The interesting thing for me is how this mission underscore the difference between SpaceX and other space companies. SpaceX have become an entire commercial space agency, able to supply everything from the rockets and capsules, to the ground operations and even the space suites and to do that in a complete package.
If you have enough money you can ring them up and say "I want to go into space" and they can make that happen. That is a pretty big deal.
That's because SpaceX is run with the goal of building actual space transit capabilities, not milking the taxpayer and distributing pork to as many politically influential districts as possible.
Until SpaceX and post-Apollo most of the space program was really a pork distribution system and a way to keep certain high-skill labor areas 'hot' in case we need them again. It wasn't a serious effort to learn about the universe or build a real presence in space. Some of that did happen but it happened almost as a side effect.
Edit:
Honestly I think SpaceX is just a decent aerospace company. They've appeared superhuman by contrast with companies like Boeing that have done nothing to innovate in the sector since the 1970s. When the comparison is with people completely asleep at the wheel, mere competence looks striking.
I don’t see downsides of keeping skilled labour “hot”.
One indirect benefit of domestic manufacturing is that it gives blue collar workers a sense of productivity and involvement in society.
Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings, and a fairly compensated workforce is less likely to feel stagnant in their stage of life, and less likely to be radicalized.
Edit: it seems there is a distinction between how you keep the labour hot - meaningful long-term missions; or a half-assed approach.
The downside to keeping skilled labour 'hot' are many. First of all, if you have skilled labor, instead of of keeping them 'hot' actually 'eat' them. Ok, the analogy breaks down. But why keep them 'hot' just have them build actually useful stuff instead. Its not like there is a lack of useful things they could be doing.
And second giving people bullshit useless projects like SLS, does not actually keep them 'hot'. Its more like warmed up Pizza. The people and more importantly organization lose the actual ability to do things quickly at reasonable prices.
Somehow it seems acceptable that SLS will cost more then 30 billion $ in development cost and 2-4 more billion $ per launch. Not to mention the time.
Don't misunderstand political pork as actually strategic workforce development or long term government policy. That just what you personally wish it to be, not what it actually is.
Building rockets and probes for a reasonable price and in a reasonable amount of time. SLS was initially billed as "a simple project to reuse a bunch of parts from the Space Shuttle" and yet it's over a decade old, 20 billions in cost and has not launched even once. So we get no real innovation (as I said previously it's just reusing fairly old technologies), it's not cheap and it's not fast. As for keeping the specialists hot; surely there are better ways to do it. It feels like saying let's keep digging ditches and filling them back up to keep our ditch diggers in shape.
No it isn't. The roads are full of plotholes because of totally broken local accounting, zoning and tax laws. Go read some 'Strong Towns' stuff if you want to know why roads have potholes.
The whole time when SpaceX didn't exist and NASA invested money in nonsense they could have invented reusable rockets, LEO constellations, nuclear reactors the list goes on.
I really don't have a clue what your issue is. There is literally no problem with not having enough ideas that are cool that NASA can work on.
While “keeping skill labor “hot”’ sounds great in theory, the practical example of US space industry pre-SpaceX leads me to grant greater weight to “not actually great.”
Palmer lucky (oculus) is mostly sending drones with grenades.
I think those are probably most of the kills tbh, and (according to my friend who works there) it is a very young, fresh, startup approach and not at all like the traditional defense industry.
NASA is a scientific institution, it will lose money. But in the end, it enables private companies like SpaceX to be successful.
More generally, no private company would be able to fund fundamental research and turn a profit. Apple used DARPA tech to make the iphone, Pfizer used decades of public research on mRNA to make the covid vaccine and SpaceX uses NASA's engineering expertise to get its rockets to orbit.
Also, SpaceX gets billions of dollars from the US government annually.
> More generally, no private company would be able to fund fundamental research and turn a profit.
I have to imagine you mean turn a profit directly on the research itself (isolated down to the cost per specific item of research).
Because obviously big tech can quite trivially fund fundamental research at an enormous scale as they see fit while printing their traditional gigantic profits.
