this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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Governments: spend 80 years developing space tech with public funding, allowing humanity to walk on the moon, have global positioning satellites, and essentially kickstart the computing industry from a necessity to build computers for orbital calculations
Private companies: mostly disappear and waste shareholder money, like Virgin or like Bezos' attempts at space, with one company with public funding raking in those 80 years of publicly-funded research to itself, underpaying and exploiting its engineers, and lowering the costs at the expense of safety due to cutting in safety measures thay will never be tolerated when humans ride those rockets
Dumbass liberal lemmitor: pRiVaTe Is ClEaRlY sUpErIoR
Also, you're focusing on the space agency of the most corrupt developed country in the world: the USA. Maybe compare the costs with those of the Chinese Space Agency?
This is such a childish take. The private and public sectors are not opposites and they don't contradict each other. They serve different purposes in the economy, and they compliment each other quite well. It's an ecosystem where one covers the gaps of the other. We need both.
NASA as well as the other American space agencies absolutely floor the global competition and it's not even close. When it comes to China, they will always have cheaper prices because they are poorer country with a weaker currency, which means they'll have a stronger purchasing power. In real terms, Chinese labor is much cheaper than American labor, Chinese materials are cheaper than American materials, Chinese manufacturing is cheaper than American manufacturing. China's space expenditure is actually around as the US as percentage of GDP (both are around 0.5%), but China's economy is smaller per capita and therefore they have a smaller budget to work with. This is why the US has the biggest, the most advanced, and the most flashy projects while China seems to be able to do a lot with less.