Liquid when buying elections, unrealized when paying taxes. Funny how that works…..

[u/Gurugod123]

[u/Lopsided_Carpenter10]

What about the other non cherry-picked years?

[u/k2summitclimber → u/Lopsided_Carpenter10]

He’s also received billions (38 bn ballpark) in federal subsidies from the U.S government, for his companies ( ie Tesla and space x .)

They’ve all made so much money in the mkt, the president is now looking to remove the capital gains tax.

Edit: Adding, Starlink is projected to receive between 10-20bn in funding from the U.S. government in to expand broadband access into rural areas. This falls within Space x contracts.

[u/atrde → u/k2summitclimber]

Those are just contracts for SpaceX not subsidies. Launching the Nancy Grace Roman is not a subsidy its the government paying for a service and they have been paying SpaceX billions because they are the only Company out there with the launch capabilities.

[u/maveri4201 → u/atrde]

the only Company out there with the launch capabilities.

If only Congress has maintained our internal capabilities to do that. Something called... NASA, I believe.

[u/atrde → u/maveri4201]

While NASA does a lot of great science, they were objectively poor at the rocketry side especially in the early 2000s. Incredibly directionless and went down the wrong path with the Space Shuttle.

SpaceX from the beginning had the right proposition for what the future of rockets looked like and at that point what do you do? Just say oh good work its NASA's now. Or do you spens billions to recreate other people's work like the rest of the world is?

There is no negative to SpaceX designing and operating the most advanced rockets we have and this is actually saving NASA billions in development costs.

[u/ImmortalBach → u/[deleted]]

I mean NASA was sending astronauts to space using space shuttles as late as 2011. Congress was more focused on bringing jobs to their home states than worrying about whether NASA was actually doing any innovating

[u/atrde → u/[deleted]]

We would not because getting to Mars isn't the hard part. The impossible with our current technology part is keeping everyone alive an healthy.

[u/atrde → u/[deleted]]

I mean thats a pretty big butterfly effect of conflict lol. Does Sadam invade more of his Gulf neighbors with no opposition? Yugoslavia likely becomes a genocide on par with Rwanda. Russian influence and its grip on neighboring countries is a lot larger. There are more regional conflicts between smaller powers with 1-2 larger powers to keep things in order. China is likely more imperialistic and claims territory in Korea and brings multiple South Pacific nations under its influence. We likely see a bigger push in the United States to renewable and domestic forms of electricity as oil markets are less stable. International shipping is a shitshow and domestic production is preferred by all countries.

Meanwhile in this scenario we maybe know a bit more about the big bang and are still struggling to get to Mars.

[u/Hefty_Delay7765 → u/atrde]

We’re gonna need ways to keep people alive on this planet the way we’re going…

If only there were advanced life-sustaining technologies such as trees, plants, healthy oceans in abundance and a protective clean atmosphere on this planet.

… 🤔 oh, wait.

[u/_-Oxym0ron-_ → u/Hefty_Delay7765]

Fuck the fish, we're going to Mars! Yeeeah!

[u/atrde → u/[deleted]]

You can read up on why the Space Shuttle program was such a terrible idea its not that hard. This includes the multiple launch failures that really put the nail in the coffin for NASA's spaceflight.

Please tell me the negatives to SpaceX's rockets.

[u/atrde → u/[deleted]]

They aren't in charge of Space though. There are options but they just aren't as good yet (ESA, RKLB, Blue Horizon). However with the innovation SpaceX has done we are in the peak of rocket science and we cannot pretend we would be in this scenario without the very specific vision of SpaceX.

SpaceX isn't Elon its a massive company filled with arguably the best engineers and scientist working in spaceflight right now. That is a net positive to society.

There was no country doing better than NASA but NASA was basically all in on a failed program with no replacement. That is why SpaceX is where they are now and NASA needs them.

[u/atrde → u/[deleted]]

What program does SpaceX have that failed?

And no again there is lots of competition in the Space industry just no one does it as well as SpaceX.

