IN A NUTSHELL 🚀 The International Space Station (ISS) faces rising safety concerns due to structural cracks and air leaks. 💰 Proposed NASA budget cuts by the Trump administration threaten the safe deorbiting of the ISS by 2030. 🛰️ SpaceX is contracted to develop a U.S. Deorbit Vehicle (USDV), but Elon Musk suggests an earlier
The issue with NASA was that they were the sole client for one industry until recently, and they choose to pick one or two companies to work with to simplify their own admin (as well as grease palms since it’s a political entity in a capitalist state).
That creates monopoly and immediately defeats any possible benefit from “natural selection” in the market. They also tend towards that because the most optimal configuration is a unified state run industry that is allowed to build up the institutional knowledge that their current private counterparts (Boeing and Lockheed) have, while also ignoring the drive for profits.
If there isn’t already an industry in place that can meet those knowledge requirements (as is China’s case), then allowing them to develop, then consuming them is the only really sustainable course of action.
Only the Soviets managed to build a new tech industry from scratch, and that took military development between 2 world wars and almost half a century, China managed to get there using a hybrid of those models in a decade.
The other, deeper, issue with NASA is that Congress required them to do everything wrong on purpose and kept cutting their budget
“shuttle derived hardware”