"Private industry is much more efficient and faster than NASA"
Time from first concept to first operational flight:
- Saturn V: ~11 years (1957–1968)
- Space Shuttle: ~13 years (1968–1981)
- SLS: ~14 years (2012–2026)
- SpaceX Starship: 21 years+ (2005–?, no operational flight yet)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@thomasfuchs look theyre just having trouble finding talent to realize their genius o̶l̶i̶g̶a̶r̶c̶h̶s̶ capitalists ideas
@thomasfuchs It's easy to fall into the trap of mistaking businesses for having the potential to be efficient because you'd think, in theory, someone chasing profits will, in fact, optimize costs, but in reality large companies do the exact opposite: deoptimizing as much as possible. Well, for a whole bunch of reasons, but the craziest to me is how much they gleefully burn all their long term bridges in their desperate chasing of getting a slightly higher profit margin on each next quarterly report... It's crazy how much more they'll spend long term just to make the short term look better...
(But yeah, some things just don't work right if you're chasing profits. Reaching space is one of them.)
That said, SpaceX is just straight up running a scam operation and pocketing handouts...
@thomasfuchs but don't you know private industry is a lot cheaper for the public?
NASA is funded by your tax dollars, while SpaceX is funded by... Your tax dollars being funneled through a private company! 🙃
Note, these are all super-heavy-ish launch vehicles.
(The cargo capacity of the Space Shuttle was a lot lower than “super heavy” because it has to lift itself up into orbit as well; but all these vehicles are in about the same ballpark as for their total power.)
@thomasfuchs
Much more efficient at disaster when you don't have to bother with all the failsafes.
@thomasfuchs that's always such a strange take to me.
Government bodies stretch their budgets way more effectively than private industry.
And it should be obvious that that is so because they don't need a profit.
@snarfmason to be fair, none of the private companies make profits either; e.g. SpaceX had a $4.9 billion net loss on $18.7 billion revenue in 2025
@thomasfuchs hahaha well true. But at least theoretically they are trying to, right?
@snarfmason I assume the reason they want to IPO now is that they need money and likely think the AI bubble is going to deflate markets soon
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