NASA still sets requirements and invites several companies to compete for contracts with different solutions. See the lunar lander contracts from a few years ago for example.
You are ascribing beliefs to be based on others in this thread I think.
What I think is that if a company is going to build and provide the solution then they should own the design. NASA should of course get to be involved in reviews and discussions, which they absolutely fucking are, but I do not think that it makes sense for one organization to design something and the other one to build it as if there's like a hard line between these two activities.
I'm not convinced that is how it worked in the days of Apollo either as you've just asserted that without citation.
How are you measuring effectiveness? It seems like you might have a pretty shallow perspective on what NASA does and what their goals are. For example, do you know how many mission directorates they have and how they differ?
Not the person you're responding to, but JWT, SLS, and several other projects have suffered extreme bloat in both cost and timeline. Mega projects like that are some of the most public -facing things NASA does, so they unfortunately tend to drive public perception.
I will never argue that NASA doesn't accomplish amazing things, but large parts of the organization are ineffective. IDK if I'd go so far as to say the entire organization is ineffective, but large parts are.
I also don't think we should cut NASA's budget at all. We should cut the bloat and redirect it to more projects.
It does read to me that many people view this with the same lens we apply to private companies.
As an example, some of the bloat is intentional because it buys down political risk. It would be more efficient to have a program like SLS done within a single NASA center. But that also makes it easier to cut funding because there are a limited number of constituents affected by those cuts. This is exacerbated by long timeline projects that don’t align with shorter political timelines. By spreading the project to many centers, it adds inefficiency but also ensures the survivability of the project. To an extent, there has a a good chance there never would be audacious projects if they were run with maximum financial efficiency. So you’re stuck with the choice of an efficient project that never gets completed or inefficient one that does. As a taxpayer, I’m not thrilled with that dynamic but I understand why it exists
JPL is also not really “NASA” in the same sense. There are only a handful of civil servants and the CalTech as a contractor. It’s similar to the “quasi-government” operations of national lab.
