A particularly salient example in light of Russia's war is that Congress repeatedly underfunded the Commercial Crew Program in favor of over-funding SLS, while we were trying to wean off Russian dependence.

But this is far from the only case. We could have had redundancy in Artemis by designing for commercial lift; half the money split between three providers would have given a lot more lift and a lot better cadence than SLS. We could seek out redundancy for SLS now, by buying rockets Artemis already requires, modified for SLS' flight profile, and spending a tiny fraction on, say, ULA and Blue's rockets.

We would have more backup launch capabilities, and more relevant talent, and more institutional knowledge, if we just invested the money in open-market demand for products, rather than supporting and endorsing monopoly-making. Was Congress more up in arms over Starship HLS, or ULA EELV? Think what it says to the market when a government is more willing to give money to a company for forming a monopoly and to penalize them for flying commercial payloads, than in purchase of a product.

The motivations for these programs aren't actually grounded in the betterment of the industry, nor of the US' launch capabilities in general. There is no way ~$100B on SLS/Orion is a sane allocation of money for that.

And private aerospace has highly monopolized themselves -- there's a reason there's so many hyphenated company names in this space. Consolidation is the natural evolution of large private companies in industries with high barriers to entry. The only mechanism we have to counter that is public spending that intentionally props up smaller players. SpaceX would already be out of business if it weren't for the US government swooping in to save the day. They didn't have a viable commercial business until later.

This is the major accomplishment of the ISS program. So what does NASA do? Decide (or be told to decide), "oh no, we need a launcher that can lift much bigger things, because OF COURSE we can't put smaller modules together in space."

The simplest way to understand if society wants something is if it will pay for it.

> the idea of access to space being solely the preserve of commercial entities is an uncomfortable one

It shouldn't be. Until SpaceX, the only way to the ISS was a Russian-controlled system. Would you prefer that to SpaceX today? Or is it better to have companies - that are regulated - follow money rather than the whims of whomever is currently in charge?

That’s society’s preferences weighted by how good each person is at making money, but it doesn’t represent society as a whole. If a person is disabled or uneducated and can’t hold a job, that person should still get an equal say in society’s preferences even though they have no money with which to express their preferences.

They don't get that through the government. A mostly binary choice comprising of what two sides promise to do on a thousand issues? How is that anything close to the perfect accessible system you're positing?

why?

I realize how dangerous/potentially harmful a "taxpayer contribution === influence" is. But I think it doesn't have to be a binary. Perhaps a "three house" style system would be an improvement for representative democracy here:

One house for representatives of each state One house for representatives of vote by population One house for representatives of taxpayers by net tax burden carried

As for having reps of taxpayers by net tax burden, what the hell does "net tax burden" mean? Tesla is useless without roads. Boeing is useless without airports. How do we apportion the tax paid against benefits received?

It's nonsense that "taxpayers" are worthy of further representation than any other citizen. The fact that corporations pay tax should not give them rights to representation in the legislature. Unless you think of corporations as one way to "represent taxpayers by net tax burden" because they are a collection of taxpayers.

Thats called aristocracy.

Because as a society, we decided long ago that everyone should be treated as equally as possible.

We don't throw people into the garbage dump because they're not as good at certain things as others.

We've encoded this into our laws, our norms, our education, and our society as a whole. We've even fought world wars because of it.

That you could even ask the question makes me think that you're just being provocative.

That we have a progressive instead of flat personal tax rate system shows this is a pretty lie.

The fact that people have got to the point of personal selfishness that they think that only "money talks" is a measure of their societal contribution is a sad indictment of the past 30-40 years of Thatcher/Reaganite nonsense.

The purpose of money is to aid in trade and that very creation and distribution of wealth.

Billionaires should be taxed at 100% for all of their liquid wealth over that $1B. If they have it invested into productive and useful wealth creation, then leave it there, otherwise, take it and do something productive with it.

Why not just say, 'I don't believe in treating everyone equally"? If you have a different position then say so. Why try and redefine things? What's the goal?

Because that's not what I mean. I'm not redefining things - progressive tax was invented way back.

- If you're born into a wealthy family, how should we handicap you or boost others to give everyone "equality of opportunity"

- Or, should we outlaw wealthy families (maybe this is a 100% tax on wealth > $1m), assuming we could actually do this

- If you're born into a normal family, but one of your parents dies when you're 17, how should we compensate you, or handicap everyone else?

