"For decades, NASA has increasingly leaned on corporate contractors to develop the spacecraft it uses to explore the solar system. Triumphs have included SpaceX's Dragon vehicles, which can now reliably shuttle astronauts to the International Space Station and beyond. The widely parroted idea is that players in the free market will be able to operate more efficiently than NASA's own stock of engineers, who masterminded the agency's triumphs of decades past, like the Apollo Moon missions and the Space Shuttle."
"A recent paper in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets set out to settle the score through a close look at the finances of 69 space-faring projects of all sizes, including 22 spacecraft built by NASA, and 47 by the private sector. For proponents of corporate partnerships with NASA, the results are embarrassing: the paper found that the contractors were just as inefficient as the government. And as the Financial Times flagged, in some cases NASA was even more efficient than industry."
An analysis compared finances of 69 space projects, including 22 NASA-built and 47 private-sector-built spacecraft. Contractors were as inefficient as government overall, and in some cases NASA was more efficient than industry. Private-sector work tended to be cheaper for class C and D low-risk, mass-manufacturable projects. Cost advantages disappeared for class A and B complex missions, where contractors faced the same constraints as NASA. Examples include the private-sector Suomi NPP weather satellite versus NASA's near-polar FAST satellite with a $73 million budget, and Lockheed's $558 million OSIRIS-REx.
Read at futurism.com
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