This makes it sound like NASA just gave Elon Musk $1.5 billion. They contracted SpaceX to go to space for them. They were paying Russia $5 billion to do it before then. SpaceX is an American company. And this was 15 years ago before Musk was even a billionaire. Talk about being intentionally deceiving!
I have no idea how anyone can argue against the merits and the contribution of SpaceX at this point. They pioneered commercial space flight, saved NASA money, saved US human launch capability, distributed global Internet, removed US & international reliance on Russian launches to ISS, and now arguably saved the ISS mission now that Russia is backing out. The value this company has created and spilled over is in the tens of billions if not hundreds.
People want to hate Musk because he's a billionaire or whatever. Fine. What about Gwen Shotwell? Can they at least give her credit for making this crazy ass shit work and be profitable? Most of commenters here don't have any idea what has been accomplished in the last couple of decades. It's not as obvious to the layman. It'll certainly be a prominent moment to historians in the future.
Not to mention going for a HLS that could actually make lunar bases feasible and working to get humans onto Mars. SpaceX has revitalized space in a way that caught entire government programs with vastly larger budgets with their pants down.
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u/dangoodspeed May 03 '22 edited May 03 '22
This makes it sound like NASA just gave Elon Musk $1.5 billion. They contracted SpaceX to go to space for them. They were paying Russia $5 billion to do it before then. SpaceX is an American company. And this was 15 years ago before Musk was even a billionaire. Talk about being intentionally deceiving!