After giving in to Putin/Xi’s demands to not provide starlink internet service over Taiwan, DOD officials are growing nervous about trusting Elon’s Space company with our national secrets
Aw man, if only there was some sort of space administration that you could invest some of your trillions of dollars into so that your satellites could be launched by a group that you can monitor and trust.
Nope, everything in the US must be privatized. EVERYTHING. Capitalism DEMANDS it
To be fair here… The old guard still aren’t working on reuse even after SpaceX not only championed it but actually succeeded and proved reliability.
The old launch providers are still just throwing their shit away and still cost billions of dollars for launches.
The Commercial Resupply Service and Commercial Crew Programs have also achieved better standards than NASA had when they started them, and at much cheaper cost than the previous solutions.
Privatisation isn’t inherently bad, and importantly, the money is still being handled through NASA for oversight.
I bet if you offered them grant money to develop it… it wouldn’t have been left on the table.
Yeah i mean look how much money telecoms got over the last century. That paid off really well.
No, but they wouldn’t do anything beyond the exact specific minimums of the grant either.
And you think a private business will do anything more than the minimum of a contract?
Yes
SpaceX has with their vehicles and options. They’re all more capable than the contact they were built under.
Huh? Why do you think this? The implication seems to be that they want to pocket the rest or something?
Let’s not forget, we are talking about NASA here, not a private corporation. Why would an arm of the federal government have any interest in not doing “anything beyond the exact specific minimums of the grant”?
I cannot speak to building rockets, but I do know about other types of government financing, and I can tell you that the scientists and engineers who would have received such a grant, would have no reason not to use as much of it as possible. In fact, that’s exactly how they would justify a need for more in the future.
Also does it even SEEM like NASA cuts corners? No. They know people’s lives are at stake. They test and retest and are very dedicated to proper procedure so things don’t get fucked up the wrong way … like when you cut corners.
NASA aren’t the ones building things. They’re just the ones deciding what the requirements are after Congress gives them a fraction of what they need to accomplish the impossible.
It’s the likes of Boeing that are building and milking it. And they have never done more than the minimum required, and until competition from SpaceX at a fraction of the cost were experts at milking the Cost Plus contracting they essentially required to do anything space related.
NASA will never be in charge of building things on their own. Space too much of a cash cow for the Congress Critters to milk via the complexity and obfuscation of the government contract process. Thinking they would be able to bring anything in house is hilarious.
the money is still being handled through NASA for oversight.
Oversight of the money is far from the problem here. This is not an issue of cheating the government or mismanagement of money, this is a national security issue.
this is a national security issue.
In some ways, SpaceX delivered too well.
NASA has been trying to find multiple launch providers but where are they? This is probably not the risk reduction they were going for but it is exactly risk that can be reduced by having multiple providers. However SpaceX succeeded well enough to dominate the field, worldwide
Where are Bozos and those other guys? Where even is ULA? Where’s that payback on NASA funding?
Revoke his security clearance. They did it to Oppenheimer for a lot less.
Ah, but he wasn’t a capitalistic wage exploitation illegal immigrant billionaire. That was his first mistake.
No, Oppenheimer was a…“communist”!! 😱😱😱😱
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IIRC, you’re supposed to report when you’ve had significant contact with Canadians and this motherfucker is talking with Vladimir Putin himself. I can’t imagine he reported that to whoever his clearance is with.
When I had my clearance, we were told if we had a conversation with a foreign national at a bar, we had to disclose it, even after we had already received our clearance.
I was put through a multi-hour polygraph interview from hell, where I was told I didn’t know how to breathe and was threatened with being failed and losing my clearance, because I was having issues remembering online foreign penpals from high school.
But motherfucker is talking to Putin on the regularly, and he’s a billionaire with billions worth of government contracts? Tell me again, US Government, why any of your citizens should give a fuck about anything, again?
Because billionaires are not citizens of a country, they are essentially a country unto themselves.
They haven’t made you do that in while. There’s way too many foreign nationals in the U.S., it would be impossible, especially in a city. The standard is ongoing contact/close personal relationships. Having a one-off conversation with a Russian at a bar isn’t going to trigger the requirement unless there’s something suspicious about the conversation itself (like they keep asking about your job).
