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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

From a national security & technology policy PoV, there are far too few private space companies. Space is looking very big and important, and the U.S. has far too many of its eggs in the SpaceX basket.

From a business PoV, there are far too many private space companies. Beyond satellite internet (which may have very sketchy economics) and maybe, eventually space tourism for the uber-rich, there isn't enough demand for launch services, satellites, etc. to justify even 10% of the current and near-future capacity.

But space is cool, and there are plenty of bright wanna-be rocket scientists and dim wanna-be space billionaires - so I'd expect to see plenty more launches and crashes of private space companies.

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> there isn't enough demand for launch services, satellites, etc. to justify even 10% of the current and near-future capacity.

Perhaps. But lower costs can reveal demand.

For example, while I think microwave beamed power from space is a terrible idea, an orbital ring can also be used to transport power[0], and Starship makes such a structure somewhat more affordable.

[0] can, but I'm not saying it's the best option, even if "a charged object spinning in a vacuum" is a ballistic superconductor[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring

[1] without the quantum effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_conduction

> lower costs can reveal demand.

The markets for sub-orbital passenger service, or transporting bulk goods, are still 99.9% speculation. Otherwise - the total cost of a satellite or space station includes generally-very-high development and construction costs, then serious ongoing operational expenses. Neither dirt-cheap launch, nor a "Raspberry Pi, but for space" generic satellite bus could make useful satellites nearly as cheap as many folks seem eager to imagine. And Kessler Syndrome concerns give every A List nation in space ample reason to discourage anyone who wants to put cheap-but-less-reliable stuff into orbit. (Or abandon their stuff in orbit, after they get bored or go bankrupt.)

Lower costs can also reveal that you've blown billions on a 4-lane bridge to Lonely Island, when the 4-trips-daily old car ferry really was enough.

I'm not sure what your point is, given you're responding negatively to the possibility of very small cheap things when my example was a piece of global power-grid infrastructure that's probably got a raw material cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars range even if launch was free? (And made out of a launch system which would make launch costs overlap the price range of cargo flights).

>> For example, while I think microwave beamed power from space is a terrible idea, an orbital ring can also be used to transport power[0], and Starship makes such a structure somewhat more affordable...

You're obviously more familiar with this concept than I am...and your wording seems fairly unenthusiastic about the prospects for it. So spending billions to unlock the possibility of it...well, just does not sound like a rational business decision. And my "...isn't enough demand...to justify..." point was tagged "From a business PoV".

There are two different things in that quote.

Microwave beamed power = bad for reasons too long to divert into here.

Orbital ring = contiguous ring orbiting earth, with connection points floating on it mag-lev style, tethered to the ground.

The latter is functionally a superconductor, you can put charge on it and it keeps moving without loss. It's also a convenient place to put PV with no clouds. It's also an estimated cost to LEO of $0.05/kg, which is cheap enough to be worth comparing to conventional transport costs.

It's certainly extremely speculative. Heck, I hope the first is built on the moon rather than on Earth because I expect surprise failure modes.

But for what it can do, there's several clear business cases — just extremely risky ones.

And that's just one thing Starship can help make affordable. For example of a different possibility: I have no idea if the occasional ideas I hear about factories in freefall are good or bad ideas, but it seems to be attracting investment now.

A "stack" of orbital ring systems (this is a train-on-ring) lets you build the functional equivalent of a space elevator out of plausible materials like fiber glass & superconductors. Every rung in the ladder has value.

Sure (also: that's a new idea I'd not heard of before), but why? Just the first step is half way to anywhere, by Δv.

The top of an ORS isn't in orbit — it's stationary with respect to the ground. You still have to burn the Δv to get into orbit. The idea is that it's easier to go slowly up, where the natural speed you're at will (eventually) match the Earth's rotation.

I'm not sure which structure you're thinking of, but the first sentence of my link was this:

"""An orbital ring is a concept of an artificial ring placed around a body and set rotating at such a rate that the apparent centrifugal force is large enough to counteract the force of gravity."""

The tether isn't in orbit, but the ring absolutely is. And you can exchange momentum with the ring to reach orbital speed.

SpaceX is amazing, but having Elon Musk as a critical geopolitical asset seems rather dodgy given his loud anti-Western comments recently.

