1mo ago

Elon Musk Trying to Scrap NASA's Moon Program

futurism.com Elon Musk Trying to Scrap NASA's Moon Program

Elon Musk is calling for NASA to ditch its Moon program, arguing that the "Moon is a distraction" and that "we're going straight to Mars.

Consequently, the South African billionaire has been put in charge of a so-called "Department of Government Efficiency" to excise $2 trillion from the national budget. Whether this advisory group will be able to take aim at the Artemis program remains to be seen.

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48 comments

Gee wouldn't have anything to do with sabotaging his competition so he can corruptly profit? Sounds like someone needs to drain the swamp of this scum.
- He is not even sabotaging his competition. Starship is supposed to be part of the program and despite the spin will not be ready.
  So he wants to cancel the program that has real deadlines so he can keep promising he will colonize Mars in the next 5 years, which he has been claiming for some time now.
  
  he HSS been
  That's a funny auto correct. Do you talk about high speed steel a lot?
  
  His Ship’s Ship
  
  Nope, no clue why it auto corrected to that, or that I even managed to mistype has.
  
  Yeah, but Biden's aides had 4 years to toss him out....
  And instead they didn't, and we all know by know from those same aides and other elected Dems that Biden wasn't competent on day 1, so if his aides didn't think something was important, it didn't get done.
  We fucked around electing Biden, his admin fucked around in office, and now we're in the find out stage just like trump voters.
  Edit:
  To clarify I meant Biden's admin had four years to cancel Musk's contracts for any of the shit ton of reasons musk shouldn't have government contracts, and then they could have drastically increased NASA funding.
  I get how my comment could have looked like I was criticizing Biden's admin for not invoking the 25th. I still think they should have, but that wasn't what I meant in the original comment.
- But if you drain a swamp, scum is all that remains.
- The primary reason NASA still exists is as a way to funnel federal tax dollars to the states in a way that doesn't look too much like socialism. They also spin it as a way to keep rocket engineers skilled up and in-industry in case they're needed for war.
  The stuff that we care about, the science, and the inspiring future generations, is all just a sideshow to the politicians signing the bills.
  
  I’m going to need to see the receipt for this claim.
  It sounds way too cool to be true.
  
  To the politicians, it's true. NASA is an easy(-ish) sell to the masses. There's a reason that the funding for NASA has stipulations on what districts certain projects are based in, and what companies make specific parts.
  The space shuttle wasn't just one company, it was dozens and dozens of companies spread out across the country building high tech and high skill parts. The SLS was based heavily on the shuttle to keep those exact same districts employed with high skill (and high pay) work.
  If congress was ok with NASA actually achieving things efficiently and on time, they'd just give them a budget and a goal, but that's not how things are funded.
  We still get the end result, it's just an extremely wasteful way to get there.
  Now look at how military projects are done. It's the same thing.
  It's all a jobs program with a big focus on shoveling money towards companies that give a few tens of thousands of dollars towards their local representative.
  
  This is what really annoys me about DOGE: we really do need to cut government spending severely as it is so inefficient, just we need to do it in a precise way that actually preserves the government’s function. Musk’s goal is to cut costs by just removing function altogether.
  
  If they actually wanted the SLS, it would have been funded in such a way as to have delivered the big orange rocket by now. It's not funded in that way. The big orange rocket is not the goal of the SLS or Artemis programs. It's all about "pork barrel" projects, which are just socialism with extra steps and less benefit. And maybe we get a cool rocket and some excellent science out of it eventually.

48 comments