Everyone able to make it to the Boston Museum of Science should make a point of watching "Deep Sky" in IMAX (the story of the JWST and tons of new-to-mankind images of the furthest reaches / oldest objects in the universe), it's breathtaking.
Not sure if it's the same one, but I saw a similar IMAX with my kids at the Kennedy Space Center a few months ago. Agree that it's well worth seeing and has some spectacular images from the JWST.
Oh I thought I had seen it at ksc and then I saw your comment. I agree, it's breathtaking and moving. It's a shame that all of this is happening to save a bunch of money for the wealthy elite that see "you, the people" as disposable items
I'm bummed to have missed that when I was last there in 2024. Overall, I was pretty disappointed with the place. It's a good stop for kids under 7, though.
To the contrary, I found the London science museum amazing. Great exhibits and great presentation.
Stop trying to use logic to make sense of these budget cuts. The budget cuts aren't about saving money. They're about destroying whole parts of the Government.
Facebook is packed with posts of people saying they support this administration but could they please make an exception for their own role or for their loved one whose nursing care got cut (at the VA) etc.
They still don't understand that they voted for this specific thing, nobody was shy during the campaign about what was to come.
Generally speaking the current administration is looking to cut some functions and programs from federal agencies and then pay private entities to perform those same functions because they believe that private industry can perform those same functions better more cheaply [1]. There is certainly some merit to that, however I think being dogmatic one way or the other is for simpletons.
Specifically for privatizing space telescopes or privatizing NASA as a whole I don't think that has been on the table, but you can imagine a scenario in which eventually something like 20%, 40%, 90% or some other significant portion of NASA's "funding" is just a pass-through vehicle for private contracts.
Honestly if you want to learn and understand more about some of these activities you can just read the news because a lot of analysis is being done, well-informed opinions are being written, and indisputable factual evidence including quotes, interviews, and detailed data are publicly available. Admittedly some reporting is behind paywalls, but that's easy to get around. I understand it's not very fair to tell someone to "go read the news", but if you can't keep up with current events or you aren't willing to that's kind of just your problem. There are plenty of websites across the political spectrum ranging from the Financial Times to the Economist, to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, international journals, and more including locally focused websites that keep tabs with events going on at the federal, state, and local level. It's certainly a lot but it's your responsibility as a citizen (assuming you are American, apologies if not) to keep yourself informed and well read.
[1] I'm being charitable here because I personally believe that the goal is to just funnel money from government agencies to specific private enterprises that have the favor of the current administration. Crony Capitalism is what that is called. The current administration has not yet earned my trust to believe otherwise.
>”They don't want to destroy [NASA], just make it so useless they have pretext to privatize it.”
I just think they were wrong. I agree that the current administration does want to prevent the administrative agencies from doing many things, but I don’t think anyone is actually looking to privatize NASA or the telescopes.
I think you're assuming a maximalist interpretation where the federal government sells NASA or spins it off as a private company or something like that. What the OP was likely referring to (and they'll have to answer definitively) was the privatization of significant portions of NASA potentially so that it just acts as a pass-through entity for private contracts.
Take something like the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA could potentially build its own rockets to launch its own telescopes [1]. Instead what we might see is NASA wants to launch a rocket with their telescope, but their capacity to launch a rocket has been privatized via contracts that go to private enterprise instead of through NASA.
Since many in the Trump administration have espoused the belief that existing functions of government and/or administrative agencies would be better off privatized or completely cut, many are worried that the same fate awaits NASA with crony capitalism as the end result.
When you say that you don't think anyone is looking to privatize NASA or the telescopes, instead what you should be considering isn't NASA being completely privatized in the sense that it's now a private entity separate from the government, but you should be considering NASA as being privatized in the sense that Congress and the Trump administration allocate taxpayer dollars through NASA to private enterprise for existing or potentially new NASA functions in the future. It's less so about literal 100% privatization, and more so about someone who happens to have a rocket company gets taxpayer allocated funding "from NASA" to provide services. I also don't think NASA as it exists today will be 100% privatized, maybe 40% is privatized, etc. , and the space telescopes won't be because they don't generate revenue, but what I do think will happen and it's up to the Trump administration to convince me that this isn't the case and earn my trust, is that they will allocate funding for NASA works specifically to private enterprise that is in favor with the current administration in a form of crony capitalism.
One way to maybe think about this would be imagine that we "privatized" the IRS and in order to file your taxes you would have to file through one of many existing vendors who have contracts from the IRS and charge you to file your taxes. Does that feel right? Why can't we just file directly with the IRS?
[1] I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing, it's just an example.
Governments are not known for their efficiency. There are many reasons for that, for example working as part of the government comes with many rigid checks and bureaucracy, there is no competition so you can be arbitrarily inefficient, and there are no real consequences for anyone.
> Generally speaking the current administration is looking to cut some functions and programs from federal agencies and then pay private entities to perform those same functions because they believe that private industry can perform those same functions better more cheaply [1].
In some cases they want the federal agency to completely stop doing things and let the private sector do them instead: for example the National Weather Service.
Some folks (e.g., the CEO of AccuWeather) wants zero free weather reports from the government, and you'd have to go to a private corporation to get a forecast.
> There is certainly some merit to that, however I think being dogmatic one way or the other is for simpletons.
Neoliberalism has more to do with beliefs (religion) than facts. We all have been conditioned to think through this frame. Thatcher etc, great results. :-)
There are only a few who do the measurements (aka science). The efficient company vs the inefficient government, it exists, but as a myth.
Nothing could make less sense than a plot to privatize space telescopes. Space telescopes have no commercial value whatsoever. All satellites which have commercial or military value are pointed at earth. The only plausible counterexample is a few of those pointed at the sun, and they only have value insofar as they can make forecasts about solar weather that may disrupt affairs on Earth.
I think it's less a plot to privatize space telescopes and more a plot to shutter NASA and get the US government out of the space industry altogether and privatize everything.
Which means that either companies find commercial value in space telescopes or else we just don't have space telescopes.
But don't worry, we'll always have luxury trips into LEO for billionaires.
After decades of searching, the only good uses for space telescopes thus far found is keeping university researchers entertained and making cool posters for geeky kids to hang in their bedrooms. That second one is actually very important to be fair.
(Human space flight is also a waste of money, for reasons I explained in other posts. Other than entertaining children, it serves almost no constructive purpose whatsoever. And the space tourism niche is basically a joke.)
Yes this has been planned for a while. But accelerating the existing schedule by 4 or 5 years would almost certainly result in a large increase to the existing $843 million dollar contract that Space X has. Elon definitely has a conflict of interest here.
Sure, and speeding up the ISS deorbit timeline would almost certainly mean a lot more money for SpaceX, at a time when SpaceX's competitors are still very far behind in terms of capability. Musk wants an earlier ISS deorbit because it lines his pockets sooner, and more reliably.
Not only does Musk have a lot of power to get favors granted to him now, but I'm sure he also realizes that there could be significant backlash against him and his companies during a future administration, if his and Trump's actions turn out to be as broadly, bipartisan-ly unpopular as I'm hoping. So not only will he want to extract as much as he can from the government now, he'll want to consolidate and increase his lead over his competitors so a future administration may have no choice but to continue using SpaceX for the bulk of its needs.
The ISS is essentially worthless and the contract to deorbit has already been given to SpaceX (during the Biden administration no less.) There is no useful (much less economically sensible) research being done on the ISS. If you consult NASA FAQs, the way they like to justify it to the public is the ISS is a center for research that will help humanity live in space. That's bullshit. We figured out decades ago that human bodies start breaking down after more than a few months in microgravity and there's really fuck-all that can be done about that. Pursuing spin habs is one possible avenue for the future, but the ISS isn't one. It's dead end technology.
And on the topic of dead end technology, let's face the fact that the ISS is just Mir 2 with US participation. The DOS-8 module it's built around is the module Mir 2 was to be built around, Mir (1) being DOS-7, and the previous DOSes were the Salyut stations. Direct hardware lineage. The only reason these things exist in the first place is because the Soviet Union though space stations would be good for earth observation, a role they are wholly obsolete in now, but once the Soviet Union started building something they liked to keep building it long after it made sense (see also, the Vostok capsule, which they are still using as a satellite bus to this day.). And the only reason the US is involved in this is literally welfare to the Russian aerospace industry to prevent their engineers from having to seek employment in Iran/etc. In this role too, it is obviously obsolete.
Now a word about Mars, because I can already sense somebody about to accuse me of being a senseless musk fanboy. Mars colonization makes no sense and musk is lying about pursuing it. For a Mars colony to actually become a "backup for humanity" of whatever drivel he claims, it would need to bootstrap itself into self sufficiency, which at the very least would require a viable economy for trading with Earth. No such economic plan for a Mars colony exists. Furthermore, SpaceX isn't even investing in the creation of the requisite colony hardware, the habitats and Martian industrial infrastructure which would be required to make it work. What they're actually doing is far more mundane; building rockets for launching satellite into Earth orbit. The Mars talk is just a recruitment tactic to pull in young idealistic engineers and get them to work long hours for cheap.
