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I have a feeling that's also because rather than build a business around making things as expensive as possible and dragging contracts out as long as possible,
by tw04 7y ago
I have a feeling that's also because rather than build a business around making things as expensive as possible and dragging contracts out as long as possible, they're trying to make significant advances in technology. While I know it's not necessarily true, it feels like the US Space Program has been a glorified corporate welfare scheme since Saturn V (prior to SpaceX shaking things up).
- jfengel 7y agoWell, yeah, it is. Or to put a very slightly more positive spin on it, they want to subsidize a company with a military program so that it has surplus capacity. A bit like the way we subsidize farmers: we want more production than we need so that if something happens (weather, somebody going out of business, bad harvest, etc) we've still got enough. Whether we really need that much military capacity... well, I'll leave that up to you. But it's not really hidden that we're throwing more money at them than the market would call for. This corporate welfare scheme is very glorified.