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Normally, I would have advocated for the nationalization of Starlink and SpaceX as a matter of national and global security, but it's not like the current American regime would do any better. I'm not going to be counting on them to investigate, let alone prosecute the affairs of this Russian junkie-stooge either.
Regardless of who would do better, the entirety of SpaceX and Starlink were paid for using American taxpayer's money and government contracts. We already paid for it, we should own it.
Ohh, just wait till they privatize weather, mail, prison. hospitals...
It's gonna be too expensive to live on this planet for YOU.
Two of those are literally already privatised in America, and one more took some significant steps in that direction earlier this year.
One? Last I checked, both weather and mail are both on their way to privatization.
As I look out the window at rain that was in the forecast yesterday, but not this morning.
Damn, mail too? That didn't make international headlines the way shutting down the weather service did.
both prisons and most hospitals are private.
As rural hospitals shut down (due to lack of federal funding) they are being BOUGHT up by private corporations and LEASED back to the federal government (federal funding).
It's a LOT more money and it's NOT going to the hospital.
Yes and the consequences are horrific.
Most prisons in the US are actually not privatized, although this is a bit of technicality as government-run prisons tend to have privatized a lot of their functions, like "catering" (lol) and guards etc.
Any sources for this? I’d love to read up on it
Brain dead take honestly. Nationalization doesn’t work out 11 times out of 10. Look at NASA, SpaceX ran circles around them with a tini tiny fraction of the funding.
Nationalization does not mean it belongs to “us” it belongs to the government, an entity with motivations, incentives and desires different from “us” the people.
Could you elaborate on how SpaceX "ran circles around NASA", seeing as how NASA basically pioneered every single piece of modern space technology, and all SpaceX is doing is fumbling to rearrange it like Legos that explode on the launch pad? Lol
Le Epic spaceship explosions.
SpaceX: 5
NASA: 1
Dumbass liberals BTFO!!
Hate to say it, but it was actually the Nazis who pioneered a lot of modern space technology. The US massively refined and improved it - often with the help of "rescued" Nazi scientists.
Not only that,but NASA gave this knowledge away for free - to the universities that taught the people who now work for Muskler.
Yeah. These dumbasses forget that government funding is what originally set the stage and enabled any progress at all for private company-entrepreneurs who benefitted from all that publicly available knowledge, paid for by our tax dollars.
Innovation will slow to a trickle with all these government cuts because these companies literally can't pay for anything not directly related to their bottom dollar, and none of them can see far enough past next quarter's profits to invest in the future.
Human knowledge can be (and historically, often has been) destroyed as well as accumulated. It's a myth originating with the Whigs that history always moved in the direction of progress. As recent political events in the US have shown, that's not true.
Except, for example, in every developed-world health care delivery system, all of which massively outperform the private-sector US system both on cost and on outcomes. Likewise, fire departments, interstate highway systems, public water supplies, armies, etc, etc.
So before calling someone a dunce, you might do well to learn more about the many things you don't know.
Well I never said anything about progress, I said it’s cumulative. We never destroy more than we have accumulated. None of the knowledge we have today would exist without the knowledge of our earliest of ancestors when Homo sapiens was still thousands of years away. That being said, looking at the sheer amount of time we’ve been accumulating knowledge even if we had a thousand years of absolute barbarity and massive ignorance, the statement that knowledge tends towards progress would still be true. The present is a blip in the scale of human history.
To address your other point. Yes I’ll admit that I was too universalistic in my argument in the heat of the moment so to speak. But the big caveat is that it does not necessarily lead to, and most always doesn’t lead to better service for end user. It’s a trade off in most cases. But I’ll never argue in favor of privatized healthcare or education for example. The loss in efficiency is simply not enough to justify the real human cost of the alternative. But cutting edge technology that is not essential, such as space travel, computers etc, belong in the private market where the right incentives to make improvements exist.
The whole point is that SpaceX's contributions have been minimal... and have still been paid for by tax dollars anyways with all the contracts they're getting. Their big thing is supposed to be reusable rockets.. guess what, NASA already pioneered the concept of reusable spacecraft with their space shuttle.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200001093/downloads/20200001093.pdf
I’m just gonna reply to everyone with this, since it drives my point home and comes from NASA themselves. You can read it or not if you want, but my point is that SpaceX reduced costs in a way NASA by itself was not capable of doing. The main reason as you might imagine is the proper incentives were not there in the same way that they exist for private industry. Look at Section 3 point B. Institutional causes and cures of very high space launch cost.
