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Comment by duderific | Hacker News Reader

I personally don't get a lot of productivity gain from putting stuff into space. I do, using Slack, and I suspect a lot of other people do as well.

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You get immense prodictivity benefits from putting stuff into space. You just don't personally notice unless it breaks.

Did you check today's weather forecast specific to your location?

Compared to what the 2,000 active satellites enable, Slack is just chatter.

Also see this page on Wikipedia documenting some of NASA’s inventions that have benefited us: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

ULA does that, not spacex

and spacex doesnt plan on going public

and technically it's russian engines that launch them

in any case company valuation is not based on aspirations

> in any case company valuation is not based on aspirations

It kind of is though. Valuation is based on future discounted cash flow. Aspirations inform how much future cash flow a company can generate.

but are satellite launches a growing market? there is only so much space up there. Mars is a different beast, but that's quite a few decades ahead before it starts bringing "cash flow"

I’m not sure if you’ve checked recently, but there’s a lot of space up there.

Not really. Geosynchronous orbital slots are filling up very quickly. They tend to space them about 2 degrees apart due to interference.

Yes, they are. Multiple constellations with thousands of satellites each are planned.

That just reinforces the point; ULA is worth even less.

Not quite, we are transitioning to our own rockets soon afaik.

How do you expect to compete with fully reusable boosters a la SpaceX? Are you building your own and when do you hope to have them delivering paying payloads? Or does ULA hope to buy reusable rockets from Blue Origin, not just engines?

They stopped using Russian engines years ago.

Nope, five of the eight ULA launches in 2018 were Atlas V's and Atlas V first stages currently use Russian RD-180 engines. ULA is interested in replacing those engines with Blue Origin engines, or replacing the Atlas V with the Vulcan (probably also using Blue Origin engines), but that hasn't happened yet.

Or use GPS?

>Did you check today's weather forecast specific to your location?

No but I used Slack today.

His example was just one of many problems solved by putting stuff in space. The modern world would have a very hard time operating at the current scale of humanity without sats. Flight ops, shipping ops, transit navigation and routing for the stuff that you buy, general communication links you probably don't even know you're using when you are using them.

Slack is obviously very useful, but it's also trivially replaced. The ability to put stuff in space is not easily replaced. Conquering the inherit business risk of space operations and engineering when others won't is part the value of space companies.

Slack could be meaningfully replaced at a company with a git repo checkout and some local hardware.

>I personally don't get a lot of productivity gain from putting stuff into space

You don't use phones, digital maps, or are glad that your national defense is up and running?

Of course, but that productivity is "baked into the cake" at this point. How much incremental productivity is gained by the new things being put into space now?

Something tells me that it's possible these devices will need to be replaced or upgraded at some point

Edit: Just 1 GPS satellite, I misread.

Satellites don't last forever. SpaceX launched 10 gps sattelites in 2018... (or more, not sure, that's just one launch)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_Block_IIIA

I believe SpaceX has launched one next generation GPS satellite so far (Dec, 2018). They are big and take up the full payload of a Falcon 9. So heavy, in fact, that SpaceX has to launch them in disposable mode. It is the Iridium satellites are the ones that SpaceX launches 10 at a time.

You're right. Put an edit at the start of my post making it clear I misread.

Thanks!

From what I see and experience, Slack has a negative impact on productivity the way most companies and employees end up using it. People get easily distracted, context switch, create random non-work related chats (music, video games, movies, etc.), and constantly check it like a bad habit.

I guess I'm old, moldy and miss the productivity and work ethic before the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, text messaging, and Slack were excessively popular and overly accessible.

I use slack to you know, slack off. My productivity has never been as low since slack was added as a constant distraction

It's possible you only notice the productivity loss, but the gains are so seamless (sharing a screenshot, a chat that removes the need for a meeting etc.) that they aren't as noticeable.

You can always quit out of the program for a while if you need to really focus, I do that often.

Yes you do. You apparently just don't know it.

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