SpaceX's rise can be traced to a critical launch from a Pacific isle

Do you own any stocks? Even holding a broad exchange fund makes you a stockholder. Have you led the charge in any lawsuits or is this just lip service outrage?

I agree future historians will judge our governments and our megacorps, the current keepers of humanity's resources, very harshly. However, many of those at the ships' helms are insulated from their own externalities, the consequences of their decisions. And most of the shares are held by others who are similarly insulated, or abstracted away through 401ks and mutual funds.

The core of the problem is that our entire system of resource allocation is based on who can make the most money with them and construct the tallest walls around them, not who uses them to better the most lives.

For every million lives destroyed by climate change, there is a million more that doesn't care about anything beyond their family, their friends, and their iPhone. A warming planet will make much of Siberia arable, for example.

I think the answer to your questions begins with another question: what would make a CEO not use lobbying to resist taxing externalities of his company? What about a board of directors? A shareholder? An "average voter?"

When we can answer those questions, we can begin to make progress.

It's entirely possible that more consumer electronics and home appliances will be purchased in North Carolina in Q4 this year, because so many were damaged in the flooding and will be repurchased out of necessity, coupled with some flood insurance money.

So let's say you're an influential shareholder at a big company, this company has been successful because it did a few things well, and there are a bunch of other shareholders with their own agendas.

Meanwhile you are a human being just like any other so fundamentally you're making decisions about what you're going to do with your own life, which is the only thing you really control.

Now, you're concerned about climate change. Does it really make sense to try to lasso this big company into doing something about climate change, if it has no experience in that field, and no one there joined in order to work on climate change?

More likely you would put some of your own (presumably considerable) resources into some other project that's focused on climate change. Because that's going to have a better chance of success than trying to sequester resources away from BigCorp for something that BigCorp fundamentally isn't committed to.

The point is you are an investor and it just doesn't make sense to invest resources into X with the goal of doing Y's job. You would invest in Y instead. Put another way if you own an all-star basketball team and you want to win an ice hockey championship you don't tell them to start playing hockey on the weekends, you use the money they made to go buy a hockey team.

Yes, the number of hurricanes could increase. But it might double, over the next century.

That's bad, but in the vast scheme of things, it isn't that bad.

No scientist believes in something like day after tomorrow, or anything coming close to what you are implying is going to happen.

It will be more like trillions of dollars in damages, over the next century. Not some world changing event.

We've been dealing with hurricanes for a while now, and if they double, it isn't going to cause the entire economy to stop.

If you want some recent example, look at Puerto Rico. ~5K people died in the recent hurricane. This is bad. But if it happened twice as often, would the world coming grinding to a halt? No. The Earth would keep spinning, people would continue to go to work every day, and watch TV.

If you want to learn from the experts on the actual scale of damage and timeline, go read what the IPCC have to say on the matter. They are the official authority on the matter. And they do not agree with the idea of world ending consequences, like people imply all the time.

(tries to apply double-negative parsing, suspecting an off-by-one error)

(stops and laughs realizing the commenter was criticizing its parent for writing something unclear)

(edits original reply from "one too many negatives there" to this ridiculous response you've now finished reading)

The bar is high for this stuff. Having the first stage of a rocket land on a barge changes the economics of spacecraft. That’s the kind of innovation people are looking for.

A lot of big money is held by public companies who generally don't like these longshots. Elon talks about it all the time himself.

It also should be a rare thing; they're moonshots, after all. The intersection between "has billions to spare" and "is insane enough to try things like going to space" is not large.

This works, but it's not as effective as you'd think. It's hugely expensive, it's slow, it has a lot of traps and pitfalls for the unwary, it often leads to highly compromised and undertested designs that are often kind of mediocre in one or multiple respects. And, again, it's expensive, it leads to expensive rockets and expensive launch costs. Ironically, developing for lower cost launches is seemingly even more expensive in up front costs due to the extra engineering, lower margins, etc.

Additionally, one of the dirty little secrets of the rocket business is that very, very few organizations actually have any current practical experience in creating new rockets from scratch. It's one thing to run through all the machining, assembly, etc. for a rocket that's already been designed, built, proven, etc, it's quite another thing to start off with a blank piece of paper and build a rocket starting from nothing.