's/rather dodgy/dodgy at best/; s/loud anti-Western comments recently/often-poor judgement and problematic mental balance/'

Could you provide examples of the anti-western comments he has posted? I understand he is one of the few of the ultra rich who wants to increase the birth rate beyond replacement in the west.

Generally I think the West is more concerned about the fact that he's currently providing infrastructure for a Western ally whilst actively campaigning for them to surrender, endorsing Russia's annexation of the Crimea and questioning the existence of NATO than his enthusiasm for fecundity.

Though I think the comment that's most indicative of Musk's actual mental state recently is "super rich ex wives who hate their spouse should be listed under the 'Reasons Western Civilization died'". :D

Thanks. So you think he is essentially against western civilization in his motives, if I understand you correctly. What do you think drives this sentiment? Does he want another sort of civilization to flourish instead of the Western one?

That's... a long way from what I actually said, which is that it's fairly unusual for a Western ally to be dependent on infrastructure provided by a company lead by an-unstable-seeming guy whose screechingly bad takes on Twitter include an obsession with endorsing their enemy's talking points.

Its always kind of funny to me that people call Musk unstable. He had the same 2 jobs for decades now. He does these jobs and works on them insane hours. He is successful in the things he does. Other then people not liking his opinion, he isn't really unstable in any meaningful way. People just prefer to call him crazy and unstable because then anything he says doesn't have to be taken seriously.

Of course he is often wrong about things, and has bad takes. And he can get angry and competitive. He is pretty petty. But if that makes somebody mentally unstable there are a lot of unstable people around.

The takeaway that everyone is failing to appreciate is very simple: nobody should be paying any attention to what is being said on twitter.

As in, a person can be a screeching lunatic on twitter yet have two companies that are hitting milestone after milestone.

The achievements are what's relevant but everyone is glued to what's tweeted.

It's not a hard lesson to learn.

There's a difference between merely tweeting nonsense and spending a large part of your fortune buying Twitter and driving its commercial partners away with the nonsense you tweet though...

And, back on topic, dependency on infrastructure provided by a company lead by someone who is publicly campaigning for you to surrender and occasionally publicly threatens to switch it off is a more conspicuous security risk than most.

He’s also turned off Stsrlink coverage in Taiwan despite being explicitly required to be enabled there by his DoD contract.

Wanting to end a civil war isn't a bad thing, as civil wars go on, the often settle in along existing battle lines, if people want it or not. Think about Korea, lots of people would have been pissed if somebody suggested to let Pyongyang be in the Communist sphere. And yet its still there.

The fact is, in actual action, rather then a few tweets throwing ideas around, is there any other private person who help Ukraine more?

I think its kind of depressing when you have pro-Ukraine people shit on Musk, including the government itself, given that without him they would be in a far worse position. But that's the thing, in war, give a hand they want a whole arm, and if you wont give the arm, they will call you an enemy. That is a rational position to take for a government that is in a war, but everybody else doesn't have to parrot the messaging.

The Soviet Union in WW2 was the same way with the US. Here have this X any Z. Stalin "but we also want Y, A, B, C and more of X. The evil capitalist wont us to fail because they don't want to give us C".

> Wanting to end a civil war isn't a bad thing, as civil wars go on, the often settle in along existing battle lines, if people want it or not.

It's possible to want to end the war without loudly and publicly endorsing explicitly Russian chauvinist positions like Crimea being "Khruschev's mistake" (screw the Crimeans that voted to continue to be part of Ukraine when they actually had a free and fair vote on the issue), Ukraine having an obligation to be "neutral" after its surrender to ensure they can't acquire any allies to protect themselves when Russia comes back for Odessa, and NATO having no reason to exist. It might be rational for Elon to believe any armistice is going to involve some concessions to Russia, but he doesn't have to parrot their messaging. (Or indeed comment at all: the main reason why you can't think of any other private people that have helped Ukraine more is that CEOs of other companies supplying Ukraine aren't quite so active on Twitter)

I think it's kind of depressing that Ukrainians have to trust him whilst he becomes one of the loudest public voices calling for a settlement on Russia's terms, and kind of understandable that they don't trust his motivations when he takes more reasonable decisions like declining to extend Starlink coverage to support an attack on the Russian naval fleet.

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