Either way, all the more reason - it's a NASA entity so You People must pay more into it.

SpaceX got money and launch facility access from NASA. Most of their important tech is their own.

All those snarky things people said about Elon blowing up rockets? Yeah...about that. Engineering is about testing, figuring out things you can do better, and learning from failures. Every rocket they stuck on the pad told them something about how to launch and recover, repeatedly. Now look at them.

Let's contrast this with NASA and use the Starliner vehicle as an example. Was Starliner a piece of crap? No. Not at all.

But because of NASA's gotten away from a test/learn/test/learn culture Boeing had to execute a VERY ambitious mission on their first crewed (and only 2nd overall) flight. That's....insane.

Completely insane. Their first human flight should have been a John Glenn-style low Earth orbit for a couple of hours, then touched right back down that same day. Instead they had to go to a much higher orbit and execute a much tougher mission.

NASA needs to get back to its roots. It's been passed up in some ways by the private sector.

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