While SpaceX has been successful and innovative, it certainly doesn’t keep folks around. Average tenure is ~3.6 years. Those folks are smart, and can always find work elsewhere. Are we optimizing for the individual? Or for an aerospace manufacturing and supply chain system that requires care and feeding over decades? A tale as old as time.
> While SpaceX has been successful and innovative, it certainly doesn’t keep folks around. Average tenure is ~3.6 years
What was it for the Apollo programme?(The entire programme was 11 years [1].)
> Are we optimizing for the individual? Or for an aerospace manufacturing and supply chain system that requires care and feeding over decades?
I’m not arguing against having more people at NASA. Simply against the claim that this is the evidenced issue. Unless the entire American space programme is a failure, private operators are not the root problem.
> Apollo program doesn’t seem to be a good example of a space pipeline that is sustainable for a few decades at least
Correct. OP suggested the root of the problem is we haven't made "these workers government employees." The Apollo programme had lots of government employees. Commercial interests clearly aren't at the root of the problem.
Im pretty sure the government employees working on Apollo were mostly already there before the program or stayed there afterwards, so their tenure was probably much longer than 3.6 years. And a lot of work on Apollo was done by contractors (for example building basically all flight hardware as far as I know).
Average tenure will always be low in a growing company, not due to people leaving but due to people joining.
Can see here space X has more than doubled the number of people the past few years, that is enough to explain that "low tenure", its just due to people joining.