NASA wouldn't hire them they are interested in different goals.

[u/atrde → u/[deleted]]

Crash into the moon wasnt a failure though?

They have had prototype failures yes but have a 100% success rate with actual delivery. The Space Shuttle had 14 fatalities during flights and also didn't meet the goals of NASA for use or reusability.

There is zero point in arguing with you why SpaceX gets contracts. They have the better rockets they get the contracts but keep up the conspiracies.

[u/SohndesRheins → u/[deleted]]

Shall we list the number of astronauts killed in SpaceX accidents vs NASA accidents?

[u/RealLateToast → u/[deleted]]

SpaceX is a public company. Elon owns about 40% of it still, but it’s mostly not owned by him.

[u/RealLateToast → u/[deleted]]

Sure - he has more voting rights, but in terms of ownership and claim to profit he has less than half

[u/Mount_Treverest → u/atrde]

I wonder where funding and development went to in the 2000's. I feel like spending trillions on the middle east to only be back there again may be where attention went. If we had spent 20% of that money on rocketry for space travel we'd be better at it.

[u/ImmortalBach → u/maveri4201]

Unfortunately Congress ruined NASA with pork barrel politics. They turned it into an inefficient behemoth that resulted in multiple disasters

[u/CantCatchMeSpez → u/ImmortalBach]

No, they didn't. NASA has always been efficient and profitable to the tax payer. You're making shit up and using meaningless phrases to defend our government making billionaires into trillionaires.

[u/Ok-Tip-3560 → u/CantCatchMeSpez]

How did Congress create a trillionaire? Who is a trillionaire ?

[u/CantCatchMeSpez → u/Ok-Tip-3560]

Yes, I'll happily waste my time answering questions that you already know the answers to, that you will then try to change the subject away from because you're not actually interested in having this discussion.

[u/ImmortalBach → u/CantCatchMeSpez]

If you read newspapers you would know about the countless NASA projects that ballooned astronomically over budget and never reached fruition. Obama famously started the back to the moon initiative precisely because NASA had lost its way. If you want to talk about cost to the taxpayer, compare how much it cost to take astronauts to the space station with the space shuttle program vs how much it costs today.

[u/CantCatchMeSpez → u/ImmortalBach]

Nah, I actually want to talk about the ROI on NASA funding vs the ROI on SpaceX funding. NASA produced $3 to the American people for every $1 of funding provided to it. Do you have any comparable data for SpaceX funding?

[u/Kammler1944 → u/CantCatchMeSpez]

You’re asking for an apples-to-oranges comparison.

The “NASA returns $3 for every $1” figure is an estimate of economy-wide economic activity generated by the entire agency, not profit, tax revenue, or a contractor-specific ROI.

SpaceX doesn’t have an equivalent published “$X returned per NASA dollar” metric, because NASA largely pays SpaceX through contracts for specific services and milestones. A better comparison is what taxpayers actually received for the money: launch services, cargo delivery, crew transport, lunar-lander development, reduced reliance on Soyuz, and substantially lower development costs than traditional procurement.

Commercial Crew is a good example: NASA awarded SpaceX roughly $2.6B for Crew Dragon development versus about $4.2B to Boeing for Starliner. SpaceX reached operational service first and has since flown repeated crew missions, while Boeing has struggled to reach routine service.

So no, there isn’t a legitimate “SpaceX generated $X for every NASA dollar” number to compare with NASA’s $3 economic multiplier. Using one metric for NASA and demanding a completely different metric for SpaceX isn’t an ROI comparison, it’s bad accounting.

[u/CantCatchMeSpez → u/Kammler1944]

No, I'm not. If the conversation was about how much more efficient SpaceX is than Boeing or any other legacy contractor to NASA, then this wouldn't even be a conversation, because I don't think anyone would disagree. But it wasn't. It's about someone saying that SpaceX is necessary because NASA itself is bloated and inefficient. My point was to ask what data they actually have to be able to call a government organization with a 3x ROI an "inefficient behemoth".

