[panick21]

I'm not sure what are talking about. I don't like giving contracts to SpaceX because they are the right kind of people, I like it because they tend to deliver faster and at less cost with something more modern and more future looking.

While on the contrary Boieng and friends try to use old tech they have in their archive to slap togetehr a minimal viable product to meet the requirment.

But the contract structure changes is not about giving contract to SpaceX only. Its about developing a space industry. And this has worked extremely well. Commercial cargo resulted in Falcon 9, Antares rockets. Antares team is now working with the Firefly startup for a next generation rocket. Clearly not as successful as Falcon, but without Falcon on the market it might have delivered differently.

It also produce Cargo Dragon and Cygnus. Both have seen a lot of further development since then and have all kinds of uses.

You can also look at CLIPS for moon landers, where some companies at small budgets have managed to build landers. And even those that weren't successful, training a lot of people on deep space probes.

If you comapre the explosion of the space industry since Commercial Cargo to the stgantion in the Shuttle/Constellation area you will see why many space fans are so in favor of the new model. And the amazing thing is, that a tiny fraction of the money was spent on the non-Shuttle/Constellation/SLS part.

In fact, I did the math and the total spend on just development of Constellation/SLS/Orion is going toward 200 billion $ over the last 25 years. And that is without actually delivering anything meaningful.

In comparison the complete development budget of Commercial Cargo was a few billion $ at most, and it has revolutionized the US space industry. The complete spend on all Commerical Cargo, Commercial Crew and Lunar development more like 20 billion $. And the impact is just hilariously larger.

Seems fairly obious what the way forward is, its just politically not feasable. As long as 50% of NASA discretionary budget is spent on ISS and Shuttle-derived stuff that will never be forward looking, you are playing the game with a hand tied behind your back and cement shoes.

[mmooss]

You don't see that, on HN, a large number of people support and defend everything SpaceX does and demonize any possible competition, critic, or criticism?

IOW, it doesn't matter what SpaceX or the others are doing, SpaceX is the 'right kind of people' to them.

[panick21]

I have read most of this threads and most threads about space on HN. There are occational full on Musk shills but I would argue its very much not the norm.

And those comments are usually not long or detailed. Almost everybody that actually engadges in the discussion doesn't seem to defend that position.

[mmooss]

The shills write the longest comments, IME. They can't contain themselves. Look at your comment - contract structures, clips, ... who would care that much about SpaceX?

[panick21]

I care about spaceflight and technology, not that crazy in a forum focused on technology. Why are you here in a thread about NASA and SpaceX if you don't care? Just to a snarky troll? I can talk about many NASA contracts, not just those to SpaceX, but crazy me, I thought in a thread about SpaceX contracts talking about SpaceX contracts is reasonable.

Sorry that complex government contracts valued at 100s of billions of $ can't be discussed in snarky one-liners and throwing around random judgments based on nothing. You seem like somebody that should be on tiktok, not HN.