SpaceX planning spaceport in coastal southwest Louisiana

[u/aquarain]

https://www.nola.com/news/business/spacex-planning-spaceport-in-coastal-southwest-louisiana/article_01510d48-5f43-4381-aff9-6294b4d9d04c.html

[u/dgg3565]

Just because multiple rules cover a particular build does not mean they're redundant or unnecessary.

India's economy buckled underneath the mountainous regulations of the "License Raj," so that they were forced into wide-scale deregulation and structural reforms.

A "self-licking ice cream cone," a term coined by Pete Worden is his famous paper, is used to describe bureaucracies that have come to exist solely to perpetuate their own existence. In particular, he applied this to the sprawling bureaucracy at NASA. There are various reasons and motives for why this happens, but the end result is that process is divorced from outcome and obscures it. When that happens, you lose responsibility—you don't know who to hold accountable—and you lose certainty—what the paperwork says about cost, safety, reliability, etc. diverges from reality. And it extends the time and expense of every task, so that you may never reach the desired outcome.

There's a reason that the first step in Musk's "Algorithm" is "...make your requirements less dumb." Any process should be comprehensible, rational, transparent, and clearly directed toward some outcome. But that's often not the case, particularly after decades of people merely adding to regulations without reviewing them. Regulations should always exist for the sake of something else—health, safety, etc.—not as an end in themselves.