this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
35 points (97.3% liked)
Space
957 readers
1 users here now
News and findings about our cosmos.
Subcommunity of Science
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I guess what I would look at is is the ability to have more space projects ongoing at once. NASA has a limited budget every year, and while it is possible for Congress to allocate a much larger percentage to them, that currently isn’t the reality. So instead of NASA managing a space station which eats up a larger percentage of their budget, a private enterprise can operate a space station (yes, with a profit motive), which frees up NASA budget to perform more missions which have at the moment only scientific value, ex probes and landers to outer solar system planets.
i mean personally? that's a tradeoff i'll make every day. the idea of ceding our last great frontier to dipshits who want to privatize access to it and close it as a common good before we even mature into a space-faring civilization is at its face unfathomable and immoral to me. i would so rather NASA do less than give even an inch of our long-term space ambitions over to private corporations.
It what way do you think the privatization has been bad so far, or could become bad soon?
3 examples that I think are positive: Crew Dragon being commercial allowed the permanent ISS crew size to go up to 7 and allow private free-flyers and ISS missions. Starship has at least 3 tourist flights booked. Among the private space stations coming soon, VAST is making something like a space RV on their own.
I don't see how any of those private activities hurt in any way.
by being private in the first place. necessarily, private corporations do not have the interests of humanity in mind, they are obliged and gladly prioritize money. simply put: i will never trust a private corporation to do the right thing if it has a profit incentive to do otherwise, because corporations are not benevolent or altruistic entities and never will be. anything they do which can be ascribed as either label should be understood as either coincidental or an intentional and cynical play to keep scrutiny and regulation off of their back. these statements i think are especially applicable to space travel.
Frankly, neither do public endeavors. Public endeavors have the interests of the politicians first and foremost, and NASA funding is, for all practical purposes, another pork program intended to draw in votes in Florida and Texas, with any gains for humanity as a side effect. In the past 50 years this model has failed to deliver improved access to space. SpaceX has managed to reduce costs (and, by extension, increase accessibility) by a hundred fold. I know everyone hates Musk, and he is well and truly an asshole, but the current space renaissance is due to SpaceX.
"The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies." -Noam Chomsky