Like a religion or a cult, you have to cut through the ideology; the ideas are parroted to control the narrative.
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/the-rot-at-the-heart-of...
https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-disaster-american-bus...
The problem is monopoly. Spacefaring isn’t exactly the type of work that attracts the safe and secure job for life types. (Most folks I know at SpaceX would have chosen another career if the only option were a public job at public pay with public promotion limits.)
What was it for the Apollo programme?(The entire programme was 11 years [1].)
> Are we optimizing for the individual? Or for an aerospace manufacturing and supply chain system that requires care and feeding over decades?
I’m not arguing against having more people at NASA. Simply against the claim that this is the evidenced issue. Unless the entire American space programme is a failure, private operators are not the root problem.
Sure, but we aren't talking about hiring astronauts (who ironically do tend to spend their entire career in government because it's the only place to get the thrills they want from fighter pilot to space).
We're talking about quality professional welders. Stereotyping them into one bucket would be silly, but I think it's fair to assume there are a large number of welders who wouldn't mind a guaranteed, high paying job with a guaranteed retirement package.
Extend that to like 90% of the jobs required to make a spaceship...
If so it might be the only government job in the country that beats the private sector in terms of pay.
People wanted to make that happen. So they did.
There hasn't been a lot to inspire people to work for the government like that lately.
We were spending more money. There was competition among contractors. And there were skilled low-level labourers from WWII.
What the government should have done is reduce their pay for missing deadlines by having milestones in the contract. At that point paying more makes economic sense and wages would rise.
A union fixes this in the long term, but that will take time. Government can employ rapidly. Something, quickly, needs to change before we forget how to build because MBAs, accountants, and lawyers burned the place down for shareholder value. There are two astronauts stuck in space very publicly demonstrating this.
Remember we are talking about experienced aircraft welders. They are not available for 20 an hour when industry is paying so much more.
