this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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SpaceX and starlink are dead in the water and utterly useless until Musk has them taken away. As long as he's running those, they're just shitty companies with lots of empty promises
I wouldn't say they're quite dead in the water but he definitely has plenty of power to enshitify them.
He already shut off the Ukraine from starlink when he felt like it.
Tit for tat Disney and Tesla.
If he fucks with SpaceX though, NASA can just stop dealing with them. They would go real quick from being profitable to begging for people to use their service.
If he starts getting a lot of back pressure from the EU and US on what he can launch, I can put a serious dent in his wallet.
"when he felt like it" isn't exactly correct, he specifically didn't allow them to use starlink to launch attacks on Russia, as it was meant to be used only for defense.
I mean, if you're being invaded, doesn't anything you do to fight back count as "defense"?
Not according to the USA initially
The problem is, none of us have real knowledge about what happened there. All we have is conjecture and/or propaganda.
It's equally reasonably possible that he has ties in Russia.
You can? Because he already has. Please do!
SpaceX has never been a good investment for NASA.
Not necessarily SpaceX but they needed something.
The problem with NASA is that the funding waxes and wains with the administrations, as does the demands of the administrations to give them the money.
If something takes more than 8 years to happen chances are the project never comes to fruition. NASA has really slowed down in development in recent decades.
Not all the innovation SpaceX is doing is really warranted, though most of it's kind of cool. But they are investing in research and development in places that NASA simply can't get to.
Starlink is just a way for spacex to capitalize on that research and development. They are their own sister company customer.
That said they can all turn into dog shit in a matter of months if somebody got a stick up their butt
SpaceX is the main contractor of NASA.
Because Republicans gutted NASA for decades. They absolutely loathed that it was a generally beloved program by everyone. And for every dollar of funding saw multiple times that in the value it created. What SpaceX did wasn't something that NASA had never thought of. They just never had the funding to really pursue it. And especially in the wasteful manner Elon musk has.
What did spaceX do, exactly?
We've had re-usable spacecraft rated for human passengers since the Space Shuttle.
Reentry vehicle sure. Launch vehicle, no. The ocean floor is littered with booster stage debris. NASA had experimented with a lot of different methods to reach orbit. And had even looked at things that SpaceX eventually built. But never had the funding to build themselves.
SpaceX is nothing but the culmination of a Reagan era fascist fever, dream. Ofdismantling good governance. Privatizing everything possible and then price gouging.
I just saw SpaceX's most recent rocket launch and it looked like they detached the boosters.
I think they exploded afterwards, too.
Absolutely. But that's only because Elon musk doesn't mind throwing away money. He's got so much of it. The rockets were supposed to stabilize themselves and land to be reused. He's blown up more rockets than NASA so far. In much less time.
Oh yeah, I was just curious what spaceX did cause it doesn't look like they accomplished anything we haven't done before.
Maybe if they successfully implement re-usable boosters, then they would have done something new.
SpaceX has Musk handlers to keep Musk away from SpaceX.
Don't know why you're down voted. They've been promising man on mars any day now for years.
The mars thing is really a small part of what they do, although it gets the press. They are pretty much the only real game in town for satellite launches, and, I think ISS transport (especially since Soyez is Russian and there's not a lot of good will going on there...). Even Amazon uses them for launches. It's approaching monopoly status for critical infrastructure (we're very dependant on satellites as a society now).
Mars is a labour of love for future ambition, but it's not the main show.
Whether the root cause is historically poor NASA funding or not (I think there's a strong argument for competition and private sector IF it's properly governed, but it never is...), the fact is that we've created a situation where vast amounts of geopolitical control rest with a single person.