So the smart way to build rockets isn't the above "obvious" way, it's an inherently iterative (agile) approach. Step 1 isn't building a rocket, it's building a team that can build a rocket. And you don't just iterate through improving the capabilities of your rocket design you also iterate through leveling up the skillset (at individual and organizational levels) of your company. It's a sort of tick/tock cadence, and each side is just as important as the other. Then, you build out a "minimum viable business" so that you can get revenue (and profits and investment capital) rolling in, keeping the company afloat, paying for new engineering and the development of new capabilities. Then you iterate and iterate and iterate your way to bigger and better things.

This model might seem extremely familiar and extremely obvious to the silicon valley set but it really is kind of foreign in the aerospace world (there's actually a bunch of interviews on youtube from NASA engineers working with SpaceX being amazed at what they were able to do and how much their process differed from the bureaucratic norms in the field). And, to be fair, plenty of New Space companies have followed similar models (Armadillo Aerospace, X-COR, Masten, several others) but for one reason or another none of them had the capabilities or the capital to jump to the level of success of SpaceX (so far).

In any event, this is precisely what SpaceX did. They started out with a dead simple (decades old) rocket design, they built a team that built a small rocket capable of getting some launch business. They streamlined the company by vertically integrating to allow faster iteration and lower costs. They iterated like crazy, they made a few mistakes here and there, had some bad luck here and there, but they managed to scrape through the choke points. They were able to launch a payload and get enough business to stay afloat, they were able to get investments and development contracts for future business that would allow them to fund further iterative improvements to their rockets. They relentlessly managed risks in an incredibly savvy way that should be taught in business schools and were able to operate an R&D program that made use of about a billion dollars in aerospace hardware for a fraction of the cost to the company itself.

A lot of this stuff is textbook modern software dev technique. Continuous integration, continuous delivery. Feature flags (to let you test new code works doing the "old" job before testing that the new code also performs new features). You'd think a big company like Google would be able to get this right, but it requires a level of commitment and an acceptance of loss ("failures" during R&D) that big, established companies are often reluctant to take on.

That being said, SpaceX really showed other companies, like Ariane Space, that you don't need 50k + people in three countries and 15+ years to get a new rocket to LEO.

Hiring a think tank to solve a problem is a brute force search; almost like a random walk in the solution space. That's a huge risk for someone with lots of money and no domain expertise, but perhaps less a risk for an Einstein who has relevant knowledge and skills. Lots of solutions were found in the proverbial garage, and perhaps would have never been the product of a billion dollars and the best MIT grads you could hire. Nonetheless, spontaneity is, by definition, not something you can really throw money at and expect to happen. Even a trillion dollars will not help you find the next Einstein who can solve the exact problem you are working on.

Focussing on SpaceX specifically, Musk has always been clear that his business goal was to provide space transport at 10% the current cost. There's a story that he'd worked out (based on his existing rocket-building knowledge) that it seemed entirely practical to build a rocket for far less than going rate - on a plane while flying back from Russia. He had a business case before he spent his first dollar.

There's obviously remaining uncertainty but it would be foolish to start a project without some idea of how you'd profit.

No scientist believes that global warming is as bad as you are making it seem.

Yes, it will cause trillions of dollars in damages over the next century or so, as sea levels go up by a couple feet.

But that is hardly the end of the world, as you are making it seem. For example, Miami is not predicted to disappear, in a mere 20 years, as you imply.

The actual negative effects of global warming are closer to being within an order of magnitude of badness to an Iraq war, in a century, than is it to being an extinction event.

Back to real life, Google doesn't provide search because it makes the world a better place. Google provides search at the scale that they do because they had a clear business model and an incentive to do so. In an alternate reality, if it turned out nobody clicked ads, then Google would probably not exist at the scale that it does. Ten years ago, some decision to build 50,000 more processing servers would have been rejected by the board because they would have deemed it unprofitable.

The profits a company makes gives them the ability to make a choice on where to expand. If they keep expanding into avenues that do not return profit, they will be given fewer of these choices -- and will eventually go bankrupt.

So atleast someone is playing that game already, same with Ocean Cleanup Drones etc. etc. Lot's of people try to use market forces to save the planet, and Big Tech Co's are investing in that space, but it's not something where one can expect results in less than a decade.

[1] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/06/07/...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14064103

https://m.xkcd.com/1484/

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c

And the satellites still made it to the proper orbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5#Launch_statistics