I’ve said for a long time now that the U.S. government needs to stop relying on SpaceX and I’ve got a ton of pushback. “He’s not in charge of the company! He just owns it!” Yeah, well I am guessing he wasn’t talking to Putin about electric cars or Twitter.
Hard to stop relying on the best rockets in the world. Maybe Blue Origin or RocketLab will step up but it’s hard to see that happening.
Better to just force him to divest than to drop one of the very few good launch providers.
They only are the best rockets in the world because the U.S. government has been giving them piles of money to develop them.
That should not have happened in the first place, but I would like to at least see the government seize their patents since they were paid for by our taxes.
Take the company, keep the good people and make it a part of nasa.
If the US can force a sale with Tiktok then the US can force Elon to sell SpaceX for national security reasons.
That sets a very bad precedent.
Or a very good one. If it’s too big to fail, then it’s already a problem.
The government forcibly taking ownership of a business is a bad thing.
Just let the business fail.
What if all the funding already comes from the government?
And then it dominos into other things failing.
So if your ISP goes under and it’s the only option in your area you’d rather be without internet than have a nationalized internet, even if the government is not allowed to snoop your data?
that precedent already exists.
For example, the Chattanooga and Tennessee Electric Power Company was nationalized into the TVA; As well as the rail roads and financial industries have a revolving door of nationalization-an-de-nationalization.
Can you explain why?
Something something competition something invisible hand?
Just to head that off, SpaceX doesn’t have competition at this point. ULA can’t match the Falcon rockets, and Boeing has their fingers in that pie. Blue Origin is staring at a corner and appears to be wanking itself. Virgin Galactic is only interested in space tourism. There’s a bunch of little companies trying to get past the R&D stage, but nobody substantial. NASA’s own rockets are an expensive boondoggle because Congress can’t shut up and let them do their job.
SpaceX is it. Nationalizing the company would not only get rid of the company’s biggest problem (the meatsack ego at its top), but would also do an end run around Congress treating NASA as a jobs program with pork in every state.
Because it opens the doors for the Republicans to start seizing businesses they don’t like.
Everyone has already told you it’s not a precedent but I should also note the eminent domain literally only requires the US to pay a fair market price, not for them to not take it.
They’ve been giving Boeing lots of money too.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding about how the space program works. NASA pays SpaceX for launch services. For other initiatives, NASA funds research initiatives through multiple companies for redundancy.
If we want to talk about pissing away money for rockets, how much money went to SLS development? Or maybe compare Boeing’s Starliner costs versus Crew Dragon.
Do the research and show me with numbers who the more cost efficient rocket development program is. I’ll wait.
The neat thing about government science programs, or any government program really, is that cost efficiency is not what drives results. If the best way to accomplish a goal is going to cost more money, then it costs more money. Thinking of the government as a business is as helpful as thinking about government budgets like a household budget. Governments maximize outcomes for their citizens, not shareholder value or profits.
And because you ended your post so unnecessarily rudely, so will I: stand up for your fellow man and encourage the de-privatization of space… and stop licking Elon’s boots. We’ll wait. ✌️
Nah Elon can fuck right off. He’s easily the world’s most colossal asshole.
How would you measure success? I’d measure it by number of objectives completed. Let’s take the commercial crew program as an example - how many successful crew launches has SpaceX completed vs. Boeing? How about vs. NASA? No American launch system compares to SpaceX in safety and capability yet. (Russia and China might be competitors, but there are political reasons why they can’t be chosen.)
I would absolutely LOVE to see more competition that obsoletes SpaceX. Maybe Blue Origin or RocketLab will step up? I don’t think SLS is really viable though.
I’d measure it by number of objectives completed.
How many commercial space flight programs landed on the moon? SpaceX was founded in 2002, over two decades ago. It had decades of public engineering data and knowledge to build on. In 1957, Sputnik made it to space, the first artificial satellite in the history of Earth. In 1969, humans landed on the moon.
I think the goals and scale of these efforts aren’t comparable. Best to compare apples to apples.
NASA pays SpaceX for launch services.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html
I think you’re confusing NASA as a client of SpaceX with direct government subsidies and contacts. SpaceX has received billions and billions of dollars via contracts since 2015 (date of the article I linked). They’ve used that government money for their R&D to advance their tech and get to where they are today.
Yes, I mentioned that they also receive R&D contracts, along with the other major players like Boeing. The difference is that historically they have received less money yet delivered more.
I’m not sure what part you think I’m not understanding since I didn’t suggest the opposite of anything you said.
Fair enough, other than the idea that they shouldn’t have been paid for the services rendered. R&D is a service just as much as launch is.
I do agree that anything developed using public funds should be publicly owned. Good luck convincing the US government of that though… that would upset the corporate overlords.
SpaceX has been paid extensively for services not rendered. The funds that are currently paying for their Starship development were ostensibly for a lunar lander. And they’re years behind schedule at this point. They haven’t even started on the lander itself.
That’s certainly true, though arguably Starship development is a prerequisite to the lunar lander, otherwise it could never leave the ground.
It’s really hard to understand why NASA picked Starship over a smaller, more traditional lander.
The Americans should probably nationalise SpaceX, or at least buy out a controlling percentage of the shares.
