NASA's James Webb Space Telescope faces potential 20% budget cut

Re:NASA's James Webb Space Telescope faces potential 20% bud... by throwaway173738 on Friday February 21, 2025 @04:08PM (#43132992)

This might surprise you but you can’t always take what people say at face value. You also have to think about why they say they want something and what else they might want. Mars is a great example of something he could fund himself, and something he presumably has funded in the past. So if he’s going to take government funding now when he’s holding the strings, it stands to reason that he’s taking advantage of his position. And you can see that play out with the $400 million dollar purchase of Cybertrucks for example where there are tons of more cost-effective tools for the job. So it seems like whatever he says his real goal is to strip-mine certain agencies for profit while he does it. Why would we trust him?

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Re:NASA's James Webb Space Telescope faces potential 20% bud... by brandonagr2 on Friday February 21, 2025 @04:27PM (#43133218)

This might surprise you, but you have no idea what you are talking about.

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.

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Re:NASA's James Webb Space Telescope faces potential 20% bud... by cma on Friday February 21, 2025 @05:08PM (#43133658)

He said his Tesla comp package was 100% to get to Mars for mankind then immediately bought Twitter when it hit the perf targets and he first got the package.

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Re:NASA's James Webb Space Telescope faces potential 20% bud... by rockemsockem on Sunday February 23, 2025 @05:15PM (#43153723)

I'm really not just looking at what he says, but his actions over the last 20+ years, combined with the fact that starting a rocket company is not a particularly great way to become richer. It certainly hasn't made Jeff Bezos more rich.

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.

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