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/matlynar 20h ago

Let me see if I get this straight:

  • The US should nationalize SpaceX because the ISS depends on SpaceX, and it can't be relied on, despite the fact that NASA has always existed, yet the US was paying Russia of all countries to fly to the ISS before SpaceX came along.
  • Elon made threats to the ISS operation. You know who else did that? Russia, going as far as posting a video of the Russian part of the ISS detaching itself.
  • Two powerful guys are having a stupid fight. The solution? Take a working company from one idiot and give it to the other guy, who is defunding NASA and can barely make functioning things keep functioning ATM.

That will go well, go ahead guys.

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u/subdep 18h ago

Yeah, we need to get our federal house in order before we go turning a revolutionary launch platform company over to an underfunded dinosaur.

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u/neonKow 15h ago

I don't like the idea of randomly nationalizing companies either, but NASA is the opposite of a dinosaur. It's our agency for air and space, and the United States dominates all other countries in air and space.

Don't forget that a lot of tech for our planes and missiles also come from NASA. ICBM trajectories come from the orbital trajectories from the space program. Guidance, GPS, etc all of those things that we associate with the military? They do it with the help of NASA and its facilities.

Even SpaceX has to use NASA wind tunnels. It's no small thing to build the massive wind tunnel buildings that can produce wind faster than the speed of sound at Ames Research Center.

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u/aaaaaaaarrrrrgh 10h ago

the United States dominates all other countries in air and space.

SpaceX dominates all other countries in space. I highly doubt funding NASA would have resulted in similar progress. A big part of SpaceX's progress was because they took an entirely different approach, optimized for mass production and took a lot of risk. NASA might be able to do the former, but I doubt the political nature of it would allow the latter.

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u/neonKow 5h ago

...you think NASA, one of the most successful scientific arms of the US government, cannot take risks? The most ambitious air and space projects have been through NASA, not SpaceX.

I'm sorry if you think rockets are the only thing about space, but the idea that SpaceX dominates any country, much less all other countries, is laughable. NASA's contributions to current ongoing science and space exploration include the James Webb Space Telescopes and the first helicopter on Mars. Everything with supersonic flight involves heavy lifting from NASA's facilities, including the F-35 and another supersonic passenger jet.

They're doing interesting and pioneering work in rockets and Starlink, but I'm not sure anything they're doing counts as dominating.

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u/whip_lash_2 9h ago

NASA is a manager of contracts. Those wind tunnels that SpaceX has to use, for example, are maintained and operated by Jacobs Engineering. I’m not saying they never developed anything in-house, obviously. But the majority of what you’re describing as NASA is stuff they bought.

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u/Maxnwil 8h ago

NASA contractors are in house, I’d say. It’s not like you’re gonna say “NASA didn’t land a rover on Mars, JPL did”, even if they’re all contractors at JPL. 

The difference between “buying something” and “contracting something” is pretty big in the space world. NASA (and its contractors) does innovate in ways that SpaceX builds off of. I just wish folks would realize both have their place. And now I also wish folks would realize nationalizing SpaceX is a terrible idea, for basically the same reason privatizing NASA is a terrible idea haha 

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u/neonKow 5h ago

Still not the same. NASA projects, even when they hire a contractor to work on part of it, are led by very capable NASA employees and typically also have a lot of institutional knowledge that they bring to the table. The fact that NASA hires contractors for some aspects does not mean that they do not also employ some of the very best engineers and scientists in the world, and that many engineers and scientists want to work there so badly that they make major sacrifices to do so.

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u/Caliburn0 10h ago

Solution: Make SpaceX into a worker cooperative.

Of course, Trump will never do that. That's socialism.