Nah, a lot of this is about removing regulation to let private businesses do whatever they want. It isn't about privatizing the government, it's about removing regulations and "woke" policies
You see, those are necessary steps since billionaires are tired of rules and regulations that don't let them grow and thus hold America back, so it can't be great again.
Once the money is approved it is then the receiving agency/orgs money. Not the Executive branch’s money to redistribute. There is no money being “saved” or “cut”, there are only corrupt people halting payments of the budgeted money and illegally laying off workers.
Many of the announced savings are fake. The actual savings are a paltry number that will be dwarfed by the 100s of billions that will be spent on border security theater, not to mention the trillions in upcoming tax cuts for the wealthy.
I'd say at least the SLS program is in jeopardy. NASA has notably had some real scares recently about massive job cuts that have thus far not panned out. Since the administration revels in chaos this probably won't be resolved neatly or soon.
IMHO if someone wanted to cut the James Webb the time to do it was 15 years ago. Now that it is actually flying and producing the best images of the cosmos to date it is too late. Those costs are fully sunk. The ongoing running costs are downright modest by government standards. Plus the project is visible enough that cuts are likely to result in public outcry.
The SLS being a government funded competitor to SpaceX has little hope...
That said I am unsure if that is that much of a blow. The government is very good at some things, it looks to me (I am a casual observer) that SpaceX has eaten their lunch in terms of a space programme.
But the James Webb was exactly the sort of incredibly difficult, high risk project that NASA (and Government labs generally) excel at. No private company would ever do something like that. It is a huge achievement and is changing our view, again, of the Universe.
So I guess it will be doomed now too. Noting so dangerous as a good example.
The SLS being a government funded competitor to SpaceX has little hope
SLS was never about being the most practical and/or efficient launcher. It is a pork barrel project, but one with an important role. In particular, it is maintaining vital aerospace industrial capacity. If the US wants things like ICBMs then programs like SLS are a necessary evil.
If the US wants ICBMs they'll leverage existing designs. The SLS has nothing to do with them, not in the slightest, aside from the fact that they're all cylindrical in shape.
I can't imagine there's much overlap. The early SLS uses space shuttle solid rocket booster casings (because the people involved are only the dumbest people on the entire planet Earth) which don't have parts commonality with anything else. The later SLS, bleh who cares what they'll do, with any luck cancellation.
The USA also fielded liquid-fueled ICBMs, but I believe they have all been decommissioned in favor of solid-fueled missiles, which are more reliable and easier to store.
There's lots of bad ideas currently becoming government policy, and that's not even a unique flaw of the USA or Trump or Musk.
So, just because idea of using Falcon 9s as a delivery solution for a strategic nuclear deterrent may be as bad as ordering your chief designer to throw a big steel ball at the window of the new model of car you're currently in the middle of announcing even despite the guy's obvious reticence, doesn't mean it won't happen.
I don't think it's a stretch at all. GP is pointing out a specific instance that illustrates that Musk doesn't truly understand the capabilities of the things he builds. He talks a good game, but he's not actually a rocket scientist/engineer. But he'll push for whatever he wants to push for, and people like Trump will eat it up and let him do what he wants.
If Musk wants to push for "Falcon 9-based liquid-fueled ICBMs", he'll do so, even if he actually does know they're not the best/right tech for the job. And someone like Trump will listen to him.
It's also a bit in bad faith of you to play the "you only disagree because Musk bad" card, when GP explicitly acknowledges that these sorts of bad government decisions are not unique to the US/Trump/Musk.
No one is seriously going to propose a liquid fueled rocket for the nuclear deterrence mission. It simply doesn't work.
However, there are potential military applications for a vehicle like Falcon 9. For example, imagine being able to insert a Special Operations team almost anywhere in the world on a few hours notice. In a potential near-peer conflict there will also be a need to quickly launch replacement military satellites to make up attrition losses.
I find people like you fascinating. Like it's so obvious that the guy is actually legitimately obsessed with going to Mars. You can question whether that's a good idea and everything else about him, but it's so obvious that this is legitimate.
So I'm seriously so, so curious, because you are far from the only person to think this, why do you think Mars is actually a facade to funnel money to his companies?
This might surprise you but you can’t always take what people say at face value. You also have to think about why they say they want something and what else they might want. Mars is a great example of something he could fund himself, and something he presumably has funded in the past. So if he’s going to take government funding now when he’s holding the strings, it stands to reason that he’s taking advantage of his position. And you can see that play out with the $400 million dollar purchase of Cybertrucks for example where there are tons of more cost-effective tools for the job. So it seems like whatever he says his real goal is to strip-mine certain agencies for profit while he does it. Why would we trust him?
This might surprise you, but you have no idea what you are talking about.
You don't have to believe anything Elon says, just look at what he has done for the past 22 years. SpaceX was founded on the singular purpose of getting to Mars. Elon originally tried to buy ICBMs from Russia to launch to Mars, when that fell through he started his own rocket company. The entire tech stack and rockets being built are to reduce the cost of mass to orbit by the orders of magnitude needed to colonize mars. There is no other reason to build something as huge as Starship. Elon IS funding getting to mars by himself, the Starship program is mostly self funded, with the Artemis HLS contract coming well after the program was started.
He said his Tesla comp package was 100% to get to Mars for mankind then immediately bought Twitter when it hit the perf targets and he first got the package.
Well, at one time he was obsessed with going to Mars... Now he seems more obsessed with being the most based twitter user and wrecking people's lives for upboats from his cronies.
If youre using the term “wokeness” seriously. You are not interested in a dialogue. You merely want to own the libs. Much of your comment history is defending Elon too and a lot of data driven replies to your past comments go seemingly unreplied by you
I don’t think you have any interest in an actual discussion here. You just want to signal youre right and the other party is wrong.
There are far more productive uses of your time then defending a stranger you’ll never meet. It’s a beautiful world out there. Please go enjoy it
Is he? Obsessed people are generally hyper-focused on their obsession by definition, Musk has pivoted to electric cars, "free speech" and now re-shaping government since announcing his Mars ambitions.
He's definitely obsessed with being seen by others as the guy who's going to be the first to Mars, but I'd put it in the same camp as his obsession with being seen as an elite Path of Exile 2 player.
Consider it this way: it is absolutely a way to funnel money to his companies because he is (probably genuinely) obsessed with getting to Mars. More money for his companies means faster development of his technology, and the ability to do more in parallel. He knows this, of course. It doesn't matter if the reason for his greed is Mars, or just plain old greed.
Musk's position as CEO of SpaceX and head of DOGE is the most conflict-y of conflicts of interest when it comes to deciding what happens to NASA. It 100% doesn't matter if he is the truest of true believers in the need to make a settlement on Mars. We should not be giving him the power to dismantle other space-related efforts to fuel his personal project. Even if he is right at how critical Mars is, it is incredibly dangerous to allow people with conflicts of interest to be responsible for decisions on this scale.
SLS has been around the moon and back; that mission was equivalent to an unmanned Apollo VIII. Going around the moon is much easier than landing on it and coming back.
Sure. And not-quite-getting-into-orbit is easier -- significantly easier -- than going around the moon.
What's your point, really, aside from nitpicking, when "orbiting the moon" is a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the statement "been to the moon and back"?
To be pedantic, Starship has made orbital velocity several times. It didn't circularize enough to be a full orbit. A full orbit would have been irresponsible. Blue Origin has left a massive trail of space junk from their last test mission because they went for an ambitious orbit rather than one that would passively deorbit immediately.
Kinda. They demonstrated orbital delta-v, but the perigee was always low enough to guarantee re-enter atmosphere after just half an orbit from launch, because of SpaceX's unreadiness to confidently perform a controlled de-orbit otherwise.
> Can't some of the money that's been saved from other cutting channeled to NASA?
Why would they want to do that? This administration is hell-bent on reducing spending, period, not moving it around, as well as crippling the executive branch's ability to govern. And they don't care what useful initiatives die due to their actions.
And I can't see Trump's supporters caring about this at all. He won the presidency in no small part because he acknowledged that people were facing financial strife, while Harris just kept repeating that the economy was great (implying that anyone with financial issues was either imagining it, or themselves at fault). Why would a Trump supporter care about some "elitist" scientist being able to look at celestial phenomena? They don't care about this stuff, sadly.
Obviously it's pointless to try to make any reasoned arguments. These people don't care, they just want to destroy for the sake of it.
In the past I wondered how great civilizations collapse and how this could happen. It is just becoming clearer and clearer every day.
According to Sam Altman "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it", this (and a lot of Elon's actions, see for example the Thailand cave incident) seems to perfectly fit that assessment.
[and to be clear, my quoting of Sam Altman is not meant to be taken as an endorsement of Sam Altman, but I suspect he has decent insight into Elon]
What background? Buying other people's dreams and aspirations (aka their companies, their ideas, and their motivation)?
This isn't shocking but rage inducing.... We spent forever building this thing and successfully getting it up and operational... I know people who have worked on this... Elon musk isn't even a real physicist, he is a business and hype man that is able to get young engineers with dreams of contributing to a great dream to work for him with a terrible work-life balance.
