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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

I expect China to be the other major player in global space industries for the simpel reason that they're the only ones with the means and resolve to undergo such an endeavour. China is a command economy and they engage in long-term projects all the time. You can see with with all the intercity rail and metro systems they've built in the last 2 decades. It's crazy. As is all their power generation (hydro, solar).

the US may have gone to the Moon 50+ years ago but a lot has changed. There's no big enemy to rally behind as we manufactured in the Cold War. We don't have titans of industry anymore. We have titans of finance who coast on the inertia of early successes while raising prices, cutting costs and engaging in rent-seeking behavior.

There are serious design issues with Starship as a platform for going back to the Moon.

I'm not at all convinced the US can build anything anymore.

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> I'm not at all convinced the US can build anything anymore.

But it has! Look at all of our private industry! That's the point!

> We don't have titans of industry anymore.

What?!

SpaceX and to a much lesser extent Tesla are good examples. Excluding those for a minute, what else does the US have world-leading manufacturing of?

Semiconductors? Nope.

High speed rail? Nope.

Auto industry? Nope.

Major infrastructure projects like bridges, tunnels, airports, etc? Nope.

Electronics (phones/laptops/etc)? Nope.

?????

The US is not exactly a manufacturing powerhouse.

It is a rent extraction/wealth transfer powerhouse.

At least for now.

Can you elaborate how SpaceX is an extraction/wealth transfer powerhouse?

I'm not sure which company you're referring to here but I do here this claim a lot about SpaceX and while i'm anti-rent-seeking I don't see SpaceX as a rent-seeking company. Yes it has gotten some grants to develop particular programs and promises from the US government to buy services but all up we're talking about (IIRC) $10-20 billion.

We just gave $40 billion to Argentina for pretty much no reason whatsoever.

Now the US government has spent a whole lot more on SpaceX but they're buying services.

SpaceX is an incredible bargain compared to the alternatives like ULA.

The production of cutting-edge semiconductors requires a global supply chain. The US's main contribution to that supply chain is (very expensive) software required in the design of an IC.

The US is second in manufacturing and far ahead of numbers 3 and 4 (Germany and Japan IIRC).

Anyone can write software, the idea that we're uniquely capable in that domain is foolhardy

Anyone can do any of those above industries as well, what's your point?

See the grandparent's comment about global supply chains. Everyone requires everyone else in those industries, no one does it all on their own.

I posit that software has no such supply chain dependency, literally anyone can do it, and thinking the US is unique in their ability to produce software isn't accurate.

Why doesn't everyone else simply start their own silocon valley!?

ByteDance, Alibaba, Baidu, three of Silicon Valley's most famous companies responsible for uniquely American successes like TikTok.

> literally anyone can do it

Doesn't it seem odd to you that only the two largest economies in the world are doing something so lucrative if literally anyone can do it?

I only need to list one other example to illustrate American exceptionalism is not an exception.

> The US's main contribution to that supply chain is (very expensive) software required in the design of an IC.

EUV tech is from American universities, licensed by choice by the US Government. In a world where Nikon was a much smaller optics player, they'd be the ones building EUV machines, and we'd be pretending Japan was the source of this tech.

The US's main contribution is doing the research required to make this whole thing possible.

Why mention Tesla in here?

They produce 1.8M cars/year while GM and Ford produce 6M and 4M, respectively. (2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_manufacture...)

GM went bankrupt, and are not producing anything that would sell globally. They’re a dead company walking.

If the Chinese EV tariffs are dropped, or if BYD start manufacturing at scale in the US, all the old US auto manufacturers are dead.

Americans like f1/2/350 to much

Teslas are built like shit compared to other cars.

Data centers.

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