After giving in to Putin/Xi’s demands to not provide starlink internet service over Taiwan, DOD officials are growing nervous about trusting Elon’s Space company with our national secrets
Yet another reason billionaires shouldn’t exist. Dude is making international policy based on requests from foreign leaders, along with having conversations with them while launching the US government’s satellites of national security importance.
They should be, it’s a spectacularly bad idea.
Satellite internet already existed way, way before Starlink. You know, good satellite internet where you have a single geostationary satellite giving you high speed instead of these small Leo ones that will fall out of orbit within a decade…
Why would Taiwan even need Starlink?
Having said that: fuck Musk, and yeah, they should never have allowed this dumb ass anywhere near rockets
The traditional satellite internet is slow and high latency. With the Starlink approach, it is indeed an issue that the satellites need to be continuously replaced, but it does provide a superior service to the user, and combined with SpaceX often launching them “almost free” by piggybacking on free space around their customer’s payloads and not having to pay anyone for launches otherwise, it does come out cheaper than the old satellite internet.
But that’s just the technology. The fact Musk is anywhere near that project makes Starlink a liability.
The vast majority of starlink are launched on their own flights.
They get a few freebies here and there but it’s not the defining factor of their success.
The success is their reusable rockets and turning satellites into a smaller mass manufactured item amd getting economies of scale, not a giant super expensive item.
Edit: also they made reusable rockets then had to figure out a use for them as there wasn’t enough global launch demand. They made their own demand. Then they used their own flights to test riskier things like the rockets with the most launches to fine tune the system without risking customer payloads.
Geostationary satellite internet is not “good.” There’s about 200ms of latency built into the system because of the distance to the satellite, which means you can’t use it for anything real-time. If it’s all you have it’s better than nothing, but LEO satellite Internet is a lot more useful.
he worships a russian asset. dont give him any access to defense
But he has money. If you’re rich, they let you do it.
Revoke his security clearance. They did it to Oppenheimer for a lot less.
Ah, but he wasn’t a capitalistic wage exploitation illegal immigrant billionaire. That was his first mistake.
If you’re going to rely on private firms for your aerospace espionage endeavors, maybe factor in their leader’s sanity before you sign the contract with them.
Nah. Loads of things just shouldn’t be privatised.
What do you value higher - that one company’s profits or the public? Why are you so selfish? Why can’t you just be happy that that one company gets to hold the entire population hostage over the necessary good or service that they can then monopolise? It’s so much easier to squeeze the poor for all they own when their very survival depends on the things you can hand out or hold back at a whim. Something something the free market will probably prevent abuse or something, so it’s perfectly okay.
I 100% agree with you but is there someone else in thr US who can reliably launch satellites? I know several othe companies are developing these systems but I don’t think any are anywhere close to Space X’s reliability or capability.
Space X is doing some awesome stuff and I hate that the awesome has to be tempered by the owner is a piece of shit.
They’re only able to do it because they’ve received trillions of dollars from the federal government.
They should nationalize SpaceX before they ever let someone like Musk get the security clearance needed to be in that position.
SpaceX is wasting government money, they have almost spent all of the money they were given to land people on the moon, on building a rocket that can’t do basic stuff.
That is not awesome.
A single launch of a Boeing rocket costs as much as the entire R&D for SpaceX rockets. Launches that cost $5 billion with Boeing, cost tens of millions with SpaceX. I can absolutely agree with you that SpaceX is wasting some of the money given to them. But the amount of taxpayer money spent on launches has been massively reduced by them providing an orders of magnitude cheaper and more reliable option.
There is definitely an argument to be made that they don’t deserve the money, but in the grand scheme of government spending, they have very much reduced it compared to the traditional launch providers.
And their rockets still have capabilities that no other launch provider has achieved yet. Boeing still wastes all their rockets by making them single use, when SpaceX uses the same rocket many times.
Compairing SpaceX and Boeing is wrong when talking about savings.