The US should honestly just nationalize SpaceX and merge it into NASA. Add its operating costs into NASA’s budget, cut some redundancies, and I’m sure we’d see a lot of progress happen pretty quickly.
I’d rather see it run like the USPS. Let it be a quasi-independent company owned by the government. Even though Congress fucks with the USPS, they don’t fuck with it like they do NASA.
Nationalizing SpaceX would probably be financially disasteous (seeing as how Musk has to keep pulling money from his businesses to fund twitter, and to buy out Gwynne Shotwell, who was approached by Boeing to be their new CEO in late 2022)
Most people assume Musk’s businesses are all on incredibly shaky ground financially and are propped up entirely though hype and speculative credit.
Thats like saying Bezos doesn’t run WAPO and didn’t kill the endorsement, its a nonsensical notion
I agree, but I heard it many times right here on Lemmy. By people also saying things like “I know Elon is terrible, but…” in the post.
Starlink + Twitter = propaganda mills deliver him Ukraine
How do you think he launches those Starlink satellites?
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Actually, Musk is not running the day to day operations at spacex, so removing spacex is not really a big need. He was driven out successfully from there a few years ago. But he’s still wrecking havoc at tesla.
He’s been talking to Putin regularly for years now. The damage has already been done.
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Conservatism is about denying basic human decency to the majority in order to artificially elevate an elite to fawn over.
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I hope it is up to us to decide that.
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His starlink --> SpaceForce --> Alphabet agencies pipeline is what scares me
More of this shit’s going up next year… Just in time for for the DPRK/PRC/Russian/Iranian escalations
Lets privatize top-secret comms and AO mission orchestration. That’s not gonna bite us in the ass…
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Starshield is a gov constellation of starlink cubesats. Same tech, hopefully different governance. But I have my doubts where Musk is involved.
Yeah, I realized my mistake almost immediately and deleted the comment but apparently not fast enough.
No worries! Just adding clarity for anyone else who might be curious. Have a good rest of your day.
CIA needs to start doing its job and um… you know, protect American interests. The African scammer needs to go.
Security clearances are nominally the domain of the FBI, rather than the CIA. They tend to see themselves as a right-wing organization though.
I don’t think they were talking about revoking the security clearance here. At least not directly.
One part of having a security clearance is also willingly signing away certain protections that you as a private citizen otherwise have.
So fwiw him having a clearance does open the door for additional scrutiny were anyone willing to look.
Yes, plus, he owns contracts with the government that likely contain classified information. It is just much easier to have him under a contract that allows them to just spy on him, in this situation.
Because money.
That’s it. That’s all. He’s rich enough to do literally anything he wants. He could use the FBI as his own personal dead hooker disposal company if he wants. Welcome to America.
Leon could buy a Medal of Freedom from the Orange Asswipe.
This is the corruption that takes the United States and throws it on the history pile with Rome
Now imagine the Roman empire with the most endgame capitalism for-profit motive on every strata of society and they also have nukes. If/when America falls, it would be reckless to think they’ll fall alone. I think it may actually look similar to how Russia tried to take Ukraine because their country was falling off a cliff economically, but like if Russia has military bases in the vast majority of countries on earth.
Milquetoast doesn’t want to do his job if it even sniffs at being political.
I cannot wait until his weak ass is kicked to the curb by Harris.
Can we stop declaring things “Too big to fail!”
Socialism for the rich.
Rugged capitalism for the poor.
Back to the bootstrap factory with you
Doesn’t he already smoke weed. Openly? On YouTube videos? The exceptions made for him are truly staggering.
He claimed it was only on Rogan and that he normally does not smoke anyway. Depending on if you wanna believe that or not.
He broke federal law in a public setting. If one murder would be enough…why not this?
I’m pretty sure smoking weed isn’t federally illegal, just possession.
I’m aware of the LSD and Ketamine, weed wouldn’t surprise me too.
Look at that asshat, skipping on stage with a shirt thats a size too small and a head filled with government secrets. Clown world.
Because cowardice runs rampant in Washington
Merrick Garland is a eunuch
The bastard should be stripped of his US citizenship for illegally working in the USA.
I mean… He makes rockets for them. Wouldn’t he have to have some clearance of some kind?
Security clearances have dependent requirements. His admitted and open drug use should have been the first thing to get his clearance revoked but as others have stated: in America you are only liable for the crimes you cannot afford to commit; as long as you have the money for it you can do anything here.
I have crossed paths with a couple celebrities that I was surprised had top secret clearances at the (based on open drug use). That part doesn’t really surprise me. His propensity for blackmail is what I find troubling. He may not be a financial risk but he’s certainly a risk due to his desire for control and/or power.
Lol. So did MacAfee. He said he had tried “all the drugs” and they gave him a clearance.
I don’t think there are any hard and fast requirements. The idea is to analyze your overall risk, not whether or not you’re a naughty person for having done drugs.
I suspect not. Even if they still work with SpaceX, the contracts could be handled in a way that doesn’t involve him. He could still manage the overall direction of the company but have others manage projects that require a clearance. I don’t know if this has ever been done before or if it would ever be done, but it is theoretically possible.
Alternatively, they could make a requirement that either Musk steps down, or is removed, from his position at SpaceX or they stop getting contracts. This would almost certainly work because the company doesn’t survive without these contracts most likely, or at least makes far less money. The board cares more about money than they do about him probably.
