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Comment by GDC7 | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me space is a social science type bet.

Much like each and every climate change related tech.

There is no guarantee that the public will be interested in space or climate change 10 or 20 years from now, and space missions which are not telecommunications satellites entirely depend on the goodwill of taxpayers to keep providing the financing.

The alternative model to taxpayers money has been private investors believing that space would somehow change and start yielding some more standard ROI after decades of atypical ROI (mostly morale boost for the nation every time a rocket went up). But that's just the financial capital part, the revenue of the aforementioned companies still comes from Government contracts.

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People talking about space is really weird to listen to. It's like people don't realize where all the information for their pocket computer comes from. Do people really not realize how essential the satellite infrastructure is to our modern economy? Hell, GPS alone is worth $1.4T[0]. Weather, imaging, internet, communication all heavily rely on space access as well and I wouldn't be surprised if each one of those were equally as valuable.

Do people really just think space is sending people to the moon and/or mars and not realize what we do right above our heads?

[0] https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/10/economic-benef...

It's a common enough view amongst industry insiders, and not exclusive to manned spaceflight. That GPS? It's fantastically useful, but its also designed and operated by the US government for defence purposes. The other GNSS PNT providers are also strategic state projects. Imaging? There are commercial markets for it (as a colleague put it, it's been "just around the corner" of realising its commercial potential since the 1970s!) but if you're putting up imaging satellite constellations you're expecting that directly as funders or indirectly as the largest customers, governments will pay for it (turtles all the way down as their commercial customers are often taking funding from ESA for research projects they hope to scale up in future, probably by selling to governments). And even much of the pure commercial Earth Observation is underwritten by "social science"-type legal obligations to monitor environmental footprints etc not by pure profit expectations. Satphones might be used by private companies paying private companies, but the only major player to start out as a VC funded entity rather than a state project crashed and burned financially before the US govt stepped in; some of the LEO connectivity providers have also headed in that direction. And satellite television is as pure a commercial play as it gets, until you start looking at who funded the first satellites for television broadcast, and try to imagine why private TV channels would have bothered investing in off-world delivery innovation without all that social investment in finding use cases for their launch vehicles and satellite tech.

As for the manned space programmes, they stop looking wasteful and start looking surprisingly beneficial when you consider externalities (from cochlear implants to memory foam), but that's the ultimate example of it being a social benefit of throwing enormous amounts of money at very smart people solving new problems, not a VC-friendly commercial proposition.

Your cellphone probably uses satellites to communicate. I'm not talking about a sat phone.

Trust me, it doesn't, unless I'm WiFi calling over a satellite link, which isn't common except on aircraft and cruise ships. Tbf, cellular is also highly regulated natural monopolies and a lot of state involvement, its just it could have been done without.

> Hell, GPS alone is worth $1.4T

The fact that it's worth that much doesn't mean that the companies sending those up there would make a fortune.

I can give you the example of concrete. Don't people realize how vital concrete is for the modern economy? It's worth 100T, matter of fact it's unvaluable, putting a figure on it would be lowballing it.

Do you want to start a concrete company though? Do you want to invest in it?

NO! You want to start/invest the Microsoft, Google and Facebook of the world.

There are plenty of concrete/building material companies that do make a fortune: Heidleberg 18.85bn EUR Cemex 13bn USD CRH 27.59bn EUR

Operating rockets and satellites, and using them to provide services back on Earth—is about $400 billion industry and is only going to grow. There will be plenty of companies that make a fortune in a market that size with relatively few players.

> There are plenty of concrete/building material companies that do make a fortune: Heidleberg 18.85bn EUR Cemex 13bn USD CRH 27.59bn EUR

That's the revenue, if you look at profits they made 1B in 2019 with 57,000 employees.

Also it was founded in 1874...

That sounds like a fortune to me.

Not when you split that billion among the many millions of people who own shares in the company.

I also remind you that the year of incorporation was 1874

I think you don't realize how much a billion dollars is. That's an insane amount of money.

I'm not sure what the year of incorporation means here? That they have clearly been profitable for a long time and been making a lot of people a lot of money for that time? I'm sorry, everything you've been saying just keeps suggesting to me that this is profitable and good business.

The goal of the individual is not to work, the goal of the individual is to retire early. Everything short of that is a failure.

This company has failed to give the opportunity to retire early to its owners ever since 1874.

The original founders didn't retire early for sure, and the 2nd generation and 3rd generation failed to do so as well.

And for sure this concrete company isn't giving a chance to retire early to those who own its stock today, because 1 billion split among the many millions of individual who own the stock makes the individual gains a non-life changing amount.

The only way you can retire early with this cement company is via betting on the stock using some insane 1000:1 leverage and trade its daily up&down movements.

Now take a second and just compare this cement company against the many thousands of millionaires that Microsoft minted over the years and that it continues to mint.

Some people have made millions from dividends and on top of that millions from the sheer stock appreciation, all that with an investment in the thousands or dozen of thousands at most.

> The goal of the individual is not to work, the goal of the individual is to retire early. Everything short of that is a failure.

You might want to tell Musk and Bezos that. Or any movie star. Really there's thousands of people you could tell this to that have amount of money that could live in luxury indefinitely. This is certainly true for any billionaire. It is also certainly true for anyone with over $50m.

Sure, but the concrete company failed to even give the owners the optionality to retire and keep their current lifestyle.

I'm very confused how you are coming to this conclusion. You haven't stated how rich the owners are. All I'm getting is you're saying that since the company still exists that the owners didn't retire. But what does "optionality to retire" mean? (Not even a real word) And what lifestyle? You can always up your lifestyle (maybe once you're worth 100bn it's all the same, but that's a dumb bar). The metric (I think) you are using is unobtainable. But a more clear metric of "could the owners retire and still live in luxury?" is a definitive yes.

If cost per pound to orbit drops by 100-1000 times with the advent of SpaceX's Starship rocket, who knows what kinds of space activities will be profitable.

If it only costs $1 million to immigrate to Mars, you might be surprised how many people would give it a try and how many billionaires would sponsor whole colonies. Like when Europeans colonized North America.

The cost to orbit drops being talked about are going to put space tourism solidly within reach of the middle class.

At that point the market becomes basically infinite: it'll be a standard rite of passage to see Earth from space, much like how people go to Disneyland.

It'll be like skydiving or visiting Everest basecamp or Antarctica.

Maybe soon you'll pop open the window on one of these new suborbital flights and skydive from the black back to Earth!

Tourism is the least exciting value proposition to me. Industry and commercial activity is where it's at.

I agree that this was historically the case, but the newest generation of space companies are making a solid case that the financial ROI is a reality and not just a theoretical promise. As the industry matures, government customers are becoming less critical to the success of many of these companies (although gov't will always play a strong role).

There is also a commercial market for satellite imagery and weather monitoring.

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