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As NASA increasingly relies on commercial space, there are some troubling signs (arstechnica.com)

submitted 5 hours ago by [email protected] to c/spaceflight

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

NASA was able to use venture capital and private equity funding for startups as a budget multiplier for themselves. Who can blame them for wanting to keep doing that?

It's a different question whether these companies underbid on contracts on purpose to undercut competition and win or accidentally because they don't know what they're doing. Either way, that is definitely unsustainable, but we need something in between that and whatever the hell Bechtel is getting paid on their cost plus ML-2 contract.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

The idea of privatizing things and opening up the engineering to the private sector actually makes quite a bit of sense to me. The idea of running space travel based on fixed-price bids is absolutely insane.

When things don't go to plan, which they never do, at least one factor will have to flex: Quality (i.e. safety), mission scope/schedule, or cost. You're already facing constant pressure for safety to be the thing that flexes, so why would you add additional pressure by assuring that people will lose money if things drag on, so safety is the only thing that can give?

[–] Oni_eyes 2 points 1 hour ago

I would hazard a guess that it's because they seem to flex the budget every single time, which either means really shitty planning by a company that is trying to look competent or excess greed by the administration of said company to make them more money.

Maybe keep the cost plus but then add a tax increase on any executives running those companies/in charge of bidding. Something like revenues derived from government contracts get taxed without deductible and in a separate file from civilian business so they can't do squirrely tax dodging.