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Trumps goons are going to sell out key functions of government to private buyers, like nasa to space x. This reminds me of when the USSR fell and all the shadiest people bought up the national industries.
I wonder who’s gonna buy the noaa. That’s the one I’m most concerned about.
it won't be though. spacex tech is massively reliant on NASA. if they do it they'll hurt spacex in the long run. which means they'll probably do it because musk is a fucking moron.
Surely he'll strip NASA, put the bits he wants up for sale, then buy them for cheap.
Sure the best staff might leave, but he'll probably keep enough of the organisation to get something out of it.
he's gonna have to find more indentured slaves
indentured slaves can actually work though
Haha yeah, those bots are garbage. But the Figure 2 bots are already testing in BMW plants. And Elon won't even have to threaten Open AI with regulation to get new tech. He can prolly just take from Boston Dynamics military contracts.
"... in the long run"
These aren't people who understand what "in the long run" means.
This quarters profits must be higher than last quarters. Fuck anything beyond that
He makes Rogozin look competent
We saw what happened the last time space infrastructure was privatized.
Boeing gave all the money to the stockholders and delivered a criminally late product that ended up failing and stranding our astronauts. Boeing obviously didn't care to test if the Teflon in those thrusters could survive repeated heatings.
SpaceX decided to go backwards in rocket technology, from Hydrogen to Methane. Hydrogen is more efficient, and makes it easier to bury carbon responsibly. Sure, Boeing's rockets got made fun of for being leaky, but I think that might be Boeing more than Hydrogen at fault. Dirty Methane rockets were cheap, and could be built simple as they experienced less thermal variation without cryogenic fuel.
SpaceX undercut the competition and turned itself into a monopoly while Boeing threw their hand to the stockholders. Now SpaceX picks up the pieces of the game they upended.
NASA was supposed to manage a thriving marketplace, full of competition. Instead it managed its way to a monopolistic structure that a single entity may try to sieze.
Fun fact about autocratic structures like monopolies and dictatorships: they can't grow power themselves, they can only sieze power organized by others.
We need to build our next wave of structures in a distributed fashion such that the levers of power are not so concentrated that they may fall into the wrong hands.
Give the power to the people. All of them.
Space travel is exceptional in that you need an incredible amount of cooperation to get a project into space. The supply chains are insane, the component parts highly specialized and hugely expensive, and the range of expertise and knowledge required is simultaneously focused and intense and broad and varied. If human society ever does manage to transition to a genuine people power, space flight will be, to my knowledge, the very last thing we achieve, because it takes so many people working together to get it done. The scope of these projects makes you realise how easy it must have been to build the pyramids. Two brothers can build a plane that just about works, but to get a vehicle to orbit needs a city of people working together.
That's all the reason it should be easier to distribute power. More people to distribute it between!
Remember when we paid people to do those things directly?
We, the American people, paid a lot of people each a reasonable salary to get to the moon.
Privatized spaceflight has we, the American people, pay a single entity less total money (they can make it more efficient, of course!). This concentrates decision-making and power.
That vehicle going in to orbit needs a city to work together. I want my taxes to pay that city and the people in it, not Boeing's shareholders who aren't helping put the vehicle into orbit, not Musk to build a second smaller city in Texas he is king of.
Thank you for your points. I completely agree that we should be paying the workers on the ground who get us to space instead of the wealthy who claim to own it.
Yes we should, and I hope we will. I would love to be able to imagine some kind of smooth, consensual, non violent transition to a society where we keep doing the same stuff but are fairly treated, but I have difficulty with that. And I think space would be the hardest industry to revolutionise because of the above. Not saying it's impossible and I'm definitely not saying it's not preferable!
Space exploration certainly will be the final frontier, its the last thing this pathetic species will have ever worked on before blinking out of existence.
I had a lengthy argument with someone that Musk couldn't possibly be kissing Trump's ass for money - he's a billionaire after all and "has all the money he needs". No no, Musk is doing this out of the goodness of his cold billionaire heart. Isn't it obvious?
Why are so many people so stupid? WHY?
Yet another page from Trump’s playbook. People insisted that Trump couldn’t be bribed because he was so rich, and that he was financing his own campaign, so he could be the only non-corrupt politician. Obviously these people are quite naive and don’t understand how wealthy Kelle tend to operate - always wanting more, more, more.
Ah yes, the essential personality traits to becoming the richest person: integrity, and stopping once you have all the money you need.
Elongated Muskrat is a billionaire who wants to become the first trillionaire. That’s what these people aren’t getting. It’s all just a game to him. He thinks that he lives in a simulation and everyone else is an NPC. He now wants to set a new high score.
Some other country is gonna have the new nasa, and the united states is going to fall even further behind. It'll just be a brain drain and most of it isn't going to go to space-x.
I wanna try something...
Ahem. Investors! I have the concept of a plan to put gigantic billboards in space that can be seen by half the planet at any given time. Give me money.
Didn't coke propose doing that with colored powder on the moon?
In one of the Red Dwarf books, there's a subplot about sending hundreds of stars supernova simultaneous in order to spell out Coke Adds Life in the sky.
Pepsi would be buried.
I didn't know there were books!
I can only recommend the first two.
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers
Better than Life
They're no hitchhiker's guide, but they have a go.
Remember when on Interstellar there's this whole prologue about the collapse of the US, the dismantling of NASA and the family getting on an argument with the school because the official stance now is that the moon landing never happened and mankind never went to space (despite there being still people alive who went there)?
So, anyway, life imitates art …
One of Trumps supporters even got punched by Buzz.
We ain't getting Interstellar, we're getting Don't Look Up.
The Republicans are still holding out for the earth getting destroyed to make room for a bypass.
People poke fun of Musk as being a idiot. But he had us Kaiser Soze'd by pretending to be dumb so that he could implement his self-serving ideas.
NASA, like the post office, is such a public benefit that we should be funding it well.
I don't think people understand how much value we get from NASA... Like, $7 for every dollar spent, or more, in economic benefit and technological advancements. So many solutions they have to come up with to make space flight possible are incredibly useful here on Earth too
Value that we won't get if we're paying a private company to do it
He efficiently using the government to make himself richer. What more did anybody expect?
NASA has already sent out emails to their teams and contractors about what implications this can have on their departments. Shit’s bad.
Space: the final (capitalistic) frontier.
Humanity: Let's make a bunch of stories about how space capitalism has some really bad outcomes.
Also Humanity: That sound great! let's do that!
And absolutely no one paying attention was shocked.
The challenging thing here is that NASA does have deep, systemic problems and is in need of some overhaul. SLS is a breathtakingly expensive boondoggle, lunar gateway has no reason to exist, Orion is underpowered and overweight, Mars Sample Return’s entire mission is in question, JWST was a decade behind schedule and an order of magnitude over budget, and the list goes on. Extreme risk-aversion and congressional meddling have resulted in a bureaucratic quagmire of an organization. It’s hard to find nasa projects that are going well.
Of course I don’t think a gorilla with a sledgehammer as we’re sadly going to see from Trump will make things any better, we need a surgeon with a scalpel.
Most of the things you listed are directly related to Congressionally mandated specifics for funding those programs. The money is only there if NASA does it the way Congress dictates, not necessarily the way it should be done.
The entire SLS program is essentially a Congressional jobs and legacy aerospace grifting program post-Shuttle.
If Congress would. Keep their hands off, and just allocate budget, most of the issues would likely disappear since the people that actually know what's going on could make the decisions instead of a Congress critter that is an imbecile.