NASA probably could be as nimble as SpaceX if they didn’t have to rely on Congress, whose goal is not to build a successful rocket, but to spread the money funnel across the States. Imagine if SpaceX’s board suddenly said “the company’s goal is now not to get to Mars, but to employ as many people and contractors as possible in all 50 states!” You’d basically get NASA.

So basically... government could be as efficient as the private sector if it wasn't government?

It could be a lot more efficient if they stopped trying to be subtle and instead spent more time thinking.

Openly admit NASA is a basic infrastructure assurance program, much like the Interstate highway system is. (Yes, it's Military capable infrastructure, for moving troops and stuff around. It turns out that useful infrastructure improves overall economic fitness and activity as well.)

Then group up all of the infrastructure spending and make sure it gives every citizen roughly equal value. Sometimes this can be justified in lower shipping costs for produced items from farms and backbone redundancy across the country. Other times it's connecting land and sea ports to the cross country grid. Evaluating a fair share of the commons and of resources to maintain the commons is a hard problem.

NASA also falls under various civic services the government proves because it makes sense for just one place to do the work; or at least for a baseline that private entities can compete against. The distribution of these programs also forms part of the weight to balance government improvements programs among areas.

It’s not the fact that they are government, it’s that the incentive structure is wrong.

Companies are incentivized to make money. In this case, the government is incentivized to provide lucrative contracts to contracted corporations.

In the 60s, when a different incentive existed, the government (i.e. NASA) was incredibly efficient.

I don't think that's a charitable reading of the GP. More like "the government is aiming for something other than efficiency, and it gets what it's aiming for".

If the government were aiming for efficiency, we might see NASA taking a different path.

I agree that it isn't the goal, but that's part of the point.

And I don't necessarily think it's always a bad thing for government to government, especially for a program that ultimately has so much of an impact on military capabilities and national security.

But it's also disingenuous to say "We could if we wanted to."

The private sector fails all the time. The problem is not government/private. The problem is large organisations with wrong incentives.

My point isn't so much that private sector can do things efficiently (certainly not always), so much as government generally can't, especially starting from a point of inefficiency.

Yes it's a matter of incentives. The problem is saying incentives for government work could change, is very different than them actually changing. Some of those incentives are inherently rooted as part of what makes government... government.

It's also important to note that while NASA might make multi-year plans they have to deal with a yearly budget from Congress and Congressional mandates. NASA has a relatively small budget but a lot of different tasks, manned spaceflight is only one of those.

They have to drop whole missions after years of planning and construction because the next year's budget is a billion dollars short. It also pushes out things like SLS development because some scheduled testing or purchase gets pushed to the next fiscal year.