It may be important to note that SpaceX and Tesla finances are likely intertwined. This is a common dynamic among Musk’s companies. So while Tesla is not a contractor, its finances do affect government contractor risk. Tesla stock has been the main collateral for Musk at the same time he engages in start-ups and I don’t think that is coincidence.

I think the OP was alluding to unreliability in the CEOs mental state, but I’ll add another aspect: they are sometimes skirting well-established norms. An example is not performing material quality checks on critical parts. This is standard practice in the domain, yet they choose not to and it resulted in a loss of a rocket and its payload. They later added those quality checks to their process. SpaceX is good, but there’s no need for repeating well worn industry mistakes just because you fancy yourself as “different”

Yes, but the government has much more control over all aspects, especially design. That changed with the commercial crew program.

And that was good because... Why?

It would potentially mitigate the risk identified by the GGP regarding “unreliable” contractors who force risks on you that you may not want. Same reason I often choose to do house maintenance myself. Not to say it’s also not without costs/risks, it just comes down to which balance you prefer.

NASA still makes these competitive contracts though and picks among several contractors. Afterwards NASA is still involved in design through reviews and other lines of communication.

Using your analogy, if I do hire a contractor I'll talk with them a lot about what they're going to do and make sure it's generally in line with what I want, but they're generating most of the ideas and just incorporating what I say.

Eh, not so much. They have reviews, but it is a much more hands off approach. *

There were instances where NASA engineers brought up issues with designs and were told it wasn’t their role to drive the design. The concept of CCP was they were buying a ride, not a rocket. Just like you don’t tell Airbus what engine they should use when you buy a plane ticket.

* IMO the goal of CCP was to find a mechanism to informally circumvent many requirements. NASA could always waive requirements but I don’t think many people were willing to sign on the dotted line even if they disagreed with the requirements. CCP unburdens them from the same requirements while also allowing them to avoid full responsibility for the decision. (More charitably, it also allowed them to avoid some political costs, like having to spread projects across multiple political areas to avoid funding cuts.)

Right, reviews, where important design concerns can be raised. IDK what specific design concerns you're referring to, but just because an issue is raised doesn't mean it's a real issue.

Again, you don't want two different organizations trying to design one thing.

You missed the part where NASA engineers were told to pipe down about concerns because it wasn’t their place to drive the design. There were numerous, the ones I’m familiar with involved touch screens in cockpits and the amount of reliability needed in safety critical hardware.

Because it got results. Landing on the moon was a government program, but you seem to dislike government.

NASA still sets requirements and invites several companies to compete for contracts with different solutions. See the lunar lander contracts from a few years ago for example.

You are ascribing beliefs to be based on others in this thread I think.

What I think is that if a company is going to build and provide the solution then they should own the design. NASA should of course get to be involved in reviews and discussions, which they absolutely fucking are, but I do not think that it makes sense for one organization to design something and the other one to build it as if there's like a hard line between these two activities.

I'm not convinced that is how it worked in the days of Apollo either as you've just asserted that without citation.

NASA has not been effective in 50 years. Maybe time to try something else?

How are you measuring effectiveness? It seems like you might have a pretty shallow perspective on what NASA does and what their goals are. For example, do you know how many mission directorates they have and how they differ?

Not the person you're responding to, but JWT, SLS, and several other projects have suffered extreme bloat in both cost and timeline. Mega projects like that are some of the most public -facing things NASA does, so they unfortunately tend to drive public perception.

I will never argue that NASA doesn't accomplish amazing things, but large parts of the organization are ineffective. IDK if I'd go so far as to say the entire organization is ineffective, but large parts are.

I also don't think we should cut NASA's budget at all. We should cut the bloat and redirect it to more projects.

It does read to me that many people view this with the same lens we apply to private companies.

As an example, some of the bloat is intentional because it buys down political risk. It would be more efficient to have a program like SLS done within a single NASA center. But that also makes it easier to cut funding because there are a limited number of constituents affected by those cuts. This is exacerbated by long timeline projects that don’t align with shorter political timelines. By spreading the project to many centers, it adds inefficiency but also ensures the survivability of the project. To an extent, there has a a good chance there never would be audacious projects if they were run with maximum financial efficiency. So you’re stuck with the choice of an efficient project that never gets completed or inefficient one that does. As a taxpayer, I’m not thrilled with that dynamic but I understand why it exists

As I understand it JPL has been pretty effective, but that's a very small part of NASA overall.

