If the FCC believed they should give assistance to SpaceX, it should have been in the form of access to the spectrum Charlie Ergen has been squatting over at DISH making the same promises SpaceX is doing right now. For those unaware of Ergan's history, the FCC for the first time decided to give a light wrist slap over setting up a constellation of fake shell corporations to bid on spectrum that included rural and small carrier subsidies. DISH has blown every build-out deadline and it's set back terrestrial carriers for years now. There were two they completely blew off that came due this year, and the only purpose they served was as an excuse to let the Sprint/TMUS merger happen, where previously TMUS had been calling out their business practices. I'm aware every Elon fanboy is going to wax poetic about how it won't be the same, but I'd caution you to consider SolarCity and what a public funds debacle that has been. There's a history of making big promises in areas and leaving a mess.
Running an ISP is an easy to understand business model, either be the only option in an area or provide better service (and/or price) then incumbents. As others in this thread have said, there's already a shitload of capital flowing around, so why should this capital come from the public. Why didn't Elon just run another 'Deposit $100 to get in line for Starlink!' As it stands most of the US is stuck with shit ISP's because of a lack of competition, and giving subsidies to incumbents (like Charter) are only going to enrich them and further entrench their monopolies.
SpaceX didn't launch this service as a practical or sensible business model for them, they already get paid to launch other telecommunications equipment into space, they are doing this to keep on the government, the public's tit.
> they are doing this to keep on the government, the public's tit
$1B is a fraction of what SpaceX, and Morgan Stanley among others, believe they can make from Starlink: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/22/mor...
I think this time it really is different. SpaceX has already reduced launch cost by an order of magnitude, and if Starship is successful another 1-2 orders of magnitude. This gives them a huge advantage over other LEO constellation attempts.
I don’t think this money is necessary for their success but if the money is there for the taking why wouldn’t they take it?
Which specific launches are you referring to? Some of the Space Force launch costs have gotten quite bloated for SpaceX as well
"United Launch Alliance, was awarded $337 million to launch two missions comparable to the one awarded to SpaceX"
https://spacenews.com/spacex-explains-why-the-u-s-space-forc....
They received subsidies for electric cars and delivered electric cars.
They received subsidies for space travel and they delivered both cargo and humans to the space station.
Now they receive subsidies on for telecommunication, given the two previous deliveries, what makes you think this third one will suddenly go the grift route?
Majority of the subsidies (around 70%?) were indirect on EV's through buyer incentive credits. I wouldn't directly consider this a Tesla subsidy as any established auto manufacturer could claim it with an electric vehicle. The remaining subsidies were far less than this FCC subsidy is.
> Why do you look at the history of telecommunication companies rather than the history of SpaceX?
Because when a company that isn't a telecommunications company decides to be one, it's important to understand why and the best way to do so is to look at the history of the industry and the behavior of principle executives in the company deciding to pivot.
>They received subsidies for space travel and they delivered both cargo and humans to the space station.
This was a great success and they should absolutely be commended for this. There are situations where the public and SpaceX have received a mutual benefit. The GPS, ISS missions, and Lockheed defense contracts all saved taxpayers a ton of money.
> Now they receive subsidies on for telecommunication, given the two previous deliveries, what makes you think this third one will suddenly go the grift route?
Sweeping aside that this is the way it's always been for a market that should not require subsidies now that costs can actually be amortized (unlike previously for Iridium), there's already a track record of scandals around their Elon-associated affiliates looting public funds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolarCity#Lawsuits_and_investi...
This is pretty much nonsense. Spend 10min actually researching the market and you would know it is nonsense.
Rocket launches are tiny part of the space market, even if SpaceX had a monopoly it would not be that much money. Also, the most valuable launches are trying up and there are not nearly enough of them for SpaceX to continue to grow.
Telecommunications however is a much bigger market, and that is why SpaceX is going into it. There is a gigantic market to be captured and SpaceX with cheap launch and amazing sat technology have a chance to do it. This is also a global play, the idea that this was done just to get access to US subsidies is nonsensical.
