• masquenox@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    it was also politically necessary

    There’s absolutely nothing “necessary” about a nationalist pissing contest between two vile empires. I know that’s an irrlevant tangent… but anyway.

    and it’s cheaper for a non-government organization to perform the launches.

    No, it isn’t. The US just did what it has always done… develop technology with public funds and then hand it off to the crony class to exploit for privatized profit at everyone else’s expense. Nothing about it is cheaper or more efficient - those are easily debunked myths.

    getting nasa involved is just going to involve gratuitous spending

    Duh… that’s how space exploration happens - through gratuitous spending. Whose money do you think Phoney Stark is burning through? His own?

    Getting NASA involved is going to lead to results other than merely corporate parasites getting rich off money that could have been far, far better spent - that’s pretty much it.

    • daltotron@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There’s absolutely nothing “necessary” about a nationalist pissing contest between two vile empires.

      I dunno, I don’t think it was necessary, but I do think we got some pretty cool stuff out of it. Satellites are kind of neat, I like those, I like knowledge about space and radiation and stuff. I would also like healthcare, that’s probably a higher priority, but I would like to have both.

      • masquenox@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        but I do think we got some pretty cool stuff out of it.

        Do you know why the US had to create NASA? The US wanted to get into space - but the corporates weren’t interested. There was no profit in it. So Eisenhower had to wait until Sputnik was launched, and then used the media hysteria to push through massive state intervention to actually get it done - same way Roosevelt had to use WW2 to launch the massive state intervention that resulted in the GI Bill (without which the modern-day idea of a “middle-class” wouldn’t even exist). This was no obstacle for the USSR, of course - they just went ahead and did it.

        Here’s the thing… nobody got any poorer because the US sent a bunch of flyboys to play tic-tac-toe on the moon. But the existence of people like Phony Stark does make us all poorer.