The profit motive is a powerful and universal incentive.

People are careless when spending Other Peoples' Money.

For example, someone doing volunteer work usually isn't trying to maximize their profit. They may be trying to maximize something else, but that fact means the profit motive isn't a universal first principle.

Many charities seem to exist only to enrich the people who run them.

We all intuitively recognize this. Why do people watch football or spend time with family on Sundays instead of working another job? Because they recognize there’s marginal utility and are more motivated by the increase in quality of life than the increase in money. So much so that we look at people who try to maximize profit at all costs as having sociopathy.

I said “maximizing utility” which is the opposite of self-sacrifice. I’m just saying “utility” is measured across more dimensions than profit.

E.g., do you pick your spouse/friends or make a decision to have children based on their ability to maximize your wealth?

I was responding to the claim about NASA.

> do you pick your spouse/friends or make a decision to have children based on their ability to maximize your wealth?

People marry for money all the time. If you're a man, and have no money and no prospects for money, what do you think your odds are of finding true love reciprocated?

As for children, the birth rate declines as the economics of having children changed from an asset to a liability. This happens in country after country. People most definitely historically have had children for their ability to produce for the family.

I know it's gauche to suggest that people are motivated by money, but it's a fact that they are, even in affairs of the heart, and especially in their professions and their behavior while working.

>I know it's gauche to suggest that people are motivated by money, but it's a fact that they are, even in affairs of the heart

We probably fundamentally disagree here. Again, I’m not saying people aren’t motivated by money. I’m saying they aren’t only motivated by money. The people I’ve met that think human interactions can be distilled to such a simple principle tend to struggle in their personal relationships in my experience.

The fact that you’re willing to type away on HN instead of trying to make more money tells me you know it’s a balancing act. Besides, I think people are more motivated by status (being the hierarchical primates that we are) and money is just a clumsy proxy for status. For example, status chasing men are more apt to date a beautiful but poor female than a rich homely one.

That they are careful with other peoples' money.

> I’m saying they aren’t only motivated by money.

I never said only. I said it is a powerful motivator that motivates nearly all of us.

> status

is another path to getting money.

> status chasing men are more apt to date a beautiful but poor female than a rich homely one

What they'll do is marry the rich one and cheat on her with the beauties. Besides, having an elegant beauty on your arm gives a big boost to one's career. Just look at JFK and Jackie. There's no doubt Jackie was a big help. And there's no doubt JFK selected her with that help in mind.

You can believe what you like. But I (and many I know) have become a lot happier through recognizing how human nature actually is rather than believing in the fantasy. The unhappy people I know are the ones who still believe in the fantasy, and are constantly disappointed.

is another path to getting money.

You have this inverted. Money is a path to status. Status is what really matters. For example, do you think a former less powerful than, say, a billionaire? Billionaire's use their money to get power, prestige, and status, but it doesn't always go as far as other means.

>I never said only.

You said universal. I'm saying it's common, but not universal. The problem with absolute statements is that it only takes one instance to disprove them.

Is Bezos marrying the richest woman he can find? I doubt it. Are you actively selling your organs for money? If not, maximizing money isn’t universal. It common, but still commonly constrained by other competing priorities. Some of which we hold more dear than money. To ignore that seems like it’s own oversimplified fantasy.

I don’t think it does. Maybe if you phrased it as “maximizing utility” but you constrained it to “maximizing money” as a universal truth. That’s demonstrably false.

Another man pushed him aside, and answered "oh, he's a Communist Party member in good standing, he's going to give it all to the Party!"

The lottery winner shot back "Oh no, I'm not a Communist anymore!"

My dad always had a belly laugh when he recounted that story.

My dad wasn't laughing at him. He was laughing at the Communists with their inability to recognize their false god.

I'm certainly not making a case for Communism. Again, it's telling that that is the lens you view these discussion through.

Imagine if NASA was solely located in Alabama where von Braun set up shop. I think it would have been defunded in short order and there would be no NASA and, by extension, no SpaceX (since they are so reliant on govt contracts)

Put JPL in California, mission control in Texas, launches in Florida, and a bunch of manufacturing at Boeing and you've got a much, much wider Congressional support base.

Look at https://www.nasa.gov/specials/ESDSuppliersMap/ - they've even managed to spread suppliers around to Alaska, Montana, and Hawaii. Every single state has at least some jobs that depend on SLS.

The political risk is the more salient point to me, and jobs is just a way to mitigate it. (You could also, for example, mitigate it with less productive means like lobbying)

(Suppliers is a different story. A lot of time NASA is handcuffed by which suppliers actually want work with them. There’s a lot of hoops to jump through and many suppliers just don’t find it worth the hassle)

1) The requirements aren't levied by congress. They are created by NASA civil servants who are usually the technical experts in a particular field. These aren't people who have much of any interface with lobbyists.

2) A lot of the instances where it's not worth it to suppliers isn't because they are being boxed out by some industry giant clamoring for some giant contract. It's usually closer to "it's not worth our effort to overhaul our manufacturing process to meet requirements so we can sell NASA a $70 teflon seal." The giant corps have little desire here either. But being a big manufacturer is sometimes correlated with having a more mature manufacturing process that meets specific standards.

There’s already enough corruption in govt, we don’t have to make believe it’s in places that’s it’s not.

Is there any infrastructure there for the mission? My cynical side wonders if someone flew to Honolulu, went to a hardware store to pick up some JB Weld, and flew it back to Florida just so they could check off Hawaii on the list of states.

