It’s happened before, look at how many academics fled Europe in WW2 to end up in projects like NASA or the Manhatten Project.

They fled. They were escaping to save their lives, not because someone made them a job offer. If not the States, they would’ve gone somewhere else.

Right, like how the USSR won the space race by not privatizing the engineers and money to a few hands, it was a state funded project that helped the USSR do in 60 years what it took Europe/USA 300 years.

What are you even talking about? From which orifice did you pull the 300 years from?

Who, like Musk?

Anyone who’s willing to look beyond next quarter earnings and elections, and commit to a project that could easily be decades in the making. Leadership that won’t bail on a project when the ruling party changes. Case in point, the US. One president makes a commitment to resuming manned lunar missions. The next president throws that plan in the dump and says “We’re doing Mars instead!” After 8 years, tops, they’re out and the new president says “Screw Mars, we’re going back to the Moon!” How are you supposed to make any worthwhile progress on such large, complicated programs if it’s probably only got 8 years before the next guy cancels it for their own glory project? Developing new space technologies isn’t fast or cheap, so you need someone who won’t pull the plug on your program because they have something else they want you to stroke their ego with.

Sounds like a pretty big problem in regards to private ownership of public money and resources. There are other ways to do it though, more efficient ways.

Spaceflight technology is pretty much the bleeding edge of our capability. Every gram matters, the failure margins are extremely slim. You’re not gonna make notable advancements if you’re not willing to push the envelope and accept that your test articles will fail, there will be setbacks and things will turn out more expensive than you anticipated. If a private enterprise wants to foot the bill for that, have at it! If a public institutions wants to foot the bill, bloody have at it! I don’t care who’s paying, as long as the funding doesn’t get chopped when progress is slower or more wrought than some naive “we will encounter no difficulties” bullshit that was used to sell the project in the first place.

Committing to mass produce something that isn’t even finished? Sounds like capitalism to me, at least Musk and Co. get billions in handouts for the government, funded by public tax payer money.

They know they’re gonna need to mass produce the Starship, so they’re already putting effort into figuring out how to do that. If your goal is to catch up to SpaceX, then you’re gonna have to mass produce your own launch vehicles, otherwise you’re not even within sight of their launch cadence. Mature, tried and tested launchers can’t match the pace of SpaceX’s prototype, let alone their workhorse. And if you’re trying to compete with them on launch cadence and mass to orbit (which you’ll need if you are to provide a viable alternative to Starlink, for example), you’re gonna have to mass produce your stuff. Better to figure it out early than to end up playing catch-up in yet another field.

Ah yes, SpaceX somehow has a magic “skip manufacturing” button.

It takes them a handful months to build a whole-ass Starship and Superheavy, outfit them with 33 engines, and launch. On the other hand, we have the SLS, which takes a year to build and the engines already exist!

This is a good thing, this is how good engineering is supposed to be done.

Agreed, but it also means that you’re gonna test slower, because manufacturing the prototypes and test articles is gonna be slower. Simulations only get you so far before you hit diminishing returns, sooner or later you’ll get to a point where you learn more and faster from physical testing. But if your manufacturing can’t keep up with the rate of your physical testing, you’re gonna get bogged down again. Sim data isn’t real-world data and the real-world data is what’s going to tell you how your rocket and its components actually operate and what forces they actually experience.

So you’re saying one country and one company building a thing is more efficient than a coalition of several companies building a thing? Your political views are starting to show.

Let’s focus on rockets here, since that’s actually relevant to the discussion. Rockets are generally assembled in one location, a couple at the most. The more geographically spread out your manufacturing is, the more time and money will need to be spent to get the individual elements to where they’re actually assembled. That’s all time and money that’s not directly contributing to the manufacturing or assembly. If you can bring the manufacturing and the assembly closer together, you’re reducing the time and money it’ll take to transport from one location to the other. This, in turn, contributes to reducing the costs and timelines of building your rocket. Does that sound logical to you, or do you need to be reminded that not even the Soviets figured out teleportation?

This makes sense if you’re a capitalist who only sees things as returns on investment in a monetary sense. The problem with capitalism is that it’s easy for your private benefactors to pull the rug from you anytime you displease them. A project that is taken seriously will be pushed no matter the setbacks (nuclear power and fusion energy) and failures would be seen as learning experiences to better know where to allocate funds, resources, and effort. Only a capitalist could see “appeasement of rich benefactors” as something to be taken more seriously than say, I don’t know, progress and development. It’s why profit-motivation is doomed to fail every time, you didn’t see the people who invented the sail, metallurgy, leavened bread, beer, and pottery hide it behind an IP to pick and choose who gets to use them.

IP law didn’t exist at the time of the sail, metallurgy or beer, so that argument is moot. Let me break my stance down for you. I want all of the things you mentioned to be funded! I’m wholeheartedly in favor of publicly funded fusion research. Please, spend public money to make renewables even better. Use my taxpayer money to build wind, solar and storage installations, as well as nuclear plants. There’s nothing I’d love more than NASA, ESA, JAXA, ISRO and many, many other public institutions getting triple, quintuple their budget and free reign to use it as they see fit. But that is not the reality that we live in and I don’t trust career politicians to not cancel unpopular programs if their election spot is on the line. Now go find me a less popular program than a new nuclear power plant. My country can’t even get new offshore wind plants built because the politicians are kowtowing to the NIMBY “BUt i cAn SeE iT fRoM tHE ShORe” crowd. “Appeasement of rich benefactors” couldn’t be further from my list of priorities, because the one priority I have in this subject is that I want to see humanity get off this one fucking rock and become actually spacefaring, not just poking our noses out the window (once) and saying we’ve been out in the world. I don’t give a shit who’s first, as long as there’s a second, a third, and a twentieth. Would I like it to be publicly funded all along the way, so more could benefit from it? Absolutely! But NASA’s liable to get reprioritised with every new administration and their fancy new 4-billion-a-pop rocket is destroying 40 year old reusable engines with every launch. ESA made their new rocket less capable than the one it’s replacing, while burying their heads in the sand and hoping that this whole reusability craze blows over. In light of that, I can’t trust either of those institutions to be the leader in advancing spaceflight technologies. So if you’d be so kind as to cut it out with your politically motivated attacks on my character, I’d really appreciate that.