Compare a SpaceX launch to a Shuttle launch yo be more accurate, and don’t forget the inflation
And somehow they want to make him in charge of government inefficiency
You want to trust him after what happened in Ukraine? Are you out of your mind? And he’s admitted that he chats with Putin on a regular basis.
Aw man, if only there was some sort of space administration that you could invest some of your trillions of dollars into so that your satellites could be launched by a group that you can monitor and trust.
Nope, everything in the US must be privatized. EVERYTHING. Capitalism DEMANDS it
To be fair here… The old guard still aren’t working on reuse even after SpaceX not only championed it but actually succeeded and proved reliability.
The old launch providers are still just throwing their shit away and still cost billions of dollars for launches.
The Commercial Resupply Service and Commercial Crew Programs have also achieved better standards than NASA had when they started them, and at much cheaper cost than the previous solutions.
Privatisation isn’t inherently bad, and importantly, the money is still being handled through NASA for oversight.
I bet if you offered them grant money to develop it… it wouldn’t have been left on the table.
No, but they wouldn’t do anything beyond the exact specific minimums of the grant either.
And you think a private business will do anything more than the minimum of a contract?
SpaceX has with their vehicles and options. They’re all more capable than the contact they were built under.
Yes
Huh? Why do you think this? The implication seems to be that they want to pocket the rest or something?
Let’s not forget, we are talking about NASA here, not a private corporation. Why would an arm of the federal government have any interest in not doing “anything beyond the exact specific minimums of the grant”?
I cannot speak to building rockets, but I do know about other types of government financing, and I can tell you that the scientists and engineers who would have received such a grant, would have no reason not to use as much of it as possible. In fact, that’s exactly how they would justify a need for more in the future.
Also does it even SEEM like NASA cuts corners? No. They know people’s lives are at stake. They test and retest and are very dedicated to proper procedure so things don’t get fucked up the wrong way … like when you cut corners.
NASA aren’t the ones building things. They’re just the ones deciding what the requirements are after Congress gives them a fraction of what they need to accomplish the impossible.
It’s the likes of Boeing that are building and milking it. And they have never done more than the minimum required, and until competition from SpaceX at a fraction of the cost were experts at milking the Cost Plus contracting they essentially required to do anything space related.
NASA will never be in charge of building things on their own. Space too much of a cash cow for the Congress Critters to milk via the complexity and obfuscation of the government contract process. Thinking they would be able to bring anything in house is hilarious.
the money is still being handled through NASA for oversight.
Oversight of the money is far from the problem here. This is not an issue of cheating the government or mismanagement of money, this is a national security issue.
why the hell would you be?
What even is the DOD/DOJ doing here?
Surely you meant “wouldn’t”
Apply the same standards the rest of us have to meet, revoke his fucking security clearance already! Same for the racist criminal spray painted orange Cheeto, too. This is completely obvious.
IIRC, you’re supposed to report when you’ve had significant contact with Canadians and this motherfucker is talking with Vladimir Putin himself. I can’t imagine he reported that to whoever his clearance is with.
When I had my clearance, we were told if we had a conversation with a foreign national at a bar, we had to disclose it, even after we had already received our clearance.
I was put through a multi-hour polygraph interview from hell, where I was told I didn’t know how to breathe and was threatened with being failed and losing my clearance, because I was having issues remembering online foreign penpals from high school.
But motherfucker is talking to Putin on the regularly, and he’s a billionaire with billions worth of government contracts? Tell me again, US Government, why any of your citizens should give a fuck about anything, again?
Are you kidding me? The national security clearance process involves pseudo-science bs like a polygraph test?
They haven’t made you do that in while. There’s way too many foreign nationals in the U.S., it would be impossible, especially in a city. The standard is ongoing contact/close personal relationships. Having a one-off conversation with a Russian at a bar isn’t going to trigger the requirement unless there’s something suspicious about the conversation itself (like they keep asking about your job).
Because billionaires are not citizens of a country, they are essentially a country unto themselves.
