Anybody who sees a ceo who plans to spend a large chunk of company profits on colonizing mars for the sake of humanity might think to themselves, "I wonder if I can start a similar company, avoid the mars colonization expenses and undercut them on price."
You misunderstand just slightly, and through no fault of your own I might add since SpaceX’s messaging is deliberately murky here.
SpaceX has no plans right now to colonize Mars. In fact, they keep saying, “Look! We want other companies or nations to step up and plan for how to establish a colony. We’re only going to do it if we absolutely have no other choice.”
SpaceX is truly establishing a financially viable solar transport system that may eventually extend beyond our solar system. This is analogous to the birth of the U.S. railroad system. We don’t know yet what what don’t know is possible.
SpaceX is poised to own space transport outright. That’s major!
Now what does Mars have to do with this? It’s just a helpful organizing goal. People love a good milestone. Something to reach for with meaning. I mean if you’ve been following SpaceX’s 15-year history you’d see that they’re nothing if not methodical in their planning and attainment of milestones.
SpaceX is one of the most well-run companies in the world. And right now they have the best prices, the best technology, the best pace, the best outlook, the best...
They have no competition. Literally. I’d invest the entirety of my lifetime earnings in SpaceX if I could. We’re witnessing historic achievements in the making.
I think for Musk, Mars is more than just a milestone, but he’s able to be realistic enough that he knows that he SpaceX needs to focus on the rockets for now.
Interesting, yes; however in tech, products, partnerships, experience or any other quantifiable measure, Blue Origin is far, far behind SpaceX.
SpaceX has launched many Orbital missions.
Blue Origin has launched none.
SpaceX has two functional, tested, orbital spacecraft in production.
Blue Origin has a sub-orbital pod with goldfishbowl windows that's not quite ready yet.
SpaceX has successfully partnered with NASA for commercial cargo missions to the ISS.
Blue Origin has not.
SpaceX has landed more than a dozen rockets post-flight.
Blue Origin has landed < 10 sub-orbital rockets.
SpaceX has designs for rockets and spacecraft that might plausibly target inter-planetary travel.
Blue Origin has not gotten to orbit yet.
Don't get me wrong; I want Blue Origin to succeed. However, the slope of their progress graph has been much shallower than SpaceXs. I don't see them ever catching or overtaking SpaceX unless something drastically unforseen happens.
Blue Origin was Founded in 2000 two years before SpaceX and they still have yet to reach LEO. That’s a really bad sign of actual progress. They are optomisic they might be able to launch four years from now assuming schedules don’t slip. But 6+ years from now is more likely.
The rocket that Blue Origin has developed is very powerful. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BE-4. It'll be used by various companies for their rockets.
The SpaceX rocket has certain trade-offs. Basically the upper stage is not that powerful compared to various other rockets. This is usually not too bad because they go for the cheapest option. Blue Origin might have a huge advantage there though.
Blue Origin is not in a need of money, this drastically changes things. It seems they went first for nailing a super powerful rocket, then to develop something close to the SpaceX BFR called New Glenn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn).
Note that in various cases people compare expendable versions with reusable versions. Further, SpaceX is often better for lower orbits.
Suggest to follow /r/spacex on reddit. Above is what I learned from reading discussions there.
The advantage of rocket science as a business is that there's a pretty big barrier to entry for anyone who wants to spend a lot of money to get in. Plus a lot of the rocket scientists who work for SpaceX (as opposed to ULA or Astrium) are there specifically because of the Mars colonization mission.
Once you have full scale mining of space materials and infinite automated production of anything, why “on earth” would you need to sell anything to anyone ever? Wealth is something you need only if you lack something else.
Wealth? Isn't that just capital? Just like the infinite automated production would be capital as well.
I would rephraze this as what need is there for markets and money?
It's not about personal gain. It'd about how to manage the resource pools of an entire civilaztion.
What you are describing is the perfectly planned economy. From empirical experience national economies cannot be efficiently planned. USSR did not have the computational capability we have now - but we don't know is there any way to control a national - lest a planetary or solar economy by any other means than markets.
So, the question to me is - if solar ecomony can be planned then there is no need for markets and money, but if it's computationally intractable, or, the market way of organization is the cheapest and best way to do it, then we are stuck with markets and money up to the heat death of the universe.
Interestingly, if from algorithmic point of view markets and money is the best way to organize a civilizations resources, then it's likely alien civilizations (if they exist) will have a market economy too.
I would hope the question of reaource allocation is tractable and that the future of mankind is more like Iain Banks's Culture rather than "robber barons of the Oort cloud".
>avoid the mars colonization expenses and undercut them on price.
it would also lead to "undercutting" on technology. Look at Bezos - without such a powerful Mars hyper-drive the best he can do is being engine supplier to ULA. Hugely respectable achievement on its own, no doubts, yet nothing close to SpaceX who has already really advanced our civilization and is on track to advance it even further.
In particular i think the Mars mission based POV allows to filter for the best architectures long-term, like modular construction F9/Heavy which wouldn't be necessary the best in the short term of just servicing Earth satellites.
