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Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

Shit, NASA does space stuff, it fails sometimes! Do we want to only fund things we know to be 100% easy to do? And don't fucking tell me, "we already landed on the moon once, how hard can it be?" because this shit is really fucking hard and takes lots of cash and a lot of what apppears to be "waste" or "failure" on a first order approximation, but in reality is actually "learned knowledge".

I can't believe people think they're going to "make america great again" by cutting funding for all the stuff that makes America an economic, cultural, and academic powerhouse.

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Worse, it’s richest country on earth complaining about being too poor and having to enact austerity measures — implemented by the richest person on the planet who’s personal pay is much, much higher than any of the savings he’s found so far.

I’ve seen many occasions in my career when some manager had flown across the country with a business class ticket, stayed in a fancy hotel, rented a luxury car, and turned up to an all-hands-on-deck meeting to announce in a grave tone that the minimum wage workers are just going to have to make some sacrifices.

This is almost precisely what’s going on with DOGE except you can substitute private jet and secret service motorcade. And instead of minimum wage, it’s… less than minimum wage.

The richest are complaining about being too poor to help the needy, and fixing the issue by cutting every program that helps those under the poverty line.

Well, basically, that sums it all up.

This doesn't seem a fair analogy. Elon Musk is not being paid by the government, as I understand.

The reason the manager flying around spending money to attend a downsizing meeting is gross is that the manager is spending company money (that could go to prevent downsizing).

To complete the analogy, you would need to be implying that Elon's personal money should be paid to fund federal services.

> you would need to be implying that Elon's personal money should be paid to fund federal services.

I am. These payments are called taxes.

Taxes he's successfully evaded paying using the the same tricks as every other billionaire, such as taking out loans against his shares that will be repaid after his death by his estate, which has negligible tax rates compared to the kind of income taxes paid by mere mortals.

All joking aside, if Elon -- just him, no other billionaire -- had simply paid the same marginal tax rates as any random upper-middle-class citizen, it would be 10x the amount DOGE had cut so far from the federal budget.

>Elon Musk is not being paid by the government, as I understand.

https://www.inc.com/bruce-crumley/why-elon-musks-faa-contrac...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/us/politics/elon-musk-com...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/01/elon-musk...

https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/as-elon-mus...

https://apnews.com/article/house-democrats-musk-doge-oversig...

I totally agree with the space is hard, it fails sometimes. I been in the space industry on both the super rigorous high cost, high mission assurance side of things and the low cost commercial launch 10 and hopefully most of them work side of things. The lunar lander is an ambitious first project and two failures in a row is real rough, but definitely happens the space industry in new ventures. I'm sure there are great engineers there and what they are doing is tough.

But...specifically on funding for Intuitive Machines I don't understand how NASA also gave then an IDIQ contract for up to $4.8 billion for lunar communications and PNT services [0] based on the experience of one lunar lander that didn't actually work.

[0] https://spacenews.com/nasa-selects-intuitive-machines-for-lu...

They shouldn't just cancel, but with the same kind of failure twice in a row it seems they should require correcting the tipping-over issue before trying a third time.

Once upon a time a bunch of nerds failed 3 times in a row while launching small rockets from an atoll. Some 20 years later they are now 13k+ nerds, they're launching every other day, land their boosters and are slowly becoming an ISP with a rocket launching side business.

Space is hard. There's nothing "embarrassing" in controlled landing on the freakin Moon with a shoestring budget, even if the landers fell over. Reddit's r/technology is leaking in this thread.

> Once upon a time a bunch of nerds failed 3 times in a row while launching small rockets from an atoll

Once upon a time most planes crashed. Then the state of the art advanced.

If IM can’t publish a convincing root-cause analysis for why their landers keep tipping over while their competitors’ don’t, they shouldn’t get new contracts and existing ones should be revisited.

I thought the same, but ...

1) private companies landing on the moon is a brand new thing in a very difficult technology. If we want to encourage it, maybe we should minimize risk.

2) what were their mission goals? Maybe it was just to stick the landing, test landing gear, etc. (There is a bunch of equipment on there for other things, so they must have had some other plans.)

3) what is the difference between a private company and NASA doing it? That is, why is it so hard to do what NASA did over 50 years ago, without things falling over, etc.? Is it budget? Time for testing and retesting (investors want returns)? Talent? Is NASA witholding its secret ingredients like a self-centered chef? (At least some national space agencies also have had problems, like JAXA, but I'm not sure how widespread that is.)

Edit: I would make it competitive, though. That's the point of private business - it can fail and disappear. Compete for the next contract.

We are definitely closer to the biplanes era of landing on the moon than we are to the Concorde era, as far as technological readiness goes. The pace of moon landers created has been much slower than the pace of airplanes built was in the early days.

Yup. The most fun fact about early aviation I heard that highlights how fast and loose everything was is that General Henry Harley Arnold in charge of the US Army Air Force during World War II learned to fly from the Wright brothers.

Not sure who you are quoting here, I never said "embarrassing". I'm sure that those "nerds" made adjustments based on the failures. That's all I was asking for.

They should ask the moon for a refund, or at least a "thank you".

I don’t make comments based on what I want to happen

An entire federal agency was deleted and thousands of non profits and other organizations were using the funding source as their only client and are also deleted now

Just because this one is publicly traded we should expect a different outcome?

I love prediction markets because now there is another outlet for perceiving politics than just debating. I take your money in a zero sum game if my worldview is more accurate, love that. I would almost say it rewards having a contrarian view of the world, but there are some psychology studies that show even ideologues like you will make accurate predictions if there is a payout of basically any amount. So I doubt it’s actually a contrarian view given that you have the same information.

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