They have been planning for this for many, many, many years long before it was even clear if they could get access to this FCC subsidy at all, something that was disputed until just a couple months ago. They didn't invest multiple billion into this project to hopefully get less then 1 billion back in the next 10 years.
As to why SpaceX takes advantage of this, why should they not? SpaceX would do the same thing without these funds, but why not take advantage of it if the government offers it?
As a former space industry worker, I don't know if I subscribe to that, but that's the best steelmanning I can come up with.
To continue on with the steelmanning, the first stage is probably a drop in a bucket compared to the entire effort. How much freight do you think it would take to colonize a planet with a population large enough to be relatively self-sufficient? Just the payload cost would be huge and that's just to park it (not to assemble, maintain etc.) I think the steelman argument would be to focus on things immediately needed, like healthcare, before space adventurism.
Edit: to put a finer point on it, the commercial space industry is essentially subsidized by the government precisely because it's not currently economical. In other words, if the government wasn't a customer there would be no commercial space industry. There's nothing inherently wrong with this because it's how high-risk industries often get started (e.g., the airlines), but the fact that it is subsidized by the government points to the fact that it is (currently) inherently uneconomical
It is basically a larger version of the argument "Well, if you are so poor, why did you drink that cup of coffee this morning?"
At no point did I say it's a magic bullet that would "completely fix" any of that. But spending hundreds of millions directly on healthcare would likely pay more healthcare dividends than, say, some unintended materials science application that started in rocket engine development.
How exactly do you think funding gets doled out? They aren't just given a blank check...Agencies request a certain amount, then as the sausage gets made on Capitol Hill, some programs are shaved, others are padded. The people in those discussions are bringing their priorities to the table and, in some cases, will have to make concessions like not having their metaphorical coffee in order to save a higher priority project.
For example, the U.S. pays more than 40% (down from 50%) of the worlds medical R&D. They essentially subsidize healthcare for much of the rest of the world (meaning the U.S. bears more of the cost so other countries can have cheaper care). There's plenty wrong with the U.S. healthcare system that needs fixing, but trite sentences don't begin to capture the real nature of the problem.
With limited resources, you have to prioritize or else you can run the risk of being spread so thin nothing is adequately funded so nothing really gets accomplished. You can't fight a war on all fronts, all the time.
I probably didn't do a good job of explaining that I meant "constrained environment" in the operations research sense. Everything rooted in the real world is constrained. Why don't we each take a private jet to work everyday? Because we're constrained on money. If we're not constrained on money, we're constrained on time. If it's not that, we're constrained by the amount of carbon we can release and still have a reasonably favorable environment for humans.
One of the reasons the Space Shuttle became somewhat of a boondoggle was because of this. They had a constrained budget but had to meet the demands of multiple, often competing, stakeholders. Musk knows this; he knows that NASA has constraints he doesn't. He doesn't have to spread his facilities across multiple States to help ensure support from as many Congress people as possible. He doesn't have to expose himself to the same level of political risk that can change every four years. He can optimize under a different set of constraints, but it would be a mistake to assume he's unconstrained.
I mean, defense contractors look at hot wars as opportunities as well. And they do drive technology forward, perhaps even more than any other force in this discussion. But that's not to say they don't have negative externalities that shouldn't be ignored.
How many trillions are spent on war? On corporate subsidies and kickbacks on everything else? How much money is wasted in so many other stupid things? We have a GDP rising at a faster rate than our populations and have for decades. We don't spend the that extra money helping people. We could, but we don't.
And then people look to NASA and SpaceX and say "Look at all that waste".
Meanwhile, this money is going to go to providing low-cost internet all over America (and then the rest of the world). It's going to provide a real, tangible benefit to people at a lower cost than the alternatives.
If people think there is an existential threat to their way of life, it's hard to convince them to take from that pocket to fund something more fanciful and likely only relevant generations away (if ever). That's the insidious part of the military boogeyman...and SpaceX probably knows this as well since they garner defense contracts too.
