Summary
Elon Musk’s DOGE faces mounting pressure to show achievements amid criticism. Staffers, under pressure from Trump administration officials, seek public relations wins to counter negative headlines.
Cuts to federal offices led to mass layoffs, and efforts to modernize government services have been chaotic. DOGE prioritizes speed over security and protecting sensitive information.
Trump has distanced himself, stating agency chiefs, not Musk, control department cuts, preferring a “scalpel” over a “hatchet” approach. Public opinion has turned against DOGE, with 48% disapproving versus 34% approving, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll.
With limited time before their tenure ends, DOGE officials are desperate to show results.
Like all his others companies.
Maybe at some point in his mid 50ties he should have focused on one thing.
You don’t have to pretend space x is bad to hate musk. Spacex has done massive leaps for space tech
So much of the criticism focuses on Starship, specifically. Starship has never claimed to be anything other than a test program. Look back into the history of NASA test programs and you’ll fine lots of exploded pieces of rockets. Starship is also moving along a whole lot better than the SLS at a comparable stage of the development track. People bleating about this clearly don’t have a lot of knowledge about rockets and their history.
Safety is somewhat valid. Obviously, exploding rockets over the Gulf of Mexico is not a good thing, but the chances of debris actually hitting a plane are minuscule. See Big Sky Theory, which is the basis for a lot of air traffic policy. It’s just that the aviation industry has extremely tight safety standards, and so they divert planes.
Falcon 9 also exists, and now has a better track record than Soyuz (the previous gold standard). People making these arguments seem to conveniently leave that out.
Now, environmental standards, how Musk is trying to gut NASA and the FAA, and how the company never would have survived without government subsidies? Yes, absolutely focus on those. Also, the fact that SpaceX employees are mostly insulated from their idiot CEO. They’re the real heroes of the company.
In a different Administration, I think SpaceX should be nationalized and run something like the USPS or Amtrak. NASA shouldn’t make their own rockets anymore. They’re really bad at making anything close to cost effective.
SpaceX is not some virtue of musk, he also pollutes heavily, and ignore safety standards to launch all those in texas
They have 95% success rate for landing boosters in a relatively new technology, saving loads in terms of trash and pollution (if that’s even a metric somebody is remotely interested in for space travel).
This is a huge leap. Probably not worth giving Musk credit for, but still.