The assumption is that there is a way to do JWST at far less money at far greater scale. Apply same logic to everything. It won’t always hold. Those places become mistakes to be fixed.
Elon and Trump might be evil. But I don’t really believe in evil. And I keep underestimating both of them. It’s no longer a matter of choice; but if there is a positive possibility, I like to imagine it and make it a plausible pathway. Tons of bad things can happen; is there a path where the current direction could be very very good?
As someone who’s worked on NASA projects, I can assure you they could cut 20% and things would probably run more smoothly, since less people would be standing around bored looking for things to do
Just with regards to space-tech: clearly there will be huge advances in the next few years.
Government will become vastly more efficient.
And for a left field example: I suspect that the next few years will see a rapid advancement in the science of solar radiation management, aka geoengineering. This was never going to happen with status quo leadership. But the fact is that we will not stop using fossil fuels in the next couple decades. So we clearly need to minimize the known risk of climate change, (even for the unknown risks of geoengineering). It costs about $10b to put enough calcium carbonate or sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to achieve heat balance and stop runaway climate change effects. Can’t have Florida flood, right?
Beyond that, there is a genuine likelihood that there will be a better economy and less war.
I’m not claiming this is the most likely outcome. But there is a reasonable chance that the next few years will work out really, really well.
This prediction is necessarily predicated on a reduction in budget with an expectation of similar performance, but the administration that is pursuing the budget cuts is also diligently working to remove accountability from the executive branch. I do not predict a more efficient government, but a less effective one.
As I said in another thread here, to solution to waste is not slashing budgets but better accountability. Without the latter there is no guarantee that any other attempted measures will have the expected results.
I think someone like Musk would care deeply about our future in space. I’ve worked on NASA projects and they’ll assemble a massive team, always larger than needed, to build and engineer something, and then nobody ever gets laid off when it’s done. Some move to other projects but many sit on their hands doing nothing. I’d bet you could cut 20% of funding and have the telescope run better than before because nobody is standing around looking for work
NASA does not directly operate JWST anyway (AURA does that via STScI), but the idea that NASA is bloated and Northrop/Ball/L3Harris are not is hilarious. If you know of people getting paid to 'sit on their hands' at NASA, you should report that to the OIG: https://oigforms.nasa.gov/wp_cyberhotline.html
Slashing the budget is not the correct way to combat waste. Accountability is. Otherwise a bad manager might claw back that 20% by firing whoever the top earners are, leaving nobody but the hand-sitters to run the show.
It's pretty clear that Musk is focused on whatever the Twitter equivalent of sound bites are, and not on any actual mission execution issues. His team has already had to come crawling back to previously-fired staff a couple times at this point. I acknowledge that accountability is harder than running around with a loudspeaker and a machete, but that's a pretty bad reason not to even try.
JWST is part of NASA, they surely hire out contractors but those contractors would still report to NASA and probably work in a NASA building. I'm not sure what your point is.
And I'm just reporting on my personal experience. A common joke is if you don't want to learn new skills or contribute, you get sent to safety. Nobody is ever fired, and people are given fake tasks to go around and look like they're working. Saying we need to review accountability before layoffs in an organization that doesn't respond to market pressure is a great way to hire an accountability team and then never do layoffs, thus resulting in a larger staff and budget. That's exactly how NASA has operated for decades, and it's not working.
> It's pretty clear that Musk is focused on whatever the Twitter equivalent of sound bites are, and not on any actual mission execution issues
I don't know what you mean by this but you sound like a very politically misinformed person. I'm guessing you use a lot of reddit?
Depressing politics aside, I'm curious about how this affects the long term usability of the telescope. I guess as long as the orbit is sustained and it doesn't suffer physical damage, it would still be basically operable for it's design life.
If major cuts essentially leave a skeleton crew, or no crew, for an extended period of time would later reinvestment be able to put the observatories back to use with only lost time? Or do these things need constant remote maintenance to stay operational?
Apparently it uses ~2.7% of its fuel every year to station-keep in the right semi-stable orbit, so presumably you need at least some crew to manage that. (and any time it's not taking observations you never get back!) I know the voyagers have needed adjustments and reconfigutation from ground crews as equipment as decayed over the years, so I assume similar things would happen on a semi-mothballed JWST.
If anything it would hurt spacex since they (theoretically) might do fewer support/maintenance missions.
My experience on NASA projects leads me to believe they could cut 20% of staff and have things run smoother, since fewer people would be bored, standing in the way looking for things to do.
Start to take seriously that the current crisis:
- will affect EVERY aspect of public life, and ripple through everyone's private life
- is exactly as bad as it seems
- with goals as venal, selfish, and compromised as it seems
QED the appropriate solution if you don't want to ride the collapse into a dystopian horrorscape cum shithole,
is to figure out what direct action you and your closest circles need to do for
- personal survival
- community survival
and hopefully
- national survival
where the latter is going to obviously mean some real, literal effort, short term, to reverse the soft coup that is going down.
Doesn't matter if these people were voted in; they can never be voted out and the sooner they are taken out of power by whatever means avail, the better.
Think on the scale of national strike and national shutdown.
Nothing short of that is going to save what generations built.
Why fight over her? She had a go, lost by the rules (even if she got more votes, still lost by the rules), didn't attempt a comeback. That was 8 years ago.
But also: "young men" is identity politics. Just a different identity than is usually meant.
The "identity politics" stuff is just exhausting. Not to get too political here but I'm only aware of one presidential campaign running a lot of ads in swing states on trans issues and it wasn't the Democrats. Then with all the talk about men and masculinity when I've tried listening to right wing media (even the politicians) and somehow that isn't "identity politics".
Identity politics was originally the idea that people can vote based on measurable core values instead of political party rhetoric. Then Cambridge Analytica was shut down, Mark Zuckerberg got questioned by Congress, and identity politics was replaced by intersectionality and ESG.
>> It's costing us too much and for what? So that Hillary Clinton can become president?
> Why fight over her? She had a go, lost by the rules (even if she got more votes, still lost by the rules), didn't attempt a comeback. That was 8 years ago.
I agree it's odd, but she was part of an important phenomena. IIRC, Kamala Harris was only there because Biden promised to have a black woman VP. And a big part of the case for Hillary Clinton was that "it was time" for a woman president.
And what did that achieve? Two terms of Trump, and the second term shaping up to be a wreaking ball. The Democrats fiddle while Rome burns, stop, yell frightening things about the end of democracy, then go back to fiddling like what they just said wasn't true.
IMHO, it's time for Democrats to stop making excuses and admit defeat. Their ideological priorities plus fearmongering couldn't defeat literally the worst, most obviously incompetent, known value opponent. The Democrats where that bad, and now we're paying the price. They need to go back to the drawing board.
>> This is why it is very important for Democrats to stop throwing young men under the bus and to quit backing identity politics.
> But also: "young men" is identity politics. Just a different identity than is usually meant.
Not necessarily. I think "identity politics" implies a certain kind of favoritism, but that's not what the GP was talking about. He just said "stop throwing young men under the bus," which arguably could mean merely withdrawing the liberal identity-politics favoritism towards girls.
Hillary Clinton is player. She was at the center of Whitewater along with her husband Bill Clinton who was impeached for lying under oath while being questioned about a sex scandal. I agree that Harris is a patsy but a patsy funded by Laurene Powell Jobs who is friends with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
I welcome a qualified female US president as long as she has the public's best interested at heart. At this rate that woman is probably going to be a Republican. And when the current brand of Democrat groans about it that will tell you what their game is all about.
And again "identity politics" originally meant voting based on your core values not political party rhetoric but then Cambridge Analytica got shut down and it became intersectionality.
> I welcome a qualified female US president as long as she has the public's best interested at heart.
If the elections were about being qualified, Trump would have needed to spend 4 years being a senator plus 4 as state Attorney General to reach parity with Haris (in addition to the 4 as VP which he can pair with being president), or 8 as senator plus 4 as secretary of state to reach parity with Clinton.
What he had in 2016 was a string of bankruptcies and a TV show and no political qualifications; what he had in 2024 was as much political experience as Haris had gained since he lost, plus 34 felony convictions for… lying about a sex scandal in his business records, plus two impeachments for something rather more serious than lying under oath about a sex scandal, and that's not even counting the unlawful document retention charges that had to be dropped because sitting presidents can't be charged (or is it tried?) unless impeached (again).
The qualifications he met were the legal minimum: old enough, born in US.
Hillary Clinton set a negative tone in the Democratic party for decades. Watch a video of British liberal Christopher Hitchens ranting about her and Bill. It all culminated in her pact with the DNC to undermine Bernie Sanders. That's a major part of how we got here.
Young men are the backbone of every economy in the world, that's a real thing and you need them, you also need their tax dollars. Men are most labor and put more into the government then they take back.
> Blaming the party not in power rather than the ones who are and are making these decisions is delusional.
If you're going to throw around words like "delusional," then it's delusional to not understand there's plenty of blame to go around (e.g. blame the Republicans for doing bad things, and blame the Democrats for being so bad that they lost to the Republicans. Insisting one and only one thing can be blamed is a recipe for avoiding responsibility.
