is skyrocketing. New assets are on the way.

My guess is that it's purpose is ABM.

> Space Force budget is skyrocketing.

As with the staffing, that's largely just a transfer from the Air Force.

https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/first-budget-request-for-...

> Most of the funding for Space Force in the F2021 request simply reflects shuffling funds into the new account structure, but an Air Force official said today there is a $900 million increase compared to FY2020.

Seen through the most charitable glasses, the purpose of Soace Force is that any major-power shooting war is now likely to involve rapid space-based asset degradation.

Fighting such a war without a unified command over the theater in which that action unfolds seems destined for failure.

And failure to preserve or triumph in space substantially degrades planetary military capabilities.

So really, Space Force is an expression of "space is important to all the other military things we do now."

ABM is pointless. Too easy to saturate aka ddos it.

>Given the creation of the new Space Force, it's hard to justify NASA on defense related stuff

NASA is a civilian agency. It isn't and never has been justified by anything related to military defense.