Starship is threatening NASA’s moon contractors
The really baffling thing to me is that although certain technologies have come to pass in the last decade that made it easier to do what spacex has done, it’s been technically <i>possible</i> since probably the late 90’s.  I’m absolutely certain that Elon musk isn’t the first person to come up with the idea of reusable rockets, and the people who actually did the work of designing those rockets were already around before Elon musk hired them.  Tom Mueller, who was the first rocket engineer Musk hired, was building rocket engines in his garage out of frustration that nobody was taking him seriously at work.  So the question is, how deep does institutional rot have to go to stifle innovation on this level industry wide?  How does an organization dedicated to exploration become so utterly unable to take risks?  There’s definitely something to learn here.<p>I’m looking through the list of the heads of nasa, and they’re all trained scientists or engineers up until 1981 when Reagan appointed a business management executive to the position.  If I could pinpoint anything as the inflection point, that’s probably it.  After that it’s a mixture, but you get a lot of military generals and other members of the national security apparatus together with various business CEOs, and some mechanical engineers, and a couple rocket scientists too.  But why did none of them try what spacex is doing?  People from lower down in the organization were presumably shouting at them that they were wasting money.  Everyone in an organization knows when the leadership is useless.  It just baffles the mind.  A fish rots from the head.