Ehhh, not really. Conservatives have an odd relationship to the space program.
They like the science things that give them flatscreen TVs, smartphones, and red dot sights on guns. They don’t like science things that tell them Noah’s flood never happened and global warming is real. The science they really, really like is the stuff they can use to beat other nations over the head and say America! Fuck Yeah!
NASA does something that clearly shows America! Fuck Yeah! to the whole world. They need to stamp out the parts of NASA that say inconvenient things about global warming, but you can get humans to the ISS and robots to Mars without any of that.
Ditching SpaceX contracts would leave the US without a manned space program. We’d have to go back to relying on Russia, and that’s not going to happen. SLS is an embarrassing budget buster. ULA is a joke. Bezos doesn’t have a rocket that can get people to the ISS (he might get around to it, someday). There’s a few up and comers out there in the rocket industry, but nobody is ready yet. Falcon 9 is it.
Elon’s response of “good luck getting to the ISS” was a pretty solid comeback to this.
Nationalizing the fuck out of SpaceX would be funny
nasa, science is already defunded, no use even if it gets nationalized.
Not sure, there is some institutional knowledge, possibly patents, etc
Except Trump doesn’t care about the ISS and would happily let it deorbit with everyone still on board.
Ehhh, not really. Conservatives have an odd relationship to the space program.
They like the science things that give them flatscreen TVs, smartphones, and red dot sights on guns. They don’t like science things that tell them Noah’s flood never happened and global warming is real. The science they really, really like is the stuff they can use to beat other nations over the head and say America! Fuck Yeah!
NASA does something that clearly shows America! Fuck Yeah! to the whole world. They need to stamp out the parts of NASA that say inconvenient things about global warming, but you can get humans to the ISS and robots to Mars without any of that.
Ditching SpaceX contracts would leave the US without a manned space program. We’d have to go back to relying on Russia, and that’s not going to happen. SLS is an embarrassing budget buster. ULA is a joke. Bezos doesn’t have a rocket that can get people to the ISS (he might get around to it, someday). There’s a few up and comers out there in the rocket industry, but nobody is ready yet. Falcon 9 is it.
Elon knows he’s safe on this one.
I don’t think that’s true actually, it’s a huge prestige project for the US, and it would be very embarrassing to lose it.
What Trump wants and what ‘the US’ wants are very different things.
Even Trump knows that relying on the Russians to get to the ISS would be a bad look for America.
Again, after 5 years of this guy, why would you think he cares about America or Americans?
His actions recently have shown he very much cares about public opinion, it’s why he’s been flip flopping on tariffs so much.