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Notes -
Is there any well-established rule of 'controversial topic of mild significance (because there are legitimate arguments on both sides) gets far more attention than uncontroversial disaster of much greater significance which is somehow considered a faux pas to talk about'. I guess it might just be a simple extension of the power media has to determine the discourse. Constant dysfunction is boring vs exciting rocket explosions and dynamic personalities like Musk or Trump.
There is for example a well-established discourse here and elsewhere about whether or not Starship is overhyped, about Elon Musk being too optimistic in his projections. Elsewhere there's a perception that Musk is a scammer who just takes credit for work that his engineers do and somehow bewitches investors into giving him all this money. I'm fairly sympathetic to Musk, building a whole new class of super heavy rocket is difficult, doing things for the first time is difficult, especially in space. Starship is mostly funded by SpaceX too, so it's not like its a big deal if there are delays.
But the non-Musk US spaceflight program seems to be non-controversially a dumpster fire, a complete clownshow, a world-historical money-shredding operation, grifter central. Orion alone (just the capsule) took 19 years and $30 billion. The rocket it's supposed to go with can't actually reach the Moon, it's not technically possible because Orion is too heavy. They unironically proposed building a space station near the moon to make up for this, make the moon mission even more complicated and expensive.
https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/
Lockheed had the temerity to charge 2.5 billion for the luxury of adding docking capabilities to their capsule! All the money for this garbage comes from the US public.
NASA and the established spaceflight players like Lockheed or Boeing should be ruthlessly purged IMO, how can you get away with stealing all this money? Find the decisionmakers and bankrupt them, jail them, teach them a lesson. Take a lesson from China's purges, you can't just have important national capabilities turned into slush funds for lazy cabals of contractors and bureaucrats. Only during the Boeing Starliner fiasco where astronauts were left stranded was there much public attention given to the dire state of procurement and even then people mostly seemed to go 'Boeing is a shit company' rather than look at things more broadly.
So I think a lot of the anti-Musk sentiment is driven by him humiliating the wrong people. Space-X makes NASA look bad. Tesla made American car companies look bad. The Starlink deployment in Ukraine made a whole lot of defence companies and EU leaders look bad.
A grossly simplified model of progressivism is that it believes all of the worlds problems are fixed by giving more money to progressives.
A lot of modern problems with governance are caused by the fact that they won't be blatant and just say that 30% of funding must be set aside for fake jobs for families of connected people on the left. Instead they mandate that various consultants must be hired or certain companies must get the contracts. As a result the actual work gets affected.
Here's a video from a NASA subcontractor explaining how the minority owned business requirements are affecting projects: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FIONXPbIkVo
Correction: replace "more" with "all the" and "money" with "power". Money is downstream from power. Forcing NASA to do DEI hires is the exercise of pure power, and when the power squeezes, the money flows to the required direction.
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