- If you get thyroid cancer at age 33, how should we compensate you, or handicap everyone else?

- How would we even quantify these opportunity gaps? The way we currently do it is by comparing lifetime earnings and try to ceteris paribus everything else, but as we start compensating, we're disturbing the experiment. Also, where does the money come from?

I'd love to hear a set of policies that deals with life's basic unfairness, but I bet it would look a lot like progressive taxation, a strong social safety net, and heavily subsidized education, and the people who support equality of opportunity definitely don't support those things. Mostly their position distills down to "don't tax us to subsidize low income/wealth people", and the best you can say about that is it doesn't reckon with the unfairness issue.

So I reject the premise. But, I also think that "equality" is actually a complex concept. Is a society that allows super wealthy people alongside homeless people equal? Is a society that puts a 100% tax on wealth > $1m but a 0% tax on income < $12,950 equal? What about a society that gives women 6 months paid leave for birth and early childhood, but men 6 weeks? What about a society that subsidizes insulin but not L-dopamine for Parkinson's sufferers?

My ideal would be that we treat people with "equal regard" for their needs and situation. Maybe that sounds like bullshit, or the idea of the government deciding what your needs are/should be is worrying, or you're skeptical we could ever really quantify it, and I would mostly agree. But I also can't come up with a better or more reasonable goal, even though we might not ever practically achieve it.

Equality of opportunity isn't equalising everything in life, it's equalising what the state (and other institutions) provides to each person. Equalising everything is equality of outcome, or how some people use "equity".

I.e. having a decent schooling, being treated equally by social institutions such as banking and law enforcement, and having an decent shot at jobs and housing, those are things to do with equality of opportunity. People shouldn't be unequally treated.

That doesn't mean that a legally blind person can become a fighter pilot, or people should be graded in school differently to compensate for ancestral sins; changing the treatment based on the individual would also be equality of outcome.

Outside of those definitions, to be clear, I'd say some things are definitely fantastic to do terms of helping people, such as providing braille on money. We just need to remember that each time we do this it's disproportionately expensive, so we need to make sure we're prioritising (somehow) to remove the most disadvantage from the most people. But I don't think this sort of thing should be in an equality discussion, as it muddles it too much.

> it's equalising what the state (and other institutions) provides to each person

Well, a couple of things about that:

- That's not equality of opportunity, it's anti-discrimination

- Generally the point of these programs is to create a more equitable society, i.e. when bad stuff happens to you (cancer, slavery) we drop a money bag at your door to catch you back up. People at least say (and indeed the Declaration of Independence starts off by saying) we want an equal society, and this is how we do it. If we give the same bag of money to everyone no matter what happened to them, that doesn't address the inequality, it just causes inflation. Indeed, you can't fix inequality by treating everyone equally, because life doesn't treat everyone equally.

> changing the treatment based on the individual would also be equality of outcome.

Why aren't we concerned with outcomes? Whenever I hear the opportunity/outcome framing this is my immediate question. Aren't outcomes the only thing that matters here? Of course we need to consider tradeoffs and costs, but if the goal is to make a more equitable society, how can we not consider outcomes? Can you claim to be an equal society when none of your policies discriminate (let's stipulate this is the case in the US, but it definitely is not), but 2/3s of your people (women and minorities in the US) are effectively an underclass? If that's the definition of equality, it doesn't sound very useful. I think we can do better.

Again this sounds like an excuse to ignore life's basic unfairness, as well as bad stuff our society has done in the past (slavery, the chattel system) and currently does in the present (the war on drugs, the gender pay gap). It's like, it's fine if we deprived people of opportunity in the past, even last year, as long as we fix that opportunity inequality sometime in the future, as though that didn't permanently set millions of people back. How do we make up for past, current, and existing and future inequities of opportunity?

Or put another way, how will we compensate the people today who will be victimized by:

- a vindictive immigration policy

- a racist carceral system

- a misogynistic reproductive rights regime

- a transphobic... everything

Will we just fix the glitch and ignore the damage those systems and policies have created? Again that doesn't sound like it really addresses the full scope of the problem.

Therefore if one wants to know what the society's preferences are, that data must be collected in such a way the each individual's preferences are included in the data set.

We might still apply a weighting function at aggregation time, depending on why we're looking at society's preferences in that instance. There are certain group's of opinions that we don't value as much for answers to some questions, but we should like to be deliberate about those choices instead of applying an implicit weighting function during collection.

The nazi also had a criminal record for raping a young boy.

