• theneverfox@pawb.social
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    1 month ago

    NASA doesn’t have effective control of their budget anymore. Congress holds the purse strings and uses them like a harness

    NASA gets funding to do something - like go to the moon, or track CO2 emissions. But it comes with strings - sometimes you have to build a certain component in a certain congressional district, sometimes Congress chooses the design you have to use

    It’s a problem of politics and corruption. When the public supports NASA, they have more autonomy. When NASA gets a blank check, they do more with it - reusable rockets aren’t a new idea, and when they cancelled the shuttle program NASA had brain drain. Some of those people founded spaceX - Elon didn’t start it, he came in when they were getting off the ground, just like with Tesla

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      From wikipedia:

      In early 2002, Elon Musk started to look for staff for his company, soon to be named SpaceX. Musk approached five people for the initial positions at the fledgling company, including Michael Griffin, who declined the position of Chief Engineer,[17] Jim Cantrell and John Garvey (Cantrell and Garvey would later found the company Vector Launch), rocket engineer Tom Mueller, and Chris Thompson.

      So your claim that

      Some of those people founded spaceX - Elon didn’t start it, he came in when they were getting off the ground, just like with Tesla

      conflicts with wikipedia’s history of the company.