gamers guess who just went into a fucking exhausted and frustrated ramble about the cancellation of the VIPER rover, and the austerity politics that are chipping away at the very foundations of NASA as a public works agency
on fucking f-list
someone states "i don't know the state of any space programs right now, last i saw was the tesla"
bad! austerity politics are eroding the very core raison d'etre for having NASA in the first place under the guise of "saving taxpayer dollars" in just the same way as the trump appointee started ripping out sorting machines from postal facilities
someone else comments about "every tax dollar invested in NASA returns many more"
except when instead of using those dollars to fund development and maintain some control of the results
we're just giving companies the money and they get to keep the profits from what the money lets them do
and "buying their capavbilities as a service :)
and then they lock what NASA funding allowed them to do behind proprietary IP rights so nobody can benefit from it even after they're dead
it's a fundamental gutting of what the agency was. not laid out to do, but certainly adjusted to do before we even flew a moon rocket
because the folks in charge in the sixties knew that if NASA was just a "beat the soviets" thing it'd die on the vine, so. NASA is, as an open secret that mostly people sneer at because they frame it wrong, a public works agency masquerading as a space program, with the FULL intention of developing, maintaining, and supporting a high tech knowledge base and industry to strengthen america's capabilities as a nation and as a people, to disburse grants to universities to study things that there's no profit motive for, to do the things that there's no market case for
it's why they put NASA research centers in almost every state in the lower 48, and the rest have at least one university that gets funding for this or that nasa project
"it's a jobs program" no fucking shit it is, because we wouldn't have this capability otherwise if we didn't fucking pay for it and pay for people to do it. you think these billionaires would do this shit out of the goodness of their heart? no they're doing it to milk the federal government of money and tax incentives and like, iff you know that you can work with it, you can factor that in, but lately the political favor has been to just hand them everything on a platter
if the NSSL defense launch contracts or anything dry up, or the launch market contracts like it's fucking overdue to again from another tech industry crash (dotcom bubble 2), these fuckers are out of here and we're left holding the bag
gave them all this money with almost no strings attached because "we're not investing in a capability, we're buying a service :) look at us saving money" andd then if they shut their doors tomorrow we've got nothing to show for it
comment about billionaires always being negative value, which is true
i mean evenn on the non-billionaire scale, this austerity fetish is kneecaping our fucking moon program
they just cancelled a moon rover thats LITERALLY FUCKING COMPLETELY BUILT AND 90% READY TO GO because the "commercial provider" that is under contract to "provide lunar landing payload services" was like "oh we need another year :(" and the budget ffor the moon rover could not accomodate a year delay without going over budget and triggering a cancellation
consequences for the payload, bbut not for the provider who caused the problem :)
we're still paying them :)
multiple comments expressing disapproval over that
they're gonna fucking take it the fuck apart and just be like "ah well nevertheless, the commercial space industry is saving us all the taxpayer dollars so its a worothy sacrifice" as we further gut our domestic spaceflight capability and make it entirely dependent on the capricous nature of entities we don't control
it's gonna get dismantled and put in a box that says "spare parts for other rovers we guess" in some warehouse at Ames or whatever