IN A NUTSHELL 🚀 The International Space Station (ISS) faces rising safety concerns due to structural cracks and air leaks. 💰 Proposed NASA budget cuts by the Trump administration threaten the safe deorbiting of the ISS by 2030. 🛰️ SpaceX is contracted to develop a U.S. Deorbit Vehicle (USDV), but Elon Musk suggests an earlier
  • @Zetta@mander.xyzEnglish
    8•7 days ago

    Whoa now, putting words into my mouth. That’s not something I ever said or believed. I’m just reflecting on the reality of our current existence, NASA spent a lot of money on rockets, It would have been the best possible outcome if NASA “offered things at the lowest possible cost”. But they didn’t, and our timeline missed the miracle where they did that.

    They did give contracts to private industry to develop rockets In the hopes of driving down launch costs for themselves and their plan worked, that’s what happened.

    I’m a pretty big space enthusiast and I like to fantasize that I may someday be able to go to space before I die, I’m fairly young, but I know probably not. However because of that I’m happy about the reality we got, even if it’s not the best one. It’s certainly not the worst reality we could’ve had. Plus (if NASAs budget wasn’t getting gutted) NASA can now allocate more money to science missions like landers, probes, telescopes, and orbiters and that is just as exciting.

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]English
      27•6 days ago

      I’m just reflecting on the reality of our current existence, NASA spent a lot of money on rockets, It would have been the best possible outcome if NASA “offered things at the lowest possible cost”. But they didn’t, and our timeline missed the miracle where they did that.

      NASA has always been used to funnel money to arms dealer companies who actually make rockets for them. Like it never had its own factories or production pipeline, it was always just big handouts to corporate MIC contractors who were further financially incentivized to delay and drive up costs even more since the contracts let them do that completely unchecked.

      It was also kept pretty tangential to what the US military wanted: they wanted ICBMs, so NASA did rocket research for them; they wanted satellites, so NASA did satellite launch research for them; they wanted some nonsense contraption for “space commandos” to steal Soviet satellites with, so NASA had to incorporate that into the Space Shuttle program which was further gutted to the point of barely being functional at all.