And that’s just the beginning of the technology needed to fully achieve his ambitions.
Anytime lines like this get written, be suspect.
>I don't see anyone on here complaining about how Charter chooses to spend the profits from this deal, it's certainly not going to go to settling Mars.
I complain all the time about the cable companies, but this is a thread about SpaceX. As irrelevant as that comment is, it's even less relevant arguing that using funds to build a LEO/VLEO satellite ISP (that will probably get divested at some point) will somehow help them get to Mars. Commercially there's no point in going to Mars so it takes political willpower and nations to finance it on a scale that's many orders of magnitude greater than anything done at the moment (more than even the JWST).
That's an incredibly short sighted argument. As if this planet will last forever. I don't get this attitude at all. It's like saying why plan for the future at all!
"I am no man!" — Eowyn
https://mobile.twitter.com/robert_zubrin/status/101347705748...
Edit: Will surely invest considerable resources to convert Earth to a national park once we have outgrown earth's economy 100x
I think greed and hedonic adaptation can also lead to this. There's no monopoly on some of the lesser angels of human nature.
That link is assuming that the ends justify the means, which I tend to believe is the road to evil. In this case, there are more foundational principals that would take precedence.
Money spent on space programs IS spent here on Earth. The money paid to engineers and fabricators and for raw materials goes to pay for house payments, durable goods, food and taxes of the individuals working on these projects. And those payments create jobs delivering these services, which benefits an ever increasing number of people.
It's not as if dollar bills were litterally burned to provide rocket thrust.
Your same argument can be used for the defense contractors as well and people will still line up to argue it’s not the best use of tax dollars
To extend that argument, is it better to give underserved internet access or spend the money on something that potentially saves someone’s life, like mosquito netting? I think even though HN is very in love with high tech problems, many would argue we could serve humanity better by prioritizing those lower tech problems that tend to solve more fundamental needs
Couldn't we spend absurd amounts of money on fixing Earth instead? Surely it's easier than starting from even less resources and livable environment than Mars.
There is a cultural myth in New Age communities that humans decimated Mars and came to Earth after, or something like that. We should fix Earth first
We're already spending more than 99.99% of our money on Earth. Are you advocating for a strict 100%?
The US can use some of the trillions it wasted(and still wasting) on middle east wars for fixing Earth.
That being said, the US could stand to spend less on military funding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Fitzgerald_and_MV_ACX_Crys...
The US Navy is much bigger and has global operations. They're just as guilty of being careless but they also have proven war fighting capabilities. No one is asking the British to sail by as a show of power and solidarity.
Similarly, military aircraft crash vastly more often than their civilian counterparts, but consider extreme safety simply isn't what militaires optimize for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
The series of four accidents including those two in a short period in the US 7th Fleet was considered a sign of very significant problems. It is not at all typical of large, capable navies.
The reason for the fairly significant consequences, the global stand down, etc., is because, as many experts wrote at the time, they said a lot about the US Navy’s capacity for warfare.
> Rates of accidents that are completely unacceptable in peacetime are a rounding errors in a significant war.
Sure, because war results in change in priorites in which the same skill and capacity will produce a much higher accident rate than peacetime.
But a high peacetime accident rate, even if lower than the accident rat that would be acceptable in wartime, demonstrates an institutional incapacity to operate as directed successfully, which is a severe warfighting liability.
Or simply a vastly different set of priorities. Navy ships are generally supposed to operate as a unit as their threatened by a host of over the horizon missiles, supersonic aircraft etc. In a very real way crashing into unknown ships isn't something that’s considered as a meaningful risk.
The root cause of these safety issues is however deeper. Militaries are constantly cycling both technology and people through positions. The specific implementation of training and UI where at fault for these crashes which is directly addressable. However, the institutional approach of using new people and technology has huge upsides in war. You need to be able to quickly replace losses in warfare so you need to rely on training not experience, and you need to test that this training is effective. Similarly, you can’t rely on proven technology and it’s proven training because new threats are constantly arriving.
