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Need to remove regulations instead and fast track SpaceX.

Every fucking time we don't need to increase the size of the Government. It only gets bigger. Never smaller.




No, launching big heavy explosive things into space shouldn’t have fewer regulations. That’s insane to think they should be able to just do it without much oversight.


Sure the safety part of it is something that should be verified before launch. But when they are launching multiple of these things and the variables are all mostly the same you don't need to do the same analysis over and over again.

A prime example is the environmental impact stuff. They have already done that multiple times. Nothing really changed. If it succeed and doesn't blow up the impact is X, if it blows up the impact is Y. Yet these approvals take weeks and months.

There are also multiple agencies that put their foot down. Famously fish and wildlife was worried starship would crash in the water and hit a shark/whale. No seriously. https://youtu.be/kS8G5D9fg3g?t=21

Then there is the story that at Vandenburg air base, they had to strap a seal to a board and play rocket noises through headphones to see if it was distressed. Keep in mind Vandenburg has been a military rocket launch site for decades. But only now when its SpaceX do these agencies put up road blocks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SvJP5wfN4k


> Keep in mind Vandenburg has been a military rocket launch site for decades.

Not one of which ever returned to base with a sonic boom.

I assure you, the folks who tried to kill goats via mental powers and staring at them have required weirder tests than the seal.


Isn’t this exactly what happened with Boeing, where the FAA delegated its authority, on the assumption that Boeing knew what it was doing?


Regulations probably are not going to fix the rot that's inside Boeing. It's like putting water in groundhog tunnels, clamp down on one area and it will pop up somewhere else.

They need to die off and get replaced by better competition when they mess up. And their market centralization ground to a halt instead of encouraged by the gov because of jobs and total risk aversion.


Boeing is publicly funded though, which means crazy incentives take over that are out of whack.


If by the size of government you mean the budget, there have been multiple instances of the government shrinking. As a percent of GDP the 90s saw cuts to federal spending, the 2011 sequestration saw a drop in spending even in nominal terms, and obviously the end of WW2 saw a massive collapse in government spending and the end of multiple different programs




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