The parent put it this way:

> If a person is disabled or uneducated and can’t hold a job, that person should still get an equal say in society’s preferences even though they have no money with which to express their preferences

Morally and rationally the nazi child rapist should not have equal say in society's preferences. Any society - any culture - that is stupid enough to place that person's preferences at a level of equality, deserves and will have earned its inevitable collapse. And there are far worse monsters roaming about than the nazi child rapist. While my specific example is an outlier (on purpose), the premise is far more expansive in principle.

It's also why a Constitutional Republic is vastly superior to actual Democracy.

For example, when considering questions of crime and punishment / deterrence we probably wouldn't value the preferences of say, psychopathic murderers, on the same level as those of the families of their victims. That would be silly.

However, it would still be good to collect their preferences on conditions within the prison system and host of other topics. And we might still intentionally devalue those preferences too, but that would be a deliberate choice of values as society.

When we fail to collect the data effectively in the first place, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to determine what we value and what we don't. So we're still going to want to know these things, that way we don't just discover later that we were ignoring a big thing that, turns out, we would have liked to value once we knew about it.

In your particular example, add in the one stipulation that both the Nazi and the family of his victims don't have much discretionary income to spend and yet they live in a world where society's preferences are collected primarily or singularly by way of observing what people spend money on. In that scenario, all of those people's preferences share the equal status of being completely ignored. That seems unfair to victims as well.

Modify the scenario a little differently and say the Nazi is very wealthy while the victims are poor. So then because of the data collection method alone, as a society, we would then be elevating the Nazi's preferences to 100% greater value than the victims.

That outcome seems vastly contrary to what we would actually value if we just fairly and accurately collected the data first and then applied our judgements about what should be valued.

Further notice that in just asking the questions, we can also easily discover at the macro level that this guy is a Nazi, after all, given the chance, he'll tell us so. This means deliberately ignoring his preferences is easy at time of aggregation and now we can do that on purpose, because as a society, we don't value the opinions of Nazis when it comes to questions of how to run things in a democracy.

Through market approach? This has never worked for roads, fire service, police, courts, sewage, water supply or any other natural monopoly.

Victorian Britain actually had a court system where you would pay the judge to judge you, and the more you paid, the 'better' the judging. You fan imagine the issues...

The things it doesn't work for are very easily defined, and don't interfere with the fact that almost everything does work well like that.

To be fair, everything else has been like this. The first railways were government funded, the first airlines (in most places), this is quite typical.

Then as things mature, as there can be a profit-motive, government tends to get out of the lime-light, and private orgs take over.

Space-X, as an example, is just that. And space travel is about to become mundane, common, normal. Just like air travel in the early 50s.

And this doesn't mean the government has zero power here. It can take over companies in time of war/national emergency, it can compel for national need.

Again, what we need to do... is realise that space travel is becoming like air travel. And I for one, would be horrified if all control to air travel was through governments only.

And there are other examples, such as the East India Company having its own army, navy and effectively ruling a big part of India at a time.

Air travel only began because the US Mail paid for airmail deliveries.

NASA only began because the post-war MIC needed to develop ICBMs.

Public education only began because industrialization required an educated workforce.

Air travel is one of the safest modes of mechanized transportation in the world, space launches would be among the least and probably wont change much in their overall reliability.

This is a very, very strange assertion.

Airflight was incredibly dangerous 100 years ago. Yet now you claim it is one of the safest, thereby validating that technological improvements, and design improvements, can change safety.

Then you say, effectively "things won't improve" for "this other tech over here".

Which is it?!

My point in all of this is, while space travel was a monumental achievement 60+ years ago, it's simply not that big of a deal now. Endless commercial corporations now engage in the act, for profit, because there is profit, and because it is so commonplace.

And this trend will only increase, eventually leading to people actually being station in space (eg, the moon, larger commercial structures, mining, etc). This will lead to more trips, and for people visiting said structures for business, and on and on.

Just as with planes, this will become safer, more common, more regulated, more... normal.

What part of this iterative process do you believe will block launches from being more safe? NOTE: don't use today's technology as a blocker, please.

Now, just because no one else is doing it doesn't mean it's automatically bad, but it's a launch technology suite that was selected against for good reason in the post-shuttle era. The (eventual) launch of Artemis I made clear, for example, that cryogenic hydrogen is a really problem-prone PITA to work with.

Let SpaceX et al. take the technology risk, and support them via contracts.

