Oh right, they are very different and neither entity has any overlap at all.
Fake news? Oil lobbyist? Hyperbole exposes a weak argument.
SpaceX was given incentives to build their Texas launch facility.
To pretend SpaceX is not benefiting from Tesla is laughable.
I don’t think anyone of us “ninnies” said anything about it being tax payer funded. It wasn’t. I’d prefer if we’d have tax payer funded space flight, because I actually care about exploration of space, not the corporate exploitation of space.
Ah! That’s true. He does get tax cuts and grants instead of that publicly funded money going to university research programs or NASA.
I keep hearing this claim about Tesla getting billions of gummint money and how it’s so unfair to the poor beleagured ICE industry. Oddly, every time so far that I’ve asked for actual details of this the response seems to end up a mumbled ‘well I read it somewhere, unfair nasty electric things ruining my preciousssssssss’ or similar.
Maybe there is actual real evidence somewhere; maybe there is actually chocolate in Hersheys brown-wax ‘confectionary’. Just haven’t seen any evidence for myself. By contrast, ICE companies seem to get quite a lot of support over the years that for some reason doesn’t count as evil subsidy.
You reply “that’s true” to a post explaining why getting paid for launch services isn’t grants and then go on to complain about getting grants… logic failure or just being argumentative?
I’d still launch a car into space only to make the Gallagher joke about Americans going to the Moon with a house and a car more literal (probably the only funny thing by him that I liked in his entire career).
I suppose I’m just one of those shit gibbons you were just going on about.
There are far less grants going to college and universities because private corporations are part of that. But hey, who needs universities anyway, right? Bunch of shit gibbons.
Gosh, I never knew that. You’d think I might have noticed after getting several degrees in scinecy stuff and engineeringy stuff and arty stuff. Silly me. Oh, wait; wrong. I’m sure there some sort of continuum thing running between the two. You’d be amazed how many ‘scientists’ spend most of their time doing enginering, and how many ‘engineers’ do solid science. And indeed how many do excellent art, and how many artist do good science or engineering.
To make those observation how kinda have to throw stuff into space. So somebody has to make the thrower. Sometimes an agency like NASA is the maker, sometimes it is somebody like spaceX or New Origins, or RocketLab.
What? You actually think the question shouldn’t be asked before exploration is done? That’s ridiculous; asking the question is part of seeking the answer.
Did your Google subscription lapse? 
The right absolutely uses these numbers to whine about Tesla, while defending their heavily subsidized non-renewable industries (Which I can’t explain or understand, nor am I here to defend them).
So as a reaction, the Muskovites then proclaim Musk Inc. is a private maverick showing up the government, which isn’t exactly telling the entire story either.
Well, yes; but both “Elon Musk’s business models are all based on government subsidy” and “Tesla has gotten $5 billion in government subsidies” are both talking points based on bullshit numbers and bizarre definitions of “subsidy”, first distributed by a series of lobbyists-formerly-connected-to-oil-companies, to all the best unselective fake-or-not news outlets.
I’m not accusing @vonbobo of being a fossil-fuel-industry shill; I’m just noting that they are uncritically repeating the baseless propaganda of fossil-fuel-industry shills.
Oh, no, I don’t think vonbobo has any ‘guilt’ here; simply posting an actual newspaper article shouldn’t lead one to that conclusion on its own.
It’s old and clearly a hit piece and has logical leaps that make Trump look coherent. Just the sort of thing the fossil fools love. Quotes from notorious shorters trying to bolster their position; conflating earnings from industry wide tax details as special subsidies … typical stuff.
Another thing that seems to be ignored by the Debbie Downer types (“we shouldn’t be wasting money on this launch because whataboutthisthatandtheother”) is that SpaceX is drastically reducing the cost of access to space, and this was a test flight in the first place. Rockets don’t go directly from the drawing board to production-ready.
Someone needed to light a fire under the cost-plus contract crowd.
So much this.
Every other rocket that the US launches pays not just for the rocket, but also for the ongoing development of that rocket. SpaceX is the only one that pays for their own R&D. It completely blows my mind that people can possibly consider SpaceX a recipient of a disproportionate amount of government money with that fact hanging over the discussion.
There could be thread upon thread on how Government contracting is the root of all evil.
Cost Plus is the number one demon.
SpaceX is doing us a favor.
NASA, for its part, is wasting so much money trying to create a public launch system that actual science missions are being cancelled. The desire to have a “public rocket”, despite the fact that they aren’t public, they’re owned by their respective corporations contracted to NASA, is actually hurting NASA’s ability to perform actual research:
http://moonandback.com/2011/09/15/impossibly-high-nasa-development-cost-are-heart-of-the-matter/
Like so many things that are politicized, like the NASA budget, so much rides on congressman X or Senator Y getting his pet project built in his district so that he can get votes that programs like the Senate Launch System continue to suck all the research dollars out of NASA just so they can recycle their old hardware, continue their longstanding and extremely lucrative relationships with the existing space industry, and maintain the status quo. That same status quo left the US without a shuttle, without a plan for the space world post-ISS, and has watched NASA change focus from Mars to the Moon to the realization that it probably can’t afford to do either of those things.
That happened because of public spending on space programs through NASA, not in spite of it.
SpaceX has demonstrably saved US taxpayers money on launches to the ISS, and on the government Falcon 9 launches, they’ve performed thus far. They’ve scared the shit out of companies that were happy to just sit back and accept cost-plus contracts for their old, incredibly expensive hardware and made them compete, and, I hope given that the Falcon Heavy launch was the second most streamed youtube video of all time, sparked the idea to a new generation of kids that a career in space might be cool again (which, I hope, increases the role of higher learning, not diminishes it).
Was that a Gallagher routine too? I just remember the Seinfeld bit.
Pay attention to Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) Boeing and Lockheed are his best friends.
Companies like SpaceX also add a buffer to the especially tasty NASA pork barrel. Every state where they need a vote in congress gets some slice. Now NASA gets the launch money, and puts it up for bid.
Pork barrel will still happen, but not such a feeding frenzy.
The “we should spend money in space, we should spend it down here” crowd seem to think we loaded $100 bills into Saturn Vs.
Thanks for not calling me stupid!
Here is the historical budget for NASA:
and in case anyone is interested, here is their own website discussing their budget (last years):
Not surprisingly, the budget for NASA really grew during the era of the Cold War, the height of our space program that put us on the moon.
I would argue the problems with NASA budget stems from the fact that we have a congress that overwhelmingly believes that private industry is the fix for everything - ignoring the very real Cold War era successes built by public money, through a public institution like NASA. We stopped supporting NASA and seeing it as a luxury primarily because the CW ended, and there was much less public support for such a program. There has grown to be some serious public outright hostility to pretty much any kind of publicly funded research. What ever problems NASA might have, I don’t think that gutting a public institution that has done something extraordinary in the history of the world is going to help. Our defense budget for killing people in other countries is a huge expense, and none of us seem to really bat an eye over that.
I wouldn’t suggest that private industry has no part to play - nor did I actually say that, BTW, despite what others here have decided I said - but if private, for profit industries are leading the way, we’re going to get what we deserve, which is a profit driven space program that isn’t primarily about exploration, but exploitation. I guess I’m having a hard time understanding how people can’t grok that point, given that it’s not like there is a shortage of science fiction media exploring the issues of privatized space travel…?
Boeing and Lockheed Martin bring good jobs to his district. Is it any surprise that he supports them?