Apple + Microsoft + Facebook + Amazon + Nvidia + Google = over half a trillion dollars in annual operating income (around $126 billion in op income last quarter).
They could fund NASA (~$25 billion) and would never really notice it. It'd take about four to six months of further op income growth by those six companies and NASA's budget would be covered in perpetuity.
They could, but they won't. The private sector is allergic to such long-term investments with no clear path to profitability. And why would they fund research if their competitors could just as easily monetize its potential results ?
They rely on publicly funded labs to make the real innovations and do the last (but nonetheless important) mile of bringing it to the public.
Advances in science requires enormous resources. Take space travel. These companies will never try to innovate in deep space travel, because it brings nothing to them. Low Earth Orbit is where the profit is (but less science)
They could fund current NASA, but they won't fund what NASA should be.
Plus, big tech do fund fundamental research, a bunch of them are working on quantum computing for instance. None of that is likely to turn a profit any time soon and the research is expensive. But they do it anyway.
Quantum Computing, Protein folding, Fusion etc are usually PR topics. If the intention is to advance these, then small amount of funding is useless. We need dedicated Manhattan project style endeavors, a population dedicated to the cause.
Why are they designing rockets then? Has very little to do with science.
Nobody denies that NASA should 'lose' money you are literally arguing a straw man. The question is 'what should NASA spend its money on'. And wasting 80+ billion $ on a completely broken architecture that makes no sense what so ever seem to most people like a bad idea.
People actually WANT NASA to actually do more science, and actually advanced tech development.
Personally I think NASA should be building things like nuclear reactors for space, or mars, moon missions. They should work on super-advanced engines. On chemical systems to make water on Mars. There are lots of things NASA could do that there simply isn't another way to do it.
What NASA should be doing is reinvesting in 70s technology that is completely useless and out-dated for purely political reasons.
I don't fucking understand why everybody who criticizes NASA is attacked with 'you hate science' when this is not actually what people are complaining about. Its just kneejerk defense of all that is wrong with NASA and congress.
NASA is scientific yes. But it's just as impacted by the defense industry's corruption of the US government where politicians go out of their way to interfere with procurement to funnel it to their donors and the cost of massively bloated projects which further harms the science they can do and harms competition.
When you throw open Huxley's doors of perception you get an extraordinary experience in the most quotidian of conditions. Like watching a river run by or just watching the washing machine run. Non psychonauts have to do extraordinary things, like become astronauts, to get to a similar level of awe-struck. A trip on a trip is a tragic waste of a trip.
Agreed. Also the hardware glitching while observing it mostly reveals truths about the hardware, very little and indirectly about the world it resides in.
I can believe it. Dunno how reasonable it would be to risk having someone in an altered state of mind on the ISS. What do you do if someone has a bad trip or decides to make poor decisions?
> What do you do if someone has a bad trip or decides to make poor decisions
The space shuttle had a hatch that could be opened to vacuum and was actually padlocked shut on some flights where the mission specialists weren't trusted by the commander [0].
If you mean STS-51-B, the commander duct taped the hatch. After that flight a padlock was added for a more permanent solution.
> “I remember waking up at the beginning of a shift and seeing duct tape on the hatch," Gregory told Ars. "I did not know what the origin of it was, and I didn’t pay any attention to it. I may have, but I don’t recall asking Overmyer about it.”
Also this detail gives me pause:
> The Space Shuttle has been retired for 13 years, but the padlock remains in the fabric of US spaceflight with Crew Dragon. A commander's lock is an __option__ for NASA's crews flying to the International Space Station on Crew Dragon, as well as private missions.
Why even make it optional? Seems better to officially take responsibility out of the commander's hands and make the lock mandatory. This would greatly reduce risk to onboard trust dynamics, since the commander is just following orders instead of signaling mistrust toward the crew.
This seems like one of those "who needs all those lifeboats??" situations. Why not avert the Titanic now?
Similar to what's been done on earth during such experiments. Just have to do it in a controlled way in a prepared environment, and have both an administrator and a person likely versed in taking the substance to minimize risk. Of course with just a sample of one it won't yield much scientific benefit.
I'm not denying that intoