lain on Nostr: One of the reasons why NASA rockets were so expensive, even when built by 'private' ...

One of the reasons why NASA rockets were so expensive, even when built by 'private' companies like lockheed, was that NASA gave them 'cost-plus' contracts, where the company could send an invoice for whatever cost they incurred during building, plus a pre-set (but guaranteed) profit margin of ~10%.

That meant that it was profitable for the companies to just get the cost as high as possible, and it seems they mostly did that by increasing overhead, hiring tons of people to essentially do nothing but increase cost.