The goal isn’t to do things we can already do the way we know how to do them, it’s to do things we can’t do in ways we don’t yet have by training new people who don’t yet know how to do it. The opportunity being seized is that the investment will pay off with a leap forward to bigger and better things.
NASA is the Idris to SpaceX’s Python, the free jazz to their K-pop, the Cyberdeck to their MacBook, or — to go back to my original analogy — the locust-based flour to their 1000 hectares of wheat. This isn’t a value judgment. Pushing boundaries and knuckling down on commercial success are both worthy endeavors.
But yeah NASA is great at many things. Issacman is smart enough to know they don’t need to be in the launch busnieee anymore.
With what authority do you say this? Do you have any idea how much closer the ISS is than the moon??
You could also look at the same ISS mission with another contractor: Boeing got paid twice as much and then failed to bring the astronauts back in Starliner. So obviously NASA is overpaying some contractors, but that's probably only part of the story of where all that money is going. For 90 billion NASA would have delivered multiple Moon landings in the 70s - with inferior tech at that, and having to figure it all out for the first time. Don't underestimate how difficult it was.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026596462...
Distance isn't the factor. Useful payload to destination and required Delta V are. Leaving earth is 10 km/s. TLI is 4 km/s.
It does not have the ISS, but IIUC it's slightly over "Low Earth Orbit".
(I'd love to see one where the distances are draw proportional to Delta V.)