That's directly going to cause accidents and while minimizing them is important, the long term tradeoff is considered worth it.
The USS Fitzgerald and USS John McCain are US Navy ships that have both had serious collisions recently that lead to loss of life. Ships having accidents is not a particularly good measure of battle readiness.
I doubt very much that the children born on Mars will share your view about the value of Earth nations.
I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that whether something is wasteful or not is a value judgement in a lot of ways, and that there aren't usually one size fits all answers for all members of a society when it comes to value judgments, especially for a potentially multiplanetary society.
This is absolutely not true in practice, even for rich people fortunate/lucky enough to be born in a place where they receive a passport with lots of options.
For the 99% of the other humans, it's even worse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#:~:tex....
Suppose the US and China get into a direct conflict. How does the US having a 10x advantage in the number of traditional arms vs only, say, 2x stop China from threatening to obliterate humanity with nukes the minute their leadership is facing an existential crisis?
Given that, you can't think of a single scenario where having multiple floating runways would possibly benefit wartime?
Imagine a world where anyone can get unfettered internet access. Instead of the great Firewall of China, citizens can just access a starlink satellite. How does that help with spreading democractic ideals? How does protesting and information dissemination look different? What if citizens in Iran, Middle East, Myanmar, etc. could all do the same thing?
I hope Starlink is thinking about these Big questions.
It doesn't seem like a very promising route for bypassing authoritarian government restrictions on the Internet.
I'm very capitalistic, but if SpaceX successfully colonizes Mars and builds factories there, I can imagine some frightening scenarios where it has considerable control over the U.S. rather than the U.S. having control over it.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/10/05/nro-reveals-plans-for-...
They seem to be the first defense contractor in a long time, maybe ever, with a specific eye on controlling costs. It may not be this way forever, but for now the taxpayers should get the savings where they can.
Nobody should feel forced to work more than they want to. (The abjectly lazy aside.) But we should also be free to work as hard as we want. And to freely associate with those with similar preferences.
I used to love burning both ends of the candle. It was invigorating. I didn't ruin my health for it. And it gave me life lessons I could not have learned any other way. The fruits of those years, as well as finding other interests, nudged me to a different preference. Which involved new (or changed) colleagues. I don't see why, to be satisfied with one arrangement, we must denigrate the other--they're just different solutions.
Work and life don't balance on a scale. The dynamic is more like homeostasis. One's stable ratio depends on a variety factors, extrinsic and from within, and what makes one person happy will be ruinous or lethargic for another.
Surely SpaceX employees are there by choice. How many of their employees have no better work/life balance employment choices? I would guess a rare few.
The problem is over-run and underestimation, and the govts' lack of flexibility with regards to contract termination in most instances.
2) Defense spending has been historically hovering between 15-25 percent in the United States.
'Taxpayer savings' does not, nor has it ever, indicated more money in the hands of the taxpayer -- it indicates how many new projects will be budgeted.
In other words : The tax payer saves nothing, but the military is given extra toys within the same budget.
Now, whether or not you are for or against the further arming of our troops and allied fighters -- that's a personal question.. but let's not pretend this equates to saved cash for the citizenry.
I would argue this is a bug for the taxpayers but a feature for the contractor. Much of their profit comes from change-orders after they win a poorly administered low-bid contract. It seems the M.O. often is "bid low to get the contract, and then argue/nickel-and-dime the taxpayer to pad the profit margin"
More distinctly, SpaceX has the corporate intention of interplanetary exploration and settling. SpaceX's integration into the established defense/NASA business table will help this end come to fruition.
SpaceX tenders for and receives contracts from the DoD. Such as one in August for Space Command launches and another in October for Earth-bound delivery of payloads. So they're a defence contractor.
He's eliminating gas vehicles, improving solar adoption, fixing rural internet, improving space science, making life interplanetary, etc.
