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Tim Worstall Contributor


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SpaceX's Success Should Lead to NASA Being Cut to the Bone

SpaceX’s Dragon capsule is now safely down from the ISS, showing that private enterprise can do at least some of this space stuff at vastly lower cost than a creaking governmental bureaucracy like NASA.

Bloomberg then makes the entirely incredible argument that this means that NASA should aim to think big and bump up its efforts to get men to Mars and so on. It’s very difficult to understand their thinking here:

This should free the space agency to concentrate on carrying out advanced missions. The most important will be manned space flight, the part of NASA’s portfolio that has always been especially popular and inspiring, and which has reliably attracted money from Congress.

If we’re to get beyond near-Earth orbit, NASA needs to articulate the ultimate goal of these expensive expeditions. A government advisory group known as the Augustine Committee offered a smart way to think about this in a 2009 report. It suggested a “flexible path” for future missions, in which humans and robots would work in tandem to explore a logical progression of destinations — such as the moon and asteroids — in the inner solar system.

This is after they’ve noted that the International Space Station itself, NASA’s last great project, has cost $100 billion and produced almost nothing of scientific or any other value. And the Space Shuttle really wasn’t all that good an idea either.

Surely the correct lesson to learn from this is that now we can see that a lumbering governmental bureaucracy is orders of magnitude more expensive than private industry we should therefore dismantle the lumbering bureaucracy and leave the private industry to get on with things.

It is possible that there are some things that NASA can do which the private companies cannot: pure scientific research perhaps. But the nuts and bolts of getting things into space just doesn’t seem to be an operation which the agency is suited to any more. So it shouldn’t be doing it.

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  • Sean Hancock Sean Hancock 3 years ago

    It is quite obvious Tim Worstall has absolutely no idea what he is talking about and shouldn’t be writing about such things. The entire idea behind the COTS program (initiated by NASA) was to free NASA from the relatively mundane LEO flights to the ISS so that NASA could work on more technically challenging things. There are decades of flight experience to LEO and it is fairly well understood at this point. Not really cutting edge anymore. What you should take away is that private industry will not go into a business there is not a market for. Space-X would not have developed COTS without $500 million from NASA.

  • ameriman ameriman 3 years ago

    Nasa’s shuttle cost $1.5 billion per flight….
    SpaceX Falcon Heavy lifts TWICE the shuttle payload for only $100 million..

    Nasa blew 40 years and $500 billion since Apollo without getting a single American out of low earth orbit… leaving itself unable to resupply it’s own ISS, unable to get an American to orbit…

    Nasa blew $20 billion on the failed/canceled Constellation trying/failing to create it’s own booster/capsule… then SpaceX created vastly superior, more advanced, more efficient booster/capsule for only $300 million…
    Nasa was too decadent, bloated, incompetent to reach Earth orbit efficiently… but you think they are somehow able to handle the much more difficult deep space missions???

    Nasa is just as bloated, incompetent, pork driven as the rest of Federal Govt.. private enterprise is our only chance for a rational, efficient, effective US manned space program… and we must downsize/eliminate NASA and instead fund private enterprise like SpaceX… to do 5 times as much for 1/10 the $s as govt..

