Governments 'too inefficient' for future Moon landings

In my libertarian college days it seemed like bureaucracy was a horrible waste of resources, but the more and more I think about it, the more and more it seems like our social institutions are "memes" of a sort; a military which does not use bureaucracy loses wars to ones that do. A bureaucracy is thus seen as a natural consequence of marshalling very large quantities of resources. That is, a bureaucracy allows you to "ignore" details of the collective -- at Microsoft you don't need to know what Janet from down the hall is working on -- but then you don't feel like "part of" the collective per se, and so we have to have a system of managers to both protect you from the collective and to protect the collective from you (i.e. corruption &#38; free rider problems).<p>If you're less of a manager and more of a programmer then it's actually really nice to think about how we might use this to architect software and/or to collect nodes together. Capitalism might have an analogue for example in developing the same software multiple times, and taking the simplest and most elegant result.

The article gets one fact wrong-- George W. Bush called for a manned mission to the moon in 2020 and Mars thereafter, but was widely ridiculed, and unsupported in Congress.<p><a href="http://articles.cnn.com/2004-01-14/tech/bush.space_1_space-exploration-mars-mission-human-missions?_s=PM:TECH" rel="nofollow">http://articles.cnn.com/2004-01-14/tech/bush.space_1_space-e...</a><p><a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-still-working-on-manned-mission-to-mars-quiet,18154/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-still-working-on-manne...</a>

These government inefficiency arguments seem to ignore the fact that NASA relied significantly on the small handful of large Aerospace companies, yet those companies seem not to be involved in the private ventures that require expanding capabilities.<p>I would look at the traditional space industry as similar to any unmotivated ~duopoly that is working in an industry with a pretty fixed income. Suddenly they look more like other problem sectors (say US cable internet? US cell? English Trains?)<p>In those industries the only possible improvements are from government interference or public shaming with comparisons to efficient markets abroad.<p>The monster in the room is that traditional government outsourcing is a model for constructing monopolies and trusts. The government avoids the complexity of proportionally paying a dozen companies for the same task and few companies can handle the complexity of working for the government.<p>Once created these trusts/monopolies that can't compete for rational customers must still expand at 9% a year and are "too big to fail" and so based on lobbying that the question of failure could never come up.<p>Outsourcing the government is like packaging up "government inefficiency" with sector destroyers and some legal skimming off the top.<p>I would predict that as soon as one of these new companies is successful they will be sued for all the IP the big aerospaces refuse to use, then acquired, and then shelved.

Maybe, This question is totally pointless. Because, it doesn't make sense to go back to the Moon. What for ? it's a desolate rock, we've been there many times already, brought back rocks, learned as much as we could about its geology that we possibly could. Going back to the moon is at best an entertainment proposition, it has no practical or scientific benefits.<p>The fact that we didn't go back on the moon doesn't say anything about government. We might hold different opinions about its inefficiencies and bloated nature, but none of them are relevant to this debate<p>Mars, on the other hand, holds a promise, although very remote &#38; very premature that it might one day host humans, even possibly a permanent settlement.

This seems to me a totally natural progression. Governments have the resources to do New Untried Things, to fund Pure Research and Crazy National Pride Projects, and so they do them because no one else can at the time that they are done. But good governments are <i>supposed</i> to be inefficient. Much as we hate bureaucracy, an efficient government is a terrible, scary thing. Inefficiency keeps it in check. So it falls to private enterprise to pick up where governments leave off.

Hmm, I wonder if same apply to mega projects. Cost overran and miss deadlines a lot.<p>What is the main reason? The fact that they are hard, because they are complex or because they are mostly managed by government. Perhaps, it is a combination of both, but would love to read some scientific analysis about that.

I've always felt that government running things like space exploration was a bit odd . I think that government funded (all or in part) private enterprise is the way to go, it worked for Columbus and other early adventurers right?