There is something that Kirchnerism did extraordinarily well for twenty years: turning public spending into a moral virtue. If an agency received more money, it was because the State was "investing"; if it hired employees, it was because it was "expanding capacities"; if a project became increasingly costly, that spending had to be interpreted as a sign of national commitment. Asking what had been produced with all that money ended up seeming, in that ideological universe, like a form of heresy.
The Tronador project allows us to observe that machinery in almost perfect condition. The discussion was reignited after an interview with Noel de Castro, an Argentine biomedical engineer and candidate for a future private space mission with Axiom Space, who harshly criticized the management of resources in the Argentine space program. According to her, Argentina would have spent around USD 600 million on the development of the Tronador launcher without achieving it.
The comparison she made was even more uncomfortable. De Castro recalled that the development of SpaceX's Falcon 1 cost approximately USD 90 million. NASA backed that figure and also estimated the subsequent development of the Falcon 9 at around USD 300 million. In other words, about USD 390 million for two launchers that actually reached space.
Argentina took a very different path.
Since 2007, around Tronador there have been prototypes, engines, tests, infrastructure, contracts, technicians, officials, official presentations, and new stages of development. There have also been real technological advances and successful tests. But almost twenty years later, what was supposed to justify the entire program is still missing: an operational Tronador launcher capable of placing an Argentine payload in orbit.
And there is an even more uncomfortable fact. In 2014, official documentation sent to Congress projected that, thanks to the development of the program, from 2018 Argentina could carry out between five and ten annual launches. This was not an estimate spread by a liberal critic nor an exaggeration later used to ridicule the State. It was the very state structure announcing what its results would be.
2018 arrived. 2019 passed. Another Kirchnerist government passed.
The five to ten annual launches do not exist.
That is the true scandal of Tronador. A project can consume fortunes, fail to meet its main objective for years, and still always find a new explanation to continue receiving public resources.
This summarizes a way of governing that Kirchnerism turned into culture: wrapping every state structure in a morally untouchable cause to make any question about costs and results seem suspicious. The same happened with science.
If someone asked how much it cost, when it was supposed to be finished, or what concrete result justified continuing to fund it, the answer was rarely technical. Questioning the budget was equivalent to attacking science; questioning the agency was to despise the State; asking for results was to adopt a "mercantilist" logic incompatible with the great national objectives.
Meanwhile, the only one obligated to function efficiently was the taxpayer, because someone had to produce the wealth necessary to sustain all that moral superiority.
Here lies the central difference with SpaceX. Elon Musk's company could truly fail. Its investors could lose money, funding could run out, and the company could disappear. Engineers were required to transform scarce resources into results before those resources were exhausted. That pressure is not a defect of capitalism. It is one of the mechanisms that forces capitalism to distinguish between good intentions and something that actually works.
The State operates under completely different incentives. When a project is delayed, the timeline can be extended; when it costs more, the budget can be increased; when a test fails, a new stage can be announced. And when someone finally proposes to reduce funding, the person responsible for the failure can almost magically transform into a victim of "underfunding."
That is why Javier Milei generates such rejection among a good part of the Argentine political, scientific, cultural, and media establishment. His deeper break does not consist only of spending less. It consists of asking a question that has been forbidden for too long: what result does the citizen receive in exchange for the money that the State forces them to hand over?
Milei does not consider that a growing budget is a moral medal. He does not assume that an agency should survive because it has existed for decades nor that invoking the word "science" grants immunity from any evaluation. That transformation seems elementary, but it fundamentally threatens a system accustomed to measuring commitment by the amount of resources absorbed and not by objectives achieved.
Hopefully one day Argentina will have a space industry capable of competing with the world. We have scientists, engineers, and technicians capable of producing extraordinary innovations.
But the case has already left an impossible-to-ignore lesson: SpaceX had to prove it could reach space. Kirchnerism demonstrated it could spend hundreds of millions without getting anywhere.