Agreed. I want to maximize functionality and prosperity. Popular politics is tribalistic nonsense. It leads to fallacious equity and fairness policies "but Billy is braking the law, why can't I? That's not fair."
Republicans are in power because Democrats spent too much time earning points with people that were already going to vote for them. That's why Trump won 7 out of 7 swing states. Democrats could respectfully take their L and learn from their mistakes but instead they want to play the blame game. I mean, we're suppose to be intellectuals, not fanatics. We should act like it.
All I know is that in this discussion, normally thoughtful and smart people are screeching that their outgroup are mean poopheads who want to ruin everything.
Broadly speaking, there are two possibilities. These "normally thoughtful and smart people" are either correct, or they are not.
Have you considered that the prior is a real possibility? I mean, the accelerationist view requires destroying that which now exists. This is not something being invented out of nowhere.
I guess my real question is: what happens if "mean poopheads who want to ruin everything" is what is actually happening? How would one have a thoughtful discussion about that? Is that even possible?
Let's take a 30,000 foot view on this. Swap, or avoid, in-out group positioning for this thought experiment.
SpaceX shows the natural boom, decay to a rut, bust out of rut cycle that happens in every industry. Strong independent government institutions make sure that the growth phase when that bust out of rut phase happens stays (relatively) positive for society and free of corruption.
I personally define a corporation as 'evil' when they try to change the regulatory framework to be in their favor since they cross the line from 'playing by the rules defined by society' to 'making up the rules instead of society making them up'. In a democracy it is important that society makes the rules to give the average person a chance to have their priorities listened to. Now that SpaceX is in politics they are an evil company because they aren't beholden to society. Musk will do whatever he thinks is valuable and there are no stops on him. I don't care how amazing the tech SpaceX comes up with, the danger posed by Musk and SpaceX are not even remotely worth it anymore.
Less than half of voters voted for this. Trump didn't even get a majority of voters to agree with him.
Harris didn't either, and by a slightly worse margin.
I don't think we can make any statements about what the public wants, just based on electoral stats. And beyond that, in a more general sense, if you think that every voter actually knows all the nuance (or even the broad strokes, sometimes) of what their chosen candidate wants to do, well... I've got some news for you.
So? Most of those went in blind because of the decades of brainwashing from private media wanting to make a quick buck. Hard to call it democracy when it's missing the actual democrats.
We know better than that. People must be educated in critical thinking. Must be equipped with high quality information sources. And must be shown by example that working things out and building together is possible.
Did we do that? Us, elites? Or did we exploit their lack of education in order to enrich ourselves? Well, apparently we reap what we sow. They no longer care about democracy. Only anger.
> So? Most of those went in blind because of the decades of brainwashing from private media wanting to make a quick buck.
So you just don’t believe in democracy and are trying to overrule the public.
All I did was point that out — why argue if that’s what you believe is correct?
> And must be shown by example that working things out and building together is possible.
The reason Trump won is because he brought in people disregarded by the system and across traditional political aisles, eg RDK Jr, Tusli Gabbard, and Nicole Shanahan.
> They no longer care about democracy. Only anger.
You can just look at these threads to see what side is lashing out in anger.
1) get his followers to accept his worldview to the exclusion of all other worldviews, and
2) lie like a cheap rug haha
Just imagine the worlds you can sell with this pair of superpowers, you don't have to materialize them into reality, you just need to say the right things during the right election cycle.
Say what you want about Trump but he's really pulled off an amazing stunt coming back from jan 6 to get right back into office. The powers of persuasion that he has coupled with the ridiculous things he says are just unprecedented and his followers either believe him or think he's trolling the libs for their benefit. We'll be discussing Trump for a long time, through whatever communication channels still exist after he departs the scene haha
Maybe me characterizing Trump as "less than truthful" might be offensive to some here, but I'm certainly not alone in this observation.
I agree with what you say here, but think there is more to it than just Trump himself. A complicit media, key backers in congress, and the courts went a long way to sanitizing his reputation over since the events of January 6th.
Beyond right-wing media's unrelenting support for him, plenty of other media outlets had no problem playing up (and probably helping to drive) economic vibes in favor of dry statistics of economic indicators. (Not that the economy has been perfect for everyone, but the post-covid recovery in America broadly seems to have done as well or better than most other countries.) Then you have the NYT running headlines like "Parkinson’s Expert Visited the White House Eight Times in Eight Months". Even if every word in such an article is entirely factual, we're clearly well into the media environment where social media and cable news networks will splash this headline (and largely only the headline) all over the place. It was clearly an editorial decision to have headlines like this dominating coverage for more than a month while Trump was ranting about Hannibal, sharks, and windmills at his rallies.
Of course the Senate and McConnell could have tried his impeachment while he was still in office at a time when it seemed like even his most ardent supporters in the media were trying to figure out how to spin things. Instead, they waited until he was out of office and then said "hey, this isn't our problem any more, let the courts handle it".
Which brings us to the courts. Without key allies like Judge Cannon (delaying and even dismissing his documents retention case) and SCOTUS (first delaying and then jumping in to intentionally tie both of Jack Smith's hands behind his back in the conspiracy case with their immunity ruling), the American public would have had far more public information to base their decision on. Plenty of his base seems to be immune to facts and evidence, but with more of this evidence in the public sphere it is certainly possible that enough swing voters would have rejected the "witch hunt" narrative.
Finally, there is the post-covid effect worldwide of incumbent parties being driven out. So yeah, I definitely think Trump's ability to manifest his reality distortion field played a large role, but he was far from acting alone. Once Trump is no longer relevant maybe we'll see that he alone was capable of wielding these superpowers, but many of these dynamics and existing power players seem poised to outlive him and I fear there is a deep well of savvy opportunists looking to replicate his success.
you're right of course, I think part of it is illustrated when you see how many of the rest of these folks changed their tune about trump in 2016 when it was clear he could bring his supporters on board. Some of those original opinions of trump were not favorable and he only turned the tide of "opinion" when the voters showed up, putting in quotes because some of that tide turning seemed shallow and opportunistic, like "better on the trump train than under its wheels."
SpaceX has shown that certain particular projects can be done better and cheaper via private investment and private enterprise.
SpaceX did not show that a private company can (or would even want to try to) tackle a multi-billion dollar space observatory platform that takes 15+ years to build, and may not be able to provide much in the way of commercial return on investment.
Everyone able to make it to the Boston Museum of Science should make a point of watching "Deep Sky" in IMAX (the story of the JWST and tons of new-to-mankind images of the furthest reaches / oldest objects in the universe), it's breathtaking.
https://www.mos.org/visit/omni/deep-sky
Not sure if it's the same one, but I saw a similar IMAX with my kids at the Kennedy Space Center a few months ago. Agree that it's well worth seeing and has some spectacular images from the JWST.
Oh I thought I had seen it at ksc and then I saw your comment. I agree, it's breathtaking and moving. It's a shame that all of this is happening to save a bunch of money for the wealthy elite that see "you, the people" as disposable items
It says tickets are unavailable.
I'm bummed to have missed that when I was last there in 2024. Overall, I was pretty disappointed with the place. It's a good stop for kids under 7, though.
To the contrary, I found the London science museum amazing. Great exhibits and great presentation.
You can find NASA's 2025 Budget Request Summary here (PDF link: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/fy-2025-budg...). It's a visually great deck that provides a lot info.
From Slide 26: "$317M supports the operation of Great Observatories including the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble, and Chandra".
Can't some of the money that's been saved from other cutting channeled to NASA?
Stop trying to use logic to make sense of these budget cuts. The budget cuts aren't about saving money. They're about destroying whole parts of the Government.
You packed quite a punch in that short comment! Those fed employees who voted for this govt. and got laid off must be feeling a voters remorse.
Facebook is packed with posts of people saying they support this administration but could they please make an exception for their own role or for their loved one whose nursing care got cut (at the VA) etc.
They still don't understand that they voted for this specific thing, nobody was shy during the campaign about what was to come.
They're anthropomorphizing the lawnmower and it's not going to work out.
They don't want to destroy it, just make it so useless they have pretext to privatize it.
I don’t think anyone wants to privatize any of the space telescopes or NASA as a whole. Do you have any evidence that there is someone who does?
Generally speaking the current administration is looking to cut some functions and programs from federal agencies and then pay private entities to perform those same functions because they believe that private industry can perform those same functions better more cheaply [1]. There is certainly some merit to that, however I think being dogmatic one way or the other is for simpletons.
Specifically for privatizing space telescopes or privatizing NASA as a whole I don't think that has been on the table, but you can imagine a scenario in which eventually something like 20%, 40%, 90% or some other significant portion of NASA's "funding" is just a pass-through vehicle for private contracts.
Honestly if you want to learn and understand more about some of these activities you can just read the news because a lot of analysis is being done, well-informed opinions are being written, and indisputable factual evidence including quotes, interviews, and detailed data are publicly available. Admittedly some reporting is behind paywalls, but that's easy to get around. I understand it's not very fair to tell someone to "go read the news", but if you can't keep up with current events or you aren't willing to that's kind of just your problem. There are plenty of websites across the political spectrum ranging from the Financial Times to the Economist, to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, international journals, and more including locally focused websites that keep tabs with events going on at the federal, state, and local level. It's certainly a lot but it's your responsibility as a citizen (assuming you are American, apologies if not) to keep yourself informed and well read.
