I can't agree that funding is "largely the reason" why NASA takes so long to do anything. I doubt funding is a top 3 reason.
NASA just isn't about high-risk / high-reward "moonshots" anymore. The overarching political environment doesn't allow it, never mind the office politics.
NASA will get back to the moon using easily an order of magnitude more funding than it should have taken, with a launch system that costs an order of magnitude more money for each launch than it should. (almost two?)
Have to +1 this. A lot (most?) of NASA's funding is directed toward keeping people employed and skilled, as opposed to accomplishing goals, as with a lot of government money. NASA could do a LOT more with the funding they already have, if they were willing to divest from older technologies and vendors, but the politics of its funding doesn't allow that.
I agree however that culture was caused by a lack of funding.
You can't be swift and lean when you are given very limited, budgeted funding. You can't take risks or you risk putting people out of a job and killing the program.
That leads to an overly conservative culture that restricts any risk taking and over-engineers everything to the point failure is effectively impossible.
This slow movement, overly conservative, design by committee approach helps limit risk but it absolutely balloons costs in the long run and horrifically delays progress. Of course if they were a company they'd eventually run out of money but that's not really an option for gov orgs so when the overly conservative, limited run designs end up encountering production issues, the projects explode in cost with nearly no upper limit.
TLDR: The political climate is a direct consequence of the lack of budget and continued restriction of that budget only worsens the problem.
> I can't agree that funding is "largely the reason"
> NASA just isn't about high-risk / high-reward "moonshots" anymore. The overarching political environment doesn't allow it, never mind the office politics.
Why doesn't the political environment allow for it. What could happen. What could regulatory bodies do to NASA for taking a risk and failing. What sort of constricting change could political bodies do in such a situation.
The funding senator became the administrator of the current moon attempt. The funding insist on using the old technology in the funding. All these sounded bad. If nasa has more freehand. But then the fund will not get back to the states …
NASA just isn't about high-risk / high-reward "moonshots" anymore. The overarching political environment doesn't allow it, never mind the office politics.
NASA will get back to the moon using easily an order of magnitude more funding than it should have taken, with a launch system that costs an order of magnitude more money for each launch than it should. (almost two?)