Are you saying the government would be more efficient if they set up the National Courier Agency to deliver their parcels, instead of paying a few bucks to Fedex each time? Or that Fedex becomes less efficient if it gets business from the government?

If NASA is going to operate ISS, it should do so at the lowest cost to taxpayers. Which comes from buying the cheapest launch services on the open market, not from building a rocket of their own that flies once or twice a year.

After the one actual Soyuz launch abort, rescuers took nearly a day to locate and reach the crew.

So are you actually claiming that governments didn't block Concorde by banning supersonic overflights, or what?

Hint: that's REALITY. Who paid for those supersonic aircraft is irrelevant, when you're claiming that we can't go into space because we don't have supersonic airline flights. We don't have supersonic airline flights because governments banned them on many of the most profitable routes.

I think you meant to say 'Governments have managed to brainwash people into doing and believing things that are against their self-interest, for the greater glory of the governments.'

After all, it's government that gets to keep every kid in a multi-billion dollar brainwashing industry for most of the first twenty years of their life.

Oh, sorry, is this the Anti-Space Nutter Nutter again? I didn't realize you were also the Anti-Supersonic AIrliner Nutter.

Not when those payments account for a fraction of their losses.

The same old left-wing talking points get so tiresome after a while.

Rather pointless to worry about, since the Russians have a gun in every Soyuz. A Soyuz launch abort is likely to end up dumping you in a forest full of wolves and bears, not a beach in the Bahamas.

And JWST is now more than a decade late, and several hundred percent overbudget, sucking up most of the money in the unmanned spaceflight budget.

Well, duh. That's because governments banned supersonic overflights of their territory, and left few financially-viable routes that could be flown at high speed.

Supersonic airliners aren't an engineering problem, they're a political problem.

Yeah, and? I'm guessing the government pays Fedex and/or UPS to deliver stuff on Earth, too.

Last I looked, most of SpaceX's upcoming business was from private organizations, not governments.

Pre-funding pensions and benefits only accounted for about a third of the losses, last I checked. They'd still be losing billions a year, regardless.

And the continual losses kind of reinforce the fact that it should be pre-funding pensions so the money will be there to fund them after it goes out of business.

The thread is populated by leftists, whose entire ideology is based around the industrial revolution. They can't even conceive of a post-industrial world, because it would put them out of business.

And, yes, the transition to digital and home manufacturing will make the cost of living implode. If I don't need piles of DVDs and books, because it's all just bits on a hard drive, I don't need rooms to store them. If I can build most of the things I need on a 3D printer when I need them, I don't need to keep many things at all around when I'm not using them. I may not even need a house at all.

But, no, rather than deal with reality, the leftists fantasize about the GLORIOUS WORKERS RISING UP TO SEIZE THE ROBOT FACTORIES FROM THE EVIL 1%!

Which is why anyone of clue should just laugh at them. Who needs the Glorious People's Resource Allocation Committee telling them what to do when they have a 3D printer in their garage?

The real story here is automation putting leftists out of a job.

And, uh, who's going to be paying the taxes, when no-one is working?

Are you seriously claiming that humans won't be able to find anything useful to do that others will pay them for?

Take a look at documentaries from the 40s to 60s, at the peak of the making-humans-work-like-machines era, marvel at how much utterly monotonous work people used to be forced to do because we didn't have the technology to replace them with EVIL ROBOTS TAKING OUR JOBS! and then marvel again at how, despite replacing all those people with EVIL ROBOTS TAKING OUR JOBS!, most people who want to work can still find a job.

It's the people who claim that EVIL ROBOTS ARE TAKING OUR JOBS! who are basing their position on faith, not facts. It's just another tiresome leftist ploy to steal money from the productive to give to the unprductive.

No, that's what happens when you raise the minimum wage while keeping interest rates so low that the cost of capital makes automation much cheaper than humans. Rather than pay people to do stuff, you just borrow money to install machines that do it, instead.

You and your comrades in government are effectively paying corporations to get rid of human employees, just so you can whine about it afterwards.