You could always just fund the space agency you already have, instead of funneling money to a foreign billionaire.

Giving companies to the state doesn't always work well. However giving companies to the workers does.

Right? Like I’m assuming a lot of these people are self labeled progressives but they sure sound conservative to me. If any risk or collateral damage is unacceptable to make progress then we might as well just fucking go back to living in caves and be done with this civilization thing. I understand the disillusion with tech, and specifically the owners of said tech but you don’t have to swing to the other side and become a fucking Luddite or something. The problems are solvable through other mechanisms rather than just stopping tech innovation or this terrible terrible idea of nationalizing corporations.

These are the same people who complain about Trump having too much unfettered power btw. And here they are discussing giving him even more power. Ain’t that something?

A private company shows up that gets federal funding while the space agency gets funding consistently cut while having to support multiple, multi-year, billion dollar projects.

A private company whose survival is 100% reliant on government money.

Capitalists on Lemmy: private company is better just because it's private

Post Soviet Russia. There’s a fun history lesson in there. They gave stock in all the companies to all the workers. Then a couple rich people got together and tricked all the people to accumulate all the stocks. Those people became the oligarchs. And we know what happened to the workers of Russia. They all died in a trench in Ukraine very happy story.

No this the one time I’m with the commies. Nationalize that shit. Like you said it’s all taxpayer money anyway. A little bit of Wall Street speculation, but who gives a fuck about those people

No this the one time I’m with the commies. Nationalize that shit. Like you said it’s all taxpayer money anyway. A little bit of Wall Street speculation, but who gives a fuck about those people

The humanity does. Well, maybe not “need” it but deserve it. Finding out about the world around us is what we exist for.

Even though it’s not a space trash problem, it is a regular upper atmosphere polluter of aluminum oxide ash. We don’t yet know the long term consequences.

So you wanna nationalize the whole telecom industry then?

I think if you consider the cost to manufacture then bury a fibre optic cable for everyone who lives 10km from a town centre, I think it's still a net positive. It's not great for sure, but amortised over a huge population it's probably the best option we have at this time.

Well, now that you bring it up...

You could always just fund the space agency you already have, instead of funneling money to a foreign billionaire.

Quite ironic from people constantly accusing their political adversaries to be communists...

You mean the NASA who landed people on the moon?

So let's assume you aren't a moon landing denier and use that as a baseline, NASA is clearly capable of things given the right circumstances and budget.

SpaceX benefited from his reputation and money, because they sure as shit didn't benefit from his technical acumen.

Business wise he is successful because he's rich and influential and that works to mitigate how shitty he is at actually running an organisation, that doesn't mean he has skills as a business person that means he has money and influence, in his case originally from the mine, then from buying and bullying his was in to businesses that were technologically sound and boosting them with his money.

You could make an argument he's a relatively good investor, but he's an actively bad CEO.

This is the thing, NASA is underfunded as it is, if we nationalized SpaceX, we wouldn't actually continue to fund it appropriately and it would simply die. Actually, with trump at the helm, nationalizing it would mean Trump immediately liquidating it. SpaceX is definitely the most successful rocket company in the US. It would be an awful shame for the space industry and for humanity's future in space.

I hate musk as much as the next guy, but I think the success of spaceX is undeniable. Their success with reusable rockets is not just impressive, it's ground breaking and important. Developing a fully reusable rocket is probably the most important challenge humans are working on in this era, and I only know of three companies attempting to do it. I don't want to kill the company that's furthest along.

all taxpayer money anyway

Yes but with very little to show for it. If the government just treated all undelivered orders as debt, it would end up deep in the red.