Everybody has seen what Starlink does in Ukraine. Expect similar initiatives from China, India and Russia (once the shitshow is over.)

Heck the Pentagon probably has a plan B in the drawer for a Starlink-like constellation dated fall 2022 should Musk go more unhinged that he already is. LEO constellations went from ‘interesting’ to ‘paradigm shift’ overnight, nothing to be surprised about.

I certainly do believe that there will be initiatives, but I am really curious about their results.

One of the necessities is cheap access to the orbit, and I just cannot see the national behemoth space agencies developing economic, reusable rockets. The traditional rocket industry in the US was unable to do that either.

You know you're living far into the future when you hear "traditional rocket industry" said unironically.

Well, solid-fuel rockets are a pretty old tech (medieval China) and even if we restrict ourselves to liquid-fueled rockets that crossed the Kármán line, the first German A-4 did so several years before the transistor was invented :)

Oh I agree. But now the situation is quite different: the impractical became necessary, both in cheap launch capacity and leo comms infrastructure. They must make it happen.

I think it's similar to the sub-5 minute mile in the sense that once something is shown as possible, others will achieve it as well.

It is also possible to land on the Moon, we know that. But no one else tried for more than 50 years.

The barriers to becoming an agile space company are formidable. When looking at SpaceX, we forget how many space startups from that period are now defunct and forgotten. John Carmack founded one, too; it is gone.

Carmack's was very much a part-time venture. It was interesting to read their blog and watch their videos. It was clear that they were very good at certain things (code + welding) and not very good at others (electronics, fire-proofing, planning, testing, finite element analysis, any kind of simulation that Carmack didn't write).

An interesting fact is that they did very well as long as they could conduct cheap tests very often. As their rockets got bigger, they could no longer do that and then they floundered.

> But no one else tried for more than 50 years.

Was there a good enough reason to go again?

In contrast, there is a good reason to have re-usable rockets and quick deployment now.

This is a good argument.

I think it's because the moon has no immediate benefit besides

Star-Link and reusable rockets now have tremendous military uses which are being demonstrated in Ukraine.

Monetary concerns will take a back seat to that.

> The EU is a religion based around big state

What is religious is the outright aversion to state intervention without good reason.

No, it's coordination between aligned states to do what is needed to improve things in general. GDPR wouldn't have been possible if it were a Danish or Estonian thing only. Same goes for DMA and DSA, the rail packages, anti-competitive rulings, normalisation in standards (like Micro USB and now Type C) and a million other things.

It’s funny that the leftists simultaneously believe EU is based on a religion of liberal capitalism and big corporations.

Maybe the reality of a 27-nation collaboration is richer and more complicated than either of these extremes.

This is due to massive, shaping French influence on the EU.

There are many relatively market-friendly nations in the EU, especially in the eastern half, but the EU is mostly an extension of the French model and without the British, it really started leaning heavily into the protectionist bureaucratic model. The UK acted as a brake of sorts on those tendencies and its influence is sorely missed, at least by people like me. (Certainly the bureaucrats rejoice.)

If you have to compare the UK and France on free market vs "protectionist and bureacratic" (i disagree, there are but notes of protectionism sometimes - e.g. Alsthom power was sold to GE without the most important bits, but it was sold nonetheless), which is better for the everyday humans? A couple of examples spring to mind, all of which are extremely disfavourable towards the UK, so please help me have a more nuanced argument:

* The privatisation of UK railways has been an unmitigated disaster

* The privatisation and selling off of various UK heavy industries (like steel, automobiles, trains, aeroplanes, shipbuilding) has been somewhat of a disaster with the majority of it closing, and the rest being foreign owned. Where the UK were a leader in many areas, they no longer are, with a drastic impact on the people who used to work there. As a counterpoint, France has managed to maintain shipbuilding, airplane, train construction at a pretty good level.

* Where the UK is "better" is financial services - IMO in part due to the English language, in part due to money laundering with the help of the various crown tax havens; and the startup scene - again the English language surely helped, but so did less rigorous labour laws (and that has been slightly relaxed in France).

Anything else come to mind?

To quote "Yes Minister" (British political satire from the 1980s):

"You know what they say about the average Common Market official. He has the organising ability of the Italians, the flexibility of the Germans, and the modesty of the French. And that's topped up by the imagination of the Belgians, the generosity of the Dutch and the intelligence of the Irish."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvYuoWyk8iU

Britain after Thatcher got a rich financial center while the countryside impoverished. The market-friendly changes didn’t produce the promised tide that would lift all boats. I recognize that the UK produces more market-friendly rhetoric, but outside the handful of wealthy city centers the UK is shockingly poor.

> This is due to massive, shaping French influence on the EU.

True. I still think Thierry Breton does a really good job, though, despite being French. Sylvie Goulard would have been a disaster -- she couldn't even speak English!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvie_Goulard

(The wiki page lies and says she speaks English -- no, she really doesn't. Her German is pretty good, though.)

I think a modest proposal for curb stomping the bad French influence in the EU is to have all EU civil servants retake their entrance exams in another language if they originally took it in French. We should also form an alliance to automatically reject Commissioner candidates who 1) don't speak English and 2) speak French at the confirmation hearings in the European Parliament.

Nope, there wouldn't be a chronic debt crisis in the Eurozone if the Germans really held so much sway.

Germany wants that crisis because it's the only way it's moribund industries can be competitive in the global market. Well not any more after their dependence on Russian gas exploded in their face, but for the past 20 years.