Remember when on Interstellar there's this whole prologue about the collapse of the US, the dismantling of NASA and the family getting on an argument with the school because the official stance now is that the moon landing never happened and mankind never went to space (despite there being still people alive who went there)?

So, anyway, life imitates art …

NASA, like the post office, is such a public benefit that we should be funding it well.

NASA does research. They push the boundaries corporations can't.

God, I love how the incoming cabinet has zero redeeming qualities amongst them.

The challenging thing here is that NASA does have deep, systemic problems and is in need of some overhaul. SLS is a breathtakingly expensive boondoggle, lunar gateway has no reason to exist, Orion is underpowered and overweight, Mars Sample Return’s entire mission is in question, JWST was a decade behind schedule and an order of magnitude over budget, and the list goes on. Extreme risk-aversion and congressional meddling have resulted in a bureaucratic quagmire of an organization. It’s hard to find nasa projects that are going well.

Of course I don’t think a gorilla with a sledgehammer as we’re sadly going to see from Trump will make things any better, we need a surgeon with a scalpel.

I had a lengthy argument with someone that Musk couldn't possibly be kissing Trump's ass for money - he's a billionaire after all and "has all the money he needs". No no, Musk is doing this out of the goodness of his cold billionaire heart. Isn't it obvious?

Why are so many people so stupid? WHY?

We saw what happened the last time space infrastructure was privatized.

Boeing gave all the money to the stockholders and delivered a criminally late product that ended up failing and stranding our astronauts. Boeing obviously didn't care to test if the Teflon in those thrusters could survive repeated heatings.

SpaceX decided to go backwards in rocket technology, from Hydrogen to Methane. Hydrogen is more efficient, and makes it easier to bury carbon responsibly. Sure, Boeing's rockets got made fun of for being leaky, but I think that might be Boeing more than Hydrogen at fault. Dirty Methane rockets were cheap, and could be built simple as they experienced less thermal variation without cryogenic fuel.

SpaceX undercut the competition and turned itself into a monopoly while Boeing threw their hand to the stockholders. Now SpaceX picks up the pieces of the game they upended.

NASA was supposed to manage a thriving marketplace, full of competition. Instead it managed its way to a monopolistic structure that a single entity may try to sieze.

Fun fact about autocratic structures like monopolies and dictatorships: they can't grow power themselves, they can only sieze power organized by others.

We need to build our next wave of structures in a distributed fashion such that the levers of power are not so concentrated that they may fall into the wrong hands.

Give the power to the people. All of them.

And absolutely no one paying attention was shocked.

it won't be though. spacex tech is massively reliant on NASA. if they do it they'll hurt spacex in the long run. which means they'll probably do it because musk is a fucking moron.

Some other country is gonna have the new nasa, and the united states is going to fall even further behind. It'll just be a brain drain and most of it isn't going to go to space-x.

He efficiently using the government to make himself richer. What more did anybody expect?

This is what losing a space race looks like.

NASA has already sent out emails to their teams and contractors about what implications this can have on their departments. Shit’s bad.

People poke fun of Musk as being a idiot. But he had us Kaiser Soze'd by pretending to be dumb so that he could implement his self-serving ideas.

"Sure is a nice publicly funded and scientifically minded space program you got here. It would be a shame if anything happened to it."

Space exploration certainly will be the final frontier, its the last thing this pathetic species will have ever worked on before blinking out of existence.

Convenient? That was the whole plan with buying X all along, to get into politics, and this guy is still there keeping it relevant.

Trumps goons are going to sell out key functions of government to private buyers, like nasa to space x. This reminds me of when the USSR fell and all the shadiest people bought up the national industries.

I wonder who’s gonna buy the noaa. That’s the one I’m most concerned about.

I wanna try something...

Ahem. Investors! I have the concept of a plan to put gigantic billboards in space that can be seen by half the planet at any given time. Give me money.

Doesn't that fat fuck get lots of money from NASA?

Space: the final (capitalistic) frontier.

Step 1) hurt other manufacturers more than Tesla

Step 2) benefit SpaceX by gutting NASA

Step 3) no regulations for digging tunnels?

What sucks the most is NASA fights tooth and nail for funding as it is. Imagine gutting it, and then coming back 4 years later to ask just for their existing budgets back.