But it's an improvement on the prior approach to instead put space eggs in two baskets: {lower risk, conservative technology choices} + {higher risk, cutting edge technology choices}

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33939692

> " 'Indeed, besides the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, and the Parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man, every organization [of 60+] in the western world that's been continuously operating since 1530 is a university.'

-- https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/E...

I believe this is why it's critically important that universities remain focused on their timeless mission rather than chasing secular fads. The Buxton index, described in the [link], is an incredibly important concept."

It's natural that we would think technology startups compelling due to the way they succeed with difficulty and risk management competence. But if their Buxton index of planning horizon is limited by their runway, and a decade is considered an Uber-long horizon, how futuristic and exceptional are we ultimately talking? I agree with the parent commenter that the eggs in two baskets serve separately appropriate purposes.

I agree with the other poster that the only thing that will light a fire under the US' butt is having a peer country clown them in a space milestone. I don't like the CCP and I abhor their practices but I do root for their space program since seeing that bright red commie flag on the moon is the only egg big enough to cover all the faces necessary in the usgov in order to actually get something done.

I also really hope that India gets in the game in a serious way so we can have even more competition, an India-China space race would be fun to watch and would have the US scrambling to catch up.

It does seem historically accurate to say that governments don't successfully complete state-of-the-art mega-projects absent war or an existential treat.

I expect those are the only things powerful enough to cut through the bureaucratic resistance to progress.

Musk is … unique. Let’s say. But he is very good at organizing companies for a relentless push for the results.

  > 1. having alternatives to other commercial ventures, which are subject to their own financial viability

  > 2. having backup launch capability

  > 3. maintaining more relevant talent in the US

  > 4. maintaining institutional knowledge of cutting edge aerospace tech

  > 5. maintaining aerospace industrial capability in the US

But leaving aside the SLS, there are missions like the mars rovers and the james webb telescope, that I think show innovation and scientific success (but I do not live on the us, so i have an incomplete view).

SpaceX suddenly going out of business (as in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy) seems rather unlikely. The same is true of ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. Absolute worse case scenario would be Chapter 11, in which the business continues to operate under new ownership, and the current owners lose everything – but even that doesn't seem that likely. Anyway, the chapter 11 scenario is still a risk with the cost-plus procurement SLS model – Boeing (or Aerojet Rocketdyne, or Lockheed Martin) going through chapter 11 might not have doomed SLS/Orion, but it likely would have caused delays. In fact, it is open to doubt whether SLS/Orion-style cost-plus contracting has any real advantage over commercial from a bankruptcy risk perspective, for two competing commercial providers must have less bankruptcy risk than a single non-commercial government contractor

> 2. having backup launch capability

Multiple commercial providers, like they've pursued for commercial cargo and crew to ISS, and are still planning to pursue for Artemis HLS, would meet that just as well as an SLS-style program could. Given they likely could have afforded at least two commercial systems for the cost of SLS+Orion, it seems this actually gives worse backup than commercial does.

> 3. maintaining more relevant talent in the US

This doesn't seem relevant, given that the most likely firms to have provided NASA with a commercial SLS alternative – SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Sierra Nevada, etc – are all US firms anyway. In fact, IIRC, the NASA procurement documents for commercial crew and cargo, and Artemis HLS, all said only US firms could respond. ITAR makes it a lot harder for US space firms to offshore jobs than most other industries.

> 4. maintaining institutional knowledge of cutting edge aerospace tech

While it is true that NASA doesn't own the engineering for the commercial programs, in the way they own SLS engineering, NASA engineers are still heavily involved in the commercial programs, for review/advice/consulting/sign-off/etc. This factor is the most plausible of all those you've mentioned, but it is unclear if having somewhat deeper engineering expertise among NASA employees (as opposed to US private sector space firms) is important enough to justify a procurement approach which costs billions over and above its commercial alternative

> 5. maintaining aerospace industrial capability in the US

This doesn't seem relevant for the same reasons as (3)

SpaceX is not critical to national security, and it—many times—came close to bankruptcy in its adolescence of the early 2010s. Aerospace, in the past, saw massive recessions where companies larger than SpaceX went poof. This will almost certainly happen again, once we’re done tooling up for China.

Which specific firms are you talking about going bankrupt here? Were those bankruptcies chapter 11 or chapter 7?

Those benefits are from having government rocket program, not from having one where politicians micromanage the rocket design to the extent of dictating the choice of engine.

Or are run by folks with sleep deprivation issues...