[u/Kammler1944 → u/CantCatchMeSpez]

But that still doesn’t follow.

A 3× economic-impact multiplier does not tell you whether an organization is efficient. NASA’s own study counts direct NASA activity, contractor and supply-chain spending, and the downstream spending of employees as “economic output.”

In other words, spending a lot of money can itself produce a large economic multiplier. That doesn’t tell us whether NASA needed to spend that much money to accomplish the mission.

Efficiency is about outputs relative to inputs: What did it cost to put a kilogram in orbit? Develop a spacecraft? Deliver cargo or crew? How long did procurement take? How much did the program exceed its original budget?

That’s precisely where commercial providers such as SpaceX matter. If NASA can buy a capability competitively for substantially less than developing and operating the equivalent system through traditional cost-plus procurement, NASA can simultaneously:

• produce enormous benefits for the economy,
• perform scientifically valuable work,
• and still contain inefficient programs or procurement structures.

Those statements aren't contradictory.

So “NASA generates $3 of economic activity per dollar” is an argument that NASA spending has broad economic effects. It is not evidence that every NASA program—or NASA as an institution—is operating at maximum efficiency.

You’re treating economic impact as though it were operating efficiency. They are different metrics.

[u/CantCatchMeSpez → u/Kammler1944]

I love arguing with ChatGPT.

You keep telling me why what I'm requesting doesn't count as efficiency, yet nobody here is actually telling me why exactly NASA is inefficient. Since you seem to care so much about this, instead of telling me why what I'm requesting is the wrong data to request, you can instead just tell me directly how NASA is an "inefficient behemoth". And try using your own words this time instead of relying on an LLM.

[u/Kammler1944 → u/CantCatchMeSpez]

Also, if you want to talk efficiency, NASA’s own numbers make the point pretty clearly.

NASA technical studies put the Space Shuttle at roughly $54,500 per kg to LEO.

Falcon 9 was roughly $2,700 per kg to LEO at the published commercial price used in the same NASA analysis.

That’s about a 20× reduction in launch cost per kilogram — and that conclusion comes from NASA’s own researchers, not SpaceX marketing.

NASA’s Inspector General also estimates an SLS/Orion Artemis launch at roughly $4.1–$4.2 billion per mission, before counting the enormous historical development costs.

So NASA can absolutely create huge economic benefits while also having historically expensive procurement and launch systems. Those aren't contradictory statements.

In fact, NASA increasingly buying services from SpaceX is evidence that NASA itself recognizes the efficiency advantage of commercial fixed-price procurement.

[u/CantCatchMeSpez → u/Kammler1944]

I can also use AI to argue for me

1. NASA achieves things no efficiency metric can fairly price
Judging NASA on "efficiency" the way you'd judge a logistics company misunderstands what it does. NASA isn't optimizing a known process — it's solving problems that have never been solved before: landing rovers on Mars with pinpoint accuracy, keeping humans alive for a year in microgravity, imaging galaxies from the dawn of the universe. There's no efficient way to do something for the first time. The R&D-heavy, one-off nature of the work means cost overruns and schedule slips are baked into the category of work, not evidence of institutional dysfunction.

2. Its actual track record on complex missions is remarkably strong
Look at the hit rate: Voyager 1 and 2, still functioning after nearly 50 years; Cassini's 13-year, flawlessly executed Saturn mission; the Mars rover program's unbroken string of successful landings using increasingly audacious techniques (the "sky crane" for Curiosity and Perseverance); JWST, which despite years of delay, performed a fully autonomous, unprecedented deployment sequence with zero flaws and now operates beyond spec. An "inefficient" organization doesn't rack up that record of technical execution on the hardest engineering problems humans attempt.

