[Arainach]

You don't want to rely on a single supplier for critical infrastructure. Their management can extort you, their failures leave you with no backup plan, if they go bankrupt you're really screwed.

Keeping multiple companies capable of building it alive is essential.

[Analemma_]

I'm not actually sure that having multiple suppliers reduces extortion? If you have a policy of "no single supplier", then supplier #2 can extort you just as much as supplier #1 does under a single-supplier policy, because you have no choice but to keep funding them.

I'm pretty sure this is what's been happening with Blue Origin: in 25 years they've delivered close to nothing, but they keep getting contracts because "we need a SpaceX alternative". What is that if not extortion.

(EDIT: the sibling comment correctly points out that Boeing is an even more obvious case. Starliner is a money pit, but we have to keep throwing more money down it so that there's no single supplier)

[IAmBroom]

Extortion requires applied force from the vendor to the customer. You're simply describing failure to deliver goods.

Words have meaning.

[prewett]

My understanding is extorting the government as the single-supplier contract winner is the standard aerospace business plan, apart from SpaceX. Seems to me that if they're going to re-open SpaceX's contract because it's late, there's a whole bunch of other contracts they should re-open. Cross-referencing Trump's golfing calendar with the aerospace industry "leadership" has a decent chance of producing some insight into the decision.

[jjk166]

> Keeping multiple companies capable of building it alive is essential.

Companies and the capability of building are two separate things. It is not at all a desirable thing to keep a company alive which refuses to develop and implement the capabilities to compete, in the process depriving resources from those that would develop those capabilities. If a company dies, its talent and equipment do not vanish into thin air, they get bought up by competitors who can put them to better use.

Unless you are actually duplicating efforts to have multiple firms produce the same things, a large number of potential suppliers does nothing to reduce your risk once you select one to move forward - especially if you still are required to use them after repeated failure. There are just a greater number of potential failure points as any of your suppliers, all of whom you rely on, might fail.

Further, in spreading contracts out among many firms, you reduce the economies of scale of any individual firm. They can not build out the additional capability that more work would afford them, all the while they are taking resources away from genuine productive capability by duplicating effort with excessive overhead.

Concentrated monopolies are bad for common consumers, who have no negotiating power and can be extorted. Governments don't have that weakness. On a purely economic level, the government is a single buyer - it's a heck of a lot easier for them to find a new rocket maker than it is for a rocket maker to find a new government that will buy from them. Beyond that, governments have a monopoly on violence, piss them off enough and bankruptcy is the least of your worries. If it really wanted to, the government could just do the work in house, either setting up new public firms or nationalizing existing ones. Excessively costly government contracts are graft, or at best pork; the government could easily get much more favorable terms if its leaders were so inclined.

[dotnet00]

Boeing has been pretty blatant about just not caring about performance on SLS, because, by being legally required to keep funding it, there isn't really anything NASA can actually do to hold Boeing responsible for underperforming.

IIRC they managed to extort additional money out of NASA for Starliner too (despite it being fixed price), for that exact reason.

SpaceX hasn't fallen to such tactics yet, but, agreed, it'll be too late to start on setting up competitors when SpaceX eventually does fall to that level (Boeing wasn't always so bad after all).