Consequently, the South African billionaire has been put in charge of a so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” to excise $2 trillion from the national budget. Whether this advisory group will be able to take aim at the Artemis program remains to be seen.
I’m going to need to see the receipt for this claim.
It sounds way too cool to be true.
To the politicians, it’s true. NASA is an easy(-ish) sell to the masses. There’s a reason that the funding for NASA has stipulations on what districts certain projects are based in, and what companies make specific parts.
The space shuttle wasn’t just one company, it was dozens and dozens of companies spread out across the country building high tech and high skill parts. The SLS was based heavily on the shuttle to keep those exact same districts employed with high skill (and high pay) work.
If congress was ok with NASA actually achieving things efficiently and on time, they’d just give them a budget and a goal, but that’s not how things are funded.
We still get the end result, it’s just an extremely wasteful way to get there.
Now look at how military projects are done. It’s the same thing.
It’s all a jobs program with a big focus on shoveling money towards companies that give a few tens of thousands of dollars towards their local representative.
This is what really annoys me about DOGE: we really do need to cut government spending severely as it is so inefficient, just we need to do it in a precise way that actually preserves the government’s function. Musk’s goal is to cut costs by just removing function altogether.
If they actually wanted the SLS, it would have been funded in such a way as to have delivered the big orange rocket by now. It’s not funded in that way. The big orange rocket is not the goal of the SLS or Artemis programs. It’s all about “pork barrel” projects, which are just socialism with extra steps and less benefit. And maybe we get a cool rocket and some excellent science out of it eventually.