Its a bit of an exaggeration to say NASA is "pouring money" in to SpaceX. They are certainly contributing substantial funds to develop the COTS and CCDev capability but its a LOT less money than NASA squandered on Ares 1 and they got nothing at all for that money wasted.

NASA is mostly contracting for the services SpaceX will be providing and they are pretty reasonably priced compared to old school NASA, Boeing and Lockheed prices.

SpaceX has a large contract to launch the nex gen Iridium satellites, it has a large contract from the Air Force, its launching satellites for private companies. All things considered it looks pretty well diversified, and its just selling space access, and developing the tech to do it, which is what a private company should be doing.

I could be wrong but I dont think this is Elon's plan for Mars. He will, no doubt, take all the Federal money he can get to go to Mars but I think he trying to corner the market for LEO launches, turn it in to a profit center, and use that money to do the more advanced missions to Mars.

If you actually WANT to go to Mars you totally cant sit around and wait for Congress and the President to fund it. A) in the current budget climate they probably won't B) as soon as the Congress/POTUS change hands they will defund the previous regimes programs and start on something totally different.

Presidents only do space programs now to buy votes in Florida, Texas, Alabama and Utah, mostly Florida because its a crucial swing state. They totally dont care if anything actually gets done.

SpaceX, to succeed, in going to Mars, needs all the money they can get but be free of the strings and whims of our completely screwed up Federal government.

Put a SpaceX Mars mission on Kickstarter?
FTFY.

Private citizens pouring money in the bureacratic maw of NASA is futility incarnate, though if you could channel it directly to JPL it might work. At least JPL still has technical and engineering competence, is somewhat isolated from NASA's bureaucracy, and gets things done.

If you could funnel a few billion to SpaceX they could do some exciting stuff aimed at Mars. Since Elon Musk is aiming there anyway he just needs more funding. SpaceX has a truly phenomonal efficiency in getting engineering bang for their bucks. As I recall NASA spent a team their to study how they were doing so much for so little compared to NASA. Of course, one answer they probably missed is SpaceX probably doesn't squander money on doing studies on why other organizations are efficient, they just build stuff, efficiently, economically and quickly.

The shuttle is immensely more fragile than an expendable booster. In particular the thermal protection system (the tiles) were known to be extremely vulnerable to ice strikes, its why they put a thermal blanket on the external tank. Capsules on top of the stack are much less vulnerable, compared to the Shuttle which sits alongside the entire length of the stack, which is why no one is considering ever doing that design again, it was flawed and everyone came to realize it, and they paid for it in both accidents.

There simply was NO good reason to continue with a launch on that abnormally cold of a day in Florida when there was ice all over the launch pad and there were signifcant risks of broken pipes, etc on the launch pad even.

They could have waited a day and they would have never had a problem. They delay shuttle launches all the time for weather, since the tiles can't stand flying through clouds or rain either.

Its likely though often denied that senior managers felt pressure to launch that day because Reagan was going to give a speech that night praising the teacher in space and NASA. The White House didn't even have to explicitly pressure them to stay on schedule, the NASA managers just had to know what kind of a mess it would be for him to give that speech if they hadn't launched, and Reagan controlled their purse strings so they needed to make him happy and make him look good.

All of the Morton Thiokol engineers responsible for the O rings were telling them to stop, they new the O rings had issues with cold temperatures. It was an anomolously cold day in Florida. It almost never freezes at Kennedy but that morning there was ice all over the launch pad. Even setting the O rings aside it was enormously foolish to launch that morning and it was pretty obvious they should postpone a day until temperatures weren't aberrant.

As I recall Reagan was giving a speech about the space program and timing it to coincide with the launch and the teacher-in-space and the bureaucrats were unwisely feeling political pressure to launch with all engineering and safety factors screamed for them to stop.

