Apparently Hank Reardon has changed his tune: the statist parasites may in fact be the only thing standing between us and the stars, but in the meantime, their privately held for profit company needs some big buxxx from said statist parasites.

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While participating in a panel called "The US Space Enterprise Partnership" at the NewSpace Conference that was held by the Space Frontier Foundation on Saturday, SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell opined that NASA's budget should be raised to -25 billion, according to a tweet by Space Policy Online's Marcia Smith. The theory is that a lot of political rancor has taken place in the aerospace community because of the space agency's limited budget. If the budget were to be increased to pay for everything on the space wish list, the rancor will cease.
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THIS IS JOHN GALT, CALLING THE WORLD!

I think NASA has suffered from big-entity syndrome (I briefly worked for IBM so I have 1st hand experience of this malaise). This is compounded by the fact that NASA was formed from several pre-existing organisations that all retained differing levels of autonomy. I think parts of NASA have been amazingly efficient of productive (the JPL for instance) and others have been bafflingly misguided and wasteful (the space shuttle program).

SpaceX is just focusing on getting launch vehicles right: cheap, reusable and reliable. Theyre doing pretty good so far. Rockets dont change much on the outside and may look superficially like ones from the 50's but SpaceXs rockets are thoroughly modern and advanced in terms of materials, engine efficiency/weight, telemetry and control etc. etc.
(Of course they were able to base a lot of their work on the earlier publicly funded NASA work, so this type of business model might eventually run out of steam)

ps: I still think NASA should be given *all the money* what the fuck else are you going to spend it on!?

Government supports climate changing industry with military violence and refuses to fund space exploration (and most people into space exploration HATE HATE HATE the idea of sending anything not a robot into space).

Human genocide.

Fuck humans, always, no matter what wonderful a thing they can do, the thing has all the value, the humans should be allowed to die. Fuck I hate this species for that dumb shit.

That being said, I liked this video because something went boom, and I'm sure they learned something from it anyway. It's an amazing adventure surrounded by complete human awful.

sending humans into space is pointless and incredibly expensive for the vast majority of things that need to be done in space.