American Company's Spacecraft Malfunctions on Its Way to the Moon

[JT45242]

4. NASA knew it couldn't waste government time, money, and resources...for profit companies will just charge more next time

Privatizing government operations and becoming reliant on for profit companies is a horrible idea. The fruits of the public investment become private patents rather than public domain. Failure costs get added to the project and the next to recoup profits rather than being as certain as humanly possible that it will work correctly the first time.

The John Oliver thing on Elon Musk talked about how NASA said that they could never risk having rockets blow up like Elon does. I also remember Sally Ride saying hat one of the big differences between the Soviet space program and NASA, especially in the beginning was that only NASA cared about whether the astronauts got home in one piece and alive. Since the Soviets did not launch on live TV, they could show only the positive footage. If negative things happened, then no one saw or heard about it.

Probably cannot be undone like when school districts sell all their buses and opt to be a customer to a bus company, the overhead to buy back into all the stuff becomes prohibitively expensive. But maybe a visionary will have the government once again take over the space agency rather than effectively treating it as a kickback agent to a handful of billionaires.