Why didn't governments try making it?
The US has tons of spy satellites, why not make some for the folks paying taxes? Why do we have to sell our firstborns (data) to Google for maps etc?
The US has tons of spy satellites, why not make some for the folks paying taxes? Why do we have to sell our firstborns (data) to Google for maps etc?
Social welfare is the top local spending category in many local/state governments
I believe some functions are simply best performed by non-profit-motivated government agencies. However, I would usually prefer an actual unregulated or black market over the corrupt frankenstein of private-public partnerships
There are plenty of solid reasons to despise Elon - no need for counterfactuals.
There really aren't that many. He's kinda a dick and briefly supported the president very publicly.
Most of the other reasons are just as fatuous as this.
What you're essentially arguing for is SpaceX building this for the government and government being the middleman.
More money would be spent. Not less.
Also frankly I would mind companies like SpaceX being contracted to build and sell satellites a lot less than them also continuing to control or operate them
The government has Starshield. And several other non SpaceX satellite systems. They famously sent four (4) recievers of that sort to Ukraine.
There's this idea out there that SpaceX is somehow stealing from NASA. Paired with the notion/assumption that the government builds its space vehicles. Completely incomprehensible.
For Internet, other satcom providers are now cheaper post Starlink.
Disinformation on the Internet? Never seen it before.
The contracts are not just publicly bid but paired.
Come off this nonsense.
Space is the sphere of government and the launchers and satellites have always been built by companies and SpaceX is very visibly cheaper.
Examples are
CCrew - Boeing
CCargo - Sierra, SpaceX is now a sub for another company bc their engines are made in Ukraine.
HLS - Blue Origin
NSSL - ULA, Blue Origin (Maybe RKLB)
NRO Starshield GMTI - Northrop Grumman
SDA - York Space
SEA-2 - OneWeb
>Can't speak to the world as a whole but the US has we spent 50 years gutting most government functions that aren't part of the police/military/surveillance apparatus (and many of those as well).
It's the likes of Boeing and Lockheed vs SpaceX not Government vs Private Sector. That's how it's worked since Apollo.
>SpaceX itself is an example of the primary mechanism of this: Diverting funding to private, no-bid contracts that remove both market forces and democratic oversight from those services while also ballooning their costs
This is the core of the disinformation. SpaceX has always been cheaper, see Europa Clipper for one of the most egregious examples. The post SpaceX era is also cheaper for the government because of the shift in contract types. That's how you hear Boeing is losing money on Starliner and Air Force 1, because companies now eat the losses they used to pass on. Raytheon (and SpaceX mind) dropped out of SDA because of this.
The contracts are also openly bid. And if they aren't classified you can bid too. Lots of these contracts don't even have pré-qualification.
This stuff is known to anyone that follows the industry. In fact, the fact other companies are involved makes it more expensive because they charge more than SpaceX per unit of work. But government keeps its leverage and industrial base.
The person you read from who claimed (I can tell they aren't original thoughts) these things is lying to you and any cursory check (sometimes just reading articles instead of just headlines is enough).
It's like the X company isn't paying taxes, "this is a bad thing" stories, then you look at the balance sheet and not only is the company paying taxes, it's lifetime and operationally unprofitable, so it has no corp tax incidence (like anyone doing part time work at minimum wage or below (at a charity))
Launch, Human Spaceflight, Satellites and Satellite Internet are now (and for most of a decade) been primarily American. Even the foreign competition is largely American (See Telesat)
Paired contracts (openly bid from a larger pool of qualified companies mind), a fixed cost for delivering ends/products etc have meant lower costs to the government, redundancy in case of failure, less time between having an idea and having it implemented (HASTE, LUCAS and Starshield).
Of course there's the risk that this means companies exit the market if they can't deliver in the old environment (SDA, Starshield) but there's still the option for old companies to compete in truly novel projects (F-47) with the old contracting system. And pairing also allows the government to bring in new companies to the fold to compete with the old guard.
As for corporate taxes, those articles are standard fare to direct misplaced anger at companies that aren't doing well on the whole (because they've never turned a profit or are in a low margin business) or are reinvesting all their money(something that's supposed to be a good thing). We aren't talking about transfer pricing and similar shenanigans. Accountants just roll their eyes. But it breeds unnecessary anger (See the "BlackRock is buying single family homes"; "SpaceX has got ~$30B of government subsidies" nonsense too)
>It's well-understood that a ton of companies operate in a mode that doesn't chase profitability
In the end these articles insinuate that said company isn't paying their fair share/ is freeloading on the polity.
The responses to the articles clearly show that it's not well understood.
It's the best and worst of times, but we should at least have clarity on what's better and what's worse.
As a broad generality, governments are utter crap at inventing/building/operating bleeding-edge technologies at giga-scale. Exceptions are generally narrow-focus military hardware, plus flood control, aqueducts, and other "obviously needed for the nation's welfare" stuff.