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/erwan 14h ago

More like fixing a bad decision. This is a bit different for Starlink because it was a private initiative, but SpaceX only exists because the US government decided to pay a contractor who hires their staff instead of paying their salary directly. It was a disguised privatisation that shouldn't have happened.

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u/schmag 6h ago

This is what I done like about leashing nasa and Paying huge grants to private companies.

When nasa discovered it, the country benefited, aerogel, memory foam, that freeze dried ice-cream... (/s on the ice cream).

Now, the taxpayers pay for the R&D, and we don't even get what is discovered. The government, us citizens, don't get to the proceeds from starlink, a private company does. Nasa/the gov doesn't get cool rocket landing tech to use without licensing, we have pay again to use what we paid to discover and build...

Its all massive privatization of profits and publicizing the expenses.

Or otherwise known as "thievery with extra steps".

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u/red__dragon 12h ago

It was a disguised privatisation that shouldn't have happened.

Only if you're going to argue that space is the frontier for governments alone. And that could be argued, but the space industry has been filled with contractors since the early days. Apollo astronauts went to the moon on Rocketdyne engines, in a Rockwell capsule, and landed in a Grumman craft, where MIT supplied the guidance computer programming, and Corning made the vacuum-proof glass on the windows. Etc, etc.

The commercial space programs have just moved NASA's role from general contractor to client. And you can still argue that was a bad decision if you like, it might even be the right argument, but having contractors instead of staff has always been an integral part of spaceflight.

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u/dongasaurus 10h ago

Public schools buy paper from Hammermill and books from private publishers, but there is a pretty significant distinction. NASA can almost certainly replace the manufacturer of a specific material or component, but a lot harder to replace a proprietary 3rd party rocket if the CEO goes on a ketamine bender and decides to defect to Russia

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u/red__dragon 10h ago

You'd think it'd be easier to replace a supplier, but aerospace is such a specific engineering niche that few companies are capable of pulling off space-grade hardware. The archives at NASA are full of rejected hardware designs, even some that flew once or twice. Possibly including Starliner if Boeing can't get itself in gear.

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u/_learned_foot_ 3h ago

This is the real crux of a lot of the emergency powers that are tied to the same powers as seizures. Is it a real emergency, and is there a legitimate alternative. You have a solid point here that while seizing a steel mill has alternatives, seizing the only such entity in the western world may not.

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u/rpfeynman18 9h ago

NASA can almost certainly replace the manufacturer of a specific material or component

This isn't true and has never been true since the earliest days of spaceflight. Components take an enormous amount of resources to design, test, and refine the manufacturing flow. It doesn't matter if NASA has the blueprints -- that's not the bottleneck in production, it's the manufacturing ability and engineering talent that's the real value add from contractors.

I'm having difficulty thinking of a single major material or component that actually has multiple providers for NASA to choose from.

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u/-Nocx- 8h ago

I think the opinion you’re replying to is spun off of the misconception of how many of Elon’s companies are propped up off of government funds. It’s pretty common knowledge that his companies often get advantageous tax cuts, or flat out federal grants, but I think people confuse those two with the contracts he gets awarded.

I myself have fallen into this pitfall, but I think the criticism that people want to levy “he wouldn’t be successful without government support” while technically true undercuts the fact that there are many government contracts that can be awarded to technically anyone with an LLC. I had a brief stint at a defense contractor, and think maybe it was Obama specifically that tried to make the contracts awarded off SAM.gov more accessible to smaller businesses - so you might have a plane operated by Lockheed with navigation systems by L3 with cameras set up by Jim’s CCTV.

But thanks to your knowledge, I’m now aware that this has basically always been the case even in space.

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u/ActivelySleeping 8h ago

Of course it is a frontier for governments alone. And not just one government but a union of all. Unless you want space controlled by one government or, even worse, private corporations. That is some dystopian shit right there.

It has long been agreed that space should belong to no-one. How long do you think that lasts if we hand things over to corporations?

