alt Hacker NewsTheoretically, absolutely. Of course it gets messy in reality. But theoretically there is no reason they couldn’t. If someone in a certain office snapped their fingers they could nationalize spacex for example and remove profitability requirements while preserving institutional knowledge and team structure. Just musk will no longer be the richest man on the planet.
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> Theoretically, absolutely. Of course it gets messy in reality
That’s like saying “theoretically you could get to space by flapping your wings”—you just need to ignore inconvenient laws of physics. Economics describes forces of the real world, you cannot just wave them away.
Practically, that's exactly what Chavez did. Where did that lead?
This is now an argument I can start to get behind. There isn't a need for profit seeking or "dollar optimization" and I fully subscribe to the argument that the government can just "do things". I likewise fully subscribe to the argument that the ability for the government to just "do things" has been eroded over time systematically.
But, like, that's divergent from "This SpaceX contract is pure grift" that OP was not so subtly implying.
When has NASA got even close to that number of dollar per kilo payload in its long history? AFAIK, never.