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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2556 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 2, 2025

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Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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.

This has been the case ever since the US committed to the space shuttle program before the vast majority* of Mottizens was even born. I once read a great series of posts (which a cursory internet search isn't turning up, alas) that criticized the space shuttle program in detail and backed it up with period documentation. It was pretty clear that while there were many who were enthusiastic about a shuttle for the wow! factor, from a simple physical and engineering standpoint it never made sense. Irrespective of the built-in limitations of gravity, space shuttle backers nevertheless pushed, and got, the largest version of the shuttle possible to the Nixon administration, thus wedding NASA to spending the majority of its budget on an ultra-high cost, ultra-low utility space plane. The choice is especially egregious since NASA's budget cuts in the 70s meant that committing to the space shuttle necessarily meant building out expensive new launch capability for the shuttle and abandoning the existing Apollo/Saturn V, which ironically could lift significantly more weight into space than the shuttle ever could. That the US continues to waste billions on launch tech based upon the shuttle's known to be inferior lift capability five decades after its inception and a decade plus after its official retirement, all while SpaceX has already achieved much better results at a fraction of the cost is just... chef's kiss.

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.

You'd think so, but in fact the US has demonstrated that it can and will pursue dodgy technology with only marginally better potential than existing tech, if at all, and do so over and over again. What's especially impressive are the ridiculously wasteful patronage programs "cost saving" programs that are so bad that we vow never to do them again... until generational memory decays enough to begin a fresh round of graft at the expense of the US taxpayer. Where's William Proxmire when we need him?

*ISTR at least one Mottizen claiming to be a Baby Boomer

I agree with the main point and am usually first to criticize cost-inefficient US military procurement, especially in the age of drones. But the F-35 is OK, it is at least better than its 1960s equivalent, you get some more bang for a lot more buck. And there are export orders. The Zumwalt is pretty terrible as a warship but it's better than it's 60s equivalent, if only it weren't so ruinously expensive and they didn't cancel the guns. The LCS is pretty useless, I think it might indeed be worse than its 1960s equivalent, the Charles F. Adams Class. I've heard some defences of the Osprey, it's not like the capabilities it brings are that useful (any serious opponent will shoot them down pretty easily) but there are some capabilities it brings to the table. These are flawed programs and show a reckless disregard for efficient and realistic procurement.

But SLS+Orion is just worse than the Saturn V. Less power, more cost, can't reach the Moon. I think this is just a whole other league of terribleness to the standard story of defence procurement fiascos, on par only with the LCS. Maybe even worse than the LCS because at least there was some kind of idea where it'd be useful, fighting in low intensity wars. Whereas SLS+Orion is supposed to go to the Moon but can't.

If the F-35 was outright worse than an F-4 Phantom then Lockheed executives should be aggressively, intensively bullied. That's the spaceflight equivalent I think.

The thing that I'm trying to point at with the F-35 reference specifically is the lessons learned from the TFX program/F-111 were that trying to save money by making one common multi-role aircraft ultimately netted a thoroughly mediocre end result that was delivered way over time and way over budget, and that sticking with individual designs to fill specific roles was far superior as evidenced by the subsequent fighters. But as sure as Odin made little green apples, the US tried to do it again with the JSF/F-35, harder and longer, as is the custom with military procurement these days, because post cold-war budget cuts, or something.

Rabble.

cost is just... chef's kiss

AI slop detected.

Are we going after ellipses now? Is nothing holy?

It stops being holy if it becomes an LLM-ism. Same with it's not X, it's Y.

The AI is doing us a favor by finding all the vapid, say-something-without-saying-anything phrases in writing and making them feel icky.

You do you, but for me... fuck that noise. I'm not going to change my writing style because LLMs use mannerisms I do, nor because it causes people to falsely think my writing was LLM generated. To me, doing that would be a weakness. IMO it's better to be your own person even if some think less of you for that.

No way! Why should I change? They're the ones that suck!

Be careful that you don't trip on the AIphemism treadmill.

Those hopped-up search engines with extra steps can have my chef's kiss and my em dashes when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

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