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NASA to lay off more than 500 employees
(www.nasa.gov)
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this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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I assume you are not aware that this is NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab(JPL), not a general NASA layoff as you may have guessed from the headline. You seem to have based your entire comment on that premise if so this is all painful to read honestly, a huge miss.
The JPL is responsible for some of the most cutting edge research in space robotics and probes, the name is a relic of its origin in the post war era, it is not an actual rocket research factory or anything like that.
Even though there are obvious issues with the SLS program, I'm not sure how much of that is NASA's fault, right away you're giving NASA way too much credit and autonomy that doesn't exist IRL at all. The privatization was the point, SpaceX is the culmination of what started in the 70s so trying to give relative praise to SpaceX's achievements here is literaly the Obama self-medal meme. I would expect you to spot this from mile away. The US government defuned NASA after declaring the space race "won" and ever since then the budget is still less than it was in 1965!
America never actually gave a shit about space exploration, even though most Americans wouldn't mind a higher NASA budget there is nothing the public can do about it. The fact is the NASA isn't just "stuck" in past glory. Don't mistake NASA and their actual research for the shit America uses as daily life propaganda. Things like the Hubble, the JWST, all the Mars and space probes etc are all incredibly important and valuable, nobody would object to this fact.
And yet hardly any of that makes the news. It seems like NASA is irrelevant because yes to some extent if you only look at modern culture, the average American couldn't name a US space probe or gives a single fuck about Mars etc.
The JWST alone was a huge worldwide boost to astronomy and physics research, teams from around the world are eager and reliant on it.
Finally the point was always that nothing SpaceX does is uniquely because its a private company or anything. Yes I agree and indeed there is undeniably some cool tech behind the Raptor engines but that is not meaningful rhetoric, Its like saying the F-22 was a huge boost in composite material research. The US could have all of that through the public sector is the point.
It was a general comment, and I don’t see what you’re writing is anything fundamentally that disagree with what I wrote.
Also, as far as chemical rockets go, yes the Raptor engine is still at the leading edge. But as I have said before, even chemical rockets likely won’t see any significant breakthroughs anymore, especially for deep space exploration. The breakthroughs I’m talking about is the next Sputnik moment, and it’s not going to come from NASA/SpaceX anytime soon. There is no such projects as you see.
As someone in the industry, you missed the forest for the trees. There's a lot more to space exploration than just launch vehicle development. SpaceX isn't going to be doing bespoke Mars rover missions anytime soon unless it has a profit motive. JPL offers a very unique product in these one-off science-driven missions that the private industry has yet to be able to replicate and may never have the incentive to do so. Further gutting JPL just means losing out on those missions, which offer valuable scientific returns to the world. JPL is the reason we have rovers driving and a helicopter flying on Mars, oribters around the gas giants, satellites in interstellar space. The list goes on.
What are you talking about?
Not OP, but I think the first part of the sentence you quoted is what they're talking about. SpaceX, a private company that is now the cutting edge of space tech in the US, is what you get as a result of general efforts to privatize everything. These efforts ramped up dramatically in the 70's, from my understanding.