raido KASAI
Ansei Master Badass
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Two in a week. Both technically private enterprise too. Not surprising really. NASA's early attempts at it weren't all that successful at the start.I was reading about this today. They're saying, when they realized it was coming back down, they self-destructed to keep it from heading into populated areas.
In related, sad, news...Virgin Galactic's space plane blew up, killing one pilot and seriously injuring the other, over the Mojave. They had just switched to a new, high-performance fuel, before this test flight.
http://www.virgingalactic.com/
I doubt it will kill either program but it may deter other less-funded groups from jumping in. Both firms are well funded enterprises and it's not all that likely that a setback like these two would make either gut the program and declare all those resources, time and dollars spent in getting to this point a complete waste, even if it were the case for any of those firms that scrapping it would be the best operational decision. Jobs at the top get lost over decisions like that.
I tend to think that given enough time, the private sector could probably do a better and cheaper job than a government agency as in most things, that is in fact the case, but the main issue I have with NASA and the private rockets is that we scrapped our working systems completely and instead decided to rely entirely upon untested upstarts who are still just finding their way through the process for the first time.
We shouldn't scrap something before what we are replacing it with is reliable. Accidents happen even with proven organizations and equipment, but those are multiplied exponentially during the early research and testing phases of these programs
If the free market is allowed to operate (which it's no longer allowed to do so in most cases), the best oversight possible is risk of complete loss of investment and a poorly ran company going under. Sadly, we don't seem to allow the market to utilize failure any more as regulatory mechanism. Now if someone big makes catastrophic business decisions, the government just bails them out because they are "too big to fail." That's a load of horse manure. If you make bad business decisions, you go out of business. That's how the system is designed to itself.I doubt it will kill either program but it may deter other less-funded groups from jumping in. Both firms are well funded enterprises and it's not all that likely that a setback like these two would make either gut the program and declare all those resources, time and dollars spent in getting to this point a complete waste, even if it were the case for any of those firms that scrapping it would be the best operational decision. Jobs at the top get lost over decisions like that.
I tend to think that given enough time, the private sector could probably do a better and cheaper job than a government agency as in most things, that is in fact the case, but the main issue I have with NASA and the private rockets is that we scrapped our working systems completely and instead decided to rely entirely upon untested upstarts who are still just finding their way through the process for the first time.
We shouldn't scrap something before what we are replacing it with is reliable. Accidents happen even with proven organizations and equipment, but those are multiplied exponentially during the early research and testing phases of these programs
Politics is ruining NASA but without oversight the private space industry has huge potential for corruption, cronyism, and exploitation of celestial objects and resources, personnel, governments, tax dollars, and publicly owned property.
I don't doubt you there, especially about private industry inevitably being more efficient than government...except when they're billing government. Then, for some reason, they seem to be just as fouled up as government ever could be.I doubt it will kill either program but it may deter other less-funded groups from jumping in. Both firms are well funded enterprises and it's not all that likely that a setback like these two would make either gut the program and declare all those resources, time and dollars spent in getting to this point a complete waste, even if it were the case for any of those firms that scrapping it would be the best operational decision. Jobs at the top get lost over decisions like that.
I tend to think that given enough time, the private sector could probably do a better and cheaper job than a government agency as in most things, that is in fact the case, but the main issue I have with NASA and the private rockets is that we scrapped our working systems completely and instead decided to rely entirely upon untested upstarts who are still just finding their way through the process for the first time.
We shouldn't scrap something before what we are replacing it with is reliable. Accidents happen even with proven organizations and equipment, but those are multiplied exponentially during the early research and testing phases of these programs
The problem that we have today is that we try to take a top-down approach to guaranteeing success by elimination of the risk of failure, that can't be done in a system which people like to think of as a free market. A truly free system has 1 single control mechanism at it's disposal and that is a company that makes bad decisions fails and goes away. Nationalizing losses and only makes "private" companies keep doing riskier behavior because in the end they will never suffer anything negative that may be a result of bad business behavior.The problem is not enough regulation yet also too much regulation. This is caused by big businesses spending million on lobbying and payoffs to get just the exact legislation they want. True classical Liberalism would be nicer than what we have right now but it is not the most perfect political philosophy although to describe anything as perfect is probably a fallacy. I tend to favor mixed economies and a mixture of socialism and libertarianism.
I agree that this particular result is true all too often, but I'd pin the blame for it on the system the government has in place more than I would on the individual players forced to operate in that system. If some crazy old man in the neighborhood keeps giving alcohol and drugs free to the kids in the neighborhood, the cause of the problem isn't that there are kids living in the neighborhood.I don't doubt you there, especially about private industry inevitably being more efficient than government...except when they're billing government. Then, for some reason, they seem to be just as fouled up as government ever could be.I doubt it will kill either program but it may deter other less-funded groups from jumping in. Both firms are well funded enterprises and it's not all that likely that a setback like these two would make either gut the program and declare all those resources, time and dollars spent in getting to this point a complete waste, even if it were the case for any of those firms that scrapping it would be the best operational decision. Jobs at the top get lost over decisions like that.
I tend to think that given enough time, the private sector could probably do a better and cheaper job than a government agency as in most things, that is in fact the case, but the main issue I have with NASA and the private rockets is that we scrapped our working systems completely and instead decided to rely entirely upon untested upstarts who are still just finding their way through the process for the first time.
We shouldn't scrap something before what we are replacing it with is reliable. Accidents happen even with proven organizations and equipment, but those are multiplied exponentially during the early research and testing phases of these programs
If the government wasn't allowed to pick winners and losers then lobbying dollars and payoffs would have no purpose.This is caused by big businesses spending million on lobbying and payoffs to get just the exact legislation they want.
I agree that this particular result is true all too often, but I'd pin the blame for it on the system the government has in place more than I would on the individual players forced to operate in that system. If some crazy old man in the neighborhood keeps giving alcohol and drugs free to the kids in the neighborhood, the cause of the problem isn't that there are kids living in the neighborhood.I don't doubt you there, especially about private industry inevitably being more efficient than government...except when they're billing government. Then, for some reason, they seem to be just as fouled up as government ever could be.I doubt it will kill either program but it may deter other less-funded groups from jumping in. Both firms are well funded enterprises and it's not all that likely that a setback like these two would make either gut the program and declare all those resources, time and dollars spent in getting to this point a complete waste, even if it were the case for any of those firms that scrapping it would be the best operational decision. Jobs at the top get lost over decisions like that.
I tend to think that given enough time, the private sector could probably do a better and cheaper job than a government agency as in most things, that is in fact the case, but the main issue I have with NASA and the private rockets is that we scrapped our working systems completely and instead decided to rely entirely upon untested upstarts who are still just finding their way through the process for the first time.
We shouldn't scrap something before what we are replacing it with is reliable. Accidents happen even with proven organizations and equipment, but those are multiplied exponentially during the early research and testing phases of these programs
I have the same argument for why I don't blame baseball players for having taken steroids when the powers in baseball set up such a system that encouraged and rewarded that behavior. Now if I was playing and wanted to compete with known takers, I'd either have to take too or look for a different livelihood.
yep, the old in-out in-outMakes sense. I just feel like, regardless of who is to blame, we're the ones taking it hard and dry, every time.