In what would be an unprecedented move, the US needs to nationalize SpaceX in the name of national security.
They don’t need to go that far. Just force Musk to divest. (And prosecute him for any crimes he’s committed, but that might be asking too much of the government.)
They should go that far though.
This entire position that things are in are a direct result of a certain party trying to privatize space travel, and “run it like a business”, which is how the Challenger disaster happened.
So wouldn’t be the worst idea to pull waayyyyyy back.
It’s not unprecedented, though.
No, not everything needs to be nationalized. That’s a lazy excuse to solving problems and often just leads to different issues. Look at the fights we have for NASA’s current miniscule budget slice for a perfect example. Our government is dog shit at allocating and running departments like this, primarily because of politics.
Remember that neither NASA or the military actually build anything themselves, everything is outsourced to companies like SpaceX, Lockheed, Boeing, etc. So you’re advocating all of that to be brought into the government bureaucracy machine with no existing infrastructure to manage it, for it to be smothered to death by politicians trying to “prove” that government doesn’t work.
Instead, they just need to demand that Elon not have any decision making position at the company to continue getting contracts, blacklist him. As it is, daily SpaceX operations run without Elon. Gwynne Shotwell actually runs the company, regardless of specific titles. Elon doesn’t actually do the engineering work either, so while he may be involved in major decisions, it’s more the overall vision, the company would operate just fine whether he’s there or not. HE is the problem, not SpaceX as a company, and not the entire C-Suite team, just him. Get rid of him and the place runs just like it does now, works towards the same goals, and daily operations and contracts continue as normal,
No, not everything needs to be nationalized.
Good thing no one said everything, just a rocket company that NASA wouldn’t need to outsource to anymore since they would have the facilities to make all the rockets they wanted themselves.
Problem is that if SpaceX becomes part of NASA, then it’ll be like the space shuttle. It’ll need parts made by every small company that contributed to some random representative in every state, so we’ll end up with 300+ contractors all building critical components.
Why can’t it source those things the same way SpaceX does now?
It could, but that’s not how these types of programs get run. They’re as much about making jobs in specific areas as they are about solving a problem.
That’s not a very convincing argument. The U.S. has never nationalized a company like SpaceX before. We have no idea how it would be run.
I don’t find the libertarian “everything the government does is inefficient and corrupt” ideas very compelling.
You’re putting words in my mouth and exaggerating my statements. Just look at how the NASA manned space programs have run since the start, AND how they are currently run. Congress puts a lot of stipulations on how they are manufactured. NASA has a big problem with congressional interference.
Their science/unmanned programs are different, because congress is more hands off. Those are running just fine. The problem is that SpaceX is a huge cost and has a lot of manufacturing and jobs associated with it. That invites congressional interference.
Not only that, but they also have a large commercial presence already with the Starlink. The government doesn’t typically run things like that, so they’ll probably sell of the Starlink portion of the company.
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s not libertarian-ism, it’s just how NASA is run. Once the budgets get into the billions, congress can’t keep their hands off it.
Yes, there are certainly problems with the Commercial Crew program right now, just look at how Starliner is run. We probably won’t get a capsule from Boeing, because they don’t have an incentive to finish, due to the fact that it’s not a cost+ program like the SLS is. SLS is also constrained by politics, they are required to use so many Shuttle parts, just to keep those sub-contractors happy.
lazy excuse
Lol what? You think that would be easy? Like when Michael tries to “declare bankruptcy” in The Office?
they wouldn’t need to take SpaceX. just replace Musk’s ownership/control with Some Advisory Board™️staffed by project managers that know the fuck they’re doing. SpaceX wouldn’t necessarily need to be closed- just a change in ownership.
Granted, that’s pratically a pipe dream since congress has been intent on privatization instead of having NASA be in that role.
after about a decade, the government then sells its stake off slowly; probably reaping a rather huge profit while it’s at it.
Just outsource DOD too, they basically work for their main sponsors anyway.
/s
