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We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink

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  • Sure, that's the ideal.

    Is it likely? Ehhhh

    From this admin? Nah. It'll be stolen and given to, idk, Thiel or Vance or whoever, but not nationalized, just reprivatized.

  • You guys are so stuck in the cult of personality. WE PAID FOR EVERYTHING SPACEX DID. IT BELONGS TO US.

    Not to mention that Musk himself contributed nothing to SpaceX's technical achievements. All he did was insist that the audio of their launches and recoveries include employees cheering maniacally - easily the most annoying aspect of SpaceX.

  • 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.

    The GM situation was a more than a bailout, they took complete control of the company, took it private, liquidated some assets, then sold it off in a new IPO.

    It's not all that different from a private equity firm doing the same thing, the major difference is the legal protections the US had (e.g. it got priority over all other creditors). If the US wanted to keep it and run it, it could've.

  • We are already fucked. The choices given are siding with Trump, and end up like Russia, or side with Elon, and end up like Cyberpunk 2077

    ..or organize, start/join unions, get involved with your local community and build up some real resistance that isn't based off obscene wealth, lawfare or media brainwashing. Once you have experienced something real, it's quite hard to understand how or why anyone would fall for the alternative.

  • We are already fucked. The choices given are siding with Trump, and end up like Russia, or side with Elon, and end up like Cyberpunk 2077

    Only useless people side with those two.

    Stop being useless.

  • Sure, I mean technically paypal was a rather innovative idea for its time, but again, the guy basically associated himself with smart people that had bright ideas.

    Yes, he does have a knack for growing businesses to a larger scale, but most millionaires/ billionaires do, cause they outsource brain matter and decision making to a select few.

    I’m not sure if I ever liked the guy or his largely exaggerated marketing, but being a POS nazi isn’t helping either, so i’m biased towards nazi hate I guess. Either way, he will need a paradigm shift for people to accept him back into the decent human beings club.
    I do hope he will find a way, but doubt it really.

    I mostly hope that his companies make it back into the “disruptive technology” club, regardless of him.

  • 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.

    Bruh this has already happened over and over again. Nobody stops them because the most violence empire on the planet is leading the way. AFAIK the USA is the only state to have actually nuked people.

    See also the zio regime. Imperial allies supreme.

    First of all, America is not "the most violent empire on the planet." America has the capability of being the most violent nation, but at the moment, our potential for violence is being eclipsed by other nations who are actively employing the same levels of violence that we are capable of. Nothing we are currently doing comes close to the violence that Russia and Israel are employing.

    And yes, America is the only nation to have deployed nuclear weapons against human targets, but that was 80 years ago, and ended the worst war in human history. After demonstrating its power, just the presence of nuclear weapons in a nation's arsenal has been enough to keep the most powerful, well-armed, violent nations (including America) from going too far.

  • 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.

    We now live in a world controlled by Sociopathic Oligarchs who can afford to create government level technology.

    People have lived in that world for most/all of human history. Assuming you come from the west, you're coming from a place where for the last couple of hundred years it's been more cost effective to just buy the government instead. Is that better? Maybe, it's a little more stable. I dunno if it's good though.

  • wow, tell me you know nothing about West Africa without telling me you know nothing about West Africa.

    I'm all for the Sahellian states getting rid of the French, but the Burkinabe gold mining system is pure chaos, often costing informal miners their lives. Burkina, in particular, didn't have anything other than use of the CFA really tying them to the French anyway. Sure, some gold mines, but that's more like a final vestige.

    Like, just overall, Bukina Faso is a weird place. Every time I've been there, the only bird I really see around is vultures. Like, no doves, no pigeons. Just vultures.

    Checked some data. In 2024, 82% of exports of Burkina Faso were in the category "Pearls, Precious Stones, Metals, Coins". In 2021, the main export partner was Switzerland with a 70% of the total exports going there. How the fuck is this not western colonialism?! I don't care if It's particularly France (CFA mentioned, good for you), it's still the victim country of the exploitation of western companies.

