Italy, Sweden and Turkey are paying their way. They are all military pilots. They are just paying for seats with Axiom directly rather than bartering for seats with NASA.
To be fair to those countries, it's typically ESA that barters with NASA, not the individual member countries. And it seems like astronauts are selected in rough proportion to national contribution (generally in line with the National Return policy).
Paying for a private seat may be a more efficient way for smaller countries to get people into space.
A fun thing is, He is from the secular demographic and his firsts words were to commemorate Ataturk and the islamists and seculars instantly switched place; Now the pro-government people say He is a space tourist and the secular opposition says he is a hero :)
This is an understatement. He was purged from the military and jailed by Islamists/Gülenists/Erdoğan using fabricated evidence and cultist judges, for "attempting a secularist coup".
I don't think it is "essentially" for propaganda. This would happen regardless, propaganda is just a side-benefit. Saying that he's "just a space tourist" would be like calling scientists that go to Antarctica for experiments "polar tourists". It is definitely overblown by the government media though.
Feels pretty win/win. I have some trepidation about letting capitalism decide our priorities in space, but so far it is helping us make really exciting progress
Maybe that's true of Blue Origin, but you're going to need a lot more evidence to back up that claim in regards to SpaceX.
The best estimate is that they make a >50% gross margin on Falcon 9 launches (at least for external customers). And while they spend a lot on Starlink launches, they're also making quite a lot of Starlink revenue at this point.
It's certainly true that they're dumping a lot of R&D money into Starship. But that strategy is how they earned their current medium/heavy lift launch market dominance, so I can't really fault them for that. And if Starship does work out, it could set them up for a functional monopoly on launch for decades. Not to mention dramatically decreasing their internal Starlink costs.
That's more just a out there goal to motivate people who are motivated by that. Still have had zero launches to Mars.
Plus, other companies are having a hard enough time competing already (even small launch is facing tough competition from the F9 rideshares), if SpaceX dropped their prices too low, it'd quickly run most of the launch market out of business, which is not in the interests of a company that wants to improve accessibility to space.
This is also why even if Starship's cost targets pan out, they'll likely just charge slightly lower than competing options for the specific payload.
OK. But the comment I responded to call it a passion/prestige project and contracted it with a normal profit driven business.
> This is also why even if Starship's cost targets pan out, they'll likely just charge slightly lower than competing options for the specific payload.
Yeah. SpaceX hasn't said anything, but I tend to believe that they'll move to a capabilities based pricing model where customers pay by the KG and/or m^3. That way they can compete for small payloads while getting paid appropriately for large ones.
If you want to just make money, there are far easier and less risky industries you can invest your money in than launch services and rockets. You can even just invest your wealth in an index fund and earn a return that is basically risk-free.
The trick is that we need to ban fraud aggressively and then reduce the profits from endeavors we want to discourage (not sure if there are good general mechanisms. I mean we use taxes for this sometimes. Imagine if one wanted to reduce the collection of user data if instead of gdpr you created a data tax!)
I'm also very interested to hear what projects you think might be good candidates to do this with!
For SpaceX it just so hilariously wrong. SpaceX did get seed money from Musk, about 90 million. The rest is venture funded just like every other successful company.
SpaceX is a very normal capitalist company. Musk has not invested more of his own money into it. SpaceX is making money and raising money to fund future projects.
One could maybe make an argument that Musk longer has ambitions to do passion projects, but he has never perused these without building the company in a capitalist way first. Because he knows that if the company isn't successful, non of the long term plans are possible.
> not normal capitalist enterprises which are all just about making a buck
Every capitalist enterprise has owners, the owners decide what they should do. Often but not always this is 'making a buck'.
Please develop this further, what Italy has to win? other than the scientific breakthrough that is to spend tax payer money to "buy a seat"
> is helping us make really exciting progress
us? you meant the USA?
progress? like?
I don't recall Italy working on any similar projects, how will these seats help italians get a return of investment?
Sounds like an attempt at masking subsidies from the EU, at the expense of ESA
I wonder who's in the lobby
"SpaceX accuses Arianespace of unfair competition" - https://www.lesechos.fr/industrie-services/air-defense/exclu...
"Elon Musk's company complains about subsidies from France and Europe, and calls on Washington to act."
> I have some trepidation about letting capitalism decide our priorities in space, but so far it is helping us make really exciting progress
Oh, the irony!
In the meantime:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station
- https://consumer.huawei.com/za/community/details/Huawei-Mate...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog...
- https://www.space.com/china-landspace-ready-for-reusable-roc...
2) click on the Italian flag
3) read about all the experiments, who funds them, why they will be run/what they hope to learn
4) go to 2 and change flag for the other countries
you will find both public and private experiments/initiatives in there