[1] I'm being charitable here because I personally believe that the goal is to just funnel money from government agencies to specific private enterprises that have the favor of the current administration. Crony Capitalism is what that is called. The current administration has not yet earned my trust to believe otherwise.
I was replying to a comment that said:
>”They don't want to destroy [NASA], just make it so useless they have pretext to privatize it.”
I just think they were wrong. I agree that the current administration does want to prevent the administrative agencies from doing many things, but I don’t think anyone is actually looking to privatize NASA or the telescopes.
Yes, certainly Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, has no conflicting interest in privatizing America's space operations...
I think you're assuming a maximalist interpretation where the federal government sells NASA or spins it off as a private company or something like that. What the OP was likely referring to (and they'll have to answer definitively) was the privatization of significant portions of NASA potentially so that it just acts as a pass-through entity for private contracts.
Take something like the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA could potentially build its own rockets to launch its own telescopes [1]. Instead what we might see is NASA wants to launch a rocket with their telescope, but their capacity to launch a rocket has been privatized via contracts that go to private enterprise instead of through NASA.
Since many in the Trump administration have espoused the belief that existing functions of government and/or administrative agencies would be better off privatized or completely cut, many are worried that the same fate awaits NASA with crony capitalism as the end result.
When you say that you don't think anyone is looking to privatize NASA or the telescopes, instead what you should be considering isn't NASA being completely privatized in the sense that it's now a private entity separate from the government, but you should be considering NASA as being privatized in the sense that Congress and the Trump administration allocate taxpayer dollars through NASA to private enterprise for existing or potentially new NASA functions in the future. It's less so about literal 100% privatization, and more so about someone who happens to have a rocket company gets taxpayer allocated funding "from NASA" to provide services. I also don't think NASA as it exists today will be 100% privatized, maybe 40% is privatized, etc. , and the space telescopes won't be because they don't generate revenue, but what I do think will happen and it's up to the Trump administration to convince me that this isn't the case and earn my trust, is that they will allocate funding for NASA works specifically to private enterprise that is in favor with the current administration in a form of crony capitalism.
One way to maybe think about this would be imagine that we "privatized" the IRS and in order to file your taxes you would have to file through one of many existing vendors who have contracts from the IRS and charge you to file your taxes. Does that feel right? Why can't we just file directly with the IRS?
[1] I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing, it's just an example.
> There is certainly some merit to that
Any source for that?
The profit margin has to come from somewhere.
Governments are not known for their efficiency. There are many reasons for that, for example working as part of the government comes with many rigid checks and bureaucracy, there is no competition so you can be arbitrarily inefficient, and there are no real consequences for anyone.
I would know, I work for the government.
> Generally speaking the current administration is looking to cut some functions and programs from federal agencies and then pay private entities to perform those same functions because they believe that private industry can perform those same functions better more cheaply [1].
In some cases they want the federal agency to completely stop doing things and let the private sector do them instead: for example the National Weather Service.
Some folks (e.g., the CEO of AccuWeather) wants zero free weather reports from the government, and you'd have to go to a private corporation to get a forecast.
John Oliver had a segment on it during Trump 1.0:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGn9T37eR8
> There is certainly some merit to that, however I think being dogmatic one way or the other is for simpletons.
Neoliberalism has more to do with beliefs (religion) than facts. We all have been conditioned to think through this frame. Thatcher etc, great results. :-)
There are only a few who do the measurements (aka science). The efficient company vs the inefficient government, it exists, but as a myth.
Nothing could make less sense than a plot to privatize space telescopes. Space telescopes have no commercial value whatsoever. All satellites which have commercial or military value are pointed at earth. The only plausible counterexample is a few of those pointed at the sun, and they only have value insofar as they can make forecasts about solar weather that may disrupt affairs on Earth.
They don’t necessarily care about space telescopes. They care about someone else receiving the tax money than NASA.
I think it's less a plot to privatize space telescopes and more a plot to shutter NASA and get the US government out of the space industry altogether and privatize everything.
Which means that either companies find commercial value in space telescopes or else we just don't have space telescopes.
But don't worry, we'll always have luxury trips into LEO for billionaires.
After decades of searching, the only good uses for space telescopes thus far found is keeping university researchers entertained and making cool posters for geeky kids to hang in their bedrooms. That second one is actually very important to be fair.
(Human space flight is also a waste of money, for reasons I explained in other posts. Other than entertaining children, it serves almost no constructive purpose whatsoever. And the space tourism niche is basically a joke.)
It's fine. Europe and Asia can handle the actual science.
Musk just yesterday asserted that it was time to deorbit the ISS.[1] Decommissioning telescopes would not be out of the question.
1. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1892621691060093254
That is something NASA has already been planning for a while now.
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/iss-deorbit-...
Yes this has been planned for a while. But accelerating the existing schedule by 4 or 5 years would almost certainly result in a large increase to the existing $843 million dollar contract that Space X has. Elon definitely has a conflict of interest here.
The Biden administration released an RFP a year ago to exactly that end. IIRC, there was an $800+ million contract awarded.
Sure, and speeding up the ISS deorbit timeline would almost certainly mean a lot more money for SpaceX, at a time when SpaceX's competitors are still very far behind in terms of capability. Musk wants an earlier ISS deorbit because it lines his pockets sooner, and more reliably.
Not only does Musk have a lot of power to get favors granted to him now, but I'm sure he also realizes that there could be significant backlash against him and his companies during a future administration, if his and Trump's actions turn out to be as broadly, bipartisan-ly unpopular as I'm hoping. So not only will he want to extract as much as he can from the government now, he'll want to consolidate and increase his lead over his competitors so a future administration may have no choice but to continue using SpaceX for the bulk of its needs.
The ISS is essentially worthless and the contract to deorbit has already been given to SpaceX (during the Biden administration no less.) There is no useful (much less economically sensible) research being done on the ISS. If you consult NASA FAQs, the way they like to justify it to the public is the ISS is a center for research that will help humanity live in space. That's bullshit. We figured out decades ago that human bodies start breaking down after more than a few months in microgravity and there's really fuck-all that can be done about that. Pursuing spin habs is one possible avenue for the future, but the ISS isn't one. It's dead end technology.
And on the topic of dead end technology, let's face the fact that the ISS is just Mir 2 with US participation. The DOS-8 module it's built around is the module Mir 2 was to be built around, Mir (1) being DOS-7, and the previous DOSes were the Salyut stations. Direct hardware lineage. The only reason these things exist in the first place is because the Soviet Union though space stations would be good for earth observation, a role they are wholly obsolete in now, but once the Soviet Union started building something they liked to keep building it long after it made sense (see also, the Vostok capsule, which they are still using as a satellite bus to this day.). And the only reason the US is involved in this is literally welfare to the Russian aerospace industry to prevent their engineers from having to seek employment in Iran/etc. In this role too, it is obviously obsolete.
Now a word about Mars, because I can already sense somebody about to accuse me of being a senseless musk fanboy. Mars colonization makes no sense and musk is lying about pursuing it. For a Mars colony to actually become a "backup for humanity" of whatever drivel he claims, it would need to bootstrap itself into self sufficiency, which at the very least would require a viable economy for trading with Earth. No such economic plan for a Mars colony exists. Furthermore, SpaceX isn't even investing in the creation of the requisite colony hardware, the habitats and Martian industrial infrastructure which would be required to make it work. What they're actually doing is far more mundane; building rockets for launching satellite into Earth orbit. The Mars talk is just a recruitment tactic to pull in young idealistic engineers and get them to work long hours for cheap.
> The Mars talk is just a recruitment tactic to pull in young idealistic engineers and get them to work long hours for cheap
His move away from the previously-stated mission for Tesla to decarbonize the world's energy systems makes a lot more sense now
Nah, a lot of this is about removing regulation to let private businesses do whatever they want. It isn't about privatizing the government, it's about removing regulations and "woke" policies
You see, those are necessary steps since billionaires are tired of rules and regulations that don't let them grow and thus hold America back, so it can't be great again.
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Once the money is approved it is then the receiving agency/orgs money. Not the Executive branch’s money to redistribute. There is no money being “saved” or “cut”, there are only corrupt people halting payments of the budgeted money and illegally laying off workers.
This only matters if the judicial branch does their job, which so far they haven't been.
The congressional branch could sue too.
Many of the announced savings are fake. The actual savings are a paltry number that will be dwarfed by the 100s of billions that will be spent on border security theater, not to mention the trillions in upcoming tax cuts for the wealthy.
I'd say at least the SLS program is in jeopardy. NASA has notably had some real scares recently about massive job cuts that have thus far not panned out. Since the administration revels in chaos this probably won't be resolved neatly or soon.
IMHO if someone wanted to cut the James Webb the time to do it was 15 years ago. Now that it is actually flying and producing the best images of the cosmos to date it is too late. Those costs are fully sunk. The ongoing running costs are downright modest by government standards. Plus the project is visible enough that cuts are likely to result in public outcry.