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    If we do, we'll definitely reach mars. I can imagine it now! Its 3055 and everything is totally fine now that we can escape to Mars in an inflatable city. A whole 4000 square feet of freedom soaring thru the sky with the last of us aboard ready for a whole new life and a good 7 in inflated cities for our children to live. She changes her name to Mother Gaia and His name is now Adam. One day in the distant future perhaps a large meteor would come roaring and reshaping our planet into livable space again.

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    Step one Musk needs to be arrested and sent to El Salvador.

  • You guys are so stuck in the cult of personality. WE PAID FOR EVERYTHING SPACEX DID. IT BELONGS TO US.

    You paid for services rendered. By your logic you should eventually own your neighborhood grocery store because that's where you buy your bread.

  • 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

    Yes, government funded endeavors are sometimes the only way to do things that don't have a clear ROI but they are also incredibly inefficient and as such should be kept only until it becomes viable for the private sector to take over.

    Private companies: *mostly disappear and waste shareholder money, like Virgin or like Bezos' attempts at space

    That's the beauty of the private sector, pure meritocracy, if you suck - you die. If those were public initiatives they would have been kept regardless of the costs or the results, wasting the taxpayer's money instead of the shareholders'.

    one company with public funding raking in those 80 years of publicly-funded research to itself

    If it was that easy NASA or all the failed companies you mentioned would have done it themselves. SpaceX has done an absolutely incredible job at innovating in the industry that has been in stagnation since the 80s, designing rapidly reusable rockets, lowering the cost per kg to LEO from $72k in today's money, from the space shuttle days to $2500 and planing to reduce it to $10 with starship.

    The public funding part doesn't mean free money from the government, the government pays SpaceX for fulfilling contracts because NASA can't do it themselves, at least not as efficiently as SpaceX. Right now majority of SpaceX's revenue comes from starlink which mainly serves private consumers so it's reliance on the government contracts is being overstated.

    underpaying and exploiting its engineers

    SpaceX $155K-$247K/yr ($117K - $175K/yr base pay + $39K - $72K/yr stock)

    NASA $113K - $158K/yr

    lowering the costs at the expense of safety due to cutting in safety measures thay will never be tolerated when humans ride those rockets

    As of 2025, SpaceX is the only U.S. company with a human-rated rocket system certified by NASA for regular flights to the International Space Station. NASA completed the certification of SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket in 2023, marking the first time a commercial system was certified for human spaceflight.

    Dumbass liberal lemmitor: pRiVaTe Is ClEaRlY sUpErIoR

    Yes.

    but they are also incredibly inefficient

    Dude, most research altogether is government funded, companies don't innovate for shit. Public research in Universities and research institutions amounts for the overwhelming majority of research, except in some sectors like automotive (where they managed to make cars 50000% bigger over the past 50 years and sell SUVs to city dwellers without lowering fuel consumption one fucking bit, my 2006 diesel car uses less fuel than most 2025 hybrids). Medicine, biology, languages, physics, chemistry... Without public funding, research dies. FFS, why do you think during the cold war the west rushed to fund public research with trillions of dollars instead of just "giving it to the free market to do its thing"?

    That's the beauty of the private sector, pure meritocracy

    Hahahahaha. This "don't tread on me" snake has never heard of the word "monopoly", or of market power. You live in an imaginary world made up by capitalist economists. Without public funding there's no education, without education there's no research, end of the story dumbass.

    Why do you think communist China is outpacing r&d in pretty much every field it decides to? Whether it be renewables, lithium batteries, electric cars, soon silicon, AI, and many other fields, China is advancing at paces the west doesn't dream of. You're taking the example of the most capitalist economy in the world (the USA) and using it to show how bad state-funded things in this hellhole are, no shit Sherlock.

    planing to reduce it to $10 with starship.

    Hahahahahahahaha yeah buddy, and we'll have full self-driving by 2021. A Musk fartbreather, of course you are.

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    No thanks, demolish Leon Hitler's space program and bury it. NASA should be the US leader for space missions and not a South African neo-Nazi sack of shit.

  • I don’t think the majority of Americans understand what that means. They’ll just scream “commies!” And raise their maga flag.

