Comment by nickff
1 day ago
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.
Yes, certainly Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, has no conflicting interest in privatizing America's space operations...
I think you're assuming a maximalist interpretation where the federal government sells NASA or spins it off as a private company or something like that. What the OP was likely referring to (and they'll have to answer definitively) was the privatization of significant portions of NASA potentially so that it just acts as a pass-through entity for private contracts.
Take something like the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA could potentially build its own rockets to launch its own telescopes [1]. Instead what we might see is NASA wants to launch a rocket with their telescope, but their capacity to launch a rocket has been privatized via contracts that go to private enterprise instead of through NASA.
Since many in the Trump administration have espoused the belief that existing functions of government and/or administrative agencies would be better off privatized or completely cut, many are worried that the same fate awaits NASA with crony capitalism as the end result.
When you say that you don't think anyone is looking to privatize NASA or the telescopes, instead what you should be considering isn't NASA being completely privatized in the sense that it's now a private entity separate from the government, but you should be considering NASA as being privatized in the sense that Congress and the Trump administration allocate taxpayer dollars through NASA to private enterprise for existing or potentially new NASA functions in the future. It's less so about literal 100% privatization, and more so about someone who happens to have a rocket company gets taxpayer allocated funding "from NASA" to provide services. I also don't think NASA as it exists today will be 100% privatized, maybe 40% is privatized, etc. , and the space telescopes won't be because they don't generate revenue, but what I do think will happen and it's up to the Trump administration to convince me that this isn't the case and earn my trust, is that they will allocate funding for NASA works specifically to private enterprise that is in favor with the current administration in a form of crony capitalism.
One way to maybe think about this would be imagine that we "privatized" the IRS and in order to file your taxes you would have to file through one of many existing vendors who have contracts from the IRS and charge you to file your taxes. Does that feel right? Why can't we just file directly with the IRS?
[1] I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing, it's just an example.