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Comment by onethought | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Privatised space industry is your country doesn't control the agenda. SpaceX is a pretty rare thing, the rest of the private space industry (Blue Origin, Virgin, Boeing) is as much of a money pit as NASA was.

Then you have rapidly progressing government run space programs like China and India. The fact that the US banned China from the ISS and banned Non-Americans from participating in what it deems as weapon systems has only driven more resolve for home grown/soveraign alternatives.

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> you don’t control the agenda

True, but not really in the way you describe. The US is the main (often, the only) customer of US space companies. If you control the money, you control the operational agenda. If you want a a new ISS? Just write up the contract.

The way in which you don’t control the agenda is only inasmuch as the strategic interests of the space company diverges from those of the US govt. But typically, with outsourced high-value work, vendors will evolve to MORE closely align to their big customers. (It screws the small customers often, but hey, the govt isn’t small).

The issue in my mind is much more value extraction & leverage, but as long as there’s multiple players (including an in-sourced option), I don’t see how it’s a problem.

Gigadollar-scale space projects seem like a particularly poor fit for the private industry model, though. Conventionally the idea of free-market competition is that companies stand to gain if they succeed but have to eat the losses if they fail, and so competition eventually selects the best. But we're not talking about making widgets or sandwiches or launch vehicles. Things like the ISS, JWST, etc are all one-off projects, and they cannot be allowed to fail, so competition doesn't really help and the public is left holding the bag, just like we see in the endless cost overruns of politically unkillable DoD contracts.

"Public bad private good" isn't a coherent strategy. If NASA isn't good enough then the preference should be to improve NASA rather than to insert an unnecessary layer of profit-taking for SpaceX or Boeing to do the same thing anyway.

>Things like the ISS, JWST, etc are all one-off projects, and they cannot be allowed to fail

True

> "Public bad private good" isn't a coherent strategy

Also true

Still, an infinite series of one-off projects comprise a continuous market. If SpaceX royally screws up one project, then yes, the public is left holding the bag _on that project_. But you know who's getting a lot fewer projects? SpaceX.

A federal gov't monopoly isn't the answer, just as abolishing NASA isn't the answer. Both are good. But... SpaceX is proving they can launch cheaper, quicker, and just as safely - isn't that a thing worth encouraging?

But space x work in spite of the nasa system... could you dream of nasa celebrating SN8 plowing into the ground as a raging success... it’s a huge cultural shift, not so much driven by private sector competition (Honestly who competes with space x?), more to do with leadership style.

BlueOrigin is a perfect Nasa 2.0 comparison.

  > could you dream of nasa celebrating SN8 plowing into
  > the ground as a raging success.

Nobody is celebrating SN8 plowing into the ground. We are celebrating the fact that SN8 plowed into the correct square meter of ground. We also celebrate the fact that SN8 plowed into that particular meter of ground while oriented in the direction that we hoped, but barely dreamed, that it would be oriented.

That’s my point... I’m not saying space X is bad or irresponsible, they are just different (and I think in a good way). Agree SN8 was amazing! And something NASA would never have done. Nor would they livestream it, nor keep it available on their website.

Echoing the sister comment to add more color, I think when it comes to this scale of money, it becomes too easy to conflate public and private capability. The ISS cost $150 billion. That is a kind of cost that even the tech behemoths of the world today would not be able to stomach. Some efforts really require country-coffer levels of money to be realized.

That means the US government directly controls which projects live and die, simply because they control the purse. Most space endeavors don't require this scale of money, and even a small token of innovation incentives can often result in outsized societal benefits. Even for SpaceX to just think about the Starship program, they literally had to corner the global orbital launch market for nearly a decade to come.

While I do agree that Boeing is a money-pit due to their involvement with SLS, I still wouldn't put Virgin or Blue Origin in anywhere close to that bucket. While these two might not be as incredibly innovative and capital efficient as SpaceX, they're still orders of magnitude better than anything like the SLS, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and others that are considered "old space".

China is pouring an absurd amount of its own money through thinly guised military development arms, and they're excelling at it. It's truly a shame that the US cut them off from the ISS, and its even more detrimental that the rest of the world has not paid close enough attention to their efforts. They're about the only player that's even close to competing with anything like SpaceX.

I wouldn't put India in the same club as China either. India has done extremely well at making cheap reliable orbital class launch vehicles by cost cutting and incremental improvements. Once SpaceX comes to the scene, they will be obsolete. They do not have the public appetite to invest the scale of money required to build programs the likes of US & China can build.

Russia meanwhile seems obsessed with trampolines.

China is more crazy because SpaceX got access to Nasa research and development (through people and location)... China have kind of home grown there whole system in an insanely short time

China finally have their own heavy lift rockets, the Long March 5B. This gives them the ability to finally launch a Mir-like space station, which they will start assembling this year.

The 5B also gives them more options.

In 10 years, when they complete their own Super Heavy Lift rocket, the Long March 9, of Saturn V class, then things will get interesting. It seems like they will ace this one as well. This can help them send human missions to the moon.

But the interesting developments, are their space plane research. Which they started back in 2006, and estimated it would take 15 years, and would require a heavy lift rocket, the 5B, which they now have. This would put it around the 2021 time frame, which is now. And last year, they successfully tested their secret space plane prototype. If they scale up their space plane, and enable it to transport humans too, then they’ll have an interesting mechanism to transport their astronauts to their space station, and return them gracefully back to the earth.

Then, it seems they will succeed with their Long March 8R, for reusable vertical take off and vertical landing, similar to SpaceX. It seems they will be the 2nd organization, after SpaceX, to achieve an operational VTVL system.

I figured, if they can robotically stick the moon landing in a vacuum, using retroactive propulsion, then they can probably land a reusable booster back on earth.

Electron Labs are a successful competitor to SpaceX in the satellite launch space. They don't have the same capabilities, but they are much more cost effective than Boeing. Virgin Orbit also just successfully launched a satellite with a rocket attached to an airplane. I think it's possible we could see more serious competitors to SpaceX given enough time.

You mean Rocket Labs? - yes agree they have a similar innovation culture to spaceX (from the outside)

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