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Remember when on Interstellar there’s this whole prologue about the collapse of the US, the dismantling of NASA and the family getting on an argument with the school because the official stance now is that the moon landing never happened and mankind never went to space (despite there being still people alive who went there)?
So, anyway, life imitates art …
We ain’t getting Interstellar, we’re getting Don’t Look Up.
Recently there was a rerun of interstellar in IMAX at our local IMAX theatre. Rewatched it and had some pretty shocking revelations that I did not think of when I watched it for the first time. The rewriting of history being prime amongst them
I remember when that movie came out people argued with me that the Democrats were the party that was going to create the world of Interstellar and the Republicans were “standing up for science”.
It was obviously nonsense then so i have little illusions that those people have changed their view on it–or if they have, they’ve simply changed to believe the moon landing was faked.
NASA, like the post office, is such a public benefit that we should be funding it well.
I don’t think people understand how much value we get from NASA… Like, $7 for every dollar spent, or more, in economic benefit and technological advancements. So many solutions they have to come up with to make space flight possible are incredibly useful here on Earth too
Value that we won’t get if we’re paying a private company to do it
NASA does research. They push the boundaries corporations can’t.
Depends where the funding goes! And then musk can take a cut.
Corporations cannot carry the risk involved. Because else it would be similar to the medicine industry, but there is no large market to sell to.
We’re going to Mars is not something you can sell in a boardroom, because why? What is the ROI?
Not with that attitude…and probably will be able to change that with the upcoming administration deregulating everything. Or did you mean won’t instead of can’t?
Deregulation means private businesses won’t research anything that doesn’t make their quarterly numbers look better. Accelerated capitalism, woohoo!
Yes, so it’s won’t and not can’t. Words matter.
Okay. Explain how his point changed now that you’ve been overly pedantic?
The challenging thing here is that NASA does have deep, systemic problems and is in need of some overhaul. SLS is a breathtakingly expensive boondoggle, lunar gateway has no reason to exist, Orion is underpowered and overweight, Mars Sample Return’s entire mission is in question, JWST was a decade behind schedule and an order of magnitude over budget, and the list goes on. Extreme risk-aversion and congressional meddling have resulted in a bureaucratic quagmire of an organization. It’s hard to find nasa projects that are going well.
Of course I don’t think a gorilla with a sledgehammer as we’re sadly going to see from Trump will make things any better, we need a surgeon with a scalpel.
Most of the things you listed are directly related to Congressionally mandated specifics for funding those programs. The money is only there if NASA does it the way Congress dictates, not necessarily the way it should be done.
The entire SLS program is essentially a Congressional jobs and legacy aerospace grifting program post-Shuttle.
If Congress would. Keep their hands off, and just allocate budget, most of the issues would likely disappear since the people that actually know what’s going on could make the decisions instead of a Congress critter that is an imbecile.
NASA budget shouldn’t matter on the scale that it does. It is <2% of the US military spendings
Honestly I think lunar gateway is a decent idea, Its the easiest thing to do thats new as far as space is concerned and thus potentially the cheapest way to gain international co-operation, public interest, and potentially ignite another space race. Looking forward it can can potentially act as a life raft for any future lunar colonies in the event of a mishap. And while a moon colony isn’t as impressive as a mars one its much safer to practice on given that emergency re-supply can actually get there before the crew are already skeletonized. A moon base itself can then act as support for moon based telescopes (which have significant advantages, and disadvantages of course) and if you can get some kind of manufacturing going its far easier to launch from the moon than it is from earth, even if the moon just ends up as a glorified space gas station.
Some other country is gonna have the new nasa, and the united states is going to fall even further behind. It’ll just be a brain drain and most of it isn’t going to go to space-x.
We saw what happened the last time space infrastructure was privatized.
Boeing gave all the money to the stockholders and delivered a criminally late product that ended up failing and stranding our astronauts. Boeing obviously didn’t care to test if the Teflon in those thrusters could survive repeated heatings.
SpaceX decided to go backwards in rocket technology, from Hydrogen to Methane. Hydrogen is more efficient, and makes it easier to bury carbon responsibly. Sure, Boeing’s rockets got made fun of for being leaky, but I think that might be Boeing more than Hydrogen at fault. Dirty Methane rockets were cheap, and could be built simple as they experienced less thermal variation without cryogenic fuel.
SpaceX undercut the competition and turned itself into a monopoly while Boeing threw their hand to the stockholders. Now SpaceX picks up the pieces of the game they upended.
NASA was supposed to manage a thriving marketplace, full of competition. Instead it managed its way to a monopolistic structure that a single entity may try to sieze.
Fun fact about autocratic structures like monopolies and dictatorships: they can’t grow power themselves, they can only sieze power organized by others.
We need to build our next wave of structures in a distributed fashion such that the levers of power are not so concentrated that they may fall into the wrong hands.
Give the power to the people. All of them.
Almost like Jim Bridenstone was a bad pick….
I had a lengthy argument with someone that Musk couldn’t possibly be kissing Trump’s ass for money - he’s a billionaire after all and “has all the money he needs”. No no, Musk is doing this out of the goodness of his cold billionaire heart. Isn’t it obvious?
Why are so many people so stupid? WHY?
Good things have happened to Elon, therefore he must be a good person, otherwise my worldview is destroyed and there is no point being good.
They have a sense of “enough” and the concept of a thousand millions for someone who barely had a thousand hundreds or even just a thousand is so far out of their realm of understanding that they think “enough” must be a concept for capitalists too
Also dumb as rocks.
Elongated Muskrat is a billionaire who wants to become the first trillionaire. That’s what these people aren’t getting. It’s all just a game to him. He thinks that he lives in a simulation and everyone else is an NPC. He now wants to set a new high score.
I had similar arguments and the synopsis is that people can’t admit being wrong because it makes them look weak. It’s a toxic masculinity and ego thing.
You basically double down on the bet and ride the boat right into hell over the waterfall.
Dead, but you never had to admit the other person was right about the waterfall!
That’s how kids were taught to think when I was in school. Did you get something wrong on your first try? You’re a failure! Take your F and move on, you’re not allowed to try again unless you fail your entire grade level. 12 years of my school system taught many people to have that ego you mentioned, myself included. I graduated high school 10 years ago and still struggle accepting my failures. I have to remind myself that in real life I can actually learn from my mistakes. Unfortunately many people never have that realization.
Ok I definitely got a different vibe from failing tests. I routinely would have to deal with that stuff again so it was a “you failed, we aren’t going to revisit it but you need to not make the same mistake again
I comfort myself by saying I have something Musk and his ilk never will: ENOUGH.
^ Brilliant comment.
Trumps goons are going to sell out key functions of government to private buyers, like nasa to space x. This reminds me of when the USSR fell and all the shadiest people bought up the national industries.
I wonder who’s gonna buy the noaa. That’s the one I’m most concerned about.
NOAA goes to The Weather Company?
NASA has already sent out emails to their teams and contractors about what implications this can have on their departments. Shit’s bad.
And absolutely no one paying attention was shocked.
Convenient? That was the whole plan with buying X all along, to get into politics, and this guy is still there keeping it relevant.
Lol you are giving Musk way too much credit. No it wasn’t the plan. But that’s what it ended up being used for.
Space: the final (capitalistic) frontier.
Humanity: Let’s make a bunch of stories about how space capitalism has some really bad outcomes.
Also Humanity: That sound great! let’s do that!
This is what losing a space race looks like.
He efficiently using the government to make himself richer. What more did anybody expect?
People poke fun of Musk as being a idiot. But he had us Kaiser Soze’d by pretending to be dumb so that he could implement his self-serving ideas.