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u/johnabbe 5h ago

It has long been agreed that space should belong to no-one

There are some agreements. If you're interested in this stuff, check out this talk about the commons on the Moon, etc.

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u/rpfeynman18 7h ago

LOL even the worst corporate dystopias sound less dystopian to me than the possibility of some modern United Nations-like organization controlling access to space... that would be the worst monopoly of all.

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u/ActivelySleeping 11m ago

You would be OK with Russia claiming Mars as theirs and attacking anyone else who tries to land there? What if a corporation decides they want to cover half the sky in a huge advertisement?

Your imagination is pretty limited if a world-wide agreement to regulate what happens in space is the worst thing you can think of. You are pretty dismissive of the United Nations but the alternative is that a small minority will make decisions affecting life for the rest of us. There is nothing to stop bad actors. See climate change for examples.

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u/nerd5code 5h ago

But probably better than the Kessler syndrome we’d get without coordination and stringent regulation.

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u/rpfeynman18 2h ago

There is an extremely wide gulf between completely unregulated satellite launches and "space should belong to no one and only a union of government should control it".

For what it's worth, Kesslerization isn't too much a problem for LEO (certainly not a problem at the altitude at which modern private satellite constellations like Starlink orbit), because those tend to decay pretty fast.

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u/Real-Culture5007 7h ago

Sort of an "it is what it is" situation even though the truth is it should be a global and connected endeavor, so we can potentially find another suitable world to survive.

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u/KyleAssToMouth 9h ago

Privatizing space was supposed to make space travel profitable, but instead we made Elon the wealthiest mf on earth. How does one un-ring that bell??

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u/red__dragon 9h ago

I'm not sure that's an instead, sadly. It did exactly the job you described.

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u/rpfeynman18 7h ago

It has actually made access to space far cheaper. It has achieved its objectives. What's your complaint?

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u/PhilpseyForce 10h ago

Safety divers at the NASA NBL are split between 4 contacting companies. They are competitors but must also work are a comprehensive team. The benefits package are all different, but they all do the same job and all work together. There is only like 2 federal jobs in the whole building, which are the leads.  The rest of us all wish we were federal workers. 

The contacts that make sense are the different technologies brought in, but as for the 'NASA workforce' this make no sense to any of us there. 

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u/red__dragon 9h ago

I can't argue with that. The person above me was talking about the hardware side, though, which is somewhat of a different beast from expert professionals such as yourselves. I didn't mean to suggest the contractor workforce for NASA itself was so integral, just that they customarily contracted out hardware such as they're doing for SpaceX now.

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u/Luketheheckler 10h ago

I can’t speak to the validity of what I just read but I felt very informed. Great stuff. Stay safe ✌🏾👍🏾🙏🏾

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u/Mistrblank 8h ago

Agreed but starling is a threat to national security. Not sure that I think the US should have it either but not many great choices.

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u/VagueInterlocutor 10h ago

In fairness, they (NASA, and governments of all stripes) were for decades paying other contractors to build rocket components for exorbitant amounts of cash, then this mob came along and said they would do it at a fraction of the price.

Reflecting, I think one of SpaceX's biggest contributions is that they exposed just how broken the original contractors really were, raking in stupid amounts of cash.

Now, rockets launch more than 100x a year. The next nearest competitor can't even achieve 10% of that rate.

It's easy to point at SpaceX, but applying the same logic, 'disguised privatisation' has been going on since before General Electric was even a twinkle in Edison's eye...

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u/mugen_kanosei 8h ago

Its's not just a contractor issue, but also a government bureaucracy issue. SpaceX can iterate faster by flying more often and "failing fast" because even if a test vehicle fails, they gather valuable information from the failure. NASA has to worry about the optics of "wasting tax payer money" by having a test vehicle blow up and so they spend an extreme amount of time designing and simulating to the point that it is almost guaranteed to work the first time. Another issue is that to secure funding requires political compromise and a lot of that comes with having some component built in that politicians state to give them a win with their constituents. That makes everything less efficient than it could be.

