I mean, government does GPS. Sends folks to space. You mention SpaceX, but let's not pretend NASA doesn't exist. Yeah, there was once that website that had a bad launch, but there's nothing inherent in government that wouldn't allow this to work well.

I do think ideally this could be done by NY or CA first. We should test out ideas in the states, where possible.

SpaceX successfully built a capsule to get people into space.

They built it to the specifications that NASA enforced upon them, which were paid for in blood.

And you don't have to look far in the SpaceX organization to see what risks the company is willing to take if an external authority isn't imposing regulation on them.

I think this mixes up low odds of success with risk, the latter rather being an expectation value than a probability (i.e. probability of success or failure times the value of the things at stake). Risk can be low even when the odds of success are not good just by nothing being really at stake.

Think about their rocket landing program: the probability of landing a rocket on a boat in the first attempt might have been low but the risk was almost negligible because the launches that SpaceX practiced landing on had been paid for by a customer already. Now, if SpaceX had bet the company on reusability by paying for all these rockets out of their own pocket instead and hoping they manage to get it right before cash runs out, then this could have been called risky.

GPS is a lot less stateful than real-time financial transaction processing. It takes time corrections from base stations and broadcasts a time signal. End users have no way of mutating state on the GPS satellite; they only listen.

I'm not saying it's easy to make a global positioning system, but it's easier than processing every transaction in the United States.

I was partially responsible for designing a system that could be used to eventually scale to handle processing every global credit and debit transaction.

GPS is harder.

disclaimer: I used to work at Visa.

Were you also partially responsible for designing a GNSS system? Otherwise it isn't clear how you can make any claim as to the difficulty of that, if you're using your experience on the former as your bona fides. I think the difficulty of payment processing isn't in the happy path, but in fraud/anomaly detection, merchant servicing/outreach, dispute resolution, all of which do not have a "set it and forget it" solution.

The platform had to encompass all of those payments infrastructure responsibilities. I'm quite aware of their relative difficulty.

Separately, I did not have to implement a GNSS system, but at the job I had immediately after Visa, I did have to work very, very closely with GNSS vendors who integrated with our AV middleware software (including having to write drivers for them), and in my current role I'm CEO of a company which produces a software platform that provides automated V&V of complex SISoS (including those integrated with and dependent on GNSS).

End to end payments systems are hard in the rats nest of legacy expectations and integration sense. End to end GPS deployment & management seems hard in the science and systems engineering sense.

Ah, yes, this government right: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/gps.html

With about 70% of their revenue from the US Government in 2018? Those defense companies might as well be an extension of the government with the added "benefit" that it allows individuals to get wealthy off them.

Edit: Further to that and the comment pointing out where GPS was researched and developed, the Air Force still operates GPS block III and contracted these services out to Lockheed. So yeah, ultimately any success Lockheed has with GPS III is ultimately a success for the government..

That's kind of the point though; would this whole arrangement work any better if it was all directly under the DoD hierarchy? Vs. private contractors like this? I was not intending to be snarky in the original comment. I've lived in a system where a lot more of the economy was under the government in the org chart and it was not magically better than the American system.

I'm not sure what point you're making. Yes, the government uses private contractors, but they'd use contractors for this transaction system, too.

Ah, yes, that one that did the fundamental research which enabled it right: https://www.nrl.navy.mil/accomplishments/systems/gps

GPS is more akin to a public lightbulb than any kind of interactive service. The government seems to falter when it has to deal with 1:1 interactions with constituents, not when it is simply building something.

To be fair, that was the first time the federal government had attempted to build a modern web application. There's a great interview with President Obama, I believe in FastCompany, where he discusses the approach to building healthcare.gov -- the crux of the issue was with the mindset. When you build large physical infrastructure, you need large companies, but the same is not true of technical infrastructure. This mindset had lead to the use of the mega contractors, but it was ultimately a small team that built the version that worked. This revelation lead to the institution of the US Digital Service.

Among the things that failed in the design for healthcare.gov: the overall plan was to have each component built, to a specification, and then any two teams that were integrating components would test integration, and the whole thing would work.

Three pieces of the puzzle missing:

1) It appears there was no honest-to-God real end-to-end testing in the plan: no team to own it, no chain of responsibility if it didn't work. So cross-functional issues like total system performance were ownerless, and it is the nature of government contracting work to push blame away, not assert ownership where none is demanded by the contract.

2) Even in integration testing, responsibility was unclear when it failed. If the specification itself proved faulty, neither side of the protocol had ownership over fixing the problem; faulty specs led to pissing matches of blame-pushing instead of any party saying "Okay, the spec is now this, just fix it."

3) Since nobody had holistic ownership, no core infrastructure decisions were made. The whole project, under the hood, was a mismash of different databases, languages, messaging services, and protocols, owned by (and chosen by) each contractor with no thought paid to long-term maintenance of the app as a singular service. Each team had their own ad-hoc dashboards with no top-level view to allow anyone to understand why the end-to-end site experience was broken. There was nobody to own a concept equivalent to "Ops" or "Site reliability" who had authority to make judgement calls here; long-term maintenance was going to look like full understanding of dozens of similar systems doing similar tasks.

There are plenty of ways to structure a public service like this that isn't fully controlled by the government. USPS comes to mind, though it's obviously not perfect in terms of independence from government control.

I'd honestly love to see something like a credit union at a large enough scale to run it's own payment processing system. Something like that could get you a nice level of independence from government control and give you an organization more incentivized to care for it's members.

US space program was mostly privately developed, in any case.

Saying "look as SpaceX" isn't much of a "government failed" as much as "Boeing failed miserably and lobbied hard to cover their failures".

That said - the government can be a facilitator without being the operator, and it shouldn't be the operator in this case.

The Federal gov't is vast and is not uniformly ineffective. Even within departments tech performance can vary greatly.

> not uniformly ineffective

Ha, that's a good phrase to use in a performance review.

"On the whole, Bob is not uniformly ineffective ..."

"... and the upside is we gathered some interesting data on personnel performance"