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.
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.
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:
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.
Any source for that?
The profit margin has to come from somewhere.
I would know, I work for the government.
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/iss-deorbit-...
Not only does Musk have a lot of power to get favors granted to him now, but I'm sure he also realizes that there could be significant backlash against him and his companies during a future administration, if his and Trump's actions turn out to be as broadly, bipartisan-ly unpopular as I'm hoping. So not only will he want to extract as much as he can from the government now, he'll want to consolidate and increase his lead over his competitors so a future administration may have no choice but to continue using SpaceX for the bulk of its needs.
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.
His move away from the previously-stated mission for Tesla to decarbonize the world's energy systems makes a lot more sense now
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.
(Human space flight is also a waste of money, for reasons I explained in other posts. Other than entertaining children, it serves almost no constructive purpose whatsoever. And the space tourism niche is basically a joke.)
They still don't understand that they voted for this specific thing, nobody was shy during the campaign about what was to come.
I’d argue the judicial branch is the only branch fighting back mostly because it still has a fair amount of Democrat judges not falling in line. As (R) prosecutors quit, as judges block executive orders and memos, it is the only fight happening as congress gives itself over to revenge politics.
IMHO if someone wanted to cut the James Webb the time to do it was 15 years ago. Now that it is actually flying and producing the best images of the cosmos to date it is too late. Those costs are fully sunk. The ongoing running costs are downright modest by government standards. Plus the project is visible enough that cuts are likely to result in public outcry.
What's your point, really, aside from nitpicking, when "orbiting the moon" is a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the statement "been to the moon and back"?
So I'm seriously so, so curious, because you are far from the only person to think this, why do you think Mars is actually a facade to funnel money to his companies?
You don't have to believe anything Elon says, just look at what he has done for the past 22 years. SpaceX was founded on the singular purpose of getting to Mars. Elon originally tried to buy ICBMs from Russia to launch to Mars, when that fell through he started his own rocket company. The entire tech stack and rockets being built are to reduce the cost of mass to orbit by the orders of magnitude needed to colonize mars. There is no other reason to build something as huge as Starship. Elon IS funding getting to mars by himself, the Starship program is mostly self funded, with the Artemis HLS contract coming well after the program was started.
I think what you're saying is that he is obsessed with Mars and is simply taking advantage of his position to fund this goal more and also massively profit. This I can understand and I think is a very real concern. I don't think it's what the poster I originally replied to is saying though.
I don’t think you have any interest in an actual discussion here. You just want to signal youre right and the other party is wrong.
There are far more productive uses of your time then defending a stranger you’ll never meet. It’s a beautiful world out there. Please go enjoy it
He has no interest in being able to control himself for years at a time, nor is he interested in solving the difficult problems of such a long deep space endeavour. If he were, then he'd be cooperative and disciplined, and try to make progress in this area.
Furthermore you're saying that since SpaceX isn't working on problems of habitation and deep space survival that he's not serious about Mars?
Is that right?
He's definitely obsessed with being seen by others as the guy who's going to be the first to Mars, but I'd put it in the same camp as his obsession with being seen as an elite Path of Exile 2 player.
Musk's position as CEO of SpaceX and head of DOGE is the most conflict-y of conflicts of interest when it comes to deciding what happens to NASA. It 100% doesn't matter if he is the truest of true believers in the need to make a settlement on Mars. We should not be giving him the power to dismantle other space-related efforts to fuel his personal project. Even if he is right at how critical Mars is, it is incredibly dangerous to allow people with conflicts of interest to be responsible for decisions on this scale.
That said I am unsure if that is that much of a blow. The government is very good at some things, it looks to me (I am a casual observer) that SpaceX has eaten their lunch in terms of a space programme.
But the James Webb was exactly the sort of incredibly difficult, high risk project that NASA (and Government labs generally) excel at. No private company would ever do something like that. It is a huge achievement and is changing our view, again, of the Universe.
So I guess it will be doomed now too. Noting so dangerous as a good example.
SLS was never about being the most practical and/or efficient launcher. It is a pork barrel project, but one with an important role. In particular, it is maintaining vital aerospace industrial capacity. If the US wants things like ICBMs then programs like SLS are a necessary evil.
Typically when you have a situation warranting nukes you won't have time to fuel a falcon 9.
So, just because idea of using Falcon 9s as a delivery solution for a strategic nuclear deterrent may be as bad as ordering your chief designer to throw a big steel ball at the window of the new model of car you're currently in the middle of announcing even despite the guy's obvious reticence, doesn't mean it won't happen.
Someone makes an uneducated point but it must be defended because Musk bad...
Do you think you're making a good point here?
If Musk wants to push for "Falcon 9-based liquid-fueled ICBMs", he'll do so, even if he actually does know they're not the best/right tech for the job. And someone like Trump will listen to him.
It's also a bit in bad faith of you to play the "you only disagree because Musk bad" card, when GP explicitly acknowledges that these sorts of bad government decisions are not unique to the US/Trump/Musk.
However, there are potential military applications for a vehicle like Falcon 9. For example, imagine being able to insert a Special Operations team almost anywhere in the world on a few hours notice. In a potential near-peer conflict there will also be a need to quickly launch replacement military satellites to make up attrition losses.
Just look at the suppliers working on the SLS SRBs and those working on the LGM-35 program, perhaps then you'll see the extent of the overlap. Furthermore, you might want to look into why the space shuttle had the architecture it did, and why space shuttle SRBs were being shipped out of Utah. Large scale SRB manufacturing has been, and continues to be, an enormous problem for the DoD. Hence why wasteful programs like SLS exist.
I suspect the facilities working on SLS solid rocket boosters are owned by Northrop Grumman, just like the companies that were left over from making Peacekeeper missiles, now making Sentinel missiles, are probably now owned by Northrop Grumman. This doesn't show that Sentinel - or any other program - is benefitting from SLS's supply chains in a meaningful way. It's hard to see how that's possible, given SLS's low-volume nature. But I guess I'll try to keep an open mind...
> Furthermore, you might want to look into why the space shuttle had the architecture it did
I have lots of opinions about that, but if you have some reference material you'd like to recommend, please do! (and if they support the notion that SLS SRB production is somehow a boon to SRB makers everywhere, I guess I'd be intrigued by that as well)
What are you a socialist? /s
Why would they want to do that? This administration is hell-bent on reducing spending, period, not moving it around, as well as crippling the executive branch's ability to govern. And they don't care what useful initiatives die due to their actions.
And I can't see Trump's supporters caring about this at all. He won the presidency in no small part because he acknowledged that people were facing financial strife, while Harris just kept repeating that the economy was great (implying that anyone with financial issues was either imagining it, or themselves at fault). Why would a Trump supporter care about some "elitist" scientist being able to look at celestial phenomena? They don't care about this stuff, sadly.
From Slide 26: "$317M supports the operation of Great Observatories including the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble, and Chandra".
Can't some of the money that's been saved from other cutting channeled to NASA?