• AA5B@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      SpaceX has been a huge success for NASA. For much less funding than NASA doing it themselves or a fraction of the cost of ULA, NASA has a very reliable and much cheaper medium launch vehicle launching much more frequently, and a heavy launcher pretty far in development.

      This is great, turning “routine” space operations over to cheaper private companies, while focussing on research and stretching the envelope

      • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        Easy to do when you pay people shit, don’t care about things blowing up, when you get to build on the already established knowledge, and use their facilities. Government on the other hand could never allow anything to fail and had to forge the path.

    • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      Corporations cannot carry the risk involved. Because else it would be similar to the medicine industry, but there is no large market to sell to.

      We’re going to Mars is not something you can sell in a boardroom, because why? What is the ROI?

      • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        What I’m saying is musk wants to divert all of the government funding from NASA to spacex. ROI is all the funding from the government, every year for decades. It’s not a sell a product and profit model in the regular sense. And this way musk can personally take a cut of all that funding.