Musk has a factory in Texas where he turns out an upper stage for the Falcon's every 3 days, reuses the first stage up to 30 times, builds a Starship every few months,and launched most of the worlds rockets in the last year. It is a busy cluttered factory in a huge building with parts spread all over and a lot of people in blue jeans working everywhere. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-edD_rl_tIU NASA in turn hired hired Boeing to build a capsule to return people from space for $4 billion. The money is gone, its years behind schedule, and they still can't reproduce 40 year old technology. One company is run by a man in a t shirt with his kids running around with him and walking thru the factory. The other is run by a bunch of suits sitting in a board room a long ways from the factory and making decisions based on engineers from India and what effect it will have on their stock price. As can be expected, there are differences in the turn around times and the end results. But it goes deeper than that. Musk is a risk taker, but in a strange sort of way. He launches very expensive rockets with known faults. His Starship 10 had different heat tiles and some missing. Hind sight is 100 % but the shuttle was never tested that way. The assumption was that to keep costs down, every flight had to be perfect. Musk wants every flight to give them information on what works and what doesn't. He expects failures and has it built into his program. In retrospect NASA lost one shuttle due to a bad o ring in a booster and a second due to the failure of the glue to hold the tile in place when a piece of foam hit it. Lots of deaths from very small details in the program. https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1961165064666312956
NASA used to be run by steely-eyed missilemen with the right stuff, now they all work for Elon Musk at SpaceX! If we return to the Moon and go to Mars, it will be because of Musk/SpaceX and not NASA.
i had a friend that was an engineer on the early space programs. Some if not all manufacturing was done outside NASA. People realizing the government was paying for it abused the system.
It's the same old story... The government eventually screws up everything it touches. NASA, Education, FEMA, etc...anything and everything. Hell, you could make a good case to say it has screwed up our Constitutional Republic!
NASA is a corrupt cesspool with many leftists and opportunists, but mostly a lot of overpaid idiots and only a few in the genius category. The worst part is they've been handed a huge budget for so long now, everything costs a thousand times more than it should. Enter Elon Musk, who I will never fully trust, but he's making progress where government fails and that's a win no matter how you dice it. I would like to see the Chandra program continued and others which really aren't too costly, but they require independent oversight and control. NASA is just too damn "swamp" to be seen as legitimate anymore.
Men tend to screw up what ever they touch. There was a book written about an attempt at a perfect society called Erehwon. Nowhere spelled backward. In it the sheep are contained by a fence made out of a piece of string. The sheep stay in the field and the main character wonders why. He is told that there is a sheep dog and he punishes any sheep that crosses the string and that it is the fear of the sheep dog, named the "Bishop", that keeps the flock in the pasture. Our problem is that the sheep no longer fear the "Bishop" and we no longer know where the string is. Musk has one vision of how to go to space and NASA and big business have another. Many in power, the greens and gimedat's want the string moved and the money taken from Musk and given to those that need the "equity" as shown in the dole, green society, and the destruction of the white society. The real argument between the left and right in its end point is the ultimate view of the nature of man. And in the end our view of where government comes from and what its rules are. Created by God or some other force and having God given rights or created by random acts of chance and having no rights beyond those that we as a group selects. And of course some know better than others what society needs. Back to the Bible vs Marx in the long run.. Constitution and Bill of Rights vs 10,000 pages of rule set down by some agency of the government. Musk may be successful in building the Starship but he has to get permission of the Calif coastal commission to launch it in Calif and they want to stop him because it only benefits one man and he supports Trump and has too much money. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/05/california-coastal-commission-spacex-00494986
I have to disagree, I'm afraid to say it. There's really no difference between the two any more, as each are wholly controlled and influenced by various benefactors. Some on either aisle are blackmailed, but that's due to their own failings, too. Now, when it comes down to religion, those who were at the formation of this republic were always strongly opposed to religious persecution, but they also recognized the importance of separation of church and State. A radical religious movement can destroy a nation just as quickly as any communist takeover. Now, I do see a silver lining here where we would both agree, and that's when we may label the lesser of these two evils. The trouble is we are in a terrible time with global and domestic economies, wars, and subterfuge. I mention this because we once had a defining line of politicians who were against warfare for profit, we had humanists and we could easily tell who they were. These days...both sides of the aisle will bow to the warmongers and there's nothing good coming our way. But, to reiterate, the leftists are of course far worse. The whole game has been rigged before any of us were born. The two party system is a false paradigm, instituted for total control.
