• CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee
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    8 hours ago

    NASA farms these out to outside companies to build anyway, as seen with the latest Boeing space fiasco, so I don’t necessarily believe this to be true. These defense contractors seem to be interested in little more than milking the US government for all they’re worth.

      • CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee
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        4 hours ago

        They have a $25B yearly budget.

        What is SpaceX spending on R&D? From what I’ve read, Starship is estimated to cost $10B for development and their R&D budget for 2023 was $1.5B. If NASA was going to build something similar themselves, they’ve had nearly 70 years and hundreds of billions to accomplish it.

        In reality their budget goes toward companies like Boeing, Northrop Grummon, and Lockheed Martin, who then pocket it and build substandard equipment. This is all public information so I can’t imagine why people are downvoting other than being extremely emotional for some inexplicable reason.

      • ripcord@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        What spacecraft do you think they built themselves, without big contractors doing mos5 of the work…?