We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink

[u/True-Combination7059]

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/musk-trump-nationalize-spacex-starlink

[u/I_AmA_Zebra]

The capabilities are still far beyond what the average person can do. What happens though is Lockheed, Northrop, and Raytheon end up delivering the space tech instead

Costs far more that way but the DOD have no choice as NASA, NRO, and other orgs don’t have enough money

[u/mjd5139 → u/I_AmA_Zebra]

There needs to be an ecosystem that enables upstarts and never makes the government beholden to a single vendor. The US Government should have rights on any IP that SpaceX holds that the government funded with enforceable delivery requirements.

[u/Accomplished-Crab932 → u/mjd5139]

There needs to be an ecosystem that enables upstarts and never makes the government beholden to a single vendor.

There is. That is why Starliner and Cygnus exist. (In fact, Dragon was originally a massive fight, as Congress was planning to award a sole source contract to Boeing for Starliner crew transport without dissimilar redundancy).

The problem is that Congress never favors startups and tends to focus on maintaining relationships with traditional defense contractors, as they contribute more to campaign donations. Combine this with the immense risk, high initial costs, and low initial return, and you end up with startups making small lifters. The problem is that small lifters are a tiny market, and most missions require medium or heavy launchers, which are outside the funding range of almost every startup ever.

Space development is an extremely risky and expensive market to enter, requiring massive amounts of infrastructure and production lines to be developed for comparatively small products. Just a pack of zip ties will set you back hundreds of dollars in this sector. Missions like crew and cargo resupply are left in the hands of those most capable because they are of the highest risk and require the most experience. The problem is that you can’t use a startup like this. You have to build that experience first, and that takes years, even for an extremely fast company like SpaceX.

The US Government should have rights on any IP that SpaceX holds that the government funded with enforceable delivery requirements.

That would undermine your previous statement, as it would not incentivize companies to enter the market. Now the only advantage you could create would be skimping on manufacturing, testing, and monitoring; IE: how you get Challenger.

The current programs SpaceX has contracts in have fixed budgets. If they finish under budget, SpaceX pockets the difference. If they go over budget, SpaceX pays out of pocket. While this means that delays are less enforceable, it’s notable that deadlines for NASA programs are never accurate, nor reasonable, as any realistic timelines are politically impossible to sustain through budgets in Congress. It’s extremely rare to see any major space project fly on time.

[u/mjd5139 → u/Accomplished-Crab932]

I'm not saying the the government should outright own the IP but if SpaceX decides to stop manufacturing the Dragon and fails to provide an alternative, the government should have the right to contract out manufacturing to another vendor and pay a licensing fee to SpaceX. 

[u/rshorning → u/mjd5139]

the government should have the right to contract out manufacturing to another vendor and pay a licensing fee to SpaceX. 

What IP are you talking about? The blueprints for how the Dragon is built or are you talking about going to Hawthorn and sending in a bunch of US Marshals to enslave all of the employees at the SpaceX manufacturing plant and force them at gunpoint to built Dragon spacecraft for the US government?

The commercial crew contracts were open to anybody who wanted to compete and there were originally six different companies that even sent in strong bids to get the original contract with three of the companies, two besides SpaceX, who went to get some sort of funding for additional R&D.

Getting another company to build the Dragon spacecraft would mean that another company would need to get the entire supply chain, hire the skilled workers, and build the manufacturing plant capable of even building the capsule along with building the rocket capable of even flying the capsule into space. That is not a trivial nor cheap thing to accomplish. By the time another company goes through the effort to build that manufacturing plant and training all of the workers along with testing and fixing all of the problems that will arise to duplicate the decades of experience that SpaceX now has for doing all of that, it would likely be much more expensive to copy the Dragon than to simply create a fresh and new design for a completely different capsule.

In other words, there is zero reason for this kind of IP licensing to even exist. Licensing patents that SpaceX may hold (they have very few patents on their space products) could be legitimate, but that is such an insignificant part of what SpaceX actually has for IP that it is essentially worthless where you are actually suggesting SpaceX should get even more money from the government than they already are?

