Comment by mike_hearn
18 hours ago
The ISS is a government project that's heading towards EOL, it has no incentive to heavily optimize anything because the people who built it don't get rich by doing so. SpaceX is what optimization looks like, not the ISS.
> has no incentive to heavily optimize anything because the people who built it don't get rich by doing so.
Optimization is literally how contractors working for the government got rich. Every hour they spent on research was directly billed to the government. Weight reduction being one of the most important and consistent points of research.
Heck, R&D is how some of the biggest government contractors make all their dough.
SpaceX is built on the billions in research NASA has invested over the decades. It looks like it's more innovative simply because the USG decided to nearly completely defund public spending in favor of spending money on private contractors like SpaceX. That's been happening since the 90s.
By the same token SpaceX has no reason to optimize Starship. That is also largely a government project.
It's a private company, is profit motivated, and thus has reason to optimize. That was the parent poster's point.
Starship isn't largely a government project. It was planned a decade before the government was ever involved, they came along later and said "Hey, this even more incredible launch platform you're building? Maybe we can hire SpaceX to launch some things with it?"
Realistically, SpaceX launches far more payload than any government.
Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, Raytheon, and all the others are private companies, too. NASA and others generally go through contractors to build things. SpaceX is on the dole just like them.
Haha no. SpaceX survives entirely on money from the US government. It's always been that way.
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that is true. They would have failed after their first failed launch. The US government saved them.