After giving in to Putin/Xi’s demands to not provide starlink internet service over Taiwan, DOD officials are growing nervous about trusting Elon’s Space company with our national secrets
Revoke his security clearance. They did it to Oppenheimer for a lot less.
If you’re going to rely on private firms for your aerospace espionage endeavors, maybe factor in their leader’s sanity before you sign the contract with them.
Nah. Loads of things just shouldn’t be privatised.
I 100% agree with you but is there someone else in thr US who can reliably launch satellites? I know several othe companies are developing these systems but I don’t think any are anywhere close to Space X’s reliability or capability.
Space X is doing some awesome stuff and I hate that the awesome has to be tempered by the owner is a piece of shit.
SpaceX is wasting government money, they have almost spent all of the money they were given to land people on the moon, on building a rocket that can’t do basic stuff.
That is not awesome.
They’re only able to do it because they’ve received trillions of dollars from the federal government.
They should nationalize SpaceX before they ever let someone like Musk get the security clearance needed to be in that position.
You want to trust him after what happened in Ukraine? Are you out of your mind? And he’s admitted that he chats with Putin on a regular basis.
why the hell would you be?
What even is the DOD/DOJ doing here?
Surely you meant “wouldn’t”
Aw man, if only there was some sort of space administration that you could invest some of your trillions of dollars into so that your satellites could be launched by a group that you can monitor and trust.
Nope, everything in the US must be privatized. EVERYTHING. Capitalism DEMANDS it
To be fair here… The old guard still aren’t working on reuse even after SpaceX not only championed it but actually succeeded and proved reliability.
The old launch providers are still just throwing their shit away and still cost billions of dollars for launches.
The Commercial Resupply Service and Commercial Crew Programs have also achieved better standards than NASA had when they started them, and at much cheaper cost than the previous solutions.
Privatisation isn’t inherently bad, and importantly, the money is still being handled through NASA for oversight.
I bet if you offered them grant money to develop it… it wouldn’t have been left on the table.
No, but they wouldn’t do anything beyond the exact specific minimums of the grant either.
Huh? Why do you think this? The implication seems to be that they want to pocket the rest or something?
Let’s not forget, we are talking about NASA here, not a private corporation. Why would an arm of the federal government have any interest in not doing “anything beyond the exact specific minimums of the grant”?
I cannot speak to building rockets, but I do know about other types of government financing, and I can tell you that the scientists and engineers who would have received such a grant, would have no reason not to use as much of it as possible. In fact, that’s exactly how they would justify a need for more in the future.
And you think a private business will do anything more than the minimum of a contract?
SpaceX has with their vehicles and options. They’re all more capable than the contact they were built under.
Yes
the money is still being handled through NASA for oversight.
Oversight of the money is far from the problem here. This is not an issue of cheating the government or mismanagement of money, this is a national security issue.
Just outsource DOD too, they basically work for their main sponsors anyway.
/s
Apply the same standards the rest of us have to meet, revoke his fucking security clearance already! Same for the racist criminal spray painted orange Cheeto, too. This is completely obvious.
IIRC, you’re supposed to report when you’ve had significant contact with Canadians and this motherfucker is talking with Vladimir Putin himself. I can’t imagine he reported that to whoever his clearance is with.
When I had my clearance, we were told if we had a conversation with a foreign national at a bar, we had to disclose it, even after we had already received our clearance.
I was put through a multi-hour polygraph interview from hell, where I was told I didn’t know how to breathe and was threatened with being failed and losing my clearance, because I was having issues remembering online foreign penpals from high school.
But motherfucker is talking to Putin on the regularly, and he’s a billionaire with billions worth of government contracts? Tell me again, US Government, why any of your citizens should give a fuck about anything, again?
Because billionaires are not citizens of a country, they are essentially a country unto themselves.
In what would be an unprecedented move, the US needs to nationalize SpaceX in the name of national security.
It’s not unprecedented, though.
They don’t need to go that far. Just force Musk to divest. (And prosecute him for any crimes he’s committed, but that might be asking too much of the government.)
They should go that far though.
This entire position that things are in are a direct result of a certain party trying to provatise space travel, and “run it like a business”, which is how the Challenger disaster happened.
So wouldn’t be the worst idea to pull waayyyyyy back.
No, not everything needs to be nationalized. That’s a lazy excuse to solving problems and often just leads to different issues. Look at the fights we have for NASA’s current miniscule budget slice for a perfect example. Our government is dog shit at allocating and running departments like this, primarily because of politics.
Remember that neither NASA or the military actually build anything themselves, everything is outsourced to companies like SpaceX, Lockheed, Boeing, etc. So you’re advocating all of that to be brought into the government bureaucracy machine with no existing infrastructure to manage it, for it to be smothered to death by politicians trying to “prove” that government doesn’t work.
Instead, they just need to demand that Elon not have any decision making position at the company to continue getting contracts, blacklist him. As it is, daily SpaceX operations run without Elon. Gwynne Shotwell actually runs the company, regardless of specific titles. Elon doesn’t actually do the engineering work either, so while he may be involved in major decisions, it’s more the overall vision, the company would operate just fine whether he’s there or not. HE is the problem, not SpaceX as a company, and not the entire C-Suite team, just him. Get rid of him and the place runs just like it does now, works towards the same goals, and daily operations and contracts continue as normal,
lazy excuse
Lol what? You think that would be easy? Like when Michael tries to “declare bankruptcy” in The Office?
No, not everything needs to be nationalized.
Good thing no one said everything, just a rocket company that NASA wouldn’t need to outsource to anymore since they would have the facilities to make all the rockets they wanted themselves.
Problem is that if SpaceX becomes part of NASA, then it’ll be like the space shuttle. It’ll need parts made by every small company that contributed to some random representative in every state, so we’ll end up with 300+ contractors all building critical components.
Why can’t it source those things the same way SpaceX does now?
It could, but that’s not how these types of programs get run. They’re as much about making jobs in specific areas as they are about solving a problem.
That’s not a very convincing argument. The U.S. has never nationalized a company like SpaceX before. We have no idea how it would be run.
I don’t find the libertarian “everything the government does is inefficient and corrupt” ideas very compelling.
they wouldn’t need to take SpaceX. just replace Musk’s ownership/control with Some Advisory Board™️staffed by project managers that know the fuck they’re doing. SpaceX wouldn’t necessarily need to be closed- just a change in ownership.
Granted, that’s pratically a pipe dream since congress has been intent on privatization instead of having NASA be in that role.
after about a decade, the government then sells its stake off slowly; probably reaping a rather huge profit while it’s at it.