  • L. Millstein L. Millstein 3 years ago

    This is peculiarly simplistic and ultimately foolish way of looking at Space X’s success. In fact, NASA is and will continue to be an important enabler and driver of US space endeavors for the foreseeable future. The folks at Space X from Elon Musk on down all know that their success would not have been possible without the very considerable help they had from NASA, not just in the form of expertise or even in the form of materials, equipment, instrumentation and facilities contributions; but, also in the form of seed funding, research & development contracts and demand pull funding such as the COTS contract. This is as true for other companies in the LEO / GTO space business as it is for Space X. The great thing about COTS and the commercial crew development programs (and those of similar ilk) is that they leverage public funding of space endeavors by fueling private enterprise to apply its creative and productive forces to achieving relatively tightly focused mutual goals relatively unencumbered by the vast bureaucratic apparatus of government organizations like NASA. It seems clear that NASA has developed a way of doing things that is almost absurdly expensive. One NASA estimate is that it will cost $38B to develop the SLS even though is will use many “parts” already developed for the Shuttle and Constellation. SpaceX on the other hand has been able develop two rocket engines and two launch systems from scratch, and a reusable orbital vehicle for about $1B – a remarkable difference even allowing for the considerable differences in capabilities and scale – and accounting systems and labor costs requirements. But it would be a mistake to think that means that NASA should be cut to the bone. For one thing, although SpaceX engineered its launch system and capsule from scratch – it relied fundamentally and considerably on NASA’s experience, knowledge and facilities to do so. And while there is nascent but nonetheless thrilling private enterprise success in development LEO / GEO capabilities; NASA, is the only game in town for anything beyond earth orbit. This may change in the coming two or three decades for the moon and for near earth asteroids; but, it will not be changing anytime soon for deeper space exploration, manned or not. NASA is crucial for creating and maintaining the fundamental science, technology and infrastructure for deep space exploration and, by extension, it makes it possible for private concerns to venture beyond earth as well. If the US wants to have a vigorous private sector space enterprise it will need a well funded and well run NASA to have it – for the foreseeable future. It the US wants to explore space and be a leading participant in the most important and the most inspiring undertaking of the 21st century then it will need a well funded and well run NASA. If the US really wants to drive its technology development, it will need an ambitious, knowledgeable, well funded and well run NASA. The real challenge is to focus NASA on its crucial missions [(1) developing knowledge and expertise, technology and infrastructure crucial to space use and exploration that is beyond the reach of private enterprise; (2) seeding the development of private enterprise in space through focused R&D funding programs and demand pull programs like COTS; (3) pursing a vigorous program of planetary exploration using unmanned spacecraft and (4) pursuing a sensible program of manned exploration with a clearly mapped agenda to go to NEAs, the moon and Mars, using public and private, national and international funding and capabilites], to reform its operations so that it is more nimble and uses funding more efficiently, and to set directions insulated from political vagaries and provide funding adequate to achieve them. For all its faults NASA has gotten us to the moon and back, given us more knowledge of the solar system than all of history before it, and has been responsible for developing some of the most pervasively important technologies that make modern life what it is. And it would have gotten us even more had it not been for the inconstancy of Congress and the Executive branch. SpaceX’s success is a credit to NASA and, far from indicating it’s time to cut the agency to the bone, tells us once again what we should already know. NASA has made and is continuing to make possible great things for our society – and the challenge is to ensure that it continues to do so by insisting that it operate efficiently, by setting clear goals, and by providing adequate funding to achieve them.
    (The foregoing comments, of course, relate only to NASA’s space-related missions; but, NASA also is an important component of the nation’s aircraft industry.)

  • ameriman ameriman 3 years ago

    Your claims of Nasa competence, knowledge is completely groundless..
    Not one person working at Nasa has EVER designed a successful rocket or space vehicle…
    Nasa’s Shuttle was promised at $7 million/flight ‘cheap, safe, reliable access to space’.. yet Nasa delivered a shuttle which cost $1.5 billion/flight, killed 2 crew, had multi-year service delays and outages…
    Nasa’s shuttle was the most bankruptingly expensive, dangerous, unreliable space vehicle in history….

    Nasa is being schooled by SpaceX, not the other way around..
    SpaceX doesn’t want or need to learn about what Nasa knows.. e.g. how to deliver $billions of shameless earmarked pork to legacy big space shuttle profiteers… like the $60+ billion unneeded, unsustainable, unaffordable SLS/Orion..

    Nasa showed it’s competence on the failed/canceled Constellation…

  • Les Roark Les Roark 3 years ago

    Lets follow through on that inspired thought and dismantle the government.
    Makes about as much sense. Don’t blame the people at NASA for stupid political decisions. From the end of Apollo to the white elephant ISS, you can pin all the bad decisions on politics. Politicians are about as far sighted as moles and while most of the (past) leadership at NASA has had the vision, they’ve also had lives to lead, children to put through college, and retirements to think about. When politicians make moronic statements about firing people who want to colonize the moon…,
    really…..REALLY, what would you expect from people at their mercy?

