If SpaceX was nationalized, Starship development would of never happened. Catching the boosters with giant chopsticks, would have never happened. We would probably spend $100B to get to a human to mars and we'd say "Done". However, keeping a profit incentive ensure proper allocation of resources and goals with economic fucundity instead of dumping 60 years to build a death trap with no meaningful payload capacity to the moon. SpaceX has only 20 years, and has rapidly advanced past any agency or company on the planet. SpaceX has the capacity and access that Governments wish they could create, but inside a government system the incintives can never exist to create those in the first place.
You'd need evidence for this claim, because it's evidently false given the nationalized space program of the soviet union and the nationalized HSR program of the PRC both had cost optimizations built in. Also, the Soviet Union's wasn't entirely centralized, different design departments competed.
> they never would have developed reusability,
Space shuttle.
> However, keeping a profit incentive ensure proper allocation of resources and goals with economic fucundity
What's the profit incentive of a nuclear weapons program? Access to space is an assurance of sovereignty. There's no room for inefficient resource allocation mechanisms like profit incentive.
Last piece of evidence i'll show... SpaceX is vastly farther ahead, with a order of magnitude less budget. Thus, the reason crazy libs want to nationalize are exactly what will be destroyed by it's nationalization. You can't force people to innovate only give them economics incentive to do so.
I get that you're trying to engage in a sort of confidence struggle with me here, but just saying I've provided you evidence doesn't actually mean I have. You said that NASA is incapable of producing a reusable design. That's demonstrably false. The question of whether it can improve on that design is a different one - demonstrably yes is the answer, since the shuttle wasn't its first design. There's nothing unique about SpaceX. The people that worked there would simply be working for NASA instead under a nationalized space program. Hell maybe Musk would even be there!
> You can't force people to innovate only give them economics incentive to do so.
I posted about this recently elsewhere, but the long and short of it is: you can't force people to innovate, full stop. No amount of money inspires innovation. People are inherently driven to innovate by their human nature. Longer comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50389140
Damage control at Tesla https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-giga...
Twitter finally distracting him away from his meddling https://www.yahoo.com/news/spacex-employees-relieved-elon-mu...
> Uhh... we tried that. it'd called NASA, and it's been behind the soviet union since the early 2000's.
Fascinating. You know what, actually, this part of the conversation is far more interesting to me. I concede that Musk is a super genius that definitely didn't do a Nazi salute on live television. I'd rather explore this with you.
So, you said it right there... NASA, which functioned as a government sponsored project manager distributing out contracts to businesses from a government budget... Failed to keep up with the Soviet Union space program, which was, well you know the answer! Fully nationalized.
I'm not surprised that American half measures at nationalization fail, just like I'm not surprised that the HSR failed through crony capitalism. There in the name. I'm arguing for something a little more dramatic than NASA. Something provably effective. Speaking of HSR, I'm reminded of another modern nationalized infrastructure project that is unparalleled in scale or success, somewhere in the East ;)
> Why do you feel the right to be able to take what someone else has built?
Musk's money has value only because of the society we all together create. It's silly to draw some lines around and say "actually the country's national space program should move to the whims of this one guy that signed investment paperwork and occasionally yells at people on a factory floor." A deeply unserious way of managing something critical to national sovereignty. The Soviets understood this which is why they got to space first. The Americans could only come close when they got a little commie about it; they surpassed the Soviets only when they centralized even more than the Soviets did, which is why Ayn Rand got upset enough to write about it: https://courses.aynrand.org/works/apollo-11/