109
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
109 points (100.0% liked)
news
24121 readers
932 users here now
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
Well there are plans just not directly from governments, NASA awarded contracts in 2023 to commercial providers to develop stations. Vast plans to launch their Haven-1 station in May 2026, it's a similar size to the Tiangong 2 but a meter wider. Smaller than the current Tiangong station though.
But ya, China will probably be doing the majority of science in space for a while. I'm glad they're doing it for humanity!
I know this is Hexbear, so probably an unpopular opinion, but I'm hopeful the commercial aspect will be as successful In lowering costs as the NASA commercial resupply /crew programs were in lowering cost to orbit.
I don't understand why it's so complicated for people to understand that the government can offer things at the lowest possible cost because the government doesn't have to make profit. Any private industry running at equal efficiency to public industry will, necessarily, cost more because it must build in margins for profit. Literally anything else a private company can do, so could the government.
Private industry cannot save us. It cannot be cheaper. This is not complicated math it's extremely simple and yet seemingly completely impossible for the vast majority of Americans to understand
Yeah, if it's all being done in-house by state industry then all else being equal it will be cheaper than a private alternative. But "bringing down costs" and technological innovation are known effects of competition between firms and is a reason why China uses markets and also a reason why Chinese aerospace is in a better long term position than the US's. For most of NASA's history, the way it funded the development of launch vehicles was not conducive to bringing down costs whatsoever. The current paradigm is better, although like you suggest it is not the only alternative.
The issue with NASA was that they were the sole client for one industry until recently, and they choose to pick one or two companies to work with to simplify their own admin (as well as grease palms since it's a political entity in a capitalist state).
That creates monopoly and immediately defeats any possible benefit from "natural selection" in the market. They also tend towards that because the most optimal configuration is a unified state run industry that is allowed to build up the institutional knowledge that their current private counterparts (Boeing and Lockheed) have, while also ignoring the drive for profits.
If there isn't already an industry in place that can meet those knowledge requirements (as is China's case), then allowing them to develop, then consuming them is the only really sustainable course of action.
Only the Soviets managed to build a new tech industry from scratch, and that took military development between 2 world wars and almost half a century, China managed to get there using a hybrid of those models in a decade.
The other, deeper, issue with NASA is that Congress required them to do everything wrong on purpose and kept cutting their budget
"shuttle derived hardware"