Stop trying to use logic to make sense of these budget cuts. The budget cuts aren't about saving money. They're about destroying whole parts of the Government.
They still don't understand that they voted for this specific thing, nobody was shy during the campaign about what was to come.
Specifically for privatizing space telescopes or privatizing NASA as a whole I don't think that has been on the table, but you can imagine a scenario in which eventually something like 20%, 40%, 90% or some other significant portion of NASA's "funding" is just a pass-through vehicle for private contracts.
Honestly if you want to learn and understand more about some of these activities you can just read the news because a lot of analysis is being done, well-informed opinions are being written, and indisputable factual evidence including quotes, interviews, and detailed data are publicly available. Admittedly some reporting is behind paywalls, but that's easy to get around. I understand it's not very fair to tell someone to "go read the news", but if you can't keep up with current events or you aren't willing to that's kind of just your problem. There are plenty of websites across the political spectrum ranging from the Financial Times to the Economist, to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, international journals, and more including locally focused websites that keep tabs with events going on at the federal, state, and local level. It's certainly a lot but it's your responsibility as a citizen (assuming you are American, apologies if not) to keep yourself informed and well read.
[1] I'm being charitable here because I personally believe that the goal is to just funnel money from government agencies to specific private enterprises that have the favor of the current administration. Crony Capitalism is what that is called. The current administration has not yet earned my trust to believe otherwise.
>”They don't want to destroy [NASA], just make it so useless they have pretext to privatize it.”
I just think they were wrong. I agree that the current administration does want to prevent the administrative agencies from doing many things, but I don’t think anyone is actually looking to privatize NASA or the telescopes.
Take something like the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA could potentially build its own rockets to launch its own telescopes [1]. Instead what we might see is NASA wants to launch a rocket with their telescope, but their capacity to launch a rocket has been privatized via contracts that go to private enterprise instead of through NASA.
Since many in the Trump administration have espoused the belief that existing functions of government and/or administrative agencies would be better off privatized or completely cut, many are worried that the same fate awaits NASA with crony capitalism as the end result.
When you say that you don't think anyone is looking to privatize NASA or the telescopes, instead what you should be considering isn't NASA being completely privatized in the sense that it's now a private entity separate from the government, but you should be considering NASA as being privatized in the sense that Congress and the Trump administration allocate taxpayer dollars through NASA to private enterprise for existing or potentially new NASA functions in the future. It's less so about literal 100% privatization, and more so about someone who happens to have a rocket company gets taxpayer allocated funding "from NASA" to provide services. I also don't think NASA as it exists today will be 100% privatized, maybe 40% is privatized, etc. , and the space telescopes won't be because they don't generate revenue, but what I do think will happen and it's up to the Trump administration to convince me that this isn't the case and earn my trust, is that they will allocate funding for NASA works specifically to private enterprise that is in favor with the current administration in a form of crony capitalism.
One way to maybe think about this would be imagine that we "privatized" the IRS and in order to file your taxes you would have to file through one of many existing vendors who have contracts from the IRS and charge you to file your taxes. Does that feel right? Why can't we just file directly with the IRS?
[1] I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing, it's just an example.
In some cases they want the federal agency to completely stop doing things and let the private sector do them instead: for example the National Weather Service.
Some folks (e.g., the CEO of AccuWeather) wants zero free weather reports from the government, and you'd have to go to a private corporation to get a forecast.
John Oliver had a segment on it during Trump 1.0:
Neoliberalism has more to do with beliefs (religion) than facts. We all have been conditioned to think through this frame. Thatcher etc, great results. :-)
There are only a few who do the measurements (aka science). The efficient company vs the inefficient government, it exists, but as a myth.
Any source for that?
The profit margin has to come from somewhere.
I would know, I work for the government.
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/iss-deorbit-...
Not only does Musk have a lot of power to get favors granted to him now, but I'm sure he also realizes that there could be significant backlash against him and his companies during a future administration, if his and Trump's actions turn out to be as broadly, bipartisan-ly unpopular as I'm hoping. So not only will he want to extract as much as he can from the government now, he'll want to consolidate and increase his lead over his competitors so a future administration may have no choice but to continue using SpaceX for the bulk of its needs.
And on the topic of dead end technology, let's face the fact that the ISS is just Mir 2 with US participation. The DOS-8 module it's built around is the module Mir 2 was to be built around, Mir (1) being DOS-7, and the previous DOSes were the Salyut stations. Direct hardware lineage. The only reason these things exist in the first place is because the Soviet Union though space stations would be good for earth observation, a role they are wholly obsolete in now, but once the Soviet Union started building something they liked to keep building it long after it made sense (see also, the Vostok capsule, which they are still using as a satellite bus to this day.). And the only reason the US is involved in this is literally welfare to the Russian aerospace industry to prevent their engineers from having to seek employment in Iran/etc. In this role too, it is obviously obsolete.
Now a word about Mars, because I can already sense somebody about to accuse me of being a senseless musk fanboy. Mars colonization makes no sense and musk is lying about pursuing it. For a Mars colony to actually become a "backup for humanity" of whatever drivel he claims, it would need to bootstrap itself into self sufficiency, which at the very least would require a viable economy for trading with Earth. No such economic plan for a Mars colony exists. Furthermore, SpaceX isn't even investing in the creation of the requisite colony hardware, the habitats and Martian industrial infrastructure which would be required to make it work. What they're actually doing is far more mundane; building rockets for launching satellite into Earth orbit. The Mars talk is just a recruitment tactic to pull in young idealistic engineers and get them to work long hours for cheap.
His move away from the previously-stated mission for Tesla to decarbonize the world's energy systems makes a lot more sense now
Which means that either companies find commercial value in space telescopes or else we just don't have space telescopes.
But don't worry, we'll always have luxury trips into LEO for billionaires.
(Human space flight is also a waste of money, for reasons I explained in other posts. Other than entertaining children, it serves almost no constructive purpose whatsoever. And the space tourism niche is basically a joke.)