If you have enough money you can ring them up and say "I want to go into space" and they can make that happen. That is a pretty big deal.
Until SpaceX and post-Apollo most of the space program was really a pork distribution system and a way to keep certain high-skill labor areas 'hot' in case we need them again. It wasn't a serious effort to learn about the universe or build a real presence in space. Some of that did happen but it happened almost as a side effect.
Edit:
Honestly I think SpaceX is just a decent aerospace company. They've appeared superhuman by contrast with companies like Boeing that have done nothing to innovate in the sector since the 1970s. When the comparison is with people completely asleep at the wheel, mere competence looks striking.
One indirect benefit of domestic manufacturing is that it gives blue collar workers a sense of productivity and involvement in society.
Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings, and a fairly compensated workforce is less likely to feel stagnant in their stage of life, and less likely to be radicalized.
Edit: it seems there is a distinction between how you keep the labour hot - meaningful long-term missions; or a half-assed approach.
And second giving people bullshit useless projects like SLS, does not actually keep them 'hot'. Its more like warmed up Pizza. The people and more importantly organization lose the actual ability to do things quickly at reasonable prices.
Somehow it seems acceptable that SLS will cost more then 30 billion $ in development cost and 2-4 more billion $ per launch. Not to mention the time.
Don't misunderstand political pork as actually strategic workforce development or long term government policy. That just what you personally wish it to be, not what it actually is.
I really don't have a clue what your issue is. There is literally no problem with not having enough ideas that are cool that NASA can work on.
Who do you think are making the shells being shipped out to Ukraine ?
I think those are probably most of the kills tbh, and (according to my friend who works there) it is a very young, fresh, startup approach and not at all like the traditional defense industry.
More generally, no private company would be able to fund fundamental research and turn a profit. Apple used DARPA tech to make the iphone, Pfizer used decades of public research on mRNA to make the covid vaccine and SpaceX uses NASA's engineering expertise to get its rockets to orbit.
Also, SpaceX gets billions of dollars from the US government annually.
I have to imagine you mean turn a profit directly on the research itself (isolated down to the cost per specific item of research).
Because obviously big tech can quite trivially fund fundamental research at an enormous scale as they see fit while printing their traditional gigantic profits.
Apple + Microsoft + Facebook + Amazon + Nvidia + Google = over half a trillion dollars in annual operating income (around $126 billion in op income last quarter).
They could fund NASA (~$25 billion) and would never really notice it. It'd take about four to six months of further op income growth by those six companies and NASA's budget would be covered in perpetuity.
They rely on publicly funded labs to make the real innovations and do the last (but nonetheless important) mile of bringing it to the public.
They could fund current NASA, but they won't fund what NASA should be.
Why are they designing rockets then? Has very little to do with science.
Nobody denies that NASA should 'lose' money you are literally arguing a straw man. The question is 'what should NASA spend its money on'. And wasting 80+ billion $ on a completely broken architecture that makes no sense what so ever seem to most people like a bad idea.
People actually WANT NASA to actually do more science, and actually advanced tech development.
Personally I think NASA should be building things like nuclear reactors for space, or mars, moon missions. They should work on super-advanced engines. On chemical systems to make water on Mars. There are lots of things NASA could do that there simply isn't another way to do it.
What NASA should be doing is reinvesting in 70s technology that is completely useless and out-dated for purely political reasons.
I don't fucking understand why everybody who criticizes NASA is attacked with 'you hate science' when this is not actually what people are complaining about. Its just kneejerk defense of all that is wrong with NASA and congress.
To whoever wants to be the first one to drop acid in space, the doors are open
Seems unlikely we'll ever definitely now, but I suspect that whomever does it next won't be the first (or second, or third).
The space shuttle had a hatch that could be opened to vacuum and was actually padlocked shut on some flights where the mission specialists weren't trusted by the commander [0].
[0] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/solving-a-nasa-mystery...
> “I remember waking up at the beginning of a shift and seeing duct tape on the hatch," Gregory told Ars. "I did not know what the origin of it was, and I didn’t pay any attention to it. I may have, but I don’t recall asking Overmyer about it.”
> The Space Shuttle has been retired for 13 years, but the padlock remains in the fabric of US spaceflight with Crew Dragon. A commander's lock is an __option__ for NASA's crews flying to the International Space Station on Crew Dragon, as well as private missions.
