• dragontamer@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    That’s the point.

    Musk already got his NASA contract money for SpaceX, Tesla and so forth. He wants to keep the money despite his rocket programs literally blowing up in everyone’s faces

    The easiest way to do that is to shutdown the government employees who run NASA, SEC, NHTSA and so forth.

    • apemint@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      He wants to keep the money despite his rocket programs literally blowing up in everyone’s faces

      What are you yapping about?

      • SpaceX is the most prolific space company in recent history, performing a launch every 3 days on average.
      • Falcon 9 is the most reliable launch system in in world.
      • Besides the 60 year old Soyuz, Dragon is the only human certified spacecraft capable of delivering crews to and from the ISS.
      • Starship is the largest rocket prototype -and manmade object- to leave the atmosphere.

      And they did all this in the last 10 years.

      Shitting on SpaceX just because Elon’s name is attached to it, -trendy as it may be right now- is dismissing the work of the engineers who made all this possible.

      And no, I’m not sucking Elon’s dick.

      In fact, the only reason SpaceX works well is because, allegedly, there’s a wall of people shielding the company from Elon’s batshit insanity. If it wasn’t for them, he would have ran it to the ground already.

      • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        SpaceX in its short lifetime has had more catastrophic failures more often than the entire history of NASA. Had anything similar happened at NASA, they would have been closed down or had their budget slashed.

        Also the incident with the rushed shodily-built Launchpad that disintegrated damaging properties all around is still being litigated against SpaceX.

        We would have been better off funding NASA with a fraction of spacex’s funding. And would have been safer as well. SpaceX has done nothing that NASA couldn’t have done had we funded it.

        • apemint@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          SpaceX in its short lifetime has had more catastrophic failures more often than the entire history of NASA.

          To build “cheap” prototypes and learn from their failure is their whole business model. And it’s working. Their rockets don’t fail on missions, they fail while testing.

          SpaceX has done nothing that NASA couldn’t have done had we funded it.

          I disagree. NASA is a government agency and by nature it’s held down by bureaucracy and moves at a snail’s place. There’s no incentive for them to keep to a budget and timeline.

          What NASA is really good at are robotics and observational science. I think they should be funded to put tech in space and on other celestial objects, and the dirty work of getting stuff off the ground should be delegated to private companies.

          • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            To build “cheap” prototypes and learn from their failure is their whole business model. And it’s working. Their rockets don’t fail on missions, they fail while testing.

            In what way couldn’t NASA do the same if they were funded similarly. When it comes to large systems like this. National mail, healthcare, space access. Capitalism absolutely cannot be as efficient. Otherwise they would have replaced these systems outright and not sought to sabotage them. As they have globally.

            I disagree. NASA is a government agency and by nature it’s held down by bureaucracy and moves at a snail’s place. There’s no incentive for them to keep to a budget and timeline.

            There’s no nature about it. The US rocketed to a space powerhouse under bureaucracy and NASA. All that changed was the concentration of wealth and the realization how much more there is to be made by private control of space access. The wealthy paid representatives to kill it. Not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy can be a good thing as well as a bad thing. It’s been the only thing keeping us from capitalistic fascism for decades. We’re going to learn that the hard way.