Elon is fixing the launch cost side of it.

If you have a probe design process that doesn't go through the US congress, it should be substantially faster and cheaper.

I often ponder if there is some sort of heuristic law that determines the level of bureaucracy based on an organization's structure.

In the case of the Congress, the problem is not bureaucratic slowness but the desire that as many companies from every state as possible took part in the project. Every congressperson wants to bring some business to their constituencies; what this business ultimately achieves may be of secondary importance.

I think all organizations drift toward dysfunction over time.

Those that have no competition inevitably end up there.

I think there's an inverse square rule relating the size (number of employees/managment) to the dysfunction

The amount of time it takes a group of people who decided to go somewhere to actually get in their cars and get moving goes up as the square of the number of people.

In that scenario, there's an inverse square law of how much cannabis was consumed between that group of people just to come to a consensus of where to go to get food that everyone has already agreed to being hungry an hour ago.