ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20…

I’m just gonna reply to everyone with this, since it drives my point home and comes from NASA themselves. You can read it or not if you want, but my point is that SpaceX reduced costs in a way NASA by itself was not capable of doing. The main reason as you might imagine is the proper incentives were not there in the same way that they exist for private industry. Look at Section 3 point B. Institutional causes and cures of very high space launch cost.

Reading directly from your source: one of NASA's key drivers have been RELIABILITY, and a "non-industrial" culture. Of course both of these things drive cost up. "Industrial" cultures have eliminated creativity since Henry Ford introduced the assembly line at his plant--everyone has a single efficient responsibility and it makes everyone miserable as a result, leading to nobody giving a single damn at the end of the day.

In the same paragraph you linked:
"The low Shuttle flight rate not only
makes for inefficient use of personnel and facilities, it distorts the cost per flight calculations because of high fixed
costs.” (Rutledge, 93-4063)"
Meaning that if they had modified their program and product to launch more frequently like SpaceX does, then the costs would be much more favorable.

And also:
"Another key factor in SpaceX’s low costs is its young, highly motivated workforce of top
graduates willing to work significant unpaid overtime. "
This is NOT a good thing--people shouldn't have to slave away for their career. It's also not sustainable, and it means that the work is being done by inexperienced individuals which leads to disasters like:

texastribune.org/2024/12/18/te… and

theguardian.com/world/2025/jun… and

businessinsider.com/spacex-sta…

SpaceX's 1st Starship launch destroyed pad with volcano-sized explosion

SpaceX's Starship rocket atop its Super Heavy booster is the most powerful rocket in history, capable of generating the same force as a volcanic eruption.

^{Morgan McFall-Johnsen (Business Insider)}

But they had no incentives to send the shuttle more often because they do not have a commercial interest in being able to do so. It’s very easy to say, they could have done X or Y thing, but here’s the thing: they didn’t, not for decades and they are still not doing it now. Theoretically given the resources they have they should have never been able to hav been shown by Space X how to save costs, but that’s the paradox of having a lot of theoretically infinite funding (in relative terms) you dont have an incentive to squeeze every little drop of efficiency that you can.

Sure you raise some good points, but you also seem to have glossed over how absolutely bloated the agency is by their own admission in this paper. Why did NASA need all that personnel when SpaceX did better with a fraction? And if what you say is true about hyper specialization is true, which org do you think was more hyper specialized the one that had magnitudes more employees or the one that had to do with a fraction of the money and the personnel.

Again, the fact of the matter is SpaceX is more efficient at this than NASA. It’s not an opinion, it’s a fact confirmed by NASA themselves. That’s the bottom line for me here.

If we are gonna fret over collateral damage of every little thing we do, we might as well go back to the caves. Steps are taken to reduce it but it can never be fully avoided. Has a NASA rocket never exploded? Would you rather freeze human technology and science in its current state? Because if you look at history we break shit in order to learn how to not break shit and how to fix shit and how to improve it. I’m frankly sick of this performative ludditism.

Edit: that being said I am not advocating for dismantling NASA or anything. The way I see it NASA should focus on research, while SpaceX can focus on making commercially viable rockets. Like we don’t have USPS making their trucks.

I get it, you're just trolling. There is no valid argument here; NASA is a government institution who's intention is to serve the people through scientific advancement, not scrounge up a fucking profit. I literally just showed you that SpaceX is only more "efficient" by taking advantage of people, which is the complete opposite end of the spectrum from what government is supposed to do. They are not even competitors. They're not even competing; SpaceX will never develop the technology that NASA did, that SpaceX relied on to be in business in the first place.

The original conversation wasn't even about money, efficiency, or profit; it was about the ability to create and benefit society. Because SpaceX has a profit motive, it will never be able to create and innovate the same way NASA did; it'll only ever be able to fulfill narrowly defined contacts. Because guess what? If it goes beyond that, it'll basically be where NASA is and then you'll be in here bitching about them too because they're not "as efficient" as the people they're paying to do a simple, narrowly defined task with overworked, inexperienced employees as they generate rampant environmental harm.

I really wasn’t going to dignify this with an answer. But fuck it, I have nothing better to do it seems.

Yes corporations are more efficient by exploiting resources to the last drop, including people (to the extent that the law and the individual allow), no shit Sherlock, that’s kind of the point. But the people are there willingly, many of them could have worked at NASA or any other STEM job but they took the job Musk offered them because he was offering a different experience than what they could have received anywhere else, and of course the promise of future riches. I understand your point of view better than you think, I just reject it because it does not apply universally. Not everyone is coerced into accepting lower pay or working more hours, some people choose that because their job is more important to them than most other things. So yes exploitation of labor happens, but at what can only be described elite level jobs, the employees that choose to be paid below market rate do so out of their choice. These are not people struggling to pay rent, they are making 3 figures most of them if not all of them. A far cry from the cashiers at Walmart.

The thing is that if you look at the way science and technology progresses it ca be boiled down to optimization in the use of energy and resources. Government agencies will never do that because of the way they are incentivized to operate which by the way is not to benefit the people, that’s a naive and utopian view of government, rather they are optimized to never spend less this quarter than last quarter because they get their budget cut if they do. You are deluded if you think a single government official in any country in any government is concerned with “the people” more than they are in their career and the budget they manage. I’ll repeat this, the government is a distinct entity from the people with different incentives and motivations, same as a corporation or an NGO or any other organization. They are all different groups with different goals and motivations and the people are yet another. Each serves themselves and that ‘s how we achieve balance. But I digress, the way incentives are set up for the government is to spend more and more even when there is no logical reason to spend more. Which is why they could not achieve what SpaceX did.

But here’s what crazy about you telling me I’m trolling, or maybe you didn’t read my edit, but I agree with you! NASA has a distinct role in the future which is to dedicate itself to research that might not have obvious commercial application but could benefit humanity in other ways, I used the USPS example: it would be kinda stupid to have USPS make it’s own trucks when it is better at doing logistics which is a task that doesn’t have a commercial upside without becoming so expensive that it hurts most of the population.

I do not know about what original conversation you refer to as my first comment was always about efficiency and cost cutting which is the only thing that will enable mass space exploration, mining and commerce and maybe colonization one day (opening the door for all kinds of human organization schemes and experiments that are no longer possible on earth due to social ossification). For me that was always the goal of NASA, and yes without NASA there would be no SpaceX, just like there would be no NASA without Newton and no Newton without Descartes and so on. No human endeavor is built from the clouds, there’s always a precursor, we can trace anything and everything to our first ancestors if you like and then to the first bacteria life forms.

And yes SpaceX itself will become a bloated, inefficient monster one day, that is the lifecycle of these entities. The argument for free markets (actual free markets not the corporatocratic protectionist nightmare that is the US system) is that a competitor will come about and do the same thing better and take their market from them if they fail to improve themselves. But maybe that doesn’t happen, at that point you will have me right by your side calling for the nationalization of SpaceX, but we are not there yet.