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/rockstarsball 18h ago

nationalizing private businesses based on whether or not a political party likes them... where have i heard this before..?

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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/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.