Definitely more efficient than NASA today. But private companies wouldn’t have been able to pull off the moon landing, which was NASA’s great accomplishment.
There’s a place for government programs and enormous piles of money.
SpaceX does one thing though… Well, three things. Rocket development, launch services and starlink.
NASA does a whole lot more, they have 10 times as many employees and far more suppliers than SpaceX does. SpaceX is basically a service provider for NASA.
This is kind of like saying that Lockheed Martin is more efficient than the department of defense.
Ok… So what does NASA do that overlaps with SpaceX? Apparently nothing. NASA is 100% dependent on private rockets. Are we supposed to call that a win or a loss?
Well one metric would be cost per kg to get something into space. I also recall a lot of people dying when NASA first started going into space, of which SpaceX has not had any rockets explode with people in them, but I’m not impaired enough to make that false equivalence like you did with Mars.
Of course my comment is false equivalence, because the initial assertion is false equivalence.
You can’t compare NASA and Spacex because they have different goals. NASA even contract many of their payloads to Spacex, which they wouldn’t do if they were in the same business.
Oh no! Homeless people are sheltering in unoccupied real estate without going to prison! They should just die outside to protect the investors who rely on homelessness to maintain property values!
Eh, owning land is the closest thing a regular person can have to a real investment. I bought a shitty house back in 2019 and sold it recently without having made any improvements to it at all, yet it sold for enough money to offset all of the mortgage payments I’d made since purchasing it. Sure, all it did was make me break even on housing, rather than actually profiting from it, but that’s a hell of a lot better than 4 years of $1,000+ rent payments a month down the drain. I’d likely have made a decent profit if I’d done anything to fix it up.
I used the money from the sale to buy an actually decent house in a better neighborhood that I’d never have been able to afford back in 2019, even though my financial situation has stayed pretty much the same. And this house will likely sell for an actual profit in a few years if I decide to move again, while being a great place to live in the meantime to boot.
Becomes slightly more intuitive when you remember there’s an asteroid belt in the middle that maybe would’ve grabbed up enough stuff to form into a planet if Jupiter wasn’t messing with it the whole time.
I was curious so I looked, Wikipedia says the asteroid belt currently contains only about 3% the mass of the moon. I definitely thought it would be more!
Asteroid belts are really sparse. Those scifi space fights in asteroid fields with constant bobbing and weaving could probably only happen within a few years of a planet being blown up. Anything that dense would be condensed into larger bodies very quickly. Turns out space is a whole lot of nothing
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