[themartorana]

No no wrong wrong please stop applying blanket statements to things like this. DARPA and NASA alone have benefitted humanity and science in ways hard to grasp - from the Internet to vaccines to the microwave frackin' oven.

Please do not lower yourself to blanket statements like this. It's true, government projects sometimes become massive boondoggles like this (or say, the JSF) but just as often the benefits are enormous.

[Fomite]

In fairness to the government, private industry has their own share of blame in the JSF.

[sixQuarks]

are you kidding me? NASA is your idea of a successful lean government project? Elon Musk is doing what NASA couldn't with a tiny fraction of their budget.

[recondite]

And how far along would Elon Musk and SpaceX be without the decades of research, development, testing, and real-world experimentation done previously by NASA and other government R&D efforts?

Your argument presupposes SpaceX hasn't benefited from the previous work done before. Which they have, immensely. Stop reducing complex systems into simple certainties. It's insulting to the entire community of scientists that have been dedicated to rocket and space research over the past 70 years.

[andreasvc]

He didn't use the word lean. NASA has gone to the moon. It is as of yet unclear whether the likes of Musk can pull that off. It seems intuitively likely that some things are best done by/funded through the government.