this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Boeing and someone else are trying too. Way behind Space X. So no, not "entire space program"...
Fuck all commercial dependency. Fully fund NASA, and let them like what they did back in the 60s, which no company could have done.
Stop relying on corporations to lead our space programs. It's too important to leave to grifters and corner cutters.
NASA has always been dependent on commercial for profit entities as contractors. The Space Shuttle was developed by Rockwell International (which was later acquired by Boeing). The Apollo Program relied heavily on Boeing, Douglas Aircraft (which later merged into McDonnell Douglas, and then merged with Boeing), and North American Aviation (which later became Rockwell and was acquired by Boeing), and IBM. Lots of cutting edge stuff in that era happened from government contracts throwing money at private corporations.
That's the whole military industrial complex Eisenhower was talking about.
The only difference with today is that space companies have other customers to choose from, not just NASA (or the Air Force/Space Force).
NASA ran the projects. They have specifications to contractors for manufacturing. That's a far cry from farming out the entire process and renting space on a commercial rocket.
NASA funded SpaceX based on hitting milestones on their COTS program. Those were just as available to Boeing and Blue Origin, but they had less success meeting those milestones and making a profit under fixed price contracts (as opposed to the traditional cost plus contracts). It's still NASA-defined standards, only with an offloading of the risk and uncertainty onto the private contractors, which was great for SpaceX and terrible for Boeing.
But ultimately it's still just contracting.
Really interesting— I don’t follow this nearly enough, so thanks
If Starship wasn't constantly exploding you might have a point. Seems as though that the reality is that they're all pretty much at the same spot but Elon wants to pretend that they aren't.