Private contractors given good specifications are certainly very effective at what they do, but I really doubt that they'd be as good if they were to go on a purely exploratory , basic research-like mission where objectives are fuzzier.

I don't doubt that a private entity is as capable of scope creep as a massive federal government institution.

But I suspect mission-fatal scope creep occurs with less frequency with private entities than with massive federal government institutions.

When you talk about oil and mining companies, you mention the same ones that suffer dozens of spills, contamination incidents, and accidents? Or is there some sort of hypothetical perfect oil company with no accidents whatsoever?

I think you have absolutely no clue of just how stupifying difficult it is to get equipment into space and surviving a reasonable amount of time.

And yet the latest football game is broadcast worldwide flawlessly.

http://espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs/2012/story/_/id/8911864/2013...

I dunno, I've often seen flaws in the broadcast of the latest football game. I think it would be more accurate to say "the latest football game is usually broadcast worldwide with flaws that are within the tolerances viewers are willing to accept", but then, people rarely die because of broadcast glitches in football games, so the tolerances there may be fairly lenient.

In some way, SpaceX's scope is much more ambitious than NASA.

It's most likely that space exploration will always be a public-private mixture given the political and military interests in play, and the fact that a privately-funded endeavor of such magnitude would be extremely unlikely to survive a failure, and no one in their right mind would underwrite such a project.

It's funny that people praise private companies' willingness to be flexible beyond bureaucracy yet they forget that a company can only survive for so long without positive returns and that limits their risk tolerance tremendously. Heck, consider how few companies are willing to do basic research nowadays.

1 SpaceX's ambitions may be broader than NASA's but their individual engineering targets are not.

2 Private space companies wouldn't exist without the public space programs, not just from a technological standpoint but public contracts have been the largest and most dependable source of revenue for private space companies.

3 Though private companies suffer from the same bureaucratic problems as governments they are more flexible because internal fights can always be resolved one way or another by engaged and decisive management (should you find yourself lucky enough to have such management.) Hierarchies in public entities are not always allowed to settle conflicts between subordinates.

    > yet they forget that a company can only survive for so
    > long without positive returns and that limits their risk
    > tolerance tremendously

For some reason, this all brings to mind the Keynes quote: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

If you count their accumulated physical assets, manpower and "intellectual property" (assuming aerospace knowledge such as that could be valued effectively), you'd find that very few institutions outside of some multinational corporations and government agencies are that big.

I doubt Musk would be able to get such funding every year until 2030, or whatever arbitrary target is set to get a man to Mars.

That of course depends on whether you expect political/military interests to be always represented by public institutes, not just today but also a couple of decades into the future. Not saying that will necessarily change, but I've read enough cyberpunk to at least consider the real possibility :)

Don't you think Amazon's stock price says differently?

To me, a private Mars colony sounds a lot like an Amazon. An endeavor with a very big mission and a very long execution time.

But SpaceX needs to make money to make colonization of Mars happen.

Making money is about making things people want. Colonizing Mars is the thing that people want; and every step towards that goal (launch vehicles, human spacecraft, etc) bootstraps them onto the next step. Much like how Amazon works; they forfeit profit today to invest in not just tomorrow, but several decades from now.

Amazon isn't launching billion dollar servers that will explode in a big publicly visible fireball when you forget to plug a cable in.

How exactly is a mission to Mars comparable to this?

SpaceX reinvests all operating income from today's offerings (launch vehicles) to build the SpaceX of the future.

Both companies appear to be bootstrapping towards a gargantuan vision that is likely decades away.

Amazon has millions.

As far as I can tell NASA accounts for less than half of SpaceX's business. According to their website they have nearly $5 billion in contracts and I can only find reference to just over $2 billion in NASA contracts.

NASA ⊂ "The Government"

SpaceX also has Defense (USAF) contracts. At least around $900 million already awarded (and that may not be all), and they recently sued to be allowed to compete for much more under the EELV program.

Didn't a SpaceX competitor install second-hand 1960s Russian rocket engines in a launch vehicle that failed recently? Its not a fault on the engines - I'm sure they were excellent - but rather an anecdote on the gargantuan barrier to competition inventing new space technology offers SpaceX.

For every Elon Musk there are a million private sector apparatchiks who run their organizations with all the efficiency of a Soviet shoe factory (see Comcast for a particularly pernicious example).

I think if he were running NASA it would probably be run pretty well.

NASA has worse problems because members of Congress see is as a tool for funneling pork spending. Any director of NASA would have to spend time playing politics with Congress in order to keep his funding and that would undermine any coherent vision that he brought to the enterprise. If buying rocket engines from Louisiana would save NASA billions in the long run, but funding depends on buying them from Alabama, Alabama it is. High-level government bureaucrats must be career fundraisers first and visionaries/competent managers second.

As the sole owner of his own launch company, Musk as a degree of freedom that he could never get as a member of the government bureaucracy and it's that freedom that allows him to run SpaceX as well as he does. In lesser hands that freedom would be a noose, but at least in that case the cost of failure to the public would be very little.

The private sector is not magically free of political influence, and SpaceX feels it stronger than most due to its reliance upon what is effectively a government monopsony.

the people that float to the top in those organizations aren't good managers, innovators or motivators - they're political strategists and careerists

I want NASA to build payloads and the private sector to build rockets. But to say that the rockets are more important than the payloads is backwards.

Well that and launch to GEO and design and build human spacecraft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_V2) and are closer to cost effective re-usable rockets than anyone ever has been.

> But to say that the rockets are more important than the payloads is backwards.

I don't recall saying that rockets are more important than payloads, but neither one does much good without the other. I'm not even sure where you are drawing the line between payload and rocket. Is the rocket that takes people to Mars a payload, or the rocket that lands on Mars, or the rocket that leaves Mars?

I am excited about SpaceX because they are dramatically reducing the cost of space exploration and industry. This makes everything NASA wants to do cheaper and more likely to actually happen.

...using NASA's money. SpaceX's money is coming from NASA. So, no, SpaceX is not doing more per dollar than NASA is.

And fwiw SpaceX so far doesn't have anything resembling a rocket that'll make it to the Moon much less Mars. Let's first see if they can even get people into LEO first (using decades of research and knowledge that NASA paid for, of course)

It is fair to count everything SpaceX has done with NASA money as stuff NASA has gotten done, NASA still has an astronomically larger denominator.

> And fwiw SpaceX so far doesn't have anything resembling a rocket that'll make it to the Moon much less Mars.

fwiw NASA does not either and SpaceX is much closer. The Falcon Heavy is expected to launch next year and will be capable of putting 14 tons in a trans-Martian orbit to Mars.