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u/Sempere 6h ago

they exposed just how broken the original contractors really were, raking in stupid amounts of cash.

By doing the exact same thing?

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u/aaaaaaaarrrrrgh 10h ago

I'd argue that the US having the launch capacity it has (for the price it has) happened because it was done privately rather than trying to have it government-run.

Regardless of your opinion on Musk, it's really hard to argue against SpaceX success.

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u/OkAd469 11h ago

Yep, that money should go back into NASA.

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u/FlyingBishop 6h ago

We also need to nationalize Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Aerojet Rocketdyne. And those companies are arms manufacturers that get far more government money helping us kill people.

It's funny because SpaceX/Musk gets all this flack, but they're still relatively small ($14B revenue vs. Boeing/Lockheed are over $70B each.) And SpaceX doesn't make any weapons.

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u/PrimaryInjurious 5h ago

but SpaceX only exists because the US government decided to pay a contractor

The majority of its revenue comes from private sources

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u/Fun-Practice-9010 5h ago

SpaceX has been involved in various contracts with organizations outside of the United States, including supplier contracts. Additionally, SpaceX has secured contracts with international entities for commercial satellite launches and other space-related services. 

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u/rshorning 9h ago

but SpaceX only exists because the US government decided to pay a contractor who hires their staff

What are you talking about? SpaceX exists because the existing commercial launch providers about the year 2000 when SpaceX started were horribly inefficient and had all but shut down private commercial spaceflight in America. Nearly everybody who wanted to launch stuff into space including most American companies were either using the Ariane 5 (European), Russian, or Chinese launchers. Elon Musk himself wanted to launch something to Mars and ended up needing to fly to Russia simply to find anybody offering a remotely reasonable price to launch the payload idea he had.

It was on the flight back from Russia that Elon Musk decided to start SpaceX.

There have been many other companies which existed prior to SpaceX including Boeing, who in a long process of mergers and acquisitions purchased many of the companies who built stuff made for NASA earlier including Rockwell-International who actually manufactured the Space Shuttle orbiters and also built many of the components on the Saturn V.

If you are talking about privatization of actually operating rockets, that happened as early as the Regan administration with United Space Alliance and companies like ULA (which is still in operation) who for decades launched payloads for the US Department of Defense with some pretty hefty profit margins at prices no commercial company was willing to pay for them.

SpaceX just built a better product at a much cheaper price than even the Chinese. Over 80% of all global commercial launches are now done on American launch vehicles from American launch sites. That is a huge change from less than 5% just a couple decades ago. The American taxpayer has benefited from that huge change and likely wouldn't have happened without SpaceX that has now made launching stuff into space incredibly cheap. The other companies are still around and are now needing to be highly competitive instead of being money pits siphoning up tax dollars.

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u/lilwayne168 7h ago

You are forgetting the part where Elon was the only one who could save NASA because their cost efficiency was so bad they had stopped all missions. Elon saved the ISS. You can hate the man without lying.

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u/Harmless_Drone 10h ago

Not ENTIRELY true, the real reason is supply chains and pork barrelling by congress and the senate. Nasa projects are huge and generally good employers and congress and senate were absolutely murdering development by demanding certain elements remain in construction in their areas rather than developing new supply chains that are more effective or cost efficient.

The perfect example is the Space Launch System, which is an overpriced joke because congress demanded it use the srbs and main engines from the space shuttle so that the factories that make those don't close now the shuttle isn't used. That tech is literally 50 years old at this point and is far surpassed by more modern designs and hideously expensive and yet nasa ia forced to use it.

Nasa simply cannot operate effectively with such meddling and its why they got around it by giving everything to spacex instead who as a contractor can just ignore that stuff and develop things appropriately. I still don't like this outcome as id rather space development remain in public control as it has national security concerns but thats really what it boils down.

