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Comment by pjkundert | Hacker News Reader

At this point, unless a nation-state gets serious (and I have to believe at least China and Russia are), SpaceX is going to win. Their lead is just too great for anyone else to surmount.

This is bad, because a sole supplier of viable orbital rocketry is almost as bad as only nation-states having the capability.

Hopefully, someone steps up to the plate. My guess is that Russia and/or China both have "black" programs to copy and replicate SpaceX's technology...

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Russia's high-tech industry is dead in the water for the foreseeable future. They won't recover for decades from the tech embargoes that started in 2014 and are very extensive now.

> Russia's high-tech industry is dead in the water

Completely agree.

> They won't recover for decades from the tech embargoes that started in 2014 and are very extensive now.

I hope they'll change approaches rather soon, 180 degrees, and will start digging out. It will still take time.

I don't see them making any kind of comeback any time soon, since they can't get any high-tech equipment from abroad. Which is pretty much impossible with current leadership and current political system.

Right, but they are in the stage of rapid changes, so current leadership may not stay for too long.

I would prefer they undergo a cultural 180 before they start catching up to the west or China on dual-use technology.

More than just sanctions, Russia is the sort of a country where if you start a company and its too successful someone with connections might show up one day with documents "proving" you signed it over to them for a fraction of its worth.

> "This is bad, because a sole supplier of viable orbital rocketry is almost as bad as only nation-states having the capability."

Well, it's still way better than none having the capability IMHO, so kudos for SpaceX to make it possible! One of those cases where being technologically brilliant gives you a big competitive advantage IMHO.

I think you should keep an eye out for Relativity Space, their rocket is soon to launch, and the whole thing is, and I am not exaggerating, fully 3d printed. It's a wonderful design and I hope it works, because it automates a great deal of the process.

Veritasium did a video on their rocket: https://youtu.be/kz165f1g8-E

Russia has straight up butchered their rocket industry. They are effectively cancelling everything new and just copying things designed in the Soviet Union with ever-decreasing budgets.

Putin never saw the space industry as anything but a profit center he can squeeze to fund other stuff, once SpaceX made it hard to compete they just gave up.

It could be bad, but it’s better to have this situation than none at all.

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