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NASA’s commercial spacesuit program just hit a major snag (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 months ago by llamacoffee@lemmy.world to c/spaceflight@sh.itjust.works

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If NASA were to re-open competition, one of the bidders could be SpaceX, which has already designed a basic spacesuit to support the private Polaris Dawn mission.

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[–] ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I agree with you.

We're paying for it anyway when a private enterprise develops this technology, but we don't get to keep the results of any of that development. That's my big problem with it. It's like any other tragedy of publicly funded projects/programs that ultimately only profit a select few like healthcare, stadiums, and pretty much any software as a service or closed source systems sold to public sectors. Those are just a few, but I'm sure there are more. This stuff is too important to the public good to be controlled and horded by corporations. The scariest thing in the alien franchise wasn't the xenomorphs, it was The Weyland-Yutani Corporation.

[–] gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 2 points 3 months ago

I haven't seen the alien franchise, but I agree with the rest.

To me, it seems to be a problem with IP ("intellectual property"). Setting IP higher should in theory advance private research and investment, while causing scarcity to the public having to rely on these services. Low IP means more equality within society, but also slower research/progress.

Personally I think that spaceflight is only at its very beginning; And it should be heavily invested and researched into. And stronger commercialization of space flight can help with that, IMO.