I'm saddend by how little I care.
I used to follow this quite intensely, and wished space-X the best. But with the owners antics, I just can't get myself to care that much. At the very least, that is sad for all the hardworking people at space-X.
I used to follow this quite intensely, and wished space-X the best. But with the owners antics, I just can't get myself to care that much. At the very least, that is sad for all the hardworking people at space-X.
Spacex contracts are by far the lowest cost to get cargo into orbit though. They save the gov money.
Your spacex contracts thing is bullshit too, but first the more important stuff. I think you'll agree many of these affect poor americans greatly, as well as poor people worldwide. A partial list of what Musk did with DOGE:
* Mass layoffs across the government. Especially education is badly affected.
* USAID shutdowns
* DOE downsizing (ie. killing education)
* Sabotaging student loans (purposefully cutting the infrastructure and personnel for getting a student loan)
* Killing off local Social Security access by closing offices
The list goes on. Next time Elon Musk says he needs engineers, I hope someone has the courage to ask him why he seriously and purposefully damaged education for Americans.
As for the spacex contracts: a cheaper price only helps if it actually leads to less spending. Since the US cannot risk spacex being the only access to space, it cannot cut funding to ULA contracts. Therefore spacex is more expensive, despite the cheaper sticker price.
Think of it this way. Let's say there's 2 cars. One is 40,000 USD (thanks to Musk and Trump's tariffs). One is 20,000 USD. But due to law you can only buy the 20,000 USD car if you ALSO buy the 40,000 USD car, there's no other way. So the real price is:
* the "cheaper" car: 60,000 USD total price
* the "expensive" car: 40,000 USD total price
See the problem here? Spacex is not actually cheaper. Only by not counting a bunch of costs because they come out of a different budget is spacex cheaper. A fact ("deception" I would say) that keeps repeating in mr. Musk's businesses. The sticker price on Tesler cars, for example, has similar problems: EXPENSIVE mandatory maintenance means the price of Musk's electric cars is far more than the competition, despite the sticker price sometimes being cheaper. Of course, now even the sticker price is far from the best.
The rest of the world is not entitled to unlimited American funds for all time.
>* DOE downsizing (ie. killing education)
Canada doesn't even have a federal-level education department. Is Canada filled with uneducated morons?
>As for the spacex contracts: a cheaper price only helps if it actually leads to less spending. Since the US cannot risk spacex being the only access to space, it cannot cut funding to ULA contracts. Therefore spacex is more expensive, despite the cheaper sticker price.
The mind boggles at this "logic".
The desire for having multiple launchers is not because "the US cannot risk spacex being the only access to space", but because the US got badly burned by putting all its rocket eggs into one space shuttle basket.
If SpaceX didn't exist, and the US government used ULA and Blue Origin for all its launches, the US would be paying far more than it is now. Don't believe me? Biden's NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>.
On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload, Europa Clipper <https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/a-year-from-launch-the...>, so who knows how many billions more from other launches.
The above is purely a cost analysis, and doesn't even cover SpaceX allowing the US to no longer being dependent on Russia for sending people into space, as was the case from 2011 to 2020.
Btw: if you're going to be racist, don't you have a problem with the fact that mr. Musk ... is not an American? I mean that is the one thing I'll credit Musk with: making Trump suck his ** in front of conservative "we hate immigrants" voters, on the white house lawn exposes the hypocrisy of MAGA and GOP voters better than even throwing a nuclear bomb on Breitbart could.
I lean pretty far left myself. But this kind of comment is why I think the left keeps losing.
The person you're engaging with is presenting rational arguments and logic in good faith, and instead of engaging and disagreeing and presenting your own counterarguments, you're just labeling them a racist.
This is not persuasive to anyone. In fact, it massively hurts your case, as readers assume you simply don't have any good reasons to support you. And I'd say it goes even further, and hurts "the left" as a whole, as people are conditioned to view that movement as in support of silencing conversation. Fewer than 20% of the population wants to live in a world where legitimate discussion might have you branded as a racist, homophobe, sexist, fascist, etc.
And not only that, it completely weakens the word. If you use the word "racist" to describe pretty much anyone who disagrees with you, then suddenly it applies to the vast majority of people, at which point it (by definition) no longer describes behavior that society finds unacceptable. Then it loses all power to cause anyone to actually reflect on themselves, or to take it seriously when the charge is levied against others.
I highly recommend reserving these words for the specific and rare times where they actually apply.
He also made a great many people rich not to mention how many jobs. That does not count?
Also I have no idea what expensive mandatory maintenance you mean. As if any other car does not require maintenance.
I mean, I live in Germany now, and the German name for Germany isn't Germany (except when it is because Denglish is surprisingly also used in political posters), and likewise has a different name in French (Allemagne), Dutch (Duitsland), Danish (Tyskland), Polish (Niemcy), and Czech (Německo).
Or how the body of water separating Great Britain from mainland Europe is "The English Channel" or "La Manche" (literally "the sleeve", but also name of a department of Normandy).
I saw fellow liberals protesting the Tesla cafe in Los Angeles. They’re actively discouraging people from buying electric. Global warming is the more important threat to our species and these fellow liberals are ACTIVELY DISCOURAGING people from buying and owning electric cars. Truly the mind boggles.
To the posters who say: Ah why should anyone care that you don't care... and actually going to call the post "narcissist"... what the heck, aren't you pointing the gun in the wrong direction? :P
I agree with the sentiment that this is sad. I was very excited for space, space space! And new cool technology and the options it'll bring. It's like we could follow the Apollo project again, but for a new generation, after decades of not-a-lot happening.
So I am sure there are hundreds of millions which are now caught between starry-eyed fascination with the technology and the progress of technology and extending humanity's reach with these biggest and most powerful, while also incredible sensitive and complex machines ever built...
But seeing the main guy unravel into a spit sputtering raving lunatic on social media, going deep into the nastiest rabbit holes available, and showing no concern for the wellbeing and welfare of those requiring protection...
Turns the whole endeavour on its head. Now it looks like the selfish race to capture space for the 1%, to monopolize access and use it as a political tool to further only the very selfish agenda of some detached madmen who don't care about the political "temperature" on earth and the damage they are doing.
So, millions of people turn their heads in sadness, and I completely understand and share that sentiment. It's a shame. It's breaking hearts.
@Elon open your eyes! Enough is enough! :)
Empathy is not weakness.
We'll have you back on the woke team the moment you're ready! :)
What used to be a very exciting pioneering space company is now a cash cow that directly funds and enables whimsies of an unhinged billionaire that keeps doing shit aimed at destabilizing lives of many, including mine. And I am not even in the US!
You are entitled to your opinions, I happen to be more or less on the same side as yours. If antics is what make you enrage, though, it isn't hard to find people that you agree with ideologically having the same behavior, and I doubt you find them as distasteful.
Politics changes but technological advances are permanent that have long term impacts.
That's not necessarily true, look at the clockwork cylinder fished up from the ancient Greeks that was apparently an Olympic oriented calendar.
And.... the pyramids. Built by humans, yet the method is not well understood now, so little so in fact that aliens seems more plausible.
I would say that technological advancement is often lost to time, those are just two examples and I imagine there are countless more we don't know.