The slap fight between Donald Trump and Elon Musk has highlighted the absurdity of keeping so much of our space program and satellite internet infrastructure in the hands of a single oligarch.
And what little they have done has been massively overpriced.
NASA budget is nonexistent and everytime they start working on something meaningful they are forced to cancel the project due to funding cuts. It was at 4.41% of the federal spending during the peak of Apollo mission, it’s 0.3% today.
SpaceX on the other hand enjoys those government handouts for doing nothing and reusing public tech, research and even personel (after Musk himself was able to fire those people) from NASA.
P.S. NASA missions might cost more, but they also don’t explode as a way to “test shit”. Public reaction to that would be a lot different, no?
NASA budget is nonexistent and everytime they start working on something meaningful they are forced to cancel the project due to funding cuts. It was at 4.41% of the federal spending during the peak of Apollo mission, it’s 0.3% today.
SpaceX on the other hand enjoys those government handouts for doing nothing and reusing public tech, research and even personel (after Musk himself was able to fire those people) from NASA.
P.S. NASA missions might cost more, but they also don’t explode as a way to “test shit”. Public reaction to that would be a lot different, no?