SpaceX has been a huge success for NASA. For much less funding than NASA doing it themselves or a fraction of the cost of ULA, NASA has a very reliable and much cheaper medium launch vehicle launching much more frequently, and a heavy launcher pretty far in development.
This is great, turning “routine” space operations over to cheaper private companies, while focussing on research and stretching the envelope
Easy to do when you pay people shit and don’t care about things blowing up. And when you get to build on the already established knowledge and use their facilities. Government on the other hand could never allow anything to fail and had to forge the path.
SpaceX has been a huge success for NASA. For much less funding than NASA doing it themselves or a fraction of the cost of ULA, NASA has a very reliable and much cheaper medium launch vehicle launching much more frequently, and a heavy launcher pretty far in development.
This is great, turning “routine” space operations over to cheaper private companies, while focussing on research and stretching the envelope
Easy to do when you pay people shit and don’t care about things blowing up. And when you get to build on the already established knowledge and use their facilities. Government on the other hand could never allow anything to fail and had to forge the path.