this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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NASA does research. They push the boundaries corporations can't.
Depends where the funding goes! And then musk can take a cut.
SpaceX has been a huge success for NASA. For much less funding than NASA doing it themselves or a fraction of the cost of ULA, NASA has a very reliable and much cheaper medium launch vehicle launching much more frequently, and a heavy launcher pretty far in development.
This is great, turning “routine” space operations over to cheaper private companies, while focussing on research and stretching the envelope
Easy to do when you pay people shit, don't care about things blowing up, when you get to build on the already established knowledge, and use their facilities. Government on the other hand could never allow anything to fail and had to forge the path.
Corporations cannot carry the risk involved. Because else it would be similar to the medicine industry, but there is no large market to sell to.
We're going to Mars is not something you can sell in a boardroom, because why? What is the ROI?
What I'm saying is musk wants to divert all of the government funding from NASA to spacex. ROI is all the funding from the government, every year for decades. It's not a sell a product and profit model in the regular sense. And this way musk can personally take a cut of all that funding.
He doesn't even need to take a cut. If more money is regularly flowing to SpaceX, the value of the company goes up, which means more money for Musk.
Not with that attitude...and probably will be able to change that with the upcoming administration deregulating everything. Or did you mean won't instead of can't?
Deregulation means private businesses won't research anything that doesn't make their quarterly numbers look better. Accelerated capitalism, woohoo!
Yes, so it's won't and not can't. Words matter.
Okay. Explain how his point changed now that you've been overly pedantic?
I wasn't being pedantic for its own sake, but because the Corp has the capability yet refuse to use it for people's benefit as they value shareholder profit more. They absolutely could, but won't. To me, this is worse than not having the ability (won't).
That's not worse to you?
Not always. There is some research that they could not do without going broke because up-front costs are too high, and there's no tangible return on investment. In these cases, it makes sense to fund publicly because there is still value to society at large. Accelerators, for example. It doesn't always have to be some conspiracy.