They could stop with the Mars nonsense and cancel SLS.
The SLS being a government funded competitor to SpaceX has little hope...
That said I am unsure if that is that much of a blow. The government is very good at some things, it looks to me (I am a casual observer) that SpaceX has eaten their lunch in terms of a space programme.
But the James Webb was exactly the sort of incredibly difficult, high risk project that NASA (and Government labs generally) excel at. No private company would ever do something like that. It is a huge achievement and is changing our view, again, of the Universe.
So I guess it will be doomed now too. Noting so dangerous as a good example.
The SLS being a government funded competitor to SpaceX has little hope
SLS was never about being the most practical and/or efficient launcher. It is a pork barrel project, but one with an important role. In particular, it is maintaining vital aerospace industrial capacity. If the US wants things like ICBMs then programs like SLS are a necessary evil.
If the US wants ICBMs they'll leverage existing designs. The SLS has nothing to do with them, not in the slightest, aside from the fact that they're all cylindrical in shape.
Not the designs, the people and supply chains that build them…
I can't imagine there's much overlap. The early SLS uses space shuttle solid rocket booster casings (because the people involved are only the dumbest people on the entire planet Earth) which don't have parts commonality with anything else. The later SLS, bleh who cares what they'll do, with any luck cancellation.
Maybe they are also orange?
Oh man, Elon is going to propose a Falcon-9 based ICBM isn't he? Might as well go full Bond villain at this point.
ICBMs have usually been solid fuelled as they can be stored ready to launch.
Typically when you have a situation warranting nukes you won't have time to fuel a falcon 9.
US-based ICBMs, yes. Russia and China have actively fielded liquid-fueled ICBMs.
The USA also fielded liquid-fueled ICBMs, but I believe they have all been decommissioned in favor of solid-fueled missiles, which are more reliable and easier to store.
There's lots of bad ideas currently becoming government policy, and that's not even a unique flaw of the USA or Trump or Musk.
So, just because idea of using Falcon 9s as a delivery solution for a strategic nuclear deterrent may be as bad as ordering your chief designer to throw a big steel ball at the window of the new model of car you're currently in the middle of announcing even despite the guy's obvious reticence, doesn't mean it won't happen.
This is a stretch.
Someone makes an uneducated point but it must be defended because Musk bad...
Do you think you're making a good point here?
I don't think it's a stretch at all. GP is pointing out a specific instance that illustrates that Musk doesn't truly understand the capabilities of the things he builds. He talks a good game, but he's not actually a rocket scientist/engineer. But he'll push for whatever he wants to push for, and people like Trump will eat it up and let him do what he wants.
If Musk wants to push for "Falcon 9-based liquid-fueled ICBMs", he'll do so, even if he actually does know they're not the best/right tech for the job. And someone like Trump will listen to him.
It's also a bit in bad faith of you to play the "you only disagree because Musk bad" card, when GP explicitly acknowledges that these sorts of bad government decisions are not unique to the US/Trump/Musk.
No one is seriously going to propose a liquid fueled rocket for the nuclear deterrence mission. It simply doesn't work.
However, there are potential military applications for a vehicle like Falcon 9. For example, imagine being able to insert a Special Operations team almost anywhere in the world on a few hours notice. In a potential near-peer conflict there will also be a need to quickly launch replacement military satellites to make up attrition losses.
lol the Mars project is a prestige project for Musk now, no way that gets defunded.
It's a distraction and likely a way to fund money to his companies.
I find people like you fascinating. Like it's so obvious that the guy is actually legitimately obsessed with going to Mars. You can question whether that's a good idea and everything else about him, but it's so obvious that this is legitimate.
So I'm seriously so, so curious, because you are far from the only person to think this, why do you think Mars is actually a facade to funnel money to his companies?
This might surprise you but you can’t always take what people say at face value. You also have to think about why they say they want something and what else they might want. Mars is a great example of something he could fund himself, and something he presumably has funded in the past. So if he’s going to take government funding now when he’s holding the strings, it stands to reason that he’s taking advantage of his position. And you can see that play out with the $400 million dollar purchase of Cybertrucks for example where there are tons of more cost-effective tools for the job. So it seems like whatever he says his real goal is to strip-mine certain agencies for profit while he does it. Why would we trust him?
This might surprise you, but you have no idea what you are talking about.
You don't have to believe anything Elon says, just look at what he has done for the past 22 years. SpaceX was founded on the singular purpose of getting to Mars. Elon originally tried to buy ICBMs from Russia to launch to Mars, when that fell through he started his own rocket company. The entire tech stack and rockets being built are to reduce the cost of mass to orbit by the orders of magnitude needed to colonize mars. There is no other reason to build something as huge as Starship. Elon IS funding getting to mars by himself, the Starship program is mostly self funded, with the Artemis HLS contract coming well after the program was started.
He said his Tesla comp package was 100% to get to Mars for mankind then immediately bought Twitter when it hit the perf targets and he first got the package.
Well, at one time he was obsessed with going to Mars... Now he seems more obsessed with being the most based twitter user and wrecking people's lives for upboats from his cronies.
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If youre using the term “wokeness” seriously. You are not interested in a dialogue. You merely want to own the libs. Much of your comment history is defending Elon too and a lot of data driven replies to your past comments go seemingly unreplied by you
I don’t think you have any interest in an actual discussion here. You just want to signal youre right and the other party is wrong.
There are far more productive uses of your time then defending a stranger you’ll never meet. It’s a beautiful world out there. Please go enjoy it
Is he? Obsessed people are generally hyper-focused on their obsession by definition, Musk has pivoted to electric cars, "free speech" and now re-shaping government since announcing his Mars ambitions.
He's definitely obsessed with being seen by others as the guy who's going to be the first to Mars, but I'd put it in the same camp as his obsession with being seen as an elite Path of Exile 2 player.
Consider it this way: it is absolutely a way to funnel money to his companies because he is (probably genuinely) obsessed with getting to Mars. More money for his companies means faster development of his technology, and the ability to do more in parallel. He knows this, of course. It doesn't matter if the reason for his greed is Mars, or just plain old greed.
Musk's position as CEO of SpaceX and head of DOGE is the most conflict-y of conflicts of interest when it comes to deciding what happens to NASA. It 100% doesn't matter if he is the truest of true believers in the need to make a settlement on Mars. We should not be giving him the power to dismantle other space-related efforts to fuel his personal project. Even if he is right at how critical Mars is, it is incredibly dangerous to allow people with conflicts of interest to be responsible for decisions on this scale.
I think it’s the other way around. He is obsessed with Mars and now he has the influence to make it happen with the help of taxpayer money.
If he is "obsessed" with that, why is he so disinterested in making progress towards it?
SLS has been to the moon and back. Starship hasn't yet made it to orbit.
SLS has been around the moon and back; that mission was equivalent to an unmanned Apollo VIII. Going around the moon is much easier than landing on it and coming back.
Sure. And not-quite-getting-into-orbit is easier -- significantly easier -- than going around the moon.
What's your point, really, aside from nitpicking, when "orbiting the moon" is a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the statement "been to the moon and back"?
I think the difference between the US lunar exploration program and the Soviet one qualifies as more than mere nitpicking.
Starship has made orbit several times.
To be pedantic, Starship has made orbital velocity several times. It didn't circularize enough to be a full orbit. A full orbit would have been irresponsible. Blue Origin has left a massive trail of space junk from their last test mission because they went for an ambitious orbit rather than one that would passively deorbit immediately.
https://x.com/shell_jim/status/1891842756500222212
Kinda. They demonstrated orbital delta-v, but the perigee was always low enough to guarantee re-enter atmosphere after just half an orbit from launch, because of SpaceX's unreadiness to confidently perform a controlled de-orbit otherwise.
No it has not. Cite a source please.
> Can't some of the money that's been saved from other cutting channeled to NASA?
Why would they want to do that? This administration is hell-bent on reducing spending, period, not moving it around, as well as crippling the executive branch's ability to govern. And they don't care what useful initiatives die due to their actions.
And I can't see Trump's supporters caring about this at all. He won the presidency in no small part because he acknowledged that people were facing financial strife, while Harris just kept repeating that the economy was great (implying that anyone with financial issues was either imagining it, or themselves at fault). Why would a Trump supporter care about some "elitist" scientist being able to look at celestial phenomena? They don't care about this stuff, sadly.
No. Because the people in charge of NASA will make sure to make sure that every dollar cut will go to the most loved programs to keep awareness high.
More likely to end up at Space X
> Can't some of the money that's been saved from other cutting channeled to NASA?
What are you a socialist? /s
Obviously it's pointless to try to make any reasoned arguments. These people don't care, they just want to destroy for the sake of it. In the past I wondered how great civilizations collapse and how this could happen. It is just becoming clearer and clearer every day.
I think "Why Nations Fail" is highly relevant in the current context.
True, but you'd think that Musk, given his background and aspirations, would have greater appreciation for the JWST.
According to Sam Altman "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it", this (and a lot of Elon's actions, see for example the Thailand cave incident) seems to perfectly fit that assessment.
