I can't agree that funding is "largely the reason" why NASA takes so long to do anything. I doubt funding is a top 3 reason.
NASA just isn't about high-risk / high-reward "moonshots" anymore. The overarching political environment doesn't allow it, never mind the office politics.
NASA will get back to the moon using easily an order of magnitude more funding than it should have taken, with a launch system that costs an order of magnitude more money for each launch than it should. (almost two?)
Have to +1 this. A lot (most?) of NASA's funding is directed toward keeping people employed and skilled, as opposed to accomplishing goals, as with a lot of government money. NASA could do a LOT more with the funding they already have, if they were willing to divest from older technologies and vendors, but the politics of its funding doesn't allow that.
I agree however that culture was caused by a lack of funding.
You can't be swift and lean when you are given very limited, budgeted funding. You can't take risks or you risk putting people out of a job and killing the program.
That leads to an overly conservative culture that restricts any risk taking and over-engineers everything to the point failure is effectively impossible.
This slow movement, overly conservative, design by committee approach helps limit risk but it absolutely balloons costs in the long run and horrifically delays progress. Of course if they were a company they'd eventually run out of money but that's not really an option for gov orgs so when the overly conservative, limited run designs end up encountering production issues, the projects explode in cost with nearly no upper limit.
TLDR: The political climate is a direct consequence of the lack of budget and continued restriction of that budget only worsens the problem.
> I can't agree that funding is "largely the reason"
> NASA just isn't about high-risk / high-reward "moonshots" anymore. The overarching political environment doesn't allow it, never mind the office politics.
Why doesn't the political environment allow for it. What could happen. What could regulatory bodies do to NASA for taking a risk and failing. What sort of constricting change could political bodies do in such a situation.
The funding senator became the administrator of the current moon attempt. The funding insist on using the old technology in the funding. All these sounded bad. If nasa has more freehand. But then the fund will not get back to the states …
"Funding" isn't really a good answer IMO. I don't know a ton about Fusion research specifically, but NASA is horrifically inefficient with money compared to private competitors. Giving them more money won't magically make them more efficient. Reasons why include:
- Their incentive is to optimize for political approval, which means spreading facilities among as many congressional districts as possible, which creates a ton of inefficiency from poor communication and the need to constantly ship things around
- Public approval is the goal and failure is the worst possible option, so things tend to be optimized to take as few engineering risks as possible and have huge amounts of bureaucracy to spread the blame for any possible failure
There's a reason why SpaceX started landing rockets with a fraction of the money that NASA spent on building ridiculous boondoggles.
>> Their incentive is to optimize for political approval, which means spreading facilities among as many congressional districts as possible, which creates a ton of inefficiency from poor communication
Ummm.. I thought remote work was no less efficient?
Remote work is fine in some circumstances. One of the circumstances where it is definitely not fine is in designing, manufacturing, and testing high-precision aerospace hardware. You aren't gonna put a 5-axis CNC mill in your garage.
You are comparing company that makes trucks with a company that makes precision scientific instrumers, and you are declaring that truck companu is more efficient per kilo of produce. this is stupid.
Nasa develops nuclear reactors, landed on titan and has reached pluto. Spacex vehicle has never left the Earth-moon system.
SpaceX is not Tesla. It's disingenuous to call SpaceX a "company that makes trucks". Just like NASA, they also make precision scientific instruments. They're the first privately funded mission to the ISS and run a massive satellite constellation.
They may not have the same accomplishments as NASA, but they're far from a "company that makes trucks".
You think their satellite fleet has absolutely no precise equipment for knowing and maintaining its position? Or for communicating with terminals and each other?
Like, come on. I get shitting on Musk is the cool new thing, but this is genuinely the case where SpaceX is doing cool things in space, and at an extremely fast pace. Get over yourself if you can’t see through your Musk hate and only see them as “a company that builds trucks”.
The analogy is apt in at least defining a separation between the overall complexity of what SpaceX produces compared to NASA, to say something of how the two different models of R&D work, but maybe off in degrees as you discussed.
"NASA makes precision scientific instruments and SpaceX makes precision scientific instruments that have higher tolerances with a higher focus on throughput, and there are rapidly diminishing returns in how much funding can be used to close the gap" is probably the right take if not as fun.
It's largely the same reason why NASA takes so long to do anything.
1. Shortage of funding
2. failure can result in loss/exhaustion of funding
3. extremely low risk tolerance
4. physical experiments needing new HW only happen when the likelihood of success is extremely high
5. projects are over engineered to reduce chance of failure
6. projects are over budget and over schedule
7. projects only make minor incremental progress
8. lack of fast/exciting progress drives decrease in funding
9. GOTO 1