SpaceX sits atop decades of resources in what constitutes sound aerospace engineering practices, and is being helped by the fact that their scope is far, far more limited than NASA's.
Private contractors given good specifications are certainly very effective at what they do, but I really doubt that they'd be as good if they were to go on a purely exploratory , basic research-like mission where objectives are fuzzier.
Yes it has. Their search result pages are crap lately, overcomplicated with ads everywhere; it's the same quality level as Yahoo circa 2002. Google is in decline; a slow decline perhaps, but it's happening.
And Google is orders of magnitude bigger by every reasonable measure than NASA both today and at the height of the Apollo programme. There are a dozen of other organizations we could point to (e.g. the largest oil or mining companies) which demonstrate that the private sector can organize on this scale quite well, thank you.
Google doesn't have products that are expected to operate perfectly 15 years from now in outer space. Google's products can survive significant defects, have bug fix turnaround times measured in minutes, and worst case, can take some downtime without too much harm.
When you talk about oil and mining companies, you mention the same ones that suffer dozens of spills, contamination incidents, and accidents? Or is there some sort of hypothetical perfect oil company with no accidents whatsoever?
I think you have absolutely no clue of just how stupifying difficult it is to get equipment into space and surviving a reasonable amount of time.
> And yet the latest football game is broadcast worldwide flawlessly.
I dunno, I've often seen flaws in the broadcast of the latest football game. I think it would be more accurate to say "the latest football game is usually broadcast worldwide with flaws that are within the tolerances viewers are willing to accept", but then, people rarely die because of broadcast glitches in football games, so the tolerances there may be fairly lenient.
Because it's the exact same rehearsed process that's performed for years at a time on hardware and software that is considerably safer than off-the-shelf computer hardware.
How do you reckon? iirc, close to half a million people worked on Apollo; that's much bigger than Google. I don't think there are any private sector organizations significantly bigger than that figure?
"half a million people worked at Apollo" -- that number included contractors as well, a word which has slightly different meaning within government. It'd be as if we included key divisions of Intel and Cisco inside of Google's numbers.
I would argue that Google does a lot of things poorly, which turn out to not be a big deal in the sector they are in but would certainly be a problem in aerospace. This isn't a knock on Google, the requirements are just different.
SpaceX's scope is irrelevant until they can be viable without substantial assistance from Mars, from the point of view of the private-is-better supporters.
It's most likely that space exploration will always be a public-private mixture given the political and military interests in play, and the fact that a privately-funded endeavor of such magnitude would be extremely unlikely to survive a failure, and no one in their right mind would underwrite such a project.
It's funny that people praise private companies' willingness to be flexible beyond bureaucracy yet they forget that a company can only survive for so long without positive returns and that limits their risk tolerance tremendously. Heck, consider how few companies are willing to do basic research nowadays.
1 SpaceX's ambitions may be broader than NASA's but their individual engineering targets are not.
2 Private space companies wouldn't exist without the public space programs, not just from a technological standpoint but public contracts have been the largest and most dependable source of revenue for private space companies.
3 Though private companies suffer from the same bureaucratic problems as governments they are more flexible because internal fights can always be resolved one way or another by engaged and decisive management (should you find yourself lucky enough to have such management.) Hierarchies in public entities are not always allowed to settle conflicts between subordinates.
I guess we could conclude from this set of arguments that a mission spearheaded by public space organizations and supported by the scalable infrastructure private space corporations provide is going to be the mainstay of any future missions; mars or otherwise.
> yet they forget that a company can only survive for so
> long without positive returns and that limits their risk
> tolerance tremendously
A company can make a loss indefinitely, as long as they don't run out of money. While Elon Musk carries such a high personal net worth, and the dream of hitting Mars stays front and foremost, that means they can make a loss for a very long time...
For some reason, this all brings to mind the Keynes quote: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".
Elon Musk and his friends' personal fortunes are a drop in the bucket compared to an established federal agency's funding. NASA's requested funding for 2014 is $17 billion.
If you count their accumulated physical assets, manpower and "intellectual property" (assuming aerospace knowledge such as that could be valued effectively), you'd find that very few institutions outside of some multinational corporations and government agencies are that big.
I doubt Musk would be able to get such funding every year until 2030, or whatever arbitrary target is set to get a man to Mars.
> It's most likely that space exploration will always be a public-private mixture given the political and military interests in play
That of course depends on whether you expect political/military interests to be always represented by public institutes, not just today but also a couple of decades into the future. Not saying that will necessarily change, but I've read enough cyberpunk to at least consider the real possibility :)
Making money is about making things people want. Colonizing Mars is the thing that people want; and every step towards that goal (launch vehicles, human spacecraft, etc) bootstraps them onto the next step. Much like how Amazon works; they forfeit profit today to invest in not just tomorrow, but several decades from now.
Amazon's failures do not result in the obliteration of their most valuable infrastucture. A small hickup isn't likely to completely ruin their company, it will only set them back a small amount.
Amazon isn't launching billion dollar servers that will explode in a big publicly visible fireball when you forget to plug a cable in.
I'm not comparing what Amazon & SpaceX are making, but the very-long-horizon vision both companies are committing to. Amazon reinvests today's income to work towards what they want to be in the 2030s and beyond.
Amazon could start turning a huge profit tomorrow if it wanted. The only reason it doesn't is because of titanic capital expenditures funded by operating profits.
How exactly is a mission to Mars comparable to this?
> SpaceX basically has just one customer which it is entirely reliant upon.
As far as I can tell NASA accounts for less than half of SpaceX's business. According to their website they have nearly $5 billion in contracts and I can only find reference to just over $2 billion in NASA contracts.
> As far as I can tell NASA accounts for less than half of SpaceX's business.
NASA ⊂ "The Government"
SpaceX also has Defense (USAF) contracts. At least around $900 million already awarded (and that may not be all), and they recently sued to be allowed to compete for much more under the EELV program.
Good point, I hadn't realized the USAF contract was awarded to them yet. That puts government funding at significantly more than half of SpaceX's existing contracts. I still wouldn't say they basically have only one customer, but it's closer than I thought.
With the "technological moat" SpaceX is building, does it matter how few customers they have today if no one can compete with them?
Didn't a SpaceX competitor install second-hand 1960s Russian rocket engines in a launch vehicle that failed recently? Its not a fault on the engines - I'm sure they were excellent - but rather an anecdote on the gargantuan barrier to competition inventing new space technology offers SpaceX.
SpaceX's scope is first and foremost to continue as a profit maximizing entity. NASA exists to improve collective scientific knowledge and research. Say what you will about Elon Musk, but SpaceX is, and therefore, acts like a business.
Private contractors given good specifications are certainly very effective at what they do, but I really doubt that they'd be as good if they were to go on a purely exploratory , basic research-like mission where objectives are fuzzier.