Quote:
Originally Posted by Coffee Warlord
Sadly, I think this is why private companies will wind up surpassing NASA down the road. The constantly shifting targets / endless red tape has got to be utterly brutal.
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If they get funding. A lot of the private companies are relying on NASA for funding (which in turn is relying on Congress). And the Senate's recent bill could screw smaller companies like SpaceX:
NASA funding: New Senate bill will keep us relying on Russians for rides to space.
As I said earlier, it will be very interesting to see what happens when SpaceX has their first failure. They scrubbed another launch today due to "pressure decay in the second stage" which sounds a lot like a problem they had on at least 2 previous launches. Without more details, it's troubling that they may not be implementing lessons learned and jives with things I've heard from former employees (which you have to take with a grain of salt, not knowing why they're "former" employees). Musk is doing some things that the industry really frowns on, but if he's successful doing it (and that's why you have to wait to see what happens when they have a failure because that's when you're going to see how flexible it is and what's really going on), the "good" things might roll into other parts of the industry, which would be a breath of fresh air.
That said, without funding from the government for at least part of these things, until it becomes a good business decision (which I really can't imagine it will in the near future, given the expense...), I don't see private companies doing much, either. :\
/tk