JPL is also not really “NASA” in the same sense. There are only a handful of civil servants and the CalTech as a contractor. It’s similar to the “quasi-government” operations of national lab.

Were you prescient enough to claim that at the time of the contract or only in hindsight? At the time, most thought Boeing was the safer bet.

I haven't thought Boeing was a good bet pretty much ever, or maybe not since the 1990s but I was a teenager then.

Boeing has been on the same path to decline as old GE was for decades.

>You do know the military spend on research

The charitable reading of parent's comment is "reduce the spending on the parts of the military that aren't research (or research solely dedicated to killing people)".

I'm sure they were thinking more along the lines of bombing various countries (or $40MM birthday parades) rather than the next onion routing protocol coming out of the Naval Research Laboratory.

You can still disagree with that, of course, but responding to the steelman version of someone's argument is much better than a snarky "You do know XYZ, right?".

That’s fair. My intent was not snark but to maybe spark some curiosity about what that military spend goes towards. But I think the OP could have framed it a little better to indicate they understood that nuance. Just like the budget cuts for NASA leave a considerable amount of research in place, it’s about priorities. The problem in many of these discussions is a lack of nuance: eg, not understanding the scope of what the DoD does, for example. The DoD spends as much as 15X as NASA on medical research, but the OP doesn’t acknowledge any of that with a overly generalized recommendation to simply cut defense spending. The difference is I’m not as confident as you to claim I know what they were thinking without further information. That’s why I framed it as a question.

This is true but I’ve wondered how much of the dynamic is because Tesla offers a limited number of models.

As others have said, Tesla is a status symbol. Meaning people often want one just because it’s a Tesla. For someone who is set on a Tesla, they have five options. By contrast, someone set on a Toyota has 20 or so. Meaning, if I want a Tesla there’s a reasonably high probability my choice will be a Model Y because I don’t have many options. 66% of Teslas sold are Model Y while only 15% of Toyotas sold are Camrys.

How do you define “success”? Is “return” just in pure economic terms or are we also measuring other benefits to society?

I feel like that lack of standardization is part of the problem. Some manufacturers may pick different times to avoid nuisance braking, but that translates to higher risk to the driver. I’d like to see some core parameters like this standardized (whether by an industry body or regulator).

The environmental aspect I rarely hear discussed is how much carbon would be saved by maintaining your existing vehicle instead. The existing car is already a sunk carbon cost and manufacturing is a huge emitter. It’s more nuanced of course, but it seems to me that it’s always been a status play falsely veiled as a virtuous environmental decision. We humans are great at rationalizing our emotional decisions.

For the rich people who can even consider a tesla, there are no old cars. The average tesla owner would not be seen in any car more than a decade old. They lease. Older/used cars are someone elses domain. This is a shame because cars today can easily last 25+ years. If manufactuers wanted to, they could even biuld them to last much longer. But the new car market is dominated by people who lease and dump cars, not people who keep them around once the shine is gone.

I've heard that argument long ago pushed by totally-not-oil-industry-marketers. If I recall correctly math worked out as 'pays for itself in three to five years'. If you are of the practice of getting a new car every two years it wouldn't help, but if you are doing so already just keeping your cars until they die/it becomes more expensive to repair would be the easy environmental improvement that would also save money.

Yep, at least using numbers from an LLM, the break even emission standpoint seems to be about 3-4 years.

For people who use leases to get a new car (average lease is 36 months) they’d be doing more harm to the environment, but for people who hold onto their cars longer, they’d be reducing CO2e.

Those are just rough generalizations, and of course it depends on driving distance, grid emissions, etc. For example, if you get your electricity primarily from coal, the break even is closer to 12 years. But as others have said, the EV market tends towards the type of people who don’t hold on to cars very long.

>expensive to repair would be the easy environmental improvement that would also save money.

This line of thinking seems to miss the financial reality of the vast majority of Americans. Most people aren’t choosing between an $1800 repair vs a $50k new EV for environmental reasons, it’s because they can only afford one of those options.

It’s much less than decades. Unless you only drive once a week to the corner store.

It really depends on the grid emissions. If you’re charging your EV in Vermont (mostly hydro grid) vs West Virginia (mostly coal fuel), it can be orders of magnitude different.

Literally what Boeing did with their software upgrade to read the (already installed) second AOA indicator