Hopefully their new coworker Agent-X is just the management push they need

Well yeah. Think how many ways those consultants can help cut more corners to slightly make more money over time.

Get money by dragging it out and asking for more time and money

The fact they moved their management to Chicago to avoid their union workers and engineers was so cowardly.

What makes it even better is that Chicago was chosen because it's a big home for MBAs and management consultants.

Fuck them.

"What are we? godless communists? MBAs and consultants are all we need." - The west.

No, because NASA needs both FBI and Congressional approval to co-operate with Chinese space programs due to the Wolf Amendment.

Despite Chinese spacecraft being based on the Soyuz and should be compatible with the ISS, China is effectively banned from the ISS.

Chinas gonna launch a moom mission just to do a kickflip over the apollo 11 flag on a moon skateboard.

Roscosmos atleast still have all the plans and drawings for the Soyuz family. NASA literally can't build another Saturn 5 rocket becuase all the companies that originally built it either merged or folded and most of the technical documentation is lost. NASA of course didn't try and archive any of it becuase it was the intellectual property of the five thousand subcontractors they used

Because people have this belief that anything government run is inefficient while private businesses don’t have that problem

Organized crime seems more organised.

This just seems to be regular, negligent crime with witness intimidation.

more than that, it's the only system that works at all ever in the history of the context of all in which you live and all that came before you!

I think they're a few big reasons for that. Insert usual caveat about how I have nothing but contempt for the absentee figurehead shithead-in-chief, and my praise here is strictly for the actual engineers, technicians, and scientists doing the real work. Or to put it another way: they're not really Elon's rockets!

First, SpaceX is immune to Wall Street shenanigans because they're not publicly traded and have no debt. They're a private company that's been profitable most of its existence. There's no share price to screw with, no loans to use as leverage over management, no way to do a hostile takeover.

Second, SpaceX is extremely vertically integrated. They make most of their own stuff. They very rarely outsource anything. When they do, it's more like a "job interview" than a long-term arrangement. If the company they outsource to doesn't deliver, they're never used again. If they do deliver, SpaceX buys them. SpaceX also has an extremely advanced and centralized system for managing all aspects of all projects. Imagine Allende's Project Cybersyn but just for aerospace. Does Boeing even make its own jetliner wings anymore?

Third, right now SpaceX lives and dies by the reliability of its Falcon 9 rocket, especially the reused first stages. Without Falcon 9, they'd be dead in the water, no payload going up, no customer cash coming in, no resources available for Starship R&D. As part of the cost-savings reusability, they need to do a huge amount of QA on technical aspects that a lot of other rocket manufacturers might not care about recording for a disposable rocket.

Uh, Starship was supposed to fly manned missions to the moon next month. In its most recent tests last year it went out of control in LEO, without even carrying any payload.

If you gave Boeing's budget to Hamas they'd have a moon base by next week