I know most of y’all have fully abandoned Twitter, but good lord if he actually does this (which is not guaranteed mind you) a LOT of vulnerable people are going to get hurt.
I know most of y’all have fully abandoned Twitter, but good lord if he actually does this (which is not guaranteed mind you) a LOT of vulnerable people are going to get hurt.
SpaceX has the added constraints of being a NASA contractor. For example, even though Crew Dragon was designed and built by SpaceX, has to strictly follow NASA safety and reliability specifications. NASA has a huge amount of oversight into their operations even though they’re technically a private company. Which is as it should be.
But then why involve SpaceX in the first place? Unless the point is to just funnel public money into a private corporation?
Yep
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As crazy as it sounds, SpaceX is the best option out of a bad bunch.
Something that a lot of people might not know is that NASA, except for prototyping, does not and never has built rockets, or crew or cargo vehicles. They build the payloads (like space probes) or supply the astronauts that go into or onto those rockets and crew vehicles. The alternative to the fixed-price contracts that SpaceX now gets are the massive-cost-overrun cost-plus contracts that have historically gone to defense contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Rockwell, Northrop Grumman, etc.
NASA has historically provided the designs that those defense contractors have built, and sometimes owns the end products (like the space shuttles). This US government aerospace contracting arrangement goes all the way back to the post-WW2 days when the US Army paid Chrysler (yes, the car company) to reverse-engineer captured V2 rockets.