IntLibber wrote:
1) ULA is the ACORN of the space biz. They're a jobs and corporate welfare program with a cost-plus contract and guarantee never to lose a dollar agreement with USAF. Of COURSE they don't see a profit in ANYTHING that they aren't able to talk Uncle Sugar into forking over tens of billions for with no guarantee of delivery. Politely worded, they are space profiteers.
2) Elon's asking for LAS money from NASA because he's pretty sure he can get the money. He's never said he is incapable of getting it done himself on his own dime, but like any smart businessman, when your competition is on a corporate welfare gravy train, it doesn't hurt to ask for money when there's an idiot with a well known predeliction for writing blank checks out there who may just give you the money. If NASA stiffs him on LAS money and tells him to capitalize it himself, I am sure he'll do just that, then keep the price for Dragon seats slightly below the Soyuz pricing to maximize profit so he can pay back wherever that capital comes from for the LAS.
Your biases are showing.
I don't disagree with you, but we'll see what happens...
3) as for technology and knowhow "Not being in place" for business to take over... excuse me? Who the hell do you think provides all that to NASA? And when NASA lays off their own staff, where do you think the best and brightest will wind up? They'll be working for private businesses at private rates and without the cushy government employee union benefits and work hours. Those that are worth their snuff will do well, and the dead wood will go someplace else.
What are you talking about? You need to read more carefully.
Private enterprise can barely make money launching comsats. Expanding into the solar system is right out. We need an organization to do the hard stuff, the stuff that won't make money right away, without regard for the fact that it isn't making money. That's NASA.
Downsizing NASA and relegating it to a ground-bound research role would retard development of space, because you can't learn how to do something nearly as effectively without actually trying to do it. Manned exploration missions can be considered to be technology demonstrator missions as well as science missions. (Also, what about the SMD? Would a corporation have launched Cassini? How about Dawn?)
That's assuming a smooth technology development curve, of course. If high-thrust Mach-effect thrusters become available, NASA can leave development of the solar system to the corporations almost right away and start working on a warp drive. Operating in space won't be particularly expensive, which is good in case of something going wrong with said warp drive...
Also (to address your point), the commercial operators cannot possibly accomodate all of the NASA and contractor personnel that will be fired. There are too many. You can rant all you like about how most of them are dead wood, but I doubt it's true, and anyway SpaceX has apparently signalled that they don't want to hire
any NASA personnel, which sounds distressingly arrogant to me...
4) Unspent money? How much unspent money is there and where is it?
There is no unspent money because they wouldn't get to keep it anyway, and any unspent money would be seen as an excuse to cut the budget next year. So the incentive is to try to spend it all.
If unspent money carried over, the first reason would disappear, creating an incentive to save, and introducing the possibility of multi-year project load balancing. The second reason would still be a problem, but locked-in multi-year budgets (as proposed by some), rather than "projections" that never materialize, would help solve that...
Furthermore, since congress still won't give the nasa administrator CEO power to close unneeded facilities, I frankly could give a crap about the idea of "fixing" NASA. Until and unless congress gives up the reins, that aint even gonna start happening. They were supposed to fix NASA back in the early 1990's, and again in the late 1990's, and again in the oughties.
The only thing that would fix NASA is spinning it off as a publicly traded corporation and letting the corporate raiders go through it with a flamethrower.
That's just rampant pessimism. Also, your second paragraph is inconsistent with your first. If NASA is unfixable, how is Congress to blame for not fixing it?
I suspect a lot of the problem with NASA stems from funding constraints - being asked to do too much with too little. There's a reason NASA's ratio of paper studies to actual completed projects is so high. Single-year budgets, cost-plus contracting, and the inability of politicians to leave the goalposts alone for more than five years are also issues. The combination of chronic underfunding and virtually-guaranteed project cancellation creates a culture of failure, and I'm not as sure as you seem to be that Congress isn't starting to realize this...
Anyway, this is becoming more of an ideological debate, which wasn't my intent, so I'll suggest that we try to wind this down...