kamiraa

GREAT question. Let me dispel some false information here.

For the most part NASA is doing things that SpaceX could never think of doing and they dont want to at all.

NASA breaks the ground on the research, physics, math, etc. At the highest level EVERYTHING is new.

Most of what the commercial players do for visiting vehicles is build based on that information. When SpaceX came around they basically filed for freedom of information act on EVERYTHING. They grabbed all the research of how something works, why, what to avoid, etc, and applied it to making their vehicle.

NASA is paying SpaceX for most of their items.

So this is how it should work.

NASA moving forward is going to focus on the items that SpaceX can't. They are going to employ the smartest PhD in the world solving problems that are NEW science. They are going to focus on ground breaking research.

SpaceX is going to focus on taking that research, and taking over the tasks and operations that NASA shouldn't focus on.

For example a vehicle going up and down to ISS, we have done it a ton of times, all major countries know how to do it. So we shouldn't focus our energy on that, we should focus it on the research required for landing on an astroid or Mars.

All US government programs are regulated that they can't spend US Tax payer dollars to justify their existence to the public. "Hey everyone checkout this new fighter jet you paid for, we awesome ".

SpaceX spends a significant amount of their money telling people of the awesome stuff they do. In reality if people saw all the cool stuff NASA does they would be blown away.

When you design a vehicle you are focused on the environment we can operate in. When you go into space you are subjected to a lot of radiation. Early when we were planning our Mars missions we started to build a vehicle called Orion. Because the planets were going through a complex alignment for a few years we were able to make the vehicle walls a certain material and thickness to prevent radiating the astronauts too much.

When congress pulled back money for a while and paused the program they thought that ok no biggie we will just give them back money later and they will fly. No no no, we missed the complex window.

Nobody wants to talk about it, because its one of the biggest screw ups ever.

So now . . . we have to wait until 2028 ish region to fly to mars because thats the window in which that SPECIFIC vehicle can fly through and keep the astronauts safe. The problem is that vehicle has a short term life because that window of safe journey only lasts a few years.

So we are going to get a few good missions out to mars, and then . . . . we have to wait for the window to open up again (1 decade plus). So we need to find alternative paths for those vehicles (other locations or planets).

We are pretty much at the assembly complete of ISS. We are adding on a few other things, but we are in the process of winding down the program.

ISS was a proving ground of technologies, processes for repair and assembly, and studying the long term affects of space on a human body. We hope to take all this information and apply it to missions further away from Earth. I think in that case building a very big vehicle would be amazing, but we would need a lot more funding.

I had a strange path.

So I was going to a great HS. I was accepted into some great schools (the main top 3). My Dad bribed me with a car to stay in state haha.

I went to college and was very bored. I left my bachelor program in Computer Engineering and decided to do other things I found interesting.

I started trying to build race cars (I had no idea what I was doing). I took welding classes, I got my EMT basic because I thought of becoming a firefighter. I got hooked up with a real race team and started traveling the country on a real Pro NHRA team and learned a ton.

I decided to go take a ton of classes at a community college while working full time in a factory and focused on getting back into engineering. I went back to my bachelor program as a Electrical Engineer and double majoring in Mechanical Engineering.

I eventually finished my bachelors in EE. Did some other cool gigs along the way. Worked on power grid layouts for high rises, then satellites, then NASA Space Shuttle, then NASA ISS, then startup, now a big bank.

For sure! We need to get our butts on other planets, we really screwed ourselves over for these mars missions and most people don't understand it yet . . .