The American taxpayer has paid to enrich Elon Musk, an oligarch poisoning our political discourse—and we’re still subsidizing him. It’s time to stop.
@JamesGleick Still, wish someone else was building a reusable launch system. You know we were paying 80M a seat for rides on Soyuz rockets, right? I don't want to pay Musk. I want to pay Russia even less.
@pieist The government should run its own space program. We got to the moon that way.
Turning space travel over to profit-making private companies is how we build oligarchs.
@JamesGleick Agreed. Though of course we contracted with several hundred private companies to do it, we remained fully in charge.
@JamesGleick (Arguably that's one of the reasons NASA is as competent as it is. Developing, coordinating and integrating a distributed project on that scale, for those stakes, requires an incredible process.)
@pieist @JamesGleick Yes as long as Congress doesn't meddle. See SLS (sometimes nicknamed the Senate Launch System).....😩
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/a-new-report-finds-boeings-rockets-are-built-with-an-unqualified-work-force/