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.
> 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.
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
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.
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> There is certainly some merit to that
Any source for that?
The profit margin has to come from somewhere.
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> 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.
2 replies →
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-...
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The Biden administration released an RFP a year ago to exactly that end. IIRC, there was an $800+ million contract awarded.
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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.
1 reply →
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