Comment by sasha-dv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sasha-dv | Hacker News Reader

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It is neither a scientific nor a societal accomplishment, it showcases neither innovation nor courage. It's just - something that happened.

While governments are cutting down their budgets for scientific research and basically accepting the status quo regarding the spaceflight, there's this guy from Africa doing something extraordinary and you see no innovation or courage?

If you describe what happened today as "there was this thing that came close to some robotic arm or something, and then the arm slowly captured it, and ... that's about it.", then I agree with you - that is boring. But, that's not what happened today.

Today we saw one guy's insane vision becoming reality. And if that is not something I don't know what is. And what's even more exciting about it is that this is just the beginning.

Governments can, with care, be kept under control. However bad corruption gets, democratic governments will always be bound to the electorate. Corporations - no.

Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?

there's this guy from Africa doing something extraordinary ... Today we saw one guy's insane vision becoming reality.

What happened today is only different because it was not government-funded[0]. I'm not allergic to the idea of government doing things (I agree with Barney Frank that "government is just the name for the things we decide to do together"), and so I really don't consider it to be interesting, or extraordinary, or insane. It's exactly what many others have done, just funded differently.

Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?

The obvious, cliche response is "not nowadays". But, more helpfully - who has jurisdiction in space?

That is my fear. At the moment, the power with jurisdiction in space is the power that can get to space. And I want that power to be elected.

Up until now, space operations have always been nonpartisan, co-operative, and peaceful. As eager as I am for humans to go further, I can't help but think that if we can't maintain that way of doing things - if humanity must, in order to get to space, give up on the hope of universal rights and self-determination (meaning democratically elected bodies of power) - then we're not ready. If we can't decide to go to space cooperatively, as one unit - if a few lucky individuals have to do it for us, even if they're right (which I believe they are), then we're not ready to go.

[0] That's a lie, of course. It was partially government-funded, because the promise of contracts with NASA et al is what's making this possible (to my understanding). But that's beyond my argument.

> Up until now, space operations have always been nonpartisan, co-operative, and peaceful.

Oh please. Space operations grew directly out of unbridled Cold War militarism, and have been pure political football at least since the approval of the absolutely insane space shuttle program.

I want high taxes, I want big government, I want single-payer health care, I want a welfare and social security system that makes Scandinavia look like a libertarian wasteland. I want ten times the corporate regulation we have now.

But there is no reason for the government to be the primary driver or provider of routine space launch services, especially when it's done such a piss-poor job of it since Apollo.

Private companies like SpaceX have ample incentive to advance the state of the art in launch services and are demonstrably doing so for less than the government has ever managed before. NASA can and should take advantage of that.

Not that insane. Everyone knew it could be done (since the 60s), and the guy was already insanely rich, so the means were available. All that was lacking was the will to do it.

Cute, but as a feel-good human interesting TV story, not life outlook-changing.

>Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?

If SpaceX goes public (and my understanding is that it will soon enough), then government can buy a massive stake in the company to control it, if they so choose.

Only if parties with majority control are willing to sell. (Which can be a lot less than majority ownership --- see Facebook for an example[].) And there have certainly been hints that when (if?) SpaceX actually does an IPO, Elon will try to have similar measures in place, to keep shareholder activists from putting the kibosh on his private Mars program...

[] Facebook has a dual-class share structure, in which class B shares have ten times the voting rights of publicly traded class A. Zuck owns a lot of class B personally, and has proxies on much of the rest, giving him personally majority control. (If the other class B owners sell, the proxies probably go away --- but so does the voting power of the shares, which convert to class A.) The upshot is that Zuck retains personal control pretty much regardless of what anyone else does with their stock.

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