Easy, nationalize SpaceX. NASA absorbs operations, continue on.
What a great idea. I hadn’t considered this. There’s no chance it will happen with our crazy reverence of the free market, but a sane country would respond this way.
Then SpaceX is forced to adhere to political considerations and budget priorities. NASA oversight and intensely risk averse culture would not have allowed spacex to build a rocket factory, or risk throwing away prototypes for rapid iteration.
Gwynne Shotwell is doing a pretty good job at SpaceX. She could be CEO once Musk gets ousted. If you look at the snail’s pace NASA has been moving at in crewed flight, I don’t think turning over SpaceX to them would be really helpful.
There isn’t much need for crewed flights though.
Not even the first car tycoon
That’s certainly the first (and only) one I could think of.
Funny how cars and fascism go so well together.
Cars promote social hierarchy in the same sort of way that building big mansions in a city do: The space required for everyone to have one results in an expensive and inefficient use of land, which means that those with the money to afford them get convenience, those without the money to afford one are pushed to the fringe, and those that just barely can afford one see their limited resources taken up with larger maintenance costs and infrastructure taxes for maintaining less cost efficient infrastructure, meaning those resources cant be used to improve their own position. They physically separate people in a way that means that those of high status dont have to rub shoulders with those of lower status the way that they would if they were all on something like a subway together, and they also act as a way to display status to others (a guy driving a rusted out accord from the 90s can probably be assumed to be upper class, for example, wheras a guy driving around a new Ferrari is much more likely to be). This isnt to say that they inherently promote fascism or anything, or that it isnt possible to have a fascist that dislikes cars, or that these things cant be mitigated with effort if you really want to run a car-based society, but fascists do like hierarchy and things that promote their in group at the expense of an out group, and ensuring their favored people can get around conveniently while others are hindered in doing so naturally feeds into that, as do things that let those at the very top display that status to the world. And of course, they require large and standardized production chains to make economically, which makes them a market where large companies, of the sort that can concentrate a lot of wealth and power to those who own them, are much more able to compete than more local players.
To me that’s an argument for why fascists like cars, but not why car manufacturers run fascist. They’re pretty similar phenomenon, but not 1:1.
I say that because a lot of high level executives don’t give a shit about the products themselves, hence CEOs jumping ship to run completely unrelated companies.
Coca Cola promoted itself as the true patriotic, German Nazi drink in the Third Reich and was a major sponsor of the olympic games in Berlin. They continued to promote themselves as Führer loving nationalists with swasticas on their ads until the very moment the US government sanctioned Germany. It worked so well most Germans were convinced it was a German product up until the end of the war when American Soldiers turned up with buttloads of that stuff while Germany has been cut off from it for years at that point. Playing both sides worked fabulously for Coke and many other companies so they will keep doing it.
Title contradicts the article body. How has history been unkind? Because Perot lost a contract once? Even though the article says that’s unlikely to happen with SpaceX.
Just ask any business owner from pre-unification Italy.
