A community to discuss space & astronomy through a STEM lens
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Please keep politics to a minimum. When science is the focus, intersection with politics may be tolerated as long as the discussion is constructive and science remains the focus. As a general rule, political content posted directly to the instance’s local communities is discouraged and may be removed. You can of course engage in political discussions in non-local communities.
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The biggest problem NASA has is they operate under the whims of the US government, while SpaceX doesn't.
Space research and operations require very long-term planning, you can't change direction every 4 years, just because a new president has different ideas than the previous one, it's already a miracle that NASA has been able to do what they're doing in this awful conditions.
No wonder SpaceX took over. It's not NASA's fault but the US government.
And the way the U.S. government is structured encourages a two-party system which flip-flops back and forth, which is particularly ill-suited for long-term projects like space exploration.
Too painful to read this... and to think of all that we have lost. We sold off so much of value just to save a few dollars in the short run...
Seen from outside US, NASA decline has begun way earlier than Elon Musk appearance, it begun when NASA was used as a piggy bank by US politicians.
a planet millions of miles away, where colonists will be insulated from the ravages of nuclear war, climate change, malevolent AI, and all the unforeseen disasters that will inevitably crush life on Earth
What sort of doomerism is this? I'm pretty sure we want to live on both planets in the long term, not just move to the worse one.