Reasonable people can disagree on this, but I don't think that resentment towards the richest man in the world or a perceived need to "put him in his place" is worth self-sabotaging your civilization's position on something as important as space.
Americans may not feel it as keenly, but here in Central Europe, we have a visceral feeling that a new period of wars is upon us. Ukraine, the Near East, Taiwan: everything converging like back in 1938-9. Authoritarians all over the world feel emboldened. And, at the same time, the West is weaker than it was, not least because of loss of industrial capacity. Space is one of the few industries where we still command some advantage, and 2/3rds of that advantage is concentrated in SpaceX.
Yeah, I don't think that sacrificing that advantage to personal dislike of Musk is worth it. Even though I agree that he is obnoxious.
>is worth self-sabotaging your civilization's position on something as important as space.
And yet we can't really be sure that Musk has anything but self interest involved. He's gone all-in on right-wing climate denying politicians. I honestly don't really care what his aspirations are for life on Mars if he's willfully helping to destroy this planet just so he can save some money on his taxes, or whatever short-term goal he thinks supporting right-wing politicians will get him.
Please go read China's GDP and try to understand how it would completely crash if they went to war with the US. We're far too dependent on each other to go to war over anything.
I stopped relying on rationality of humans when it comes to war.
Russia and Ukraine had terrible birth rates before the war and Russia had a clearly inadequate amount of soldiers for occupying a country of that size (only about 200 000, where a million or more would be realistically required). Not very good preconditions for a massive war. Putin went ahead anyway.
GWB's attack on Iraq wasn't a particularly smart action either.
Maybe China can learn from those mistakes. Or maybe Xi feels that his time is slowly coming to an end anyway, and a Heroic Feat is necessary to fix his position in the textbooks of tomorrow.
Americans may not feel it as keenly, but here in Central Europe, we have a visceral feeling that a new period of wars is upon us. Ukraine, the Near East, Taiwan: everything converging like back in 1938-9. Authoritarians all over the world feel emboldened. And, at the same time, the West is weaker than it was, not least because of loss of industrial capacity. Space is one of the few industries where we still command some advantage, and 2/3rds of that advantage is concentrated in SpaceX.
Yeah, I don't think that sacrificing that advantage to personal dislike of Musk is worth it. Even though I agree that he is obnoxious.