It may be that Elon Musk types are extremely rare but I doubt they're as nearly as rare as most people think and we only need a thousand out of billions. The thing that makes him extremely rare, I think, is that he lucked upon a windfall of $200+ million from PayPal, a startup success that he had almost nothing to do with.
Now that I think about it, an Elon Musk Prize funded and designed by Elon Musk would be viable. His current net worth could fund 600+ Elon Musks. Elon Musk could create more Elon Musks...it's almost too simple!
“You get really tired of hot dogs and oranges after awhile,” he said. “And of course pasta and a green pepper and a big thing of sauce. And that can go pretty far, too.
“So it’s like, ‘Oh, okay, if I can live for a dollar a day then at least from a food cost standpoint, well it’s pretty easy to earn like $30 in a month anyway, so I’ll probably be okay.’ “
This isn’t the only example of a young Musk roughing it. When he started his first company, Zip2, he and his brother slept in their office instead of renting an apartment. They showered at the YMCA.
“We were so hard up, we had just one computer so the Web site was up during the day and I was coding at night,” Musk recalled during a commencement speech at USC. “Seven days a week, all the time.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/03/2...
My Dad provided 10% of a ~$200k angel funding round much later, but by then risk was reduced & round would’ve happened anyway."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211064937004589056
Also relevant in that thread:
"He didn’t own an emerald mine & I worked my way through college, ending up ~$100k in student debt. I couldn’t even afford a 2nd PC at Zip2, so programmed at night & website only worked during day. Where is this bs coming from?"
"This is a pretty awful lie. I left South Africa by myself when I was 17 with just a backpack & suitcase of books. Worked on my Mom’s cousin’s farm in Saskatchewan & a lumber mill in Vancouver. Went to Queens Univ with scholarship & debt, then same to UPenn/Wharton & Stanford."
This is pretty intense myth-making. He worked 4 days at a lumber mill.
It's pretty clear that Elon was from a wealthy*N background so the details are kind of irrelevant. Who bought the plain ticket?
There is also security, it's easier to take risks with strong familial support and fallback. Not saying this is a bad thing at all, it just is what it is.
And if reality doesn't actually line up with that, hey why not just invent a bunch of stuff.
We can do this infinity. Somebody that grew up poor in the US has success. Well, he had food as a child, 100s of starving African could have done the same, but 'who don't have the privilege necessary'.
So lets not give credit to anybody ever. If you were not a slave in Somilia at 13 that swam across the ocean by yourself and then build a new technology from the ground up, you deserve nothing and you are just one of those no good privileged people.
This may well be his next project.
I've wanted to read about what happened if anyone ever decided to apply Asimov's filter at earlier ages. His filter was simply having interest in particular science fiction. https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/1963-asimov
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terrafo...
I'm not one of those "why spend money on space when humans are starving on Earth" people.
My point was more about the actual technology required to terraform a planet. Why talk about terraforming Mars when our own would be saved by the same non-existent tech.
We spent $700 billion a year on the defense budget, and $7 trillion on wars, $1 billion on inspiring stunts like moon landings or mars landings once a generation, are not really a waste, the money is mostly spent on earth, dual use technology comes out of it, and it opens the possibility of space tourism, not to mention just cheaper launch capabilities (driven by the need to send a million tons to Mars) also benefit building a better space-based asteroid/comet defense system too.
That's because they are framed as a more immediate existential threat. Humans are present biased and don't like to spend lots of money on low-probability events until they are unavoidable (see: attitudes towards pandemic preparations in 2019).
If an actual high probability ELE asteroid collision was detected, people would get their shit together real quick. Or maybe not, the COVID crisis has shattered my faith. I'm sure a bunch of people would claim the asteroid prediction is a NASA scam to install socialism or something.
Perhaps there aren't any better alternatives, but I'd think that orbital mirrors at least would be an option (like the soletta from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy), though the scale of construction would be beyond anything that's been done before even if it were extremely thin. Placing a million square miles of mylar into space doesn't sound like an easy problem, though something much smaller and specifically focused at, say, the equator or specific sites might be more practical.