  • Alex Hamp Alex Hamp 3 years ago


    Do your research. What an incredibly misinformed and ignorant thing to say, It seems the author of this article is utterly clueless.

  • ameriman ameriman 3 years ago

    Nasa’s useless, boondoggle, white elephant ISS, promised at $8 billion, actually cost over $160 billion…

    You will not find a single qualified scientist not on NASA’s payroll who will claim that the ISS is worth 1/100th of it’s bankrupting cost..

    The Shuttle and ISS were both shameless Nasa jobs/pork programs… whose bankrupting budget overruns and costs caused the cancellation of dozens/hundreds of actually worthwhile space projects…

    If we had instead developed SpaceX Falcon/Dragon type efficient hardware after Apollo, we could have had lunar colonies, Americans on Mars, visits to asteroids, actual ‘cheap, safe, reliable access to space’ DECADES AGO…

    Instead, the big govt Nasa US space monopoly crippled/destroyed the US commercial space, handed it to the Russians/ESA… and doomed us to low earth orbit for the past 40 years..

    But now the Nasa monopoly has been broken, and private enterprise will open up space for Americans…. not just a few hundred joyriding govt selected human cannonballs at over a $billion taxpayer dollars each.

  • Ewan Spence Ewan Spence, Contributor 3 years ago

    What the US Government should do is simple. Anyone who wants to fly a stocking mission to ISS gets a flat fee. Nothing more than basic FAA guidelines to apply though, companies just need to do it safely and be able to dock. Just as the USPO was bootstrapped by the early barnstormers, “space mail routes” can be set up and then the commercial partners can start doing cool stuff.

  • J Edgecombe J Edgecombe 3 years ago

    Most NASA contractors come to NASA for information about how NASA does things. They get that information and mostly take the attitude that if it isn’t broke, dont fix it – just use it with minimum changes. Spacex went to NASA with questions. They had a clean sheet rocket and spacecraft design. They went into the archives and interviewed decision makers about things like political and technical constraints and a thorough review of the problems that these decisions were addressing. In some cases, NASA was continuing to avoid a problem that no longer exists. There was no longer a logical reason to do it NASA’s way. And guess what? NASA concurred. NASA accomodated SpaceX, NASA worked hard to cooperate. They accomplished a lot together, and while the NASA people won’t high five on camera, you can see it in their faces. They signed up to be a part of an exciting space program, not do as little as possible until they can collect their retirement.

    The first 3 flights of the Falcon 1 failed. The Falcon 9 was such a sure thing that the plutocrats were counting their chickens in advance. NASA was sure to be embarrassed. SpaceX would go broke or Congress would cancel the program and we would go back to our pork barrel space program spread throughout almost every congressional district in the country. Good old cost plus contracts. Why do it right when you can get paid to do it over?

    OOPS! Success! How did this happen with the wrong company? Not to worry though, the lobbyists will fully fund their retirements trying to correct this oversight.

    There is no NASA success that Congress cannot ruin unless the voters speak up!

    There is no real parallel between what NASA does and sports, but imagine for a moment Congress holding hearings and then voting on who should be the basketball coach at UCLA. Now imagine the riots on the basketball court if there were no refs. Government is a Goldilocks problem. There is too much, too little, and just right. Unfortunately, just right is a moving target and very hard to hit and it doesn’t stay just right, so you have to keep trying.

    No baseball player can bat 1.000, but that doesn’t mean we should stop playing baseball.

  • Daen de Leon Daen de Leon 3 years ago

    Until private companies build an orbital space station, fly men to the moon, operate robotic rovers on Mars, fly probes to Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury, and more, then I would venture we’re getting value for money, considering that all 50 years of the NASA budget combined amount to no more than one year of defense spending.