[undersuit]

Those government inefficiencies are a great source of profit. Cut the FTEs today because the contractor's unrealistic low bid looks better on the budget. Make sure to hire a woman or minority owned for-profit road construction company, or hell just let the roads get so bad a pizza company can make it into a very effective ad campaign. I think we are a country hobbled by capitalism, afraid to do anything because it might hurt profits, even if it will hurt people.

NASA led private contractors to develop the Saturn V rocket and associated modules, now NASA is buying solutions, services, and products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Program

[dmix]

Early NASA was the sum of the private companies and the smartest nerds pulled from academia that they absorbed and turned into an organization. These people brought their culture of production and research from where they came from and built something great. Now NASA is merely a legacy gov agency whose culture is that of every old gov agency. Risk adverse, checkbox focused, political pawns, professional budget wranglers, etc.

Blaming capitalism alone on that is a bit silly. There's nothing capitalistic about a giant gov agency funding the same tiny group of companies for decades.

Public-private partners is a good idea because public orgs that need to produce IRL things are very flawed, but you still need national interests beyond market interests so this is the compromise that has worked many times.

But they replaced the public-private idea with a series of mega gov bureaucracies whose whole job is propping up monopolies who are prevented from failing in an open market because they are deemed essential to the national interest - entirely because gov refuses to adapt to reality and allow proper competition or long term investment.

Boeing has no risk and neither does NASA because they can just keep choosing the safe choice, Boeing. What a lovely market.

We need to kill or reboot legacy gov agencies when they get old. And we need to force any public-private arrangements to legitimately foster competition, which means lots of compromise beyond a VC type situation, like reducing the litany of special interest checkboxes (jobs, geography, diversity, etc) and paperwork for small companies.

[undersuit]

>Blaming capitalism alone on that is a bit silly. There's nothing capitalistic about a giant gov agency funding the same tiny group of companies for decades.

I'm blaming capitalism 100% for the hollowing out of NASA. I never said early NASA was perfect.

>But they replaced the public-private idea with a series of mega gov bureaucracies whose whole job is propping up monopolies who are prevented from failing in an open market because they are deemed essential to the national interest - entirely because gov refuses to adapt to reality and allow proper competition or long term investment.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm blaming capitalism of doing.

>We need to kill or reboot legacy gov agencies when they get old.

I really think if we just didn't let this happen constantly we'd have a better system. It's going to shift the litany of special interest because the goal is profits, but barely, existing contractors will just open up a bunch of subsidiary companies.