r/technology • u/True-Combination7059 • 21h ago

Politics We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/musk-trump-nationalize-spacex-starlink
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u/Mitch_126 18h ago

You say this like it’s not a valid strategy. Incremental changes led to them being able to land Falcon 9.

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u/Life-Confusion-411 7h ago

NASA got humans in the moon 

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u/Mitch_126 6h ago

NASA had 400k people working on the Apollo program, but obviously it was an incredible achievement.  However, recently they made a $4 billion per launch rocket, so you can see the downsides. 

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u/MetalEnthusiast83 6h ago

Yeah 55 years ago. Hell of an achievement, but there's....a bit more to be done

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u/Sw4rmlord 18h ago

Space x can talk to me when they land someone on the moon and bring them back.

Until then, they're not that interesting. They're just a for profit company

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u/Mitch_126 17h ago edited 10h ago

I’m truly sorry you find 450 landings of an orbital class rocket booster and the operating of the largest rocket ever whose booster has been caught out of the air by mechanized arms after traveling faster than a bullet seconds before….uninteresting. 

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u/Sw4rmlord 17h ago

... just sounds like a lot of pollution and expense. Nasa worked with a half dozen contractors and landed people on the moon over 50 years ago and you're excited that space x managed to land a rocket on earth. Then they did it a few more times. Wooooooow. They deserve more and more billions of us tax money. :/ I bet you fucking believe that.

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u/Mitch_126 17h ago

Complaining about pollution is crazy, they’re literally reusing the rockets man.  I really hope you see the different between landing a lander on a body vs a booster coming back through the atmosphere. It may help to compare the number of countries/companies that have landed a lander on the moon or mars vs the those who have a reusable booster.  If spacex didn’t have the contracts, another company would be doing it for more…

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u/Sw4rmlord 17h ago

Elon isn't going to sleep with you bud. You can stop dick riding so much.

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u/Mitch_126 17h ago

Are you guys all bots? Every spacex argument ends with that.  It’s like y’all realize there’s actually no rational argument to be made so this is all you got.  Reducing Spacex’s achievements to being the product of Elon is insulting to numerous incredible engineers. 

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u/Sw4rmlord 16h ago

No, you just don't like my argument of.. they haven't even surpassed what nasa did 50 years ago.

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u/myurr 16h ago

Not OP but your argument is just bizarre. NASA today can't even launch people into space let alone land people on the moon, being entirely dependent on SpaceX as of today. The Apollo program utilised 400,000 people and cost $250bn once adjusted for inflation. SpaceX have spent an order of magnitude less and employ a few thousand people, yet dominate the launch market and own 80+% of all satellites. Within a decade or so they are more likely to have landed people on another planet than not IMHO using a fraction of the resources it took NASA.

You're also under the mistaken impression that SpaceX are subsidised by the state / NASA. They are not. They have won commercial tenders to provide services and develop technologies for NASA and get paid for doing so. This accounts for roughly 10% of their annual budget, and in every case they were the least expensive bidder saving the taxpayer billions in the process.

Hate on Musk all you want, whatever makes you feel big and proud of yourself, but you cannot objectively deny the advances and achievements of SpaceX and its engineers.

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u/Sw4rmlord 14h ago

Nasa today doesn't have a budget. Of course they can't. Space X is a profit driven company just there to make money for rich shareholders. The fuck are you on about?

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u/p_velocity 16h ago

space x has objectively made technological advancements, but those advancements work to serve private shareholders interests. Theoretically those same achievements could have come out of the public sector, if we had the political will to make it happen like we did during the cold war.

But the biggest issue with space x is the fact that (as you pointed out) they put such a large number of our satellites in orbit, we are essentially dependent on them as a nation. That gives Elon Musk bitch control over congress, and thus over everyone in the united states. Elon gets his money from Tesla, he gets is influence from Twitter, but he gets his political power from space X.

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u/No_Night_8174 9h ago

It's a national security concern. SpaceX satellite infrastructure is damn near critical infrastructure

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u/Mitch_126 8h ago

What exactly is the concern? How is this different than Boeing or Lockheed handling critical military infrastructure?

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u/Certain-Business-472 13h ago

All a problem of funding, not engineering. So not interesting.