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
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.
nationalization doesn’t work, and it has never worked
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.
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:
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.
NASA basically pioneered every single piece of modern space technology
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.
Think objectively about things, don’t just say things to echo the hivemind.
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?
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.
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
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.
Removed by mod
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.
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.
Removed by mod
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