Are you kidding me? The national security clearance process involves pseudo-science bs like a polygraph test?
If you’re going to rely on private firms for your aerospace espionage endeavors, maybe factor in their leader’s sanity before you sign the contract with them.
Nah. Loads of things just shouldn’t be privatised.
What do you value higher - that one company’s profits or the public? Why are you so selfish? Why can’t you just be happy that that one company gets to hold the entire population hostage over the necessary good or service that they can then monopolise? It’s so much easier to squeeze the poor for all they own when their very survival depends on the things you can hand out or hold back at a whim. Something something the free market will probably prevent abuse or something, so it’s perfectly okay.
I 100% agree with you but is there someone else in thr US who can reliably launch satellites? I know several othe companies are developing these systems but I don’t think any are anywhere close to Space X’s reliability or capability.
Space X is doing some awesome stuff and I hate that the awesome has to be tempered by the owner is a piece of shit.
They’re only able to do it because they’ve received trillions of dollars from the federal government.
They should nationalize SpaceX before they ever let someone like Musk get the security clearance needed to be in that position.
SpaceX is wasting government money, they have almost spent all of the money they were given to land people on the moon, on building a rocket that can’t do basic stuff.
That is not awesome.
And somehow they want to make him in charge of government inefficiency
You want to trust him after what happened in Ukraine? Are you out of your mind? And he’s admitted that he chats with Putin on a regular basis.
he worships a russian asset. dont give him any access to defense
But he has money. If you’re rich, they let you do it.
Yet another reason billionaires shouldn’t exist. Dude is making international policy based on requests from foreign leaders, along with having conversations with them while launching the US government’s satellites of national security importance.
They should be, it’s a spectacularly bad idea.
Just outsource DOD too, they basically work for their main sponsors anyway.
/s
why the hell would you be?
What even is the DOD/DOJ doing here?
Surely you meant “wouldn’t”
In his defense, the GOP also answers to Putin, so it makes sense he would too.
Satellite internet already existed way, way before Starlink. You know, good satellite internet where you have a single geostationary satellite giving you high speed instead of these small Leo ones that will fall out of orbit within a decade…
Why would Taiwan even need Starlink?
Having said that: fuck Musk, and yeah, they should never have allowed this dumb ass anywhere near rockets
Geostationary satellite internet is not “good.” There’s about 200ms of latency built into the system because of the distance to the satellite, which means you can’t use it for anything real-time. If it’s all you have it’s better than nothing, but LEO satellite Internet is a lot more useful.
Old sat internet is not high speed unless you have your own private sat and are willing to spend crazy amounts of money and they suffer from very high latency. I’m a musk hater but starlink preforms pretty well. My dream is that the US will nationalize spacex and remove musks influence. Nothing but a cancer
“As much as I hate elon…”
“I hate elon as much as the next guy, but…”
“Look, I’m no elon fan, but…”
I’m sure you all know, but to be clear, when you see the above in elon posts… these are the beginnings of sentences from people who don’t hate elon. They are sentences from people who like elon, but think you will hate them, or not consider their opinions, if they say out loud that they do, in fact, like elon.
On a separate but related note, this is elon speaking at a hate-filled rally featuring a series of bigoted speakers, including himself. The rally very intentionally cosplayed an American Nazi rally that famously occurred at Madison Square garden in the 1930s. To emphasize how on the nose this all was, elon wore a specially made hat - a hat that very deliberately used an especially prominent font from the Nazi era. They are literally SCREAMING it in your face and tattooing it on their foreheads
elon has done nothing good or admirable with his life and elon will will not do anything good or admirable with his life. You can’t compartmentalize your opinion on this, he sucks, on the whole.
Jesus Christ.
Fraktur was a remnant from Kaiser times. Nazis were quite against it, maybe because of different reasons you might assume. Hitler said this: “In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The countries of the East, North and West will learn our language in order to be able to communicate with us. The prerequisite for this is that the script known as Gothic will be replaced by what we previously called the Latin script and now call normal script.”
