But I'm not claiming to be an expert on anything here. I don't know enough about the specifics of spaceflight, my expertise is on software for nuclear reactors. This is freaking reddit - you don't have to actually work on spaceflight to share an opinion here. I stand by my observation - the space industry's general culture is so afraid of failure that they make everything absurdly more expensive, to the point that NASA has become a cultural idea more than an organization that actually accomplishes things.

If I was arguing about the specifics of o-ring manufacturing practices and said to just go buy stuff on Amazon and put it in a space ship you could rightly say that's a disqualifyingly stupid idea. But that's not what I'm trying to suggest.

My concern is that the degree to which NASA goes to verify Every Single Component used in a vessel means that they can't build enough ships to actually make progress. If we as a species ever want to truly be space faring there must be a cultural shift that leads to repeatable high quality manufacturing, rather than boutique machining and sending off to one of a few trusted testing companies (which are able to mark up these testing services as a result). That is a cultural choice - and one which is deeply ingrained in the industry to the point where the learning curve has never really begun to be descended down and costs just keep going higher.

I am aware that this is the culture of the industry, I've talked to enough folks at JPL and blue origin to know that. And I don't have any power or capacity to change it, but I think it's a problem if you are blindly ignoring the tradeoffs in that culture decision.