Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Bill Nelson 2.0

15 Comments

First he called cost-plus contracts a “plague” on the agency, and now he’s praising SpaceX (while pretending that he wasn’t one of the “poo pooers” himself, who told Lori to “get her boy Elon in line”). And I love this:

“

When there was the beginning of the space cargo and crew [programs], the two serious bidders were SpaceX and Boeing, and everybody poo-pooed SpaceX and said, ‘Oh, Boeing is a legacy company,'” Nelson said. “Well, guess who is about to make its sixth flight after its first test flight with astronauts, and guess who’s still on the ground?”

That’s got to leave a mark.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Thoughts On Artemis 1

5 Comments

…from Joe Pappalardo:

It may be unfair to compare SpaceX and NASA, but SpaceX is built to be fast-but-risky whereas NASA is built to be slow-but-reliable. We’re now seeing that the fast-but-risky approach is actually leading to not only faster but more reliable results. Artemis is this giant U.S. government program that leaks money—as the Apollo program was—and that seems antiquated, but lots of members of Congress could get behind its traditional approach, which made use of languishing NASA facilities and had a supply chain stretching into lots of different communities. There are real benefits to NASA doing work across these communities, of course, but this approach can get in the way of doing things quickly, being able to change direction when engineers learn something new, or being free to adopt new technology and machinery. There’s less flexibility. And the Space Launch System isn’t reusable, either, meaning it’s a costly rocket that can only be used once. It would be foolish to stop this program now, but it would be grossly irresponsible to replicate it in the future.

He doesn’t explain why it would be “foolish to stop this program now.” I can only think that it’s the sunk-cost fallacy, but I think that what is foolish is to continue to throw good money after bad.