It also doesn’t mean they want spaceflight material. It can just be something needed to support the project, like shelving to hold extra parts. But it the charge code is traceable to the program, it makes the list.

* this is also why SpaceX can do things cheaper. They don’t have the same quality requirements so they can streamline their processes. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes not: https://parabolicarc.com/2016/06/28/nasa-investigation-space...

I recall some NPR story recently about war games the US runs about a hypothetical war with China -- it was said that the US loses most of the time in these simulations. Why? A lack of industrial capability.

Zero of which are currently capable of putting a human around the Moon.

Prove yourself and the contracts get bigger.

NASA budget is like 30% SLS/Orion for decades+.

> Prove yourself and the contracts get bigger.

If you hard allocate a huge part of the budget you can only give out so many other contracts for the best bids.

Astra, Rocket Lab, etc. have to demonstrate capability to move up the ladder.

So, 'currently' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, not to mention in general the idea of SLS being ready to send people to the Moon now is a bit of a stretch too since Artemis II will be ready to launch in 2024 if we're lucky, which is also when (if we're lucky), Lunar Starship should be starting its testing.

Look at where the major NASA centers are compared to politically important states. That reduces political risk but also increases inefficiency.

SpaceX and NASA have different, but symbiotic, goals.

To get to the Moon a Starship will require two launches. A manned vehicle and a fuel tanker. They have to dock in Earth orbit, refuel, then the manned vehicle transfers to a Lunar injection orbit. It's very likely a Starship will need a tanker waiting on the Moon to refuel a lander for the return trip and landing back on Earth.

Starship hasn't even flown let alone demonstrated in-orbit refueling. SpaceX hasn't even demonstrated that in the small scale with Dragon capsules. It's a hard problem with a lot of unknowns.

SLS can launch the manned element directly into a Lunar injection orbit. It doesn't require any refueling to get anywhere. It also doesn't need a fuel tank at the destination to allow a lander to return home.

In order to do that the launch stages don't save any fuel for landing. It's "more expensive" to use expendable stages but all of their energy is used for their payload and none is saved for landing (and landing safety margin). Overall SLS is mass optimized rather than cost optimized.

The NASA way involves a lot fewer moving parts and <unproven technology goes here>.

The difference is that Starship is getting $3B from NASA vs the $40B that SLS got. NASA could get a single launch moon mission using Starship, but they'd have to pay SpaceX more than $3B to get it.

> SLS can launch the manned element directly into a Lunar injection orbit. It doesn't require any refueling to get anywhere. It also doesn't need a fuel tank at the destination to allow a lander to return home.

SLS doesn't carry the lander nor the fuel for the lander. So yes, it does need something else to get the lander's fuel to the destination.

SLS could absolutely be cheaper, but reuse isnt really part of that equation.

SLS is going to have difficulty maintaining a 1 launch per year even without payload readiness, so of course it's expensive and therefore disposable. But if they had reusability, they might have been able to fly it more often, thus helping make it cheaper on average to fly.

With SLS this becomes stark in the sense that if SLS was reusable, it could fly more often and would have lower per launch costs, which would make the other lunar lander proposals more viable and would make it more realistic to fly science payloads on it. If SLS were reusable, establishing a long term lunar presence with it wouldn't be a joke that everyone pretends to take seriously because it wouldn't be a matter of choosing between sending over a crew or launching components for a base for a given year.

This is true, but the issue is that there just isnt the need for it really. Very, very few missions actually require a SHLV. There just arent enough payloads atm, and that probably wouldnt change a ton even if the rocket was cheaper

This touches on an important question in economics. When you take your 101 class, if you pay attention, you will see that there is no role for competition at all. The whole economy could be a single firm, and all the prices and quantities would be the same, because the firm drives down economic profit to zero on the marginal good as a result of maximizing their producer surplus all by itself. This comes from optimization of convex functions - with appropriate convexity assumptions, any economic profit is money left on the table for the firm because it would just produce more and sell more units up until the last unit sold would earn zero profits.

What this means is that there is usually not a difference between a planned economy managed by a social planner and a free market economy (there are some differences with more exotic models, but this isn't important here). That is the observation you are using.

This led economists to investigate what the difference would be, and one group focused on non-convexities, a small group jumped into the rabbit hole of disequilibrium economics, while another group -- the Austrians -- insisted it was lack of price information that thwarted the social planner. If everything was auctioned off and every task given a budget with a maximization goal, we would discover prices but administrative processes would not discover prices.

But what I believe is that many organizations are just bad actors -- they leave money on the table, both in the free market and in an administrative setting. What you need is competition to drive out bad actors. People do not act in their self-interest nearly as much as models predict -- they have to basically be forced into it with competition.

The first inkling I had of this was landlords in San Francisco letting their properties rot via water damage because they couldn't be bothered to fix the windows. Why would they commit economic sabotage? Because they could afford to lose the money and still make enough to meet their needs. And for others, it was just that they were bad at their job, but rising property prices/rents meant they would not be driven out of business. This is why monopolies suck so much -- there is no mechanism to get rid of those who are bad at their job, even the job of profit maximization. So rather than viewing an organization as maximizing efficiency, maybe view it as "minimizing effort subject to avoiding bankruptcy".

Once you adopt that view, you get different answers to questions such as why NASA isn't as efficient as possible (and neither is SpaceX). You are only as efficient as your competitors/shareholders force you to be.