This seems like one of those "who needs all those lifeboats??" situations. Why not avert the Titanic now?
But sober people also make many bad decisions. A space ship needs to be resilient to bad decisions, and I assume/hope the ISS already is well fortified in that respect.
A stable, thoughtful, trained scientist, in the company of supportive and emotionally intelligent colleagues, does not present a significant risk when fed a normal dose of LSD.
Seems like a pretty fucking bad set and setting honestly. Regular astronauts already deal with powerful feelings in their normal job. Adding a drug to that is a bad plan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/us/alaska-airlines-off-du...
The same thing you do on terra firma. You do your best to keep them calm, and talk them down. I've never had to physically restrain anyone, but seems like that would actually be easier to do on the ISS. Just wrap them up and let 'em float around
I'd also expect bad trips to not be as big of an issue in a NASA sanctioned experiment with a much more closely controlled dose vs some tab you got off the guy in a tye dyed t-shirt at the concert type of situation.
A great way of restraining someone is pushing them against an unmovable object. On Earth, that is either the floor or a wall, then you can pin them somewhat against that, at least restricting them somewhat.
Walls and floors are the same in space, and the person can literally float away with six degrees of freedom, at any time.
I feel like physically restraining people would be harder in zero gravity than non-zero.
But it could probably be arranged under supervision with an anesthetizer option.
They probably already have some protocol for antisocial or psychotic behavior.
But it could reasonably be arranged under supervision with an anesthetizer option.
They probably already have some protocol for erratic behavior.
If my spaceship commander just told me he had taken 2 tabs, I would start writing my obituary.
https://www.reddit.com/r/KamalaHarris/comments/1eunob4/elon_...
In the Isaacson biography there's a theme across his ventures, sparked by early misfortune, about being in control of things end-to-end because then you have more flexibility to optimize, make more leaps that can come from orchestrating creative adn bespoke integration options.
> Significantly, the Merlin engines—like roughly 80 percent of the components for Falcon and Dragon, including even the flight computers—are made in-house. That’s something SpaceX didn’t originally set out to do, but was driven to by suppliers’ high prices. Mueller recalls asking a vendor for an estimate on a particular engine valve. “They came back [requesting] like a year and a half in development and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just way out of whack. And we’re like, ‘No, we need it by this summer, for much, much less money.’ They go, ‘Good luck with that,’ and kind of smirked and left.” Mueller’s people made the valve themselves, and by summer they had qualified it for use with cryogenic propellants.
> “That vendor, they iced us for a couple of months,” Mueller says, “and then they called us back: ‘Hey, we’re willing to do that valve. You guys want to talk about it?’ And we’re like, ‘No, we’re done.’ He goes, ‘What do you mean you’re done?’ ‘We qualified it. We’re done.’ And there was just silence at the end of the line. They were in shock.” That scenario has been repeated to the point where, Mueller says, “we passionately avoid space vendors.”
Every parts manufacturer tries to extract as much as possible from the leeway in the middle.
We know what wide-open unregulated markets result in when lives are at stake. It would be nice to think that engineers and executives would never sacrifice human life for profit, but we know that some of them will.
I also think about all the advice I read on this forum to "raise your rates" and "charge based on the value you deliver, not what your costs are." But when physical engineering companies take this approach, it's somehow just greed or complacency. Of course any potential client can just decide to hire their own staff and do the job in-house if your quote is viewed as unreasonable.
We know much more about what happens with regulation: prohibitively expensive nuclear power and unbearably slow progress in simple medical devices. Opportunity cost is enormous here.
> It would be nice to think that engineers and executives would never sacrifice human life for profit, but we know that some of them will.
This is really simplistic. We wouldn't use anything if it cost what it cost to make it 100% safe. Everything has risks and prices.
We certainly need to constantly revisit things but without regulations our society wouldn’t be fun to live in.
See what I mean? What's the point of misinterpreting?
No one is ever saying "zero regulations are best". There are hundreds of thousands of regulations. Because there are so many, lots of them are not great or constrictive, and we never got to the world where the US is powered by 1990 by majority nuclear power, and the following developing China followed suit, and businesses sprang up there to roll out the same technologies worldwide, and we had far, far less climate change.
Death is bad for business? I dunno why this myth that without government life would be a deadly hellscape seems to persist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jan/06/bp-oil-s...
etc etc
/s?