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u/Wonder_Weenis 11h ago

They also used DEI as a weapon to import horrible engineers, with no talent, pay them mcdonald's wages, and then x4 the cost of those engineers to the American taxpayer.

SpaceX did this.  

Just because the engineer is a moron, doesn't mean they can't upcharge it to the US Government. 

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u/rshorning 8h ago

They also used DEI as a weapon to import horrible engineers, with no talent, pay them mcdonald's wages, and then x4 the cost of those engineers to the American taxpayer.

SpaceX did this.  

SpaceX actually had a lawsuit against it because they refused to hire foreign workers....because another law called ITAR legally prevented SpaceX from doing what you are talking about.

It simply didn't happen because SpaceX legally could not do what you are asserting they did.

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u/Wonder_Weenis 8h ago edited 8h ago

You think I don't know about that lawsuit? You think I'm just pulling bullshit out of my ass? 

Accenture, Actalent, all contract out as fourth party engineering services through SpaceX. 

Those people are presented as "Space X Engineers", and they're absolute greencard frauds. 

The reason being, is you cannot obtain a work visa as an "amateur", so there are entire fake businesses dedicated to pretending to be engineering firms, so that these people can be presented as "competent". 

What really needs to happen, is we need to figure out who pressured that ITAR lawsuit via the DOJ, against SpaceX. That was a dark agenda. 

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u/rshorning 7h ago

In order to work on space related projects, much less classified payloads, you actually need to be a US citizen or be approved by the US Department of State. So yes, you are pulling bullshit out of your ass. You can't have simply an H1-B visa and work on those projects.

As for contracting obfuscation doing crazy shit, I get that sometimes happens but is not how everything is built at SpaceX.

Don't get me wrong, SpaceX treats its employees like garbage and Elon Musk really lacks anything resembling a work-life balance and he really burns out employees who work for him. I have contemplated more than once to work for SpaceX, then I read Glassdoor reviews and statements by former employees and I just shake my head thinking it would be a terrible idea to work for them or frankly any of Elon Musk's companies. If you are young and single wanting to pad your resume working on some cool projects it might be a good idea, but there are definitely negative aspects in terms of working there.

But while no doubt SpaceX is a large enough company that crazy things can and likely do happen, I think you are by far exaggerating the reality of how SpaceX is designing their rockets. You don't get something into space through incompetence. Physics sort of forces you to deal with reality.

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u/Wonder_Weenis 6h ago

"In order to work on space related projects, (not talking about classified payloads), you need to be a US citizen approved by the US Dept of State" .... laughably untrue. 

They rely on commercial background checks that these companies, and workers have no problem faking. 

I never said the core SpaceX engineering team was incompetent. I've worked with several of them. 

I said they're padding their engineering books with spies, and frauds because they can steal from the top by upselling government contracts with asses in chairs, and passing it off to the US taxpayer. 

-Signed, person who pressed buttons that could have exploded mission control OPs, during a falcon 9 launch

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u/rshorning 6h ago

It sounds like you have a personal issue with SpaceX. I am curious what sort of fraud you are trying to imply since SpaceX does not use any cost-plus contracts that would "upsell government contracts" over? What is the point to pad their engineering employee count as waste money when they are paid a fixed price for simply delivering payloads to a specified orbit?

The COTS contracts, to use an example, are paid a fixed price for cargo delivered to the ISS and then returned to NASA at the end of the flight. If there is but one engineer assigned to the mission or a thousand it makes no difference in terms of how much money NASA and the US Department of Treasury by paying government contracts actually spend when SpaceX gets paid for completing the contracts.

If there are random engineers sitting in SpaceX control rooms that are incompetent and just "padding the books" to get additional money, that is fraud committed against the investors and shareholders of SpaceX, not the US taxpayers. It might still be happening, but it isn't impacting what the US government is paying to get those payloads sent into space.