this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Certain things, yes. Certain other things, not at all.
As much as I hate Elon Musk the company he owns that does space stuff pretty rapidly got a whole lot of new rockets up and got them to land instead of crashing into the sea. The newest govt produced rocket, the SLS, was years late and billions of dollars over budget, and they expend the rockets.
spaceX did some cool stuff. That being said, fuck Elon Musk, he had nothing to do with any of its success.
Whenever people tout Space X as an exemplar of private efficiency my eyebrow twitches.
They wouldn’t exist if not for the billions spent through public funding of R&D at NASA.
Space X also can take risks governments can’t. Imagine if NASA blew up rockets as often as Space X? The Republicans would gut their funding even more then they already have.
Exactly about the risks. Not having silly uninformed backlash about failures is a big benefit to private companies (at least privately owned). The government and NASA funded SpaceX because they recognized that it was more efficient than developing their own launch vehicle. They tried with Ares, but that fell though and Obama (or his cabinet) decided to let industry try instead. So they funded SpaceX to develop a launch vehicle.
Seems like it worked