Reading directly from your source: one of NASA's key drivers have been RELIABILITY, and a "non-industrial" culture. Of course both of these things drive cost up. "Industrial" cultures have eliminated creativity since Henry Ford introduced the assembly line at his plant--everyone has a single efficient responsibility and it makes everyone miserable as a result, leading to nobody giving a single damn at the end of the day.
In the same paragraph you linked: "The low Shuttle flight rate not only makes for inefficient use of personnel and facilities, it distorts the cost per flight calculations because of high fixed costs.” (Rutledge, 93-4063)" Meaning that if they had modified their program and product to launch more frequently like SpaceX does, then the costs would be much more favorable.
And also: "Another key factor in SpaceX’s low costs is its young, highly motivated workforce of top graduates willing to work significant unpaid overtime. " This is NOT a good thing--people shouldn't have to slave away for their career. It's also not sustainable, and it means that the work is being done by inexperienced individuals which leads to disasters like:
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/12/18/texas-space-x-lawsuit-tceq-pollution/, and
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/25/mexico-president-lawsuit-spacex-debris-rocket-explosions, and
https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starship-super-heavy-launch-destroyed-launchpad-volcano-sized-explosion-2023-11
But they had no incentives to send the shuttle more often because they do not have a commercial interest in being able to do so. It’s very easy to say, they could have done X or Y thing, but here’s the thing: they didn’t, not for decades and they are still not doing it now. Theoretically given the resources they have they should have never been able to hav been shown by Space X how to save costs, but that’s the paradox of having a lot of theoretically infinite funding (in relative terms) you dont have an incentive to squeeze every little drop of efficiency that you can.
Sure you raise some good points, but you also seem to have glossed over how absolutely bloated the agency is by their own admission in this paper. Why did NASA need all that personnel when SpaceX did better with a fraction? And if what you say is true about hyper specialization is true, which org do you think was more hyper specialized the one that had magnitudes more employees or the one that had to do with a fraction of the money and the personnel.
Again, the fact of the matter is SpaceX is more efficient at this than NASA. It’s not an opinion, it’s a fact confirmed by NASA themselves. That’s the bottom line for me here.
If we are gonna fret over collateral damage of every little thing we do, we might as well go back to the caves. Steps are taken to reduce it but it can never be fully avoided. Has a NASA rocket never exploded? Would you rather freeze human technology and science in its current state? Because if you look at history we break shit in order to learn how to not break shit and how to fix shit and how to improve it. I’m frankly sick of this performative ludditism.
Edit: that being said I am not advocating for dismantling NASA or anything. The way I see it NASA should focus on research, while SpaceX can focus on making commercially viable rockets. Like we don’t have USPS making their trucks.
I get it, you're just trolling. There is no valid argument here; NASA is a government institution who's intention is to serve the people through scientific advancement, not scrounge up a fucking profit. I literally just showed you that SpaceX is only more "efficient" by taking advantage of people, which is the complete opposite end of the spectrum from what government is supposed to do. They are not even competitors. They're not even competing; SpaceX will never develop the technology that NASA did, that SpaceX relied on to be in business in the first place.
The original conversation wasn't even about money, efficiency, or profit; it was about the ability to create and benefit society. Because SpaceX has a profit motive, it will never be able to create and innovate the same way NASA did; it'll only ever be able to fulfill narrowly defined contacts. Because guess what? If it goes beyond that, it'll basically be where NASA is and then you'll be in here bitching about them too because they're not "as efficient" as the people they're paying to do a simple, narrowly defined task with overworked, inexperienced employees as they generate rampant environmental harm.
I really wasn’t going to dignify this with an answer. But fuck it, I have nothing better to do it seems.
Yes corporations are more efficient by exploiting resources to the last drop, including people (to the extent that the law and the individual allow), no shit Sherlock, that’s kind of the point. But the people are there willingly, many of them could have worked at NASA or any other STEM job but they took the job Musk offered them because he was offering a different experience than what they could have received anywhere else, and of course the promise of future riches. I understand your point of view better than you think, I just reject it because it does not apply universally. Not everyone is coerced into accepting lower pay or working more hours, some people choose that because their job is more important to them than most other things. So yes exploitation of labor happens, but at what can only be described elite level jobs, the employees that choose to be paid below market rate do so out of their choice. These are not people struggling to pay rent, they are making 3 figures most of them if not all of them. A far cry from the cashiers at Walmart.