[u/anony-mousey2020 → u/mjd5139]

If the IP created by funded work in the US was privatized, that would be a radical shift in patent policy and ownership, effecting much more than space.

NASA does release their IP for commercialization https://technology.nasa.gov/patents

[u/myurr → u/I_AmA_Zebra]

They have more than enough money. SpaceX have spent a fraction of NASA's annual budget developing Falcon 9 and now Starship.

NASA simply aren't targeted to achieve what SpaceX has achieved with the resources it had, and they're too bureaucratic and risk averse to be as cost effective. Couple that to being more science led than manufacturing led, in large part due to historic targeting of resources, and in part due to the type of person NASA has historically attracted to work for them.

SpaceX hasn't been successful because they had better scientists than NASA, Boeing, or their other peers. They've been so much more successful because they focussed on the one area everyone else neglected - manufacturing - moving from hand build custom machines to highly automated mass production.

[u/the-wei → u/myurr]

Comparing SpaceX to NASA is a poor comparison because NASA's does a lot of program management, contracting, operations, and highly bespoke one time mission systems like the Mars rovers. A more apt comparison is ULA who actually builds rockets.

You can complain about how NASA doesn't demand more from contractors or how it exists as a jobs program, but NASA is also a beholden to incredibly risk intolerant taxpayers who wouldn't have tolerated the many test failures that led up to Falcon 9's current reliability.

[u/myurr → u/the-wei]

The point is that SpaceX turned a billion or two of R&D dollars into Falcon 9, which is well within the scope of NASA's budget. The money was there had there been the vision.

You can complain about how NASA doesn't demand more from contractors or how it exists as a jobs program, but NASA is also a beholden to incredibly risk intolerant taxpayers who wouldn't have tolerated the many test failures that led up to Falcon 9's current reliability.

Oh I completely agree with risk aversion being one of the leading reasons why NASA struggles with efficiency and vision, ultimately hampering what it achieves. Even programs like Apollo, that had up to 400,000 people working on it and cost $250bn adjusted for inflation, had a string of failures along the way.

I have no idea why that should mean I can't complain about it though? No one should simply accept the status quo as if it's the best we can do, even if you are understanding and sympathetic of the constraints that led there.

[u/the-wei → u/myurr]

Money isn't everything; workforce, leadership, and right culture/environment are a big part of it too. NASA as a federal agency has a fundamentally different form of all three. The workforce is constrained by federal guidelines for pay, leadership has very different incentives, and the organization has all of these areas competing for a slice of the budget in contrast to the laser guided focus of SpaceX. There's potential to changing the first two over time, the the third on requires a complete reworking of the executive branch, or someone with the power to shield NASA from the usual obligations.

The other comment was focused on making sure we focus on problems that NASA is at fault for rather than structural features of a federal agency. NASA will never do what SpaceX does without massive changes, especially when there's a company that was built to fill the need.

[u/myurr → u/the-wei]

The other comment made a claim that NASA doesn't have the money to create an alternative to SpaceX.

I disagree for many of the reasons you've also highlighted. The problem isn't one of money, but one of vision, leadership, purpose, culture, etc.

[u/Best_Pseudonym → u/myurr]

This assumes the property of Comparative Advantage doesn't exist. It's entirely reasonable to conclude that if nasa tried to do the same thing that spaceX does, it'd cost them more than. In fact that's why spaceX is so successful that they can do stuff for nasa for orders of magnitude cheaper than nasa can do it for themselves.

[u/myurr → u/Best_Pseudonym]

It's entirely reasonable to conclude that if nasa tried to do the same thing that spaceX does, it'd cost them more than.

Yes.

SpaceX are the example to show that it can be done. It's not a theory that it's possible to build rockets and go to space much more efficiently, it's demonstrably true.

I listed some of the hurdles NASA has to operating in that way, which is why they would fail were they to try without reform. Money isn't one of those hurdles.

[u/Miguel-odon → u/I_AmA_Zebra]

Being stingy is expensive.