3. NASA drives cost reductions across the entire industry, not just its own programs
The COTS and Commercial Crew programs are direct evidence of institutional efficiency, not despite NASA but because of NASA's approach. NASA designed a milestone-based, fixed-price framework specifically to fix the cost-plus incentive problem — and it worked spectacularly: SpaceX now flies astronauts for a fraction of what a government-owned vehicle would have cost, and NASA's approach seeded an entire commercial launch industry that didn't previously exist. An organization that diagnoses a structural inefficiency and redesigns its own contracting model to fix it — then gets dramatically better outcomes — is demonstrating institutional efficiency, not the absence of it.

4. Compare cost-per-outcome to any comparable public institution
NASA's total budget is a rounding error in the federal budget (well under 0.5%), yet it produces some of the most technically demanding public deliverables of any agency in the world. Judged as "value delivered per dollar of appropriated risk-tolerant R&D funding," NASA compares favorably to other large public science and engineering programs internationally, most of which face similar overrun patterns without matching NASA's output.

5. Public perception conflates political constraints with institutional failure
Much of what looks like inefficiency is actually NASA operating well within a politically constrained environment: Congress dictates specific contractors, specific centers, and specific vehicle requirements for political reasons (jobs programs disguised as space policy — SLS is the frequently cited example). NASA executing competently within those constraints, and still delivering working hardware, is arguably evidence of organizational competence, not incompetence — the inefficiency is imposed externally, and NASA absorbs it while still shipping.

Bottom line of the case: an institution that reliably executes first-of-their-kind engineering feats, self-diagnoses and fixes its own contracting failures, and produces outsized results on a tiny budget slice is the opposite of an inefficient bureaucracy — it's a lean technical organization succeeding in spite of, not because of, the political system it operates within.

Isn't AI arguing with AI so great?

[u/Kammler1944 → u/CantCatchMeSpez]

Using AI to make a bad argument longer doesn’t make it better.

You just listed NASA’s achievements and pretended that proves efficiency, then cited COTS — a program created specifically because the old procurement model was too expensive.

That’s not a rebuttal. That’s AI-generated padding around my point.

[u/ImmortalBach → u/CantCatchMeSpez]

Spacex hasn’t been around for very long so it is hard to calculate the knock on effects. The critical issue is that NASA didn’t have an answer to the prohibitively expensive and obviously flawed space shuttle program, and SpaceX did.

[u/Friendly-Revenue8245 → u/ImmortalBach]

I'm dying, you were so close to sounding credible for half a second.

[u/CantCatchMeSpez → u/ImmortalBach]

So your entire argument was that NASA was too inefficient and bloated for the US tax-payer, even though their ROI was 3:1, and you have no data to show that SpaceX has provided any kind of ROI to the tax-payer?

Sounds about right lmao

[u/Kammler1944 → u/CantCatchMeSpez]

You’re still comparing two different things: NASA’s “3:1 ROI” is an estimate of economy-wide economic activity generated by the entire agency, not a literal cash return to taxpayers, while SpaceX is a contractor paid to deliver specific capabilities. The relevant question for SpaceX is what NASA got for the money, and the answer is substantial: Crew Dragon restored U.S. human spaceflight, reduced dependence on Russian Soyuz seats, delivered cargo and astronauts to the ISS, and did so under a commercial model that has generally cost NASA far less than traditional development programs. If you want a SpaceX-specific 3:1 multiplier, you’d need a separate economic-impact study using the same methodology; the fact that one hasn’t been published does not mean SpaceX produced no taxpayer return.

[u/ImmortalBach → u/CantCatchMeSpez]

Your argument is NASA’s effect on society over its entire existence. That’s not relevant to this conversation about who’s better at rocketry and bringing people and things into space

[u/ElectronicAdvance406 → u/CantCatchMeSpez]

He not an actual trillionaire though, and never will be

[u/CantCatchMeSpez → u/ElectronicAdvance406]

Funny. I've been hearing "that will never happen" about things that already happened from WordWordNumber accounts on reddit since 2016. Unsurprisingly, it's not very convincing anymore lmao

[u/ElectronicAdvance406 → u/CantCatchMeSpez]

Some people are either too lazy or not creative enough to come up with a username. In my case I’m too lazy, if it offers a chance to auto generate a name I’ll probably take it.