(Look at the quality of life in failing/failed states, where there's effectively no government. Libertarian paradises are extremely rare; deadly hellscapes are all too common.)
More seriously, I wonder as a human species if we’ll evolve beyond certification being the only way to prove a work was done properly. I suspect the civilization who does that will save an order of magnitude more human workers.
I imagine it's similar to what we see in software, where we see mega-waterfall projects delivered for the government cost way too much and still fail, and where tech companies & literal hobbyists can deliver higher quality software more quickly by avoiding an overbearing planning process.
SpaceX builds all 33 engines on a Starship for that amount.
Someone that goes to work to do the tasks assigned to them (which applies to both managers and those on the line) vs. someone that goes to work because they want something (e.g. maybe a certain product made with certain features) thinks very differently. The latter has a whole plan and the plan has certain sub-requirements that all feed back into the greater goal.
As part of going to Mars, you will likely have to send many supporting missions, which drives the requirement to lower costs. When designing bespoke systems, contracting it out to third party vendors can be expensive. Usually you contract out to third party vendors because they can utilize economies of scale because they have many clients who are asking for the same thing, but there are no economies of scale here because no one has reusable rockets in their catalog.
More likely they lease launch facilities from the government to minimize regulatory interference from… the government.
But you know it ISN'T private, because every rocket ever designed will end up in public space, either literally in outer space, or dropping parts in the ocean, or a tiny tiny tiny tiny chance of exploding somewhere less convenient.
This idea that you can just make your own little closed off launch pad and therefore ignore society is stupid.
Some of the more onerous pushback comes from people who have been ignored before and turned out to be right. For example, when Dupont and friends first started producing PFAS, someone out there was crying foul about "hey maybe we shouldn't just dump this everywhere", and they were ignored, it was dumped everywhere, and now we get to deal with the consequences because nobody listened to those people.
This has happened hundreds of times, including serious things like lead paint and leaded gasoline, which we KNEW caused direct and measurable harm to people, and yet was completely ignored. A portion of the public has obviously lost ALL trust for the private sector claiming any sort of "this couldn't possibly cause problems" and are willing and able to take action.
If you are a "big" enough entity, there is no such thing as "private". Anything you do, affects a lot of people, and you should be treated that way.
there aren’t many technical issues to pouring concrete in a good lat-lon
Other than when a powerful and explosion-prone rocket destroyed its launchpad, hurling chunks of steel-reinforced concrete thousands of feet. But it's almost 18 months since that happened.
That launch was on 20th April 2023, and the next prototype test launch was only 212 days later on 18th November 2023, although I think the pad redesign/rebuild/repair work was complete by the end of July 2023.
So only 3-4 months to redesign/rebuild/repair the pad (although it's probably reasonable to assume some design work had already occurred).
I'm no rocketry expert, but I'm old enough to remember the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; I'm pretty sure if you've got falling chunks of steel-reinforced concrete hitting your space vehicle during launch, that's an issue.
But it was also a prototype being deliberately tested to destruction, so the context as compared to Columbia was quite different. (And it wasn't just the rocket itself that was a prototype, the pad and tower were at least a little as well).
And this has always been SpaceX's approach, rapidly iterating their design by building, testing, destroying, rinse/repeat - so it sometimes feels a little difficult to compare to a more NASA-style design process where a (usually) small number of items are produced with a significantly lower tolerance for failure.
(Edit: And how much better is it to learn these design lessons before the cargo is more fragile/delicate/squishy?)
Having chunks of the launchpad go flying isn't just an inconvenience - flying debris during launch can damage critical rocket systems, as the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster demonstrated.
SpaceX doesn't have real competition after Boeing failed.
What happens in such a monopoly?
The prices rise.
First, the competition is international, and some is from governments who need a non-US supplier.
Second, the goal in most corporations isn't maximum profit per item but maximum profit per year, and if they can indeed deliver the prices Musk is speculating about of getting a million people to pay 100-200 thousand USD each to go to Mars, that allows the overall market to be much larger than if he can only charge 150 million (or even 1.5 billion) for 4-seat rides to a low orbit space station every six months.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2023/10/18/this-aster...
One of us will be correct.
My Rolls Royce which I can't afford is a lot cheaper than the car I can afford which got more expensive than my previous one.
