[ShorsHammer]

If governments are so good at aerospace then why can a man with no training and some funding come along and cut the launch price per kg by 80% within a decade or so.

Governments are notoriously bad at procurement, especially in this sector.

Governments are very much about short term gain too, just with money that's not their own.

[themagician]

A man didn’t.

A man with a ridiculous amount of money and a cult following hired a bunch of very smart people, many who used to work for the government, to work for him to build rockets for other people so he could make more money.

NASAs goal was never to build rockets for cheap. It was to do great science.

[ShorsHammer]

What a shame that the thousands of people who have been elected in that time by the public and with a budget a few magnitudes larger couldn't manage somehow it. Either they are wildly incompetent or the one person with far less money is highly competent. Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle?

Guess it was too hard, political considerations and such, certainly some aerospace CEO's got rich regardless in the meantime, so good for them yes?

[dang]

Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly and it's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[ShorsHammer]

I'm not sure what is flamewar about that comment Dan but will endeavour to be more generalist I guess? Respect the tough job you have and will keep it more impersonal.

US aerospace funding by the government is clearly broken, this is known the world over. SpaceX came along and cut costs by half within a decade, that's surely common knowledge by this point?

https://theconversation.com/how-spacex-lowered-costs-and-red...

[avmich]

> US aerospace funding by the government is clearly broken, this is known the world over.

I generally agree with you here - but we'll need to separate "privatizable" aerospace projects from others.

Rocket design is quite old, being a prerequisite to all else. No wonder a lot of experience was gained and - by now - private enterprises can optimize this, so governments should step aside.

At the same time there are projects which could produce commercial benefits after much longer time spans. Automatic interplanetary stations are in that range. So are space telescopes.

That explains how, simultaneously, SpaceX can outwit NASA in rocket design - yet doesn't yet venture into space telescopes business, nothing serious there.