spacex will hopefully first orbital flight

Giving people pretend work when you could just as well give them real work is literally the dumbest thing I have ever heard. If they want something there is plenty of workforce there to get it. Where is the billions of $ the government spends to keep a bunch of computer scientist and programmers to spin their wheels? It doesn't exist because it makes no sense. This crazy thing called private companies. Or how about this crazy idea, this workforce could work at places like SpaceX, Firefly, RocketLab and so on. How about you have your workforce try to build those instead of blowing 2 billion a year on a nothing. > (maybe hypersonic missiles? nuclear thermal rockets?) They are working on technology from the past with tools from the pasts and methods from the past. This workforce is not innovating can creating new things learning new things. > If you see it as a qualified workforce preservation program, then it is quite successful. You are just paying them to keep them around and a little busy, not to take you to the Moon. What you don't want is to turn that pretend work into real results, because those results is not what you are paying them for. So what you do instead is you give them some pretend work. But what do you do with your workforce once you built all the rockets you need? Do you simply fire them all? What if there's some new development 20 years from now, some Chinese or Russian innovation (maybe hypersonic missiles? nuclear thermal rockets?) that destabilizes the balance of powers? You won't be able to flip a switch and bring all your engineers back to work to figure out some way to stay relevant. The Trident II SLBM is an absolute marvel of technology, and it's probably unsurpassed even today, three decades after it was introduced. The US has built thousands, or maybe tens of thousands rockets capable of reaching space in the '60s, '70s, '80s and a bit in the '90s.

If you see it as a qualified workforce preservation program, then it is quite successful.

SLS is such if you see it as a space exploration program. > the complete waste of taxpayer money that is the SLS. Critical word here is difficult (not some ad-tech SAS company).įWIW the government has a ton of inefficiencies but their goal isn't to productionize something and turn it into a business. This, frankly, unintelligent argument that the government is a waste of resources probably better represents your understanding of how difficult technology gets funded in the US.

Most of all climate technology, space tech and the internet has been developed off their back and productionized (ie most of the technology is de-risked thanks to the fundamental research from the government). With out the decades of work and capital that the R&D programs have built in this country none of SpaceX would be possible.Įverything that Elon has done has been piggybacked on the heavy lifting of the government. So what you fail to understand and much of the 'govt waste' argument also fails to understand is that the government has funded the basic research and incredible high risk capital to do any the projects in the first place.

Spacex will hopefully first orbital flight