Similarly, space operators who can't launch goldie-locks efficiency payloads are paying for multiple inefficient small loads instead.
Tesla : Rivian/Lucid :: SpaceX : Blue Origin/ULA
Tesla : BYD :: SpaceX : LandSpace [0]/Galactic Energy [1]
1. https://www.space.com/galactic-energy-ceres-1-sea-launch-vid...
I doubt that will happen for US satellites
Because this literally something you couldn't buy before. Maybe if you went to Russia and gave them a lot of money.
SpaceX has made everything cheaper in Space cheaper and many things possible that literally weren't a commercial thing before.
But now the companies need money for AI and prices rise.
Without real competition what stop SpaceX from rising its prices?
If you look back historically, the idea that monopolies were broken up because of their ability to raise prices without the check of competition just isn't really telling the full story. Consider this from the Congressional Record of the House (1890) by a proponent of the then under debate anti-trust act (https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/05/..., page 4100):
"Some say that the trusts have made products cheaper, have reduced prices; but if the price of oil, for instance, were reduced to 1 cent a barrel it would not right the wrong done to the people of this country by the "trusts" which have destroyed legitimate competition and driven honest men from legitimate business enterprises."
The argument wasn't that the "trusts make products -cheaper-" idea was wrong, but that it didn't matter.
The only way to maintain a natural monopoly is the ensure that the barriers to entry for competition are sufficient to make new entrants unviable. One way to do that is to leverage economies of scale to lower prices to the point where a new entrant simply can't compete on price.
Yes, if you want to do new things, like AI, you need to pay more.
If you want to only do what you were able to before, the price of that is lower. Wtf are you talking about.
Remember the time when cloud services made things cheaper?
Guess what happened next?
I can choose Hetzner, which is a high quality low cost provider of basic cloud services. I can deploy open source options onto their cloud and push costs quite low.
The cost of cloud services has not soared. And companies like Cloudflare have continued to undercut AWS at every opportunity.
Oracle, Microsoft and Google all have strong incentive to hold AWS in check on what they can charge, and they do exactly that through rampant competition.
No. When was that? Cloud made things easier and faster not cheaper. You trade money for convenience.
The cloud services analogy isn’t a good one because it wasn’t mainly about cost. It’s about not having to deal with the logistics of a commodity layer.
What happens if a commercial companies beats its competitors?
Prices rise.
Trivially, in a monopoly, raising prices infinitely for a product does not maximize profit.
SpaceX has effectively had a monopoly on commercial space launch since it was first able to actually use reusable rockets. Because the innovation of reusing rockets has brought the marginal cost of launching so far down prices will continue to go down.
Right now SpaceX is supply constrained, not demand constrained. All of their launches are booked. As SpaceX's supply increases they will be able to bring launch costs down even further until they hit an equilibrium of monopoly pricing that does maximize profit.
The same goes for healthcare in general. It's one of the most regulated sectors of the US economy and the government places an extreme cost on doing most anything in that sector through hyper regulation and very epic scale barriers to entry. The US is very far from being a Capitalist healthcare system, it's in fact the worst of both systems: it's a hyper regulated corporatist system, intentionally protected by the government from competition, captured by corporations.
At the level of persuasion, I don't understand why people use and defend "capitalism" rather than "free-market economics".
I guess this would need a new term since the word has been seemingly reclaimed by the capitalists as a good thing.
A clear eyed look at history makes it evident that if you take away private enterprise what you are left with is pretty much nothing but corruption, special interests and broken rights protections. Just look at the Soviet system, or Chinese state sector, or pretty much any thorough going socialist system ever. In non-capitalist industrial economies corruption isn't just a problem with the system, it is the system.
The trick is to guarantee not just private rights to capital, but private rights full stop. Rights of ownership and economic freedoms for private citizens, sure, but also political rights, legal rights, labour rights. The full package. Capitalism on it's own isn't enough, and in fact without individual legal and political rights it's not possible to sustain meaningful individual rights to capital anyway.
A good case in point in the Oligarchic system in Russia. In theory that's a capitalist system, but actually it's not. In practice individual citizens in Russia don't have meaningful capital and economic rights, if they actually try to fund and start a company that genuinely challenges the incumbents they get torn apart by the incumbents. Real capitalism means full individual rights over capital, but as with any other right that can only exist in a broadly free society.
Sounds like capitalism to me.