Despotic Ibrahim Traoré, using the money from nationalised formerly French gold mines to checks notes give $180.000.000 to farmers in farm equipment to industrialise agriculture. So despotic and antidemocratic.

Governments: spend 80 years developing space tech with public funding, allowing humanity to walk on the moon, have global positioning satellites, and essentially kickstart the computing industry from a necessity to build computers for orbital calculations

Private companies: mostly disappear and waste shareholder money, like Virgin or like Bezos' attempts at space, with one company with public funding raking in those 80 years of publicly-funded research to itself, underpaying and exploiting its engineers, and lowering the costs at the expense of safety due to cutting in safety measures thay will never be tolerated when humans ride those rockets

Dumbass liberal lemmitor: pRiVaTe Is ClEaRlY sUpErIoR

Also, you're focusing on the space agency of the most corrupt developed country in the world: the USA. Maybe compare the costs with those of the Chinese Space Agency?

They didn't, because someone got paid to write this article!

No, nazis actually privatised a lot of formerly state-owned sectors of the economy

Agreed. But also commies believe that when the state takes something, "we" will get it (and they fail to see why states sponsor their useful idiocy)

Yeah, let's give the trump administration the power to seize companies it doesn't like, that is a great idea that def won't be abused all the time

I think every larger nation deploying their own constellation would reduce people losing access due to political games.

If there's only one network with the same topology as Starlink, then the USA, China, or Russia will end up making a bunch of rules on everyone else just like Elon does today. Look how the USA abuses centralized internet infrastructure already. Multiple overlapping systems would be wastefully redundant, but reduces the risk of censorship.

We can't get along and can't have nice things.

this the one time I’m with the commies

Are you against universal and free healthcare, education and retirement? Are you against improving worker rights, paid holidays, sick leave, guaranteed housing and guaranteed employment? Are you against unionisation of workplaces and collective worker decisions mattering in business? Are you against heavy regulation against climate change and pollution of the environment? Are you against anti-racism, feminism, anti-fascism and the redistribution of wealth from the richest to the poorest? I'm sure you have a lot more common ground with us commies than you think

I mean if we count bailouts as nationalization, then now we've got like some kinda national "socialism" where state and corporate power have fused.

Reusable rockets are cool

lol you really threatened Lemmy with a good time

The article is not far off from the mob mentality in this thread. It makes one good point, that one oligarch should not be in control of a global communications network, but it fails to notice that this move would take the power from one wealthy individual and hand it over to another, who now holds all the power.

And let's be clear, if we nationalized, Trump would ruin SpaceX, run it right into the ground like every company he's ever touched. Starship would never be finished, despite being within sight of the rocketry holy grail, reusable rockets. Washington would take control of starlink, which would probably be good, except it gives trump control over a communication system, which is a terrible idea. But it wouldn't last long, because when we mismanage and underfund SpaceX and it crumbles, we'll have no way to replace starlink sats and the whole network will disappear.

Nationalisation is SpaceX is a dumb idea because people aren't really thinking it all through. The outcome would be a lot worse for everyone, especially with a vindictive president that would like nothing more than to seize the assets of his opponents and liquidate them into his own coffers.

Fediverse is superior to state-owned.

Now that you mention it, we need an Amazon replacement too.

Never lived up to the hype. Take almost as much effort to get ready for another flight as building another one.

It might! But the article I linked also suggests it might destroy ozone and have a net warming effect. We just don’t know. The upper atmosphere has never before had this level of direct pollution injection.

You want a truly multinational organization responsible for it, nothing that can be controlled by a single nation, even one as (ex)influential as the us.
Something based on the UN perhaps.

Combine that with making internet access a human right, to stop denying connectivity outright.

Ideally then you could't enforce meaningful censorship, but more realistically you would route regions to their respective governments servers so they could censor as before on their territory.
That would not guarantee free access to the internet to everyone, but should be an acceptable compromise to basically all nations.

After that, other doubting nations could still pull their own constellation, nothing is stopping that.

I would love if the internet program was uncensored, but that probably needs personal circumvention same as now, if such a program wants any degree of success.

Shouldn't be incompatible with nationalizing SpaceX and Starlink. Just give it all to NASA, actually.

Hardly. Usually the process goes like this:

African Nation - has natural resource and has no way to get it out of the ground.

Foreign company that does this all the time: Yo, we'll literally pay you to let us dig up this stuff.

Regime: Yes, I was paid, perfect. Thanks. And we'll charge you what seems like tons of money also.

10 years later

New Regime: Hm.....that's an awfully nice mine you have there. We've increased taxes on it 400 times and you are still not closing. It means there's too much money to be had! So we will take it and do the mining ourselves! How hard could it be?!

New regime nationalizes mine

3 months later

New Regime: Sadly, we must now close the mine and send everyone with jobs home because my drunk cousin is not a good mine director, and all the things broke and we didn't know you had to order more spare parts.

New Regime places FOR SALE sign on mine and waits for another foreign company to start the cycle over again.

It sounds like we don't disagree that much, I just think other doubting nations is extremely likely.

Edit: but gosh darn that is nice to imagine. Everyone, everywhere, having free internet.

We no longer live in a world where our biggest fear would be the government controlling high level corporations and their operators.

We now live in a world controlled by Sociopathic Oligarchs who can afford to create government level technology. Right now it's mostly tourism rockets and satellites, but now we see Skum weaponizing that technology, and/or using it as a bargaining chip. He has cut off Starlink in a war zone to benefit the county who defers to him, but is openly hostile to the US, and now he's threatening to cut off our access to the space station. He is using tech that WE PAY FOR with government contracts and grants, to pursue his own diplomacy, for his own benefit, and against our interests.

Eventually, someone will start building and stockpiling actual weapons, perhaps even atomics. Then we will be asking why someone didn't step in and stop them before they became a bonafide threat.

We paid for Skum's technology, and he gets to control it as a courtesy. Just the threat of using it against us should be enough reason to declare him a national security threat, confiscate his American-taxpayer financed businesses, and imprison him.