Creating engineering jobs at NASA would be one thing, but creating jobs at a private contractor is vastly more expensive. That overhead is all about lining well connected people’s pockets.
It’s almost silly how much effort is put into making things as inefficient as possible. The federal government is intentionally given a bad reputation here, but it’s shocking how much more efficient they are internally vs outsourcing stuff.
I had the same feeling. A lot of the things that NASA develops internally are mindblowing (e.g. the Mars rovers or the Casini probe, both developed by JPL), but everything subcontracted to Boeing or Lookeed endup uber delayed and hyper expensive.
If you are honest with yourself, the JPL missions are often insanely expensive.
The Curiosity rover was supposed to be 1.5 billion, but ended up 2.5 billion, and the main explanation of that was 'to develop a new landing mechanism'. Ok, I guess.
And now Perseverance is again 2.5 billion despite large parts of the rover, landing system and so on, were already 95% developed.
Not to mention it took 8+ years from Curiosity to Perseverance.
Space Nerds bitch less about these programs since they at least are successful compared to the human part of NASA but if you really look at the achievement per $ its not that fantastic.
It's also worth noting that technically JPL contracts to NASA... It's actually part of Caltech under contract to NASA rather than a direct NASA organization.
John Carmack, of Armadillo Aerospace fame (and Quake too), once mentioned how they helped some NASA specialists in a project where their flying platform Pixel was involved. John said, that collaboration was the first opportunity for at least some NASA PhDs to actually work with flying hardware - years spent in NASA before that were all about papers.
It’s almost silly how much effort is put into making things as inefficient as possible. The federal government is intentionally given a bad reputation here, but it’s shocking how much more efficient they are internally vs outsourcing stuff.