[and to be clear, my quoting of Sam Altman is not meant to be taken as an endorsement of Sam Altman, but I suspect he has decent insight into Elon]
This isn't shocking but rage inducing.... We spent forever building this thing and successfully getting it up and operational... I know people who have worked on this... Elon musk isn't even a real physicist, he is a business and hype man that is able to get young engineers with dreams of contributing to a great dream to work for him with a terrible work-life balance.
Elon and Trump might be evil. But I don’t really believe in evil. And I keep underestimating both of them. It’s no longer a matter of choice; but if there is a positive possibility, I like to imagine it and make it a plausible pathway. Tons of bad things can happen; is there a path where the current direction could be very very good?
Government will become vastly more efficient.
And for a left field example: I suspect that the next few years will see a rapid advancement in the science of solar radiation management, aka geoengineering. This was never going to happen with status quo leadership. But the fact is that we will not stop using fossil fuels in the next couple decades. So we clearly need to minimize the known risk of climate change, (even for the unknown risks of geoengineering). It costs about $10b to put enough calcium carbonate or sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to achieve heat balance and stop runaway climate change effects. Can’t have Florida flood, right?
Beyond that, there is a genuine likelihood that there will be a better economy and less war.
I’m not claiming this is the most likely outcome. But there is a reasonable chance that the next few years will work out really, really well.
This prediction is necessarily predicated on a reduction in budget with an expectation of similar performance, but the administration that is pursuing the budget cuts is also diligently working to remove accountability from the executive branch. I do not predict a more efficient government, but a less effective one.
As I said in another thread here, to solution to waste is not slashing budgets but better accountability. Without the latter there is no guarantee that any other attempted measures will have the expected results.
But I suspect you're not asking the question because you want to know the answer.
In any case it's partly aan impossible question at this stage because it hasn't been up so long. A lot of the research that came out of Hubble took years to complete and the datasets there were much much smaller.
Slashing the budget is not the correct way to combat waste. Accountability is. Otherwise a bad manager might claw back that 20% by firing whoever the top earners are, leaving nobody but the hand-sitters to run the show.
It's pretty clear that Musk is focused on whatever the Twitter equivalent of sound bites are, and not on any actual mission execution issues. His team has already had to come crawling back to previously-fired staff a couple times at this point. I acknowledge that accountability is harder than running around with a loudspeaker and a machete, but that's a pretty bad reason not to even try.
And I'm just reporting on my personal experience. A common joke is if you don't want to learn new skills or contribute, you get sent to safety. Nobody is ever fired, and people are given fake tasks to go around and look like they're working. Saying we need to review accountability before layoffs in an organization that doesn't respond to market pressure is a great way to hire an accountability team and then never do layoffs, thus resulting in a larger staff and budget. That's exactly how NASA has operated for decades, and it's not working.
> It's pretty clear that Musk is focused on whatever the Twitter equivalent of sound bites are, and not on any actual mission execution issues
I don't know what you mean by this but you sound like a very politically misinformed person. I'm guessing you use a lot of reddit?
"Reporting to NASA" and "being part of NASA" are two different situations. AURA, which runs STScI and thereby JWST, reports to more than just NASA. It's an international project, so the consortium of universities that comprise AURA reports to multiple agencies. The fact that you think this is fundamentally identical to internal NASA culture tells me you're not qualified to ascertain the level of my political information.
STScI is not working in a NASA building, they're operating out of Johns Hopkins. I've consulted for this organization a half dozen times, and I've consulted for NASA Goddard as well, and I am telling you they are not the same.
What I meant by the sound bite reference is that there is not any meaningful insight being brought to the work DOGE is doing. They're doing keyword searches and sorting by total contract spend and binning anything whose title would make a good Twitter post. We saw all this before from Ross Perot.