Yes. SpaceX has done bad things and deserves to be criticized for them. But (and I think this is analogous to a lot of issues) the problem here isn’t that SpaceX isn’t NASA; it’s that NASA doesn’t have the political room to experiment and inevitably sometimes fail that SpaceX does. This is too complex an issue to fit all the layers and nuance into one honk, but “SpaceX is bad because their rockets explode” is not a good analysis. https://chaos.social/@russss/110249195107310284
I think a lot of people who favor public ownership of publicly important things get tricked this way, into thinking that we should have the status quo but with different structures on paper.
Imagine a NASA that wasn’t being dogwalked by Congress, that got to apply most of its budget to weird-but-might-work stuff like New Horizons and the helicopter on Mars. Imagine a NASA with a 35% failure rate but a 65% “holy fuck, whoa” rate for uncrewed space missions.
Public ownership of gray, stable, safety-of-life infrastructure that should not be run at a profit is clearly necessary. It does not follow that everything publicly owned should be boring and reliable.
@Wolven Are you connecting that to what I said with “… and I would rather the conversation about them focus on that and not irrelevant things” or with “… so I think any attack on them is legitimate, even if it might promote misunderstanding” or with some other thing I’m missing?
@vruba The first, but also, using that to broaden it out to larger discussions on what you mention about, y'know, properly funding and supporting NASA.
Because, yes, imagine if NASA was given to tools, leeway, and respect their track record deserves. Sure would be nice.
@Wolven Yeah. Sometimes I dare to hope that improving this situation, as unimportant as it seems to the big picture, might provide some inspiration for progress on more pressing issues.
@vruba I think they're bad because they're spending a shit-ton of public money blowing things up and polluting their ecology while trying to reinvent the wheel, when we had systems in the pipe that they could have built on and pushed to develop in a real partnership 🤷🏿♂️