SpaceX in its short lifetime has had more catastrophic failures more often than the entire history of NASA.

To build “cheap” prototypes and learn from their failure is their whole business model. And it’s working. Their rockets don’t fail on missions, they fail while testing.

SpaceX has done nothing that NASA couldn’t have done had we funded it.

I disagree. NASA is a government agency and by nature it’s held down by bureaucracy and moves at a snail’s place. There’s no incentive for them to keep to a budget and timeline.

What NASA is really good at are robotics and observational science. I think they should be funded to put tech in space and on other celestial objects, and the dirty work of getting stuff off the ground should be delegated to private companies.

All of that was paid for my tax dollar

Except it wasn’t.

From wikipedia: “SpaceX developed Falcon 9 with private capital as well, but did have pre-arranged commitments by NASA to purchase several operational flights once specific capabilities were demonstrated.”

NASA payed them to transport cargo to the ISS. Both Falcon1 and Falcon9 were privately funded.

and costs far more than what NASA would have paid to do it.

You mean the NASA that’s known for budget overruns? That estimated the shuttle program would cost $54M per flight that turned out to cost $409 million? (inflation adjusted)
The NASA that couldn’t come up with a new launch system for 14 years after the shuttle program was cancelled?

Do you think SpaceX operates an R&D division of astrophysicists to figure out how space travel even works?

Do you think astrophysicists is the science of spaceflight? Well, it shows you have no idea what you’re talking about.

He wants to keep the money despite his rocket programs literally blowing up in everyone’s faces

What are you yapping about?

• SpaceX is the most prolific space company in recent history, performing a launch every 3 days on average.
• Falcon 9 is the most reliable launch system in in world.
• Besides the 60 year old Soyuz, Dragon is the only human certified spacecraft capable of delivering crews to and from the ISS.
• Starship is the largest rocket prototype -and manmade object- to leave the atmosphere.

And they did all this in the last 10 years.

Shitting on SpaceX just because Elon’s name is attached to it, -trendy as it may be right now- is dismissing the work of the engineers who made all this possible.

And no, I’m not sucking Elon’s dick.

In fact, the only reason SpaceX works well is because, allegedly, there’s a wall of people shielding the company from Elon’s batshit insanity. If it wasn’t for them, he would have ran it to the ground already.

“update your drivers and run windows update”

Because they’re ugly, bulky and inconvenient as fuck.

You’d probably have to keep tuning as the weight of the spool decreases.
Its more practical to print a spool holder with bearings for it. Thingyverse has some good ones