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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I didn't bring them up, because most of their customer base is still governments, and that would have muddied the argument.

(I think that (most of) space exploration should be left completely to the private sector, not just the execution, but also the financing.

Even if you think that the government should be involved in the sciences, manned space flight is pretty much a more expensive version of unmanned space flight.

It's useful as entertainment only, so far. Eg the moon landing was great entertainment, better than a Marvel movie. But also more expensive. I don't think the government should be involved in providing entertainment.

But in any case, after the moon landing, the amount of inspiration coming out of manned space flight has dropped dramatically.)

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> space exploration should be left completely to the private sector, not just the execution,

If you’re fine with there being no space exploration whatsoever. Which is a reasonable view, it’s very expensive and highly unprofitable.

Why would a (rational) private corporation ever send a rover to mars or a drone to titan? It would be an absurd thing to do..

There's more to the private sector than profit seeking corporations. Basically, everything that's not the government 'lives' there: clubs, charities, churches, foundations, etc.

If there's enough will in the population to vote for spending tax payer money on space exploration, surely there's enough willingness to crowdfund the whole thing?

And if people only want space exploration if they can vote other people's money to finance it, but don't want to put their own money where their mouth is, I'm not sure that would be a ringing endorsement?

> If you’re fine with there being no space exploration whatsoever. Which is a reasonable view, it’s very expensive and highly unprofitable.

I like space exploration, but I wouldn't want to force other people to pay for my aberrant preferences.

Yeah, it’s a perfectly reasonable view. We just shouldn’t pretend that space exploration would still be a thing if governments couldn’t finance it (which your previous comment sort of implied)

Yes.

Manned space exploration would probably not have been (much of) a thing. At least not until much later when the technology has improved.

Unmanned space exploration would probably still have happened to some degree. SpaceX has a lot of private customers.

(And I'm much less against governments financing unmanned space exploration than against them financing manned space exploration. That's just such a money sink.)

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