Pentagon Uneasy About Elon Musk’s New Spy Satellites
futurism.com
Elon Musk's SpaceX just launched a bunch of spy satellites for the Pentagon — and some in the DOD are getting worried.

After giving in to Putin/Xi’s demands to not provide starlink internet service over Taiwan, DOD officials are growing nervous about trusting Elon’s Space company with our national secrets

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
    112·
    16 days ago

    SpaceX is wasting government money, they have almost spent all of the money they were given to land people on the moon, on building a rocket that can’t do basic stuff.

    That is not awesome.

    • dev_null@lemmy.ml
      32·
      16 days ago

      A single launch of a Boeing rocket costs as much as the entire R&D for SpaceX rockets. Launches that cost $5 billion with Boeing, cost tens of millions with SpaceX. I can absolutely agree with you that SpaceX is wasting some of the money given to them. But the amount of taxpayer money spent on launches has been massively reduced by them providing an orders of magnitude cheaper and more reliable option.

      There is definitely an argument to be made that they don’t deserve the money, but in the grand scheme of government spending, they have very much reduced it compared to the traditional launch providers.

      And their rockets still have capabilities that no other launch provider has achieved yet. Boeing still wastes all their rockets by making them single use, when SpaceX uses the same rocket many times.

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
        2·
        16 days ago

        Compairing SpaceX and Boeing is wrong when talking about savings.

        Compare a SpaceX launch to a Shuttle launch yo be more accurate, and don’t forget the inflation

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
          1·
          16 days ago

          Damn, we don’t have enough zeros for that. That’s more like the Russian fine against Bozos

        • dev_null@lemmy.ml
          11·
          16 days ago

          There is an important fact about the Space Shuttle: it doesn’t exist anymore. Even if it was cheaper - which it wasn’t - it wouldn’t have meant much today, because today all other existing options are much more expensive. I’m comparing options we have today, and more importantly comparing to the option SpaceX moved the government off of.

          If NASA brings back the space shuttle and it’s cheaper than SpaceX then amazing, let’s go. But they didn’t (because it wouldn’t have been cheaper).