We’d still be funding NASA and it’d be much, much better than dumping taxpayer money (which is where the funding for most of their recent advances come from) into a private company instead of the government agency created to do exactly the same thing.

[–] schmidtster -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If NASA didn’t believe something would work, they wouldn’t waste R&D on it, especially when the taxpayer would be paying for the failures and demanding more.

This was only ever possible by being privately funded. And yes, public money was added, AFTER it was proven to be viable, which was purely private. Can’t have B without A first.