    But the idea of a starlink-like business owned by UN would be nice, and not an American corporation owned by a nepobaby Elmo.

    In the USA space-x gets away with a lot. A few years ago they announced they were no longer going to bother with getting all the FAA approvals needed for their rockets because it took too long. Space-x still got government contracts.

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    imagine how many more rockets we could reuse if the NASA subdivision formerly known as SpaceX did literally any of the standard, rigorous fault-checks.

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    NOW they complain about giving Musk money?
    Most of the 38 billion was given by Biden.

  • It’s a shame you commies don’t know history? Do you avoid it on purpose because it interferes with your ability to make shit up and try to sound intelligent

    I know it's asking a lot, but you could give an example instead of insulting me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • In the USA space-x gets away with a lot. A few years ago they announced they were no longer going to bother with getting all the FAA approvals needed for their rockets because it took too long. Space-x still got government contracts.

    If your want proof that the wealthy live by a different set of laws, look no further than the time Elon Musk, ceo of SpaceX, went on a podcast and smoked weed.

    SpaceX has DOD contracts for launches, and somehow him blatantly violating federal law had no impact on the contracts his company fulfilled for the government.

    Do I think weed should be classified like it is? No.

    Do I think that everyone should be held to the same standard? Yes. And if anyone else had been involved in government projects while going on podcasts and smoking weed, they’d at the very least be fired.

  • 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.

    Donald Trump does not have "all the power". Otherwise, he wouldn't be acquiescing to the courts at all. It's wild to me that you think that the US government would do a worse job of running SpaceX and Starlink than Elon Musk.

    You're treating it like simply replacing one CEO with another, but that isn't what it would be. I know that Trump wants to be king, but he still isn't.

