Yeah... spend some time actually interacting with people with clearances. They are people just like any other so you have some humans and some deranged chuds. And everyone in positions of power are either political appointees (elected or otherwise) or ladder climbers who want to suckle on the teat of those appointees.
So when you point out that someone is actively cheering for russia in a conflict with our allies or is openly calling people slurs? You get told that people are allowed to have political opinions and you are the problem. Because YOU are the reasonable person who will drop it. Whereas they will then bitch and moan that someone in IT has "blue hair" and whine until a local politician runs on that and suddenly everyone has very strict dress codes.
Which, in turn, leads to people leaving in droves which just leaves the shitheads and the appeasers.
Not for the upper managers though, right? I've also had clearances, and I know about some shocking things that some of the government managers did while never so much as being investigated for them.
Know of a company that misrepresented a product to the government. When the government found out they frooze all purchases from them for 3 years. Once that was found out, wall street crashed their stock. After that happened, the CEO was fired.
starlink works... if it isn't out in the sun for too long. spacex works... for the purposes of what the actual contracts are for.
the issue is musk being highly likely to be compromised and openly calling for the rape and murder of people he doesn't like. Which gets back to "politics is allowed and you are the intolerant one" level responses.
I mean, nationalized spacex is just NASA again. Which I am all for since spacex (and blue origin and the other one) mostly just came out of poaching staff from NASA and JPL in the first place.
That is 95% false and is the nonsense that has mostly been pedaled by the musks of the world to justify privatized space flight.
Like everything with the US military industrial complex, we split everything up to nonsensical degrees. So much of the research and designs NASA uses are based on work and spec by the Army and Air Force. Which, in turn, leads to very specific proposals for companies like Boeing (eep) and the like.
But the actual design and research and even "small scale" testing? That is generally NASA and JPL. JPL in particular being a government research lab (similar model used by the Navy and the DOE) that coordinates with in house talent as well as university groups around the country.
But as spacex and the like basically poached so much of the top talent out of NASA and JPL and universities? It stopped being "Build this rocket to these specs" and more "Hmm. That rocket you are trying to sell us looks REAL familiar but we have been told by congress we can't design it ourselves so here is your money. Say hi to Fred for us."
Well I dealt with NASA quite a little bit. But, you know best I Suppose.
Sure, you can argue that the.space race was formed, and many accomplishments that came from it, are a result of a military dick measurement exercise. But, maybe there is something you don't know. When man adventures, the development of technologies follows. This has happened throughout history.
BTW, JPL fixed Voyager the other day. Launched in 1977 it is the first man made object in interstellar space.