NASA is working on the constellation program, they’re trying to go back to the moon for example and eventually to Mars. Then you have SpaceX, and they’re working on their own — not a moonshot but more of a Mars-shot. NASA themselves calculated that it would have been more expensive for them to develop what SpaceX is doing, which is an indictment of NASA — they are themselves admitting as much. But SpaceX seems to be moving very fast. So it doesn’t seem to be something in US culture or society. It seems to be something in the motivations or inner workings of the US government.
That was Jose Luis Fernandez de la Puente on Venture Stories, “Science, Innovation, and Longevity.” I think the constellation program ended and they’re working on Artemis now to get to the moon, but nevertheless he makes a good point that I haven’t heard put so bluntly. Clearly there are all sorts of places that progress can be accelerated — particularly in public sector work like NASA and DoD — but we are not achieving them for some reason. Here’s some more on that:
I believe that organizations in general usually don’t survive for a long time in a healthy state. Organization age, so to speak. It could be that the NIH or NSA or current institutions, when they were made they were quite lean and efficient. But as they exist for a while longer, they become sclerotic, slower, and more bureaucratic.
… It’s more egregious in some sectors like aerospace and defense, where you have really old primes, Lockheed Martin and Boeing have been there forever. They always get the interesting contracts. That isn’t going to change very likely. If you have an industry that has more or less been the same forever, it ultimately becomes a mesh with government officials.
And I have to agree with this:
The idea of funding people not projects, that seems to work. Having the freedom to think in a more comprehensive, long-term way. That is one of the most impactful things one can do to foster better science.
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