It felt absurd living through it. Part of the absurdity of our situation was that we were a small startup building something NONE of the more established players would touch. That’s how we got the deal in the first place. None of the more established players would touch it because NASA just plain hadn’t budgeted enough to do it right. I’ve been vague about what it was because we signed some VERY strict NDAs and I don’t want my big mouth to come back and bite me. But we (being a small, eager startup) jumped in saying “We’ll do whatever it takes!” when we got into the meat of it it, what they were demanding simply wasn’t possible for what they were willing / able to pay. (Thus the bouncing back and forth between cutting things out and then putting them back in)
And like I implied, I believed our actual customer (the big aerospace company) KNEW that going in and manipulated the situation so they could grab some of that money before NASA pulled their head out of their ass and realized what they were asking for was impossible. This dovetails really nicely with the video @bionicjoey@lemmy.ca posted, where Destin says “We need to tell the truth!” “No one’s talking about this!” There are entrenched players who benefit from that and in that video he’s calling them out to their faces.
And honestly, we COULD have done it for about half of NASA’s budget, if they had just let us build it and gotten out of our way and stopped flowing down micromanagey requirements to us via our customer. That’s something that the ISS Commercial Resupply missions kind of got forced to do by a random sensible moment in between congress and NASA leadership. It was pretty successful, but the big contractors didn’t like it and their lobbyists jumped in to derail it being applied to future deals.
(As I understand it… the wheeling and dealing part of it is NOT my area of expertise… the above opinion is based more on space industry office gossip)
This is… Absurd? It seems like as time has gone on, NASA has progressively shifted towards an outsourcing model for more and more of its programs.
This model obviously explodes costs, which don’t help NASA’s shoestring budget. But even in that context, this sounds absurd.
It felt absurd living through it. Part of the absurdity of our situation was that we were a small startup building something NONE of the more established players would touch. That’s how we got the deal in the first place. None of the more established players would touch it because NASA just plain hadn’t budgeted enough to do it right. I’ve been vague about what it was because we signed some VERY strict NDAs and I don’t want my big mouth to come back and bite me. But we (being a small, eager startup) jumped in saying “We’ll do whatever it takes!” when we got into the meat of it it, what they were demanding simply wasn’t possible for what they were willing / able to pay. (Thus the bouncing back and forth between cutting things out and then putting them back in)
And like I implied, I believed our actual customer (the big aerospace company) KNEW that going in and manipulated the situation so they could grab some of that money before NASA pulled their head out of their ass and realized what they were asking for was impossible. This dovetails really nicely with the video @bionicjoey@lemmy.ca posted, where Destin says “We need to tell the truth!” “No one’s talking about this!” There are entrenched players who benefit from that and in that video he’s calling them out to their faces.
And honestly, we COULD have done it for about half of NASA’s budget, if they had just let us build it and gotten out of our way and stopped flowing down micromanagey requirements to us via our customer. That’s something that the ISS Commercial Resupply missions kind of got forced to do by a random sensible moment in between congress and NASA leadership. It was pretty successful, but the big contractors didn’t like it and their lobbyists jumped in to derail it being applied to future deals.
(As I understand it… the wheeling and dealing part of it is NOT my area of expertise… the above opinion is based more on space industry office gossip)