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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • You’re putting words in my mouth and exaggerating my statements. Just look at how the NASA manned space programs have run since the start, AND how they are currently run. Congress puts a lot of stipulations on how they are manufactured. NASA has a big problem with congressional interference.

    Their science/unmanned programs are different, because congress is more hands off. Those are running just fine. The problem is that SpaceX is a huge cost and has a lot of manufacturing and jobs associated with it. That invites congressional interference.

    Not only that, but they also have a large commercial presence already with the Starlink. The government doesn’t typically run things like that, so they’ll probably sell of the Starlink portion of the company.

    It’s not a conspiracy, it’s not libertarian-ism, it’s just how NASA is run. Once the budgets get into the billions, congress can’t keep their hands off it.

    Yes, there are certainly problems with the Commercial Crew program right now, just look at how Starliner is run. We probably won’t get a capsule from Boeing, because they don’t have an incentive to finish, due to the fact that it’s not a cost+ program like the SLS is. SLS is also constrained by politics, they are required to use so many Shuttle parts, just to keep those sub-contractors happy.








  • First - The major problem with trash isn’t the getting rid of it part, it’s the gathering it up part. If we could do that, it wouldn’t be a problem.

    Second - Launching things on a rocket is kinda dangerous still, there’s a risk the rocket will blow up on launch, scattering the material across a large area. This is a big reason why things like nuclear waste is a problem to transport in general, much less flying it somewhere.

    Third - Launching something into the SUN is really hard, it would be easier to send something out of the solar system than back into the sun.
    https://van.physics.illinois.edu/ask/listing/43694

    Fourth - Someday we’ll figure out a use for everything, wall-e style. If we dump everything into a centralized landfill, we’ll eventually be able to collect/sort/recycle it into something useful. Throwing it into the sun (or off-planet) would make that stuff unavailable forever.

    Finally - Throwing stuff into the sun would actually get rid of it forever, yes. It would be completely decomposed into the atoms it was made from. If we threw ENOUGH heavy metals into the sun, we could actually poison the sun making it not able to fuse hydrogen anymore, but even if we threw the entire earth into the sun, it wouldn’t be enough.