Mastodawn

Jennifer Kayla | Theogrin 🦊Apr 22, 2023

@maxkennerly
The worst part, to me, is its siphoning of funds from actual governmental groups such as NASA, a drain which is crippling the future of space travel and exploration in pursuit of wacky, pie-in-the-sky ideas. That's billions of dollars that could, for example, go into the teaching of STEM, but which has instead been earmarked for people who are already billionaires and want to play a round or two of real-life Kerbal on everyone else's quarter.

@theogrin @maxkennerly Musk is a horrible human being, but SpaceX is *cheaper* than any other launch provider NASA uses. And if the Starship system works (a big if), it will offer huge increases in space travel and exploration capabilities at even lower cost.

Kevin Leecaster Apr 22, 2023

@michaelgemar @theogrin @maxkennerly
The belief that private companies will provide vital public services "cheaper" than the government has been quite the successful disinformation campaign from corporations for sure.

@GreenFire @theogrin @maxkennerly That’s true for many services (*especially* healthcare) but generally not for producing physical goods. The government doesn’t have factories for making the cars its employees drive, or to build the planes that it flies — it relies on corporations to produce those things. It would be hugely expensive for it to reproduce those capabilities.

@maxkennerly @theogrin @michaelgemar @GreenFire

It *is* hugely expensive to *buy* those products too. What you just described is not something inherent to private enterprise, it’s simply the argument that government can’t tool up a whole new industry cheaper than those who *already* own the assets.

@DavidM_yeg @maxkennerly @theogrin @GreenFire The US government itself has *never* built significant launch capabilities — it has *always* contracted with existing aerospace companies to build under contract. The difference in this era is it is now buying “off-the-shelf” launch services from companies, rather than having them construct bespoke vehicles just for the government. This is indeed vastly cheaper for government.

@michaelgemar @theogrin @GreenFire @maxkennerly

I have a couple of questions:
Who built and paid for the launch facilities that launch services are using?
Do they really pay fair price for using them or is their use subsidized?
Who will pay for the damage done in this most recent misuse of those facilities?

@DavidM_yeg @theogrin @GreenFire @maxkennerly If you are referring to the Starship facilities in Texas (which are completely separate from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center), the Texas location is fully private and paid for by SpaceX. Kennedy, by contrast, is indeed government supported, but various private and semi-private companies launch from there.

@theogrin @maxkennerly @GreenFire @michaelgemar

re Starship that’s good to hear… but how much of SpaceX is government funded (not the vc rhetoric, but actual contracts and funding?)

@michaelgemar @theogrin @GreenFire @maxkennerly

I haven’t heard a convincing argument that private enterprise is inherently better that government development.

Here’s what I think:
Private enterprise is great at externalizing, offloading, and downloading costs, reducing quality and immediate expense. *Sometimes* there’s value in that.
Governments can spend the money needed for development and quality and safety before it will ‘pay a return’.

@theogrin @michaelgemar @GreenFire @maxkennerly

The best results often come from an interplay between these factors
BUT
the Pollyanna idea that business is inherently efficient is wasteful and harmful, especially when it is used to line to pockets of the wealthy.

2/f

@DavidM_yeg @theogrin @GreenFire @maxkennerly I complete agree with all these sentiments. (As I said earlier, the most obvious area where private business has been terrible is healthcare.) There’s nothing magic about private business.

But the flip side in the space domain is large contractors who get fat sucking up public money with giant cost-plus contracts to produce vehicles designed to spread funds to as many congressional districts and states as possible.

@michaelgemar @maxkennerly @GreenFire @theogrin
Pointing out bloated pork barreling contracts while defending private enterprise is an odd flex. Those seem like excellent examples where government *could* just do it cheaper on their own. Unless I suppose… You live in a country where democracy is so broken, that nothing can be accomplished without pork barrelling.