Biden wants a space tax on companies like SpaceX that launch in the US | Hacker News Reader

Biden wants a space tax on companies like SpaceX that launch in the US

businessinsider.com

6 pointshotdailys13 comments

I wish they applied the same effort they have on creating new taxes on improving accountability and transparency of how those taxes are spent.

What do you guys think? My initial thought is that it sounds like a moronic idea. A lot of countries near the equator could offer better prices - French Guiana or rest of South America.

After reading the article and reasons for the tax, I think it's a good idea.

What do you think about the reasoning behind the tax?

Depends on FAA involvement in each launch. In case of an airline FAA controls each flight for hours. In case of a rocket launch, most trouble comes from "don't go in that area" type of commitment, plus investigations of something went wrong.

Given that each airline can keep hundreds of machines in the air at any one time, and rocket launches happen weekly at best, paying 10% of the overall fee does not look fair.

Would be happy to know what aviation specialists think.

Sounds like telling the goose laying golden eggs to start paying for the water it's swimming in or move to another pond pronto.

From a legalistic standpoint it makes sense: the FAA spends a lot of resources regulating SpaceX's activity, therefor tax SpaceX to pay for it.

From an economic and geopolitical standpoint it's clearly a poor choice to introduce an extra tax on something which drives a large amount of economic activity and is an important strategic asset.

After actually reading the article, if US launches require using US ATC/airspace management resources, then having space companies offset some of that cost is reasonable. If they go elsewhere, they aren’t using that infrastructure anyways, so no need to offset it.

[dupe]

Actual article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/04/us/politics/spacex-biden-...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39951579)

Article looses a lot of credibility when it claims that space launches make up 10% of commercial aviation.

"Space launches still represent a small proportion of the commercial airspace — about 10% in 2023"

the stat referenced is actually that human crewed spaceflights are 10% of spaceflights...

From a random top link in search,

> In 2022, U.S. airlines generated nearly 279.6 billion U.S. dollars in operating revenue

Would absolutely believe space is a 30b industry in the US.

> Would absolutely believe space is a 30b industry in the US.

SpaceX did 4.6b a year in revenue in 2022 [1].

But this is besides the point, they grossly mis represent the GAO report they cite for the statistic[2] which says.

"The number of commercial launch and reentry operations carrying humans is a small proportion of the overall number of commercial space operations—about 10 percent in 2023—but it is growing."[2]

BusinessInsider's sloppy reporting turned it into

"Space launches still represent a small proportion of the commercial airspace — about 10% in 2023"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX

[2] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106184

Number of flights, number of people, total payload weight, total gross weight, total delta-v/kg, revenue ... there's a lot of ways to measure %.

Fwiw, I was counting satellite costs in my napkin math, where 30b seems reasonable. And I wasn't counting only spacex. There's obviously clearly zero chance there's even 0.001% of the number of space astronauts a year as there are people who flew, and I just refuse to believe anyone would actively be making that claim, so it seemed logical to me to search for better things to assess that space flight seems like it might possibly perhaps be 10% of.

You don't need to search for anything they literally link to https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106184 when they give that stat... they practically plagiarize the section & grossly misrepresent the statistic

"a small proportion of the overall number of commercial space operations—about 10 percent in 2023" -> "a small proportion of the commercial airspace — about 10% in 2023"

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