Confused about engineering a spacecraft that carries humans

[MisterEd51]

NASA has been a victim of not enough money and a bureaucracy that makes what it does inefficient. That makes what it does take longer than what can be done by private industry. The one advantage it has it can think big and not worry about the bottom line like a private for-profit company does.

Private companies are much more efficient at building rockets and spacecraft than NASA. I know that private companies have been doing this for NASA all along but not independently. In the past NASA stifled private industry by mandating stifling oversite. This made the programs much more costly and take much longer than necessary. I hope they use the lessons shown by Boeing and SpaceX that use general requirements and up-front seed money. That should make the end results less costly and be finished much more quickly.

The biggest disadvantage of private companies becoming more involved is that at some point they have to be self-sustaining or risk being shut down. There will be some additional money from NASA for flights to the ISS but otherwise they will have to find private paying customers to keep in business i.e. not lose too much money.

The U.S. does cooperate with other countries with the International Space Station. Much of it was built with the help of Canada, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States, and eleven Member States of the European Space Agency (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, , Switzerland and the United Kingdom). To save money Russia was contracted to build several ISS modules. Russia launch capabilities have been used for crew replacement and resupply missions. Since Russia has indicated it intends to end this help companies like Boeing and SpaceX will need to fill in fully as soon as possible.

NASA has partnered with the private companies Boeing and SpaceX by providing it seed money to build manned and unmanned spacecraft for use for flights to the ISS. More recently NASA has asked for help from international partners and private industry like Boeing to fulfill its mandate to return to the moon by 2025. It is doubtful if could do this by itself.

I doubt SpaceX by itself will be going to Mars any time soon like has said more than once. It will need a number of partners to spread the risk. It could easily bankrupt itself if there costly overruns or worse yet a mission failure. It would probably be necessary to partner with NASA and some international partners to make it all possible.