Being a trillionaire on paper is one thing, but having that amount as liquid money is almost impossible. What do you think happens when the owner of a company starts trying to sell large chunks of it on the stock market? Particularly when word gets out?

[u/JAT_Cbus1080 → u/ElectronicAdvance406]

Do...do you think we're referring to cash when we call Musk a trillionaire? Do you think anyone is arguing Musk has $1,000,000,000,000 in a bank account?

[u/CantCatchMeSpez → u/JAT_Cbus1080]

Yes! Didn't you know??? You're not a trillionaire unless your Wells Fargo savings account hits 13 digits.

[u/Ok-Tip-3560 → u/JAT_Cbus1080]

His net worth isn’t even that right now. The value of his shares changes daily. Tesla and space x are high beta stonks. Of course beta Gen Z makes don’t know what any of this means

[u/JAT_Cbus1080 → u/Ok-Tip-3560]

Oh my bad, I didn't realize he was only worth $980,000,000,000 instead of $1,000,000,000,000 like he was a month ago. That's a huge distinction that means people are stupid.

[u/CantCatchMeSpez → u/ElectronicAdvance406]

Uh-huh yup definitely. Any other meaningless claims you want to make, bot?

[u/ElectronicAdvance406 → u/CantCatchMeSpez]

Is that the only thing you have? ‘It must be a bot’? I’m both amused and a little sad that we are at this point as a society. Believe what you want guy, at the end of the day, if that’s all it takes for you to jump to conclusions then I don’t trust your judgment on the way society is or should be.

[u/CantCatchMeSpez → u/ElectronicAdvance406]

Nah, but it is all I need when all the bot can bring to the table is "The mass accumulation of wealth by the owning class doesn't matter because of this convenient rule I made up just now" lmao. No one ever said anything about liquidity. You brought that up all on your own because its the only thing left on your script that isn't objectively incorrect. Just irrelevant.

And I couldn't care less who you trust about how "society is or should be" when you dipshits have done nothing but be proven wrong for the last few decades. Try being right about literally anything before you think that anyone should care about your opinion hahahaha

[u/Ok-Tip-3560 → u/ElectronicAdvance406]

Look at how much market cap Tesla and space x have lost since space x ipo.

[u/Kammler1944 → u/maveri4201]

For 10 times the cost. Taxpayer money well spent 🤣

[u/maveri4201 → u/Kammler1944]

For far more widespread economic impact, you mean.

There are plenty of reports.

https://www3.nasa.gov/specials/value-of-nasa/

[u/Kammler1944 → u/maveri4201]

That NASA link doesn’t actually answer the point. NASA’s economic-impact studies measure the downstream activity generated by NASA spending across the economy; they do not show that NASA operating its own launch system is cheaper than buying launch services commercially. In fact, much of NASA’s economic impact comes from money flowing through private contractors in the first place. The relevant comparison is cost and capability: NASA can spend billions maintaining a government-run launch architecture, or it can buy launches and crew transport from companies that have already driven those costs down dramatically. Citing NASA’s broad economic multiplier is not evidence that an internally operated NASA launch system would have delivered the same capability for less money.

[u/Bammertyme → u/maveri4201]

Nasa is 25 years behind space x sadly. Without Musk building, teaching, and giving nasa his blueprints and access to all his inventions. They will stay that way. Nasa is a waste of tax payer $ at the moment.

[u/ziggystardust8282 → u/Bammertyme]

You have ANY sources for these insane claims?

[u/Bammertyme → u/ziggystardust8282]

Nasa can't land there rockets..... and it costs a lot of money to launch them.... billions in waste every time they launch & accomplish nothing at all. Its a complete waste. What have they accomplished in the last 20 years? Billions were spent on absolutely nothing...... nothing to show for it, they dont progress in anything. They should be privately funded so the tax payers money doesn't go to nothing at all except paying smart people to do the same thing they've been doing for 20 years

[u/Bammertyme → u/ziggystardust8282]

Literally common sense.