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    When it comes to public outreach, the question is more “why not?”
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    lupusblackfur@lemmy.worldL
    Welp, queue up some more multi-million dollar "donations" to have these cases dropped... Not like the TechBros don't have the funds. ‍️ ‍️
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    django@discuss.tchncs.deD
    All the tasks could have been easily solved with some basic APIs and algorithms.
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    Gemini is just a web replacement protocol. With basic things we remember from olden days Web, but with everything non-essential removed, for a client to be doable in a couple of days. I have my own Gemini viewer, LOL. This for me seems a completely different application from torrents. I was dreaming for a thing similar to torrent trackers for aggregating storage and computation and indexing and search, with search and aggregation and other services' responses being structured and standardized, and cryptographic identities, and some kind of market services to sell and buy storage and computation in unified and pooled, but transparent way (scripted by buyer\seller), similar to MMORPG markets, with the representation (what is a siloed service in modern web) being on the client native application, and those services allowing to build any kind of client-server huge system on them, that being global. But that's more of a global Facebook\Usenet\whatever, a killer of platforms. Their infrastructure is internal, while their representation is public on the Internet. I want to make infrastructure public on the Internet, and representation client-side, sharing it for many kinds of applications. Adding another layer to the OSI model, so to say, between transport and application layer. For this application: I think you could have some kind of Kademlia-based p2p with groups voluntarily joined (involving very huge groups) where nodes store replicas of partitions of group common data based on their pseudo-random identifiers and/or some kind of ring built from those identifiers, to balance storage and resilience. If a group has a creator, then you can have replication factor propagated signed by them, and membership too signed by them. But if having a creator (even with cryptographically delegated decisions) and propagating changes by them is not ok, then maybe just using whole data hash, or it's bittorrent-like info tree hash, as namespace with peers freely joining it can do. Then it may be better to partition not by parts of the whole piece, but by info tree? I guess making it exactly bittorrent-like is not a good idea, rather some kind of block tree, like for a filesystem, and a separate piece of information to lookup which file is in which blocks. If we are doing directory structure. Then, with freely joining it, there's no need in any owners or replication factors, I guess just pseudorandom distribution of hashes will do, and each node storing first partitions closest to its hash. Now thinking about it, such a system would be not that different from bittorrent and can even be interoperable with it. There's the issue of updates, yes, hence I've started with groups having hierarchy of creators, who can make or accept those updates. Having that and the ability to gradually store one group's data to another group, it should be possible to do forks of a certain state. But that line of thought makes reusing bittorrent only possible for part of the system. The whole database is guaranteed to be more than a normal HDD (1 TB? I dunno). Absolutely guaranteed, no doubt at all. 1 TB (for example) would be someone's collection of favorite stuff, and not too rich one.
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    What I said is that smart people can be convinced to move to another platform. Most of my friends are not technically inclined, but it was easy to make them use it, at least to chat with me. What you did is change "smart people" with "people who already want to move", which is not the same. You then said it's not something you can choose (as you cannot choose to be rich). But I answered that you can actually choose your friends. Never did I say people who are not interested in niche technologies are not smart. My statement can be rephrased in an equivalent statement "people who cannot be convinced to change are not smart", and I stand to it.
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    There you go then. It's 80 €.
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    Obviously the law must be simple enough to follow so that for Jim’s furniture shop is not a problem nor a too high cost to respect it, but it must be clear that if you break it you can cease to exist as company. I think this may be the root of our disagreement, I do not believe that there is any law making body today that is capable of an elegantly simple law. I could be too naive, but I think it is possible. We also definitely have a difference on opinion when it comes to the severity of the infraction, in my mind, while privacy is important, it should not have the same level of punishments associated with it when compared to something on the level of poisoning water ways; I think that a privacy law should hurt but be able to be learned from while in the poison case it should result in the bankruptcy of a company. The severity is directly proportional to the number of people affected. If you violate the privacy of 200 million people is the same that you poison the water of 10 people. And while with the poisoning scenario it could be better to jail the responsible people (for a very, very long time) and let the company survive to clean the water, once your privacy is violated there is no way back, a company could not fix it. The issue we find ourselves with today is that the aggregate of all privacy breaches makes it harmful to the people, but with a sizeable enough fine, I find it hard to believe that there would be major or lasting damage. So how much money your privacy it's worth ? 6 For this reason I don’t think it is wise to write laws that will bankrupt a company off of one infraction which was not directly or indirectly harmful to the physical well being of the people: and I am using indirectly a little bit more strict than I would like to since as I said before, the aggregate of all the information is harmful. The point is that the goal is not to bankrupt companies but to have them behave right. The penalty associated to every law IS the tool that make you respect the law. And it must be so high that you don't want to break the law. I would have to look into the laws in question, but on a surface level I think that any company should be subjected to the same baseline privacy laws, so if there isn’t anything screwy within the law that apple, Google, and Facebook are ignoring, I think it should apply to them. Trust me on this one, direct experience payment processors have a lot more rules to follow to be able to work. I do not want jail time for the CEO by default but he need to know that he will pay personally if the company break the law, it is the only way to make him run the company being sure that it follow the laws. For some reason I don’t have my usual cynicism when it comes to this issue. I think that the magnitude of loses that vested interests have in these companies would make it so that companies would police themselves for fear of losing profits. That being said I wouldn’t be opposed to some form of personal accountability on corporate leadership, but I fear that they will just end up finding a way to create a scapegoat everytime. It is not cynicism. I simply think that a huge fine to a single person (the CEO for example) is useless since it too easy to avoid and if it really huge realistically it would be never paid anyway so nothing usefull since the net worth of this kind of people is only on the paper. So if you slap a 100 billion file to Musk he will never pay because he has not the money to pay even if technically he is worth way more than that. Jail time instead is something that even Musk can experience. In general I like laws that are as objective as possible, I think that a privacy law should be written so that it is very objectively overbearing, but that has a smaller fine associated with it. This way the law is very clear on right and wrong, while also giving the businesses time and incentive to change their practices without having to sink large amount of expenses into lawyers to review every minute detail, which is the logical conclusion of the one infraction bankrupt system that you seem to be supporting. Then you write a law that explicitally state what you can do and what is not allowed is forbidden by default.
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    If you want to stay on the bleeding edge you've got to be a reversal of Europe, which means allowing innovation and competition. Hence why VT is nearly 70% US.