this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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In the entire history of NASA, they’ve never manufactured any boosters for themselves. Redstone was from the army. Titan, also military. Saturn I and V were designed by NASA but contracted to big aircraft manufacturers as contractors. Shuttle was Boeing / Rockwell for the orbiter, ATK for the boosters. SLS is basically all the Shuttle contractors, again. (That was the point.)
I hear what you’re saying. But NASA would need to spin up an entire company from scratch to build their own rockets. That’s not what their mandate is, and it’s not what they’re good at.
The difference is that NASA was really on top of them. There are entire manuals and documentaries not just on how they did Apollo, but also on how they organised it, and how they ran every process.
And they chucked all of that away for some of the most insane hodgepodge improvised bullshit imaginable. The entire SLS/HLS split is ridiculous, and serves no propose other than giving companies more money for little gain.
A lot of the Apollo work also got done in basically one administration (Johnson largely continued JFK’s policies). As soon as Nixon was in charge, NASA got gutted, and then they only had the resources for shuttle. Later Apollo missions got cancelled because Nixon thought the money was better spent killing more Vietnamese people.
Switching administrations means vastly changing policies, if for no other reason than the new boss hates the old boss. SLS “succeeded” (got hardware made and launched, at least) where Constellation failed partly because they buttered everyone’s bread in the right way.
HLS is dumb. SLS is dumb. But similarly to Commercial Cargo and Crew, it survived administration changes partly because NASA wasn’t directly at the helm, so the new guys didn’t just hit the big red stop button.
Is the US an oligarchy now? It certainly feels like it is.
Just mooting it would send a shot across the bow. And it would get the ball rolling if the private industry didn't reform it.