You get what you pay for and the service got paid for ultimately.
If it was important enough, it would have been paid for.
Please just stop this thing you're doing. It's nakedly markedly dishonest
You're Russian? Sucks to be you
The problem is not 'space' - it's getting ourselves sufficiently organized.
Unbelievably ignorant take and sadly typical for HN these days.
It's the same neo-liberal aggression couched in rhetorical trickery.
Why do we need to let this be a monopoly controlled by one person. A king in a board room is still a king.
It’s not simply a matter of political will, the quality of what governments have been able to produce just is no match for what companies can do. It’s the same for rockets as it is for cars, computers, or anything else. Ever heard of a government-made car? There were a few that came out of the Soviet Union and they were laughably bad and only obtainable in small quantities. Rockets and satellites are the same way, the government just does not have the same incentives to produce things that companies have.
The proof is in the rockets. Compare SpaceX’s rockets with any government developed rockets anywhere in the world, it’s not even close.
Falcon 9, Heavy, Starship, Dragon. The government never would have come close to developing any craft like these let alone being able to launch a constellation like Starlink.
I would fully acknowledge that spaceX pushed space exploration and commercialization forward. But you have to admit 1. The government paid for that by awarding contracts. 2. A monopoly isn’t an agreement we have to accept.
Only about 20% of SpaceX's income is government contracts, and for that 20% the government receives an absolute bargain. Compare cost per launch of the space shuttle or a Russian rocket to a Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy.
>A monopoly isn’t an agreement we have to accept.
There isn't a monopoly anywhere in sight, you use that word without any understanding of its meaning obviously. Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, Relativity, etc are all competing with SpaceX. Rocket Lab and Blue Origin are both planning their own exact copies of Starlink.
Incentives drive outcomes, the government lacks incentives to produce high quality objects at scale, there's a century's worth of data to prove that point.
Compare the cost per satellite to operate the GPS constellation vs the Starlink constellation. The private company is an order of magnitude more efficient. GPS was launched in an era where the government had a monopoly on spaceflight, if it were launched today by SpaceX, the cost would be an order of magnitude cheaper.
>The stealth bomber
I don't know which bomber you're talking about but if you're talking about the B-2, that was developed and manufactured by private companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_B-2_Spirit
The government is great for funding basic tech, i.e. redirecting taxpayer money back into the private sector with a specific goal. Arguing that we should let the government have a monopoly on spaceflight is like arguing that we should let the government have a monopoly on building cell phones or cars.
This is the opposite of a monopoly, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab are both planning competing constellations. Eventually there will be many competing constellations in orbit delivering service.
>Government could be the creator
Okay so why wasn’t it? The lifetime funding for NASA is 700+ billion dollars. With that incredible sum of money they weren’t able to even make reusable rockets let alone the satellite constellation. Launching a constellation with NASA’s pre-SpaceX approach (using Russian rockets) would have been literally impossible because Russia could have never built nearly enough rockets. Launching even a small fraction of Starlink would have consumed the entire NASA budget several times over.
Comparing GPS and Starlink doesn’t really even make sense because the scope of each project is so vastly different. Starlink if delivered by the same people who made GPS, would have been literally impossible, because the mass to orbit is orders of magnitude larger than the GPS project. Starlink was only possible because of the efficiency provided by SpaceX’s reusable rockets and the leading minds in the government literally said that reusable rockets were impossible and impractical until SpaceX actually delivered reliable reusable rockets.
Also pointing to blue origin which is substantially related to the Amazon monopoly isn’t the best refutation of my argument. When all competition and innovation requires behemoth monopolies rather than ecosystems of entrepreneurship and capital markets capitalism has been replaced with oligarchy.
Nasas mandate wasn’t to build reusable rockets. They built the space shuttle, which was reusable. The GPS network is a constellation of satellites. They also launched numerous spacecraft that landed on planets and moons. If we wanted nasa to do what spaceX has done it could. At then end of the day teams of humans do things. If we want the teams of humans in government to do things we can arrange them to do it. I don’t see anyone saying private military, fire departments or police departments are significantly better than public government systems.
It feels like there's no feasible solution here that would please you guys.
Should we all democratically vote on every satellite launched into space individually? It's already our elected representatives that approve it.
Earth orbit is more constrained, but it's very far from full. Geostationary orbits are about 20% full, but the rest is practically empty still.
Forward back to fascism. No thanks. He already caused astonishing harm.
Kind of fucked up lol
> rather than someone who is starting wars to profit from insider trading...
Your moral and ethical bar is Trump?
I do like big cities and their skylines though, sure.
The problem is that nobody asked the other 8.3 billions people what they think about seeing stuff in the sky. For the benefit of 1/1000th of humanity (~10 million starlink users).
We will be investigating him for decades and he deserves every second of it.
It's just the money.
If we were actually going to Mars, then yes, but somehow he made himself the 'First Trillionaire' - without even so much as getting out of Earth's orbit.
This is NFT progress, in that, there is some plausible economic value in NFTs, but in reality, it's just a hustle.
Money is a materialization of human desire.
The 'power' part is one of the most important things to understand.
In our every day lives, we see regular people 'creating value by working' and 'collecting money' and then 'spending according to their needs and desires'.
We see things like groceries, fuel, food - it all seems like relatively open and mostly kind of fair system - and it is, at that level.
But significant amount of wealth is accumulated into structure and by individuals that have power totally disproportinate to their value creation.
Kings of England didn't rule 'arbitrarily' - they owned most of the land - that was their power.
If you own all the land, the serfs can't escape your taxation - however you think you can create value, it will be taxed away.
Corporations have incredible economies of scale and leverage through division of labour that individuals could ever have - and - they are even 'limited liability.
We set individual up to compete against goliaths, and then give those goliaths special advantages.
'Parts of the Economy' are relatively fair, just, open etc. but much/most of it is not, it's a game of power leverage and accumulation, as it always has been. It's that part that people don't have a strong instinct for.
Power is exercised according to desire.
It's a fine point, because some people believe that everything is controlled by a cabal of secret bankers and rich people and that's not true either.
'Nobody is charge' - that's also unsettling. But there are centres of great influence, many of which do not have our best interests at heart.
If technological progress requires monopolies and the road toward serfdom is that really a path we want?
Elon doesn't own space, he just happens to be the one who is currently best at making it reachable. There is plenty of space for everyone else, and others will get there, eventually.
I could eat myself up with envy over the money he's making from it... or be glad that it's at least someone getting rewarded for moving humanity forward (while also being an asshole), rather than someone who is starting wars to profit from insider trading...