[and to be clear, my quoting of Sam Altman is not meant to be taken as an endorsement of Sam Altman, but I suspect he has decent insight into Elon]
That is interesting, and pathological if true. Thank you for the insight.
What background? Buying other people's dreams and aspirations (aka their companies, their ideas, and their motivation)?
This isn't shocking but rage inducing.... We spent forever building this thing and successfully getting it up and operational... I know people who have worked on this... Elon musk isn't even a real physicist, he is a business and hype man that is able to get young engineers with dreams of contributing to a great dream to work for him with a terrible work-life balance.
JWST launched on an Ariane
That Musk is dead.
Doubt he ever really existed, he was just better at keeping his psychopathy under wraps.
he is not profiting from it so…
The assumption is that there is a way to do JWST at far less money at far greater scale. Apply same logic to everything. It won’t always hold. Those places become mistakes to be fixed.
Elon and Trump might be evil. But I don’t really believe in evil. And I keep underestimating both of them. It’s no longer a matter of choice; but if there is a positive possibility, I like to imagine it and make it a plausible pathway. Tons of bad things can happen; is there a path where the current direction could be very very good?
As someone who’s worked on NASA projects, I can assure you they could cut 20% and things would probably run more smoothly, since less people would be standing around bored looking for things to do
No.
Just with regards to space-tech: clearly there will be huge advances in the next few years.
Government will become vastly more efficient.
And for a left field example: I suspect that the next few years will see a rapid advancement in the science of solar radiation management, aka geoengineering. This was never going to happen with status quo leadership. But the fact is that we will not stop using fossil fuels in the next couple decades. So we clearly need to minimize the known risk of climate change, (even for the unknown risks of geoengineering). It costs about $10b to put enough calcium carbonate or sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to achieve heat balance and stop runaway climate change effects. Can’t have Florida flood, right?
Beyond that, there is a genuine likelihood that there will be a better economy and less war.
I’m not claiming this is the most likely outcome. But there is a reasonable chance that the next few years will work out really, really well.
If you think there is a chance we're going to start deploying stratospheric aerosol injection, might as well get good at it, if you want to help scale up deployments: https://makesunsets.com/products/join-the-next-balloon-launc...
What country are you referring to? Most of the HN audience is in the USA.
> Government will become vastly more efficient.
This prediction is necessarily predicated on a reduction in budget with an expectation of similar performance, but the administration that is pursuing the budget cuts is also diligently working to remove accountability from the executive branch. I do not predict a more efficient government, but a less effective one.
As I said in another thread here, to solution to waste is not slashing budgets but better accountability. Without the latter there is no guarantee that any other attempted measures will have the expected results.
Yep. History of humanity is littered with stories of super powers crumbling under their own foolishness. Very strange to actively witness the death.
Then tell me how you have gained from the this telescope or even how it has furthered NASA's knowledge of the universe?
There's a section about this on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Sci...
But I suspect you're not asking the question because you want to know the answer.
I think someone like Musk would care deeply about our future in space. I’ve worked on NASA projects and they’ll assemble a massive team, always larger than needed, to build and engineer something, and then nobody ever gets laid off when it’s done. Some move to other projects but many sit on their hands doing nothing. I’d bet you could cut 20% of funding and have the telescope run better than before because nobody is standing around looking for work
NASA does not directly operate JWST anyway (AURA does that via STScI), but the idea that NASA is bloated and Northrop/Ball/L3Harris are not is hilarious. If you know of people getting paid to 'sit on their hands' at NASA, you should report that to the OIG: https://oigforms.nasa.gov/wp_cyberhotline.html
Slashing the budget is not the correct way to combat waste. Accountability is. Otherwise a bad manager might claw back that 20% by firing whoever the top earners are, leaving nobody but the hand-sitters to run the show.
It's pretty clear that Musk is focused on whatever the Twitter equivalent of sound bites are, and not on any actual mission execution issues. His team has already had to come crawling back to previously-fired staff a couple times at this point. I acknowledge that accountability is harder than running around with a loudspeaker and a machete, but that's a pretty bad reason not to even try.
JWST is part of NASA, they surely hire out contractors but those contractors would still report to NASA and probably work in a NASA building. I'm not sure what your point is.
And I'm just reporting on my personal experience. A common joke is if you don't want to learn new skills or contribute, you get sent to safety. Nobody is ever fired, and people are given fake tasks to go around and look like they're working. Saying we need to review accountability before layoffs in an organization that doesn't respond to market pressure is a great way to hire an accountability team and then never do layoffs, thus resulting in a larger staff and budget. That's exactly how NASA has operated for decades, and it's not working.
> It's pretty clear that Musk is focused on whatever the Twitter equivalent of sound bites are, and not on any actual mission execution issues
I don't know what you mean by this but you sound like a very politically misinformed person. I'm guessing you use a lot of reddit?
A hedge fund manager, somewhere out there, does not have enough tax cuts to pay for the 5th infinity pool and a lambo. Science can go suck it!
Queue "In the eyes on an angel" by Sarah McLachlan.
This is basically "Don't Look Up" in real life.
Not commenting on the budgets cuts themselves, but operations, monitoring, and maintenance of JWST is under contract with Northop Grumman until 2027.
Whew, good thing Musk and Trump love respecting existing contracts and settled law then. https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/02/18/g-s1-49...
Why would that matter? Trump can break the contract and there's nothing they can do about it
Depressing politics aside, I'm curious about how this affects the long term usability of the telescope. I guess as long as the orbit is sustained and it doesn't suffer physical damage, it would still be basically operable for it's design life.
If major cuts essentially leave a skeleton crew, or no crew, for an extended period of time would later reinvestment be able to put the observatories back to use with only lost time? Or do these things need constant remote maintenance to stay operational?
Apparently it uses ~2.7% of its fuel every year to station-keep in the right semi-stable orbit, so presumably you need at least some crew to manage that. (and any time it's not taking observations you never get back!) I know the voyagers have needed adjustments and reconfigutation from ground crews as equipment as decayed over the years, so I assume similar things would happen on a semi-mothballed JWST.
Gee, I wonder if this will maybe benefit Space X in some way?
You're gonna have to connect the dots here...I don't see the benefit to space x
If anything it would hurt spacex since they (theoretically) might do fewer support/maintenance missions.
My experience on NASA projects leads me to believe they could cut 20% of staff and have things run smoother, since fewer people would be bored, standing in the way looking for things to do.
Start to take seriously that the current crisis: - will affect EVERY aspect of public life, and ripple through everyone's private life - is exactly as bad as it seems - with goals as venal, selfish, and compromised as it seems
QED the appropriate solution if you don't want to ride the collapse into a dystopian horrorscape cum shithole,
is to figure out what direct action you and your closest circles need to do for - personal survival - community survival and hopefully - national survival
where the latter is going to obviously mean some real, literal effort, short term, to reverse the soft coup that is going down.
Doesn't matter if these people were voted in; they can never be voted out and the sooner they are taken out of power by whatever means avail, the better.
Think on the scale of national strike and national shutdown.
Nothing short of that is going to save what generations built.
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> Hillary Clinton
Why fight over her? She had a go, lost by the rules (even if she got more votes, still lost by the rules), didn't attempt a comeback. That was 8 years ago.
But also: "young men" is identity politics. Just a different identity than is usually meant.
The "identity politics" stuff is just exhausting. Not to get too political here but I'm only aware of one presidential campaign running a lot of ads in swing states on trans issues and it wasn't the Democrats. Then with all the talk about men and masculinity when I've tried listening to right wing media (even the politicians) and somehow that isn't "identity politics".
Identity politics was originally the idea that people can vote based on measurable core values instead of political party rhetoric. Then Cambridge Analytica was shut down, Mark Zuckerberg got questioned by Congress, and identity politics was replaced by intersectionality and ESG.
We could have had Bernie
I wish we did.
>> It's costing us too much and for what? So that Hillary Clinton can become president?
> Why fight over her? She had a go, lost by the rules (even if she got more votes, still lost by the rules), didn't attempt a comeback. That was 8 years ago.
I agree it's odd, but she was part of an important phenomena. IIRC, Kamala Harris was only there because Biden promised to have a black woman VP. And a big part of the case for Hillary Clinton was that "it was time" for a woman president.
And what did that achieve? Two terms of Trump, and the second term shaping up to be a wreaking ball. The Democrats fiddle while Rome burns, stop, yell frightening things about the end of democracy, then go back to fiddling like what they just said wasn't true.
IMHO, it's time for Democrats to stop making excuses and admit defeat. Their ideological priorities plus fearmongering couldn't defeat literally the worst, most obviously incompetent, known value opponent. The Democrats where that bad, and now we're paying the price. They need to go back to the drawing board.
>> This is why it is very important for Democrats to stop throwing young men under the bus and to quit backing identity politics.
> But also: "young men" is identity politics. Just a different identity than is usually meant.
Not necessarily. I think "identity politics" implies a certain kind of favoritism, but that's not what the GP was talking about. He just said "stop throwing young men under the bus," which arguably could mean merely withdrawing the liberal identity-politics favoritism towards girls.
