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NYTimes is reporting that aides to Trump are urging him to "cancel all of Musk’s contracts and launch several investigations into [him]" Bannon is quoted as saying “They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately.” The Investigations would look at Musk's alleged drug use and immigration status, and his security clearance would be revoked.
Quote from NYT megathread: „House Democrats are jumping on Elon Musk’s allegation that President Trump’s name is in the supposedly secret documents the federal government has on powerful men who were in the orbit of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. They immediately called for the release of the Epstein files.
„Elon Musk’s friends and associates on Thursday are in a state of disbelief. Several said they, like the rest of Washington, are glued to their computers as they watched their friend joust with President Trump, unsure what exactly his plan is.“
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State of disbelief? Me too, me too… What the fuck is happening?
On the personal level everyone knows that two galaxy sized egos will sooner or later clash, on the cultural level the MAGA jocks and the grey tribe nerds are not natural allies: As soon as Musk was out of the door Jared Isaacman‘s nomination for NASA director was revoked.
I am still shocked about the sudden implosion. The coming Moon landing and Artemis missions with SpaceX lander … not happening. Mars mission? Not happening with a hostile administration. Musk supported MAGA because Biden ignored him? Boy, will that be a rude awakening. On the other side: Trump has now an enemy with 200 million followers and who owns the dominant conservative online corner.
What a wonderful development. Get the popcorn.
Hopefully Musk learns what the majority of the rest of the grey tribe learned long ago: that Trump, while being useful for trashing wokeness, is broadly a thuggish buffoon. In a perfect world Musk would become an abundance Democrat, or give up on politics altogether and go back to making rockets.
The abundance democrats are also buffoons, albeit less buffoonish than other democrats. They're like paultards with a D after their name.
We're simply in a downward swing on the western civilizational cycle. The next boom we'll conquer Mars, Venus, maybe the stars. But the west doesn't have its shit together well enough right now and no one else has the capability and desire.
Chinese are just gonna burn their space program while you're dealing with boomer entitlement and the chickens of the Civil Rights Act coming home to roost.
I don't think they will oblige.
I mean, the last time they had an advantage in exploration they totally did.
Yeah, for reasons that probably whoever was doing foreign trade fell out of favor at court. Well guess what - there's no money in space exploration. It's an endless money pit.
Whatever economy you build out there won't affect things down here. It is actually a perfect sink for the 'overproduction' problem China supposedly has.
The engineering challenges that have to be overcome to do this tend to create some rather interesting products; space manufacturing may also have unique benefits, and that'll likely require human staff if only to oversee and maintain the equipment doing the manufacturing.
Being able to pick things up from the planet and deliver them back down is the first step of that; nobody's bothering to build machines or research processes for space because we're still working on getting there from here.
Can you name any specific and forseeable advantages that space manufacturing may have? And if so, would they be significant enough to offset the disadvantage of needing to ship things from and to space?
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