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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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]
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?
Are you kidding? There have been so many discussions about the JWST's output on HN that if you haven't already heard the answers to your questions then you must have been actively ignoring them.
In any case it's partly aan impossible question at this stage because it hasn't been up so long. A lot of the research that came out of Hubble took years to complete and the datasets there were much much smaller.
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.
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".
>> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Not just the government. Destroying whole parts of the future and the potential of humanity, just to stoke the egos of two men.
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.
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They don't want to destroy it, just make it so useless they have pretext to privatize it.
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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.
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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.
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lol the Mars project is a prestige project for Musk now, no way that gets defunded.
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SLS has been to the moon and back. Starship hasn't yet made it to orbit.
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> 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.
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.
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]
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JWST launched on an Ariane
he is not profiting from it so…
That Musk is dead.
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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?
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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?
Are you kidding? There have been so many discussions about the JWST's output on HN that if you haven't already heard the answers to your questions then you must have been actively ignoring them.
In any case it's partly aan impossible question at this stage because it hasn't been up so long. A lot of the research that came out of Hubble took years to complete and the datasets there were much much smaller.
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.
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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.
Just name a random star “Trump” and the Oompa Loompa will be happy
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".
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We could have had Bernie
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>> 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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.