You overlook the fact that, as a result of the Challenger accident, the Shuttle program was severly damaged. Prior to Challenger it was an aggressive program pushing boundaries, afterward it become conservative, limited and cautious. In the wake of Columbia it was crippled, and was relegated to almost the bare essential missions needed to finish and support the ISS. The Air Force largely abandoned the Shuttle and returned to expendable launchers, though many think they wanted to do that anyway and Challenger was just a convenient excuse.

Shuttles were also different than expendable launchers. They were very limited in number, expensive and difficult to build especially after the assembly line had shut down so you couldn't afford to lose any of them without damaging the whole program.

The loss of life aside, the consequences of the twin disasters were the entire program was wrecked, the U.S. manned spaced program was crippled, may never recover at NASA, and it was all preventable and unnecessary. At this point companies like SpaceX are probably the only hope for a recovery because they are culturally free of most of the problems afflicting NASA's culture. To be successful in a technology intensive endeavor like space exploration engineers need to have a dominant voice in the program. Their voice can't be drowned out by bureaucrats and program managers with insufficient regard for the engineering.

Roger Boisjoly recently passed away. He was one of the engineers who tried to stop the ill fated launch of Challenger on an abnormally cold morning in Florida. He knew there was a high risk of the O rings leaking if they were cold, NASA management refused to listen to him, an O ring did failt, it ended in catastrophe. The Shuttle program was crippled from that day on.

From the article:

"It was the end of the dream," said John Pike, executive director of GlobalSecurity.org and a longtime analyst of U.S. aerospace. "Before the Challenger, you could think about the idea of going boldly where no one had gone before. The accident ended it."

Boisjoly was not the only engineer who attempted to stop the launch and suffered for blowing the whistle. Allan J. McDonald was Thiokol's program manager for the solid rocket booster and became the most important critic of the accident afterward. When he was pressed by NASA the night before the liftoff to sign a written recommendation approving the launch, he refused, and later argued late into the night for a launch cancellation. When McDonald later disclosed the secret debate to accident investigators, he was isolated and his career destroyed.

The tragedy was particularly hard on Boisjoly, who would sometimes chop wood in the Utah winter to work out his anger. In a 2003 interview with The Times, he recalled that NASA tried to blackball him from the industry, leaving him to spend 17 years as a forensic engineer and a lecturer on engineering ethics.

When the space shuttle Columbia burned up on reentry in 2003, killing its crew of seven, the accident was blamed on the same kinds of management failures that occurred with the Challenger. By that time, Boisjoly believed that NASA was beyond reform, some of its officials should be indicted on manslaughter charges and the agency abolished.

NASA's mismanagement "is not going to stop until somebody gets sent to hard rock hotel," Boisjoly said. "I don't care how many commissions you have. These guys have a way of numbing their brains. They have destroyed $5 billion worth of hardware and 14 lives because of their nonsense."

You sound pretty bitter dude. Let me guess, you either work at NASA, Boeing or Lockheed, right?

I admit to being guilty of being something of a SpaceX fanboy but thats because I haven't seen anything happen the U.S. as far as launchers go worth cheering since Apollo died. SpaceX may crash and burn but I sure hope they don't because NASA, Boeing and Lockheed aren't doing much except milk the status quo.

It would suck for a while but it would probably be a huge win in the long run.

It would be one of the few ways the U.S. could regain a manufacturing base. It is nearly impossible for a country to stay solvent for the long run with the massive current accounts deficit the U.S. is running, Yea there would be short term pain until the U.S. rebuilt its industrial base along with probably rebuilding it other cheap places like Mexico or South America. It would be kind of win to get the manufacturing base closer to the U.S. whatever because as fossil fuel prices explode so do shipping costs.

All things considered a quick crisis would be better than maintaining the status quo which will inevitably lead to a U.S. default, a dollar collapse and truly massive upheaval in the U.S. and in the rest of the world.

Either the U.S. needs to return to running trade surpluses or its going to have to go old school and use its massive military to plunder the rest of the world. Squandering nearly a trillion a year on your military and producing nothing but failed money sinks like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan has to be some of the most flawed strategic thinking in history.