The thing is that if you look at the way science and technology progresses it ca be boiled down to optimization in the use of energy and resources. Government agencies will never do that because of the way they are incentivized to operate which by the way is not to benefit the people, that’s a naive and utopian view of government, rather they are optimized to never spend less this quarter than last quarter because they get their budget cut if they do. You are deluded if you think a single government official in any country in any government is concerned with “the people” more than they are in their career and the budget they manage. I’ll repeat this, the government is a distinct entity from the people with different incentives and motivations, same as a corporation or an NGO or any other organization. They are all different groups with different goals and motivations and the people are yet another. Each serves themselves and that ‘s how we achieve balance. But I digress, the way incentives are set up for the government is to spend more and more even when there is no logical reason to spend more. Which is why they could not achieve what SpaceX did.
But here’s what crazy about you telling me I’m trolling, or maybe you didn’t read my edit, but I agree with you! NASA has a distinct role in the future which is to dedicate itself to research that might not have obvious commercial application but could benefit humanity in other ways, I used the USPS example: it would be kinda stupid to have USPS make it’s own trucks when it is better at doing logistics which is a task that doesn’t have a commercial upside without becoming so expensive that it hurts most of the population.
I do not know about what original conversation you refer to as my first comment was always about efficiency and cost cutting which is the only thing that will enable mass space exploration, mining and commerce and maybe colonization one day (opening the door for all kinds of human organization schemes and experiments that are no longer possible on earth due to social ossification). For me that was always the goal of NASA, and yes without NASA there would be no SpaceX, just like there would be no NASA without Newton and no Newton without Descartes and so on. No human endeavor is built from the clouds, there’s always a precursor, we can trace anything and everything to our first ancestors if you like and then to the first bacteria life forms.
And yes SpaceX itself will become a bloated, inefficient monster one day, that is the lifecycle of these entities. The argument for free markets (actual free markets not the corporatocratic protectionist nightmare that is the US system) is that a competitor will come about and do the same thing better and take their market from them if they fail to improve themselves. But maybe that doesn’t happen, at that point you will have me right by your side calling for the nationalization of SpaceX, but we are not there yet.
Fuck off with the notion that everything that contradicts your opinion is the "hivemind." It is supremely condescending and toxic to pretend you're the only one capable of independent thought.
Did I ever say or imply that everything that contradicts my opinion is of the hive mind? Because I don’t think I did. But this particular trope of trying to flatten any of the achievements of Musk’s companies simply because they are associated with him and calling for their nationalization is a tiresome talking point of the online “left” that simply parrots whatever everyone else “on their side” is supposed to think because it has leftie vibes. It’s as brain dead a take as any you would find on a Magatard community.
And I do need to point out that nationalization is not inherently socialist or left wing at all.
I think you severely discount NASA's achievements. I would wager the stagnation of NASA and the subsequent rise of SpaceX was largely due to a lack of funding for NASA and waning public interest and lack of leadership.
I doubt the public would have tolerated the idea blowing up rockets until it worked as a good use of tax payer dollars. So did NASA fail us, or did the public fail NASA?
Section 3 Point B.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200001093/downloads/20200001093.pdf
They keep giving contracts to SpaceX because that's the way the budgets are mandated from congress. They have X amount of money to distribute. Everything goes to generally the lowest bidder, and because there are only a handful of options, they have to keep using one contractor to produce their parts because it's even more expensive to keep switching.
So drop the attitude. Usually the worst bidder gets the job, and it ends up costing more money after everything is said and done.
Section 3 Point B.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200001093/downloads/20200001093.pdf
Not tough to see how you ended up permabanned on reddit.
How'd you know that, recognized the username?
I looked at his acct and it was the subject of one of his last posts.
It wasn’t by calling out people spouting takes they haven’t thought through for more than 5 minutes because they fit the vibes they like.
I actually am skeptical of nationalization. I think the free market is more efficient in most situations.
But if you think SpaceX is running circles around NASA, well that's so ridiculous that I'm starting to doubt myself.
They did though, they massively cut costs of launching a rocket, which is again the real barrier for space exploration, especially commercially viable space exploration. It’s not clear that NASA could have done that seeing how their costs remained roughly the same for decades, but don’t take it from me, take it from NASA themselves:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200001093/downloads/20200001093.pdf
What’s your counter argument for saying they didn’t run circles around NASA?
All the explosions.
That’s bound to happen every now and then. At least it hasn’t happened with people inside.
If Tesla is any indication, it's only a matter of time.
Well the engineers at SpaceX are generally more responsible and more concerned with security than Tesla, if only because the hardware is so expensive. But yes, it could happen any of these days.
Judging by the way they spelled "teeny," I can't help but wonder if they might also be familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet
El problema principal de estúpidos como tú es asumir que puedes inferir absolutamente nada de la persona detrás de un username en una plataforma total y absolutamente anónima. Cara de cabron huelebicho.
Yeah boy get them boots deep I like the sloppy way you kiss that leather.