Hillary Clinton is player. She was at the center of Whitewater along with her husband Bill Clinton who was impeached for lying under oath while being questioned about a sex scandal. I agree that Harris is a patsy but a patsy funded by Laurene Powell Jobs who is friends with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
I welcome a qualified female US president as long as she has the public's best interested at heart. At this rate that woman is probably going to be a Republican. And when the current brand of Democrat groans about it that will tell you what their game is all about.
And again "identity politics" originally meant voting based on your core values not political party rhetoric but then Cambridge Analytica got shut down and it became intersectionality.
> I welcome a qualified female US president as long as she has the public's best interested at heart.
If the elections were about being qualified, Trump would have needed to spend 4 years being a senator plus 4 as state Attorney General to reach parity with Haris (in addition to the 4 as VP which he can pair with being president), or 8 as senator plus 4 as secretary of state to reach parity with Clinton.
What he had in 2016 was a string of bankruptcies and a TV show and no political qualifications; what he had in 2024 was as much political experience as Haris had gained since he lost, plus 34 felony convictions for… lying about a sex scandal in his business records, plus two impeachments for something rather more serious than lying under oath about a sex scandal, and that's not even counting the unlawful document retention charges that had to be dropped because sitting presidents can't be charged (or is it tried?) unless impeached (again).
The qualifications he met were the legal minimum: old enough, born in US.
Hillary Clinton set a negative tone in the Democratic party for decades. Watch a video of British liberal Christopher Hitchens ranting about her and Bill. It all culminated in her pact with the DNC to undermine Bernie Sanders. That's a major part of how we got here.
Young men are the backbone of every economy in the world, that's a real thing and you need them, you also need their tax dollars. Men are most labor and put more into the government then they take back.
Blaming the party not in power rather than the ones who are and are making these decisions is delusional.
> Blaming the party not in power rather than the ones who are and are making these decisions is delusional.
If you're going to throw around words like "delusional," then it's delusional to not understand there's plenty of blame to go around (e.g. blame the Republicans for doing bad things, and blame the Democrats for being so bad that they lost to the Republicans. Insisting one and only one thing can be blamed is a recipe for avoiding responsibility.
Agreed. I want to maximize functionality and prosperity. Popular politics is tribalistic nonsense. It leads to fallacious equity and fairness policies "but Billy is braking the law, why can't I? That's not fair."
Republicans are in power because Democrats spent too much time earning points with people that were already going to vote for them. That's why Trump won 7 out of 7 swing states. Democrats could respectfully take their L and learn from their mistakes but instead they want to play the blame game. I mean, we're suppose to be intellectuals, not fanatics. We should act like it.
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Your comment raises an interesting issue. TFA is free of politics, aside from mentioning the incoming NASA administrator.
1) As political decisions impact things like science, is this not fit for discussion here, because there is a tinge of politics?
2) What are some not dumb points to make about this story? Or, are there none possible?
All I know is that in this discussion, normally thoughtful and smart people are screeching that their outgroup are mean poopheads who want to ruin everything.
Broadly speaking, there are two possibilities. These "normally thoughtful and smart people" are either correct, or they are not.
Have you considered that the prior is a real possibility? I mean, the accelerationist view requires destroying that which now exists. This is not something being invented out of nowhere.
I guess my real question is: what happens if "mean poopheads who want to ruin everything" is what is actually happening? How would one have a thoughtful discussion about that? Is that even possible?
Let's take a 30,000 foot view on this. Swap, or avoid, in-out group positioning for this thought experiment.
I'm complaining about manners and communication style.
If they're right or not doesn't enter into my argument.
> How would one have a thoughtful discussion about that? Is that even possible?
Is absolutely is. Also a pretty minimal skill requirement for me to take anyone seriously.
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SpaceX shows the natural boom, decay to a rut, bust out of rut cycle that happens in every industry. Strong independent government institutions make sure that the growth phase when that bust out of rut phase happens stays (relatively) positive for society and free of corruption.
I personally define a corporation as 'evil' when they try to change the regulatory framework to be in their favor since they cross the line from 'playing by the rules defined by society' to 'making up the rules instead of society making them up'. In a democracy it is important that society makes the rules to give the average person a chance to have their priorities listened to. Now that SpaceX is in politics they are an evil company because they aren't beholden to society. Musk will do whatever he thinks is valuable and there are no stops on him. I don't care how amazing the tech SpaceX comes up with, the danger posed by Musk and SpaceX are not even remotely worth it anymore.
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Less than half of voters voted for this. Trump didn't even get a majority of voters to agree with him.
Harris didn't either, and by a slightly worse margin.
I don't think we can make any statements about what the public wants, just based on electoral stats. And beyond that, in a more general sense, if you think that every voter actually knows all the nuance (or even the broad strokes, sometimes) of what their chosen candidate wants to do, well... I've got some news for you.
Okay, so you just don’t believe in democracy.
But this is how our system works — and many of the same people objecting now were cheering the radical Biden regime policies.
So? Most of those went in blind because of the decades of brainwashing from private media wanting to make a quick buck. Hard to call it democracy when it's missing the actual democrats.
We know better than that. People must be educated in critical thinking. Must be equipped with high quality information sources. And must be shown by example that working things out and building together is possible.
Did we do that? Us, elites? Or did we exploit their lack of education in order to enrich ourselves? Well, apparently we reap what we sow. They no longer care about democracy. Only anger.
> So? Most of those went in blind because of the decades of brainwashing from private media wanting to make a quick buck.
So you just don’t believe in democracy and are trying to overrule the public.
All I did was point that out — why argue if that’s what you believe is correct?
> And must be shown by example that working things out and building together is possible.
The reason Trump won is because he brought in people disregarded by the system and across traditional political aisles, eg RDK Jr, Tusli Gabbard, and Nicole Shanahan.
> They no longer care about democracy. Only anger.
You can just look at these threads to see what side is lashing out in anger.
People did not vote for this.
Trump literally distanced himself the entire election cycle from Project 2025.
Trump has this unusual ability to
1) get his followers to accept his worldview to the exclusion of all other worldviews, and
2) lie like a cheap rug haha
Just imagine the worlds you can sell with this pair of superpowers, you don't have to materialize them into reality, you just need to say the right things during the right election cycle.
Say what you want about Trump but he's really pulled off an amazing stunt coming back from jan 6 to get right back into office. The powers of persuasion that he has coupled with the ridiculous things he says are just unprecedented and his followers either believe him or think he's trolling the libs for their benefit. We'll be discussing Trump for a long time, through whatever communication channels still exist after he departs the scene haha
Maybe me characterizing Trump as "less than truthful" might be offensive to some here, but I'm certainly not alone in this observation.
I agree with what you say here, but think there is more to it than just Trump himself. A complicit media, key backers in congress, and the courts went a long way to sanitizing his reputation over since the events of January 6th.
Beyond right-wing media's unrelenting support for him, plenty of other media outlets had no problem playing up (and probably helping to drive) economic vibes in favor of dry statistics of economic indicators. (Not that the economy has been perfect for everyone, but the post-covid recovery in America broadly seems to have done as well or better than most other countries.) Then you have the NYT running headlines like "Parkinson’s Expert Visited the White House Eight Times in Eight Months". Even if every word in such an article is entirely factual, we're clearly well into the media environment where social media and cable news networks will splash this headline (and largely only the headline) all over the place. It was clearly an editorial decision to have headlines like this dominating coverage for more than a month while Trump was ranting about Hannibal, sharks, and windmills at his rallies.
Of course the Senate and McConnell could have tried his impeachment while he was still in office at a time when it seemed like even his most ardent supporters in the media were trying to figure out how to spin things. Instead, they waited until he was out of office and then said "hey, this isn't our problem any more, let the courts handle it".
Which brings us to the courts. Without key allies like Judge Cannon (delaying and even dismissing his documents retention case) and SCOTUS (first delaying and then jumping in to intentionally tie both of Jack Smith's hands behind his back in the conspiracy case with their immunity ruling), the American public would have had far more public information to base their decision on. Plenty of his base seems to be immune to facts and evidence, but with more of this evidence in the public sphere it is certainly possible that enough swing voters would have rejected the "witch hunt" narrative.
Finally, there is the post-covid effect worldwide of incumbent parties being driven out. So yeah, I definitely think Trump's ability to manifest his reality distortion field played a large role, but he was far from acting alone. Once Trump is no longer relevant maybe we'll see that he alone was capable of wielding these superpowers, but many of these dynamics and existing power players seem poised to outlive him and I fear there is a deep well of savvy opportunists looking to replicate his success.
you're right of course, I think part of it is illustrated when you see how many of the rest of these folks changed their tune about trump in 2016 when it was clear he could bring his supporters on board. Some of those original opinions of trump were not favorable and he only turned the tide of "opinion" when the voters showed up, putting in quotes because some of that tide turning seemed shallow and opportunistic, like "better on the trump train than under its wheels."
You can just look at how happy his supporters are — and their memes about “we did vote for this”.
SpaceX has shown that certain particular projects can be done better and cheaper via private investment and private enterprise.
SpaceX did not show that a private company can (or would even want to try to) tackle a multi-billion dollar space observatory platform that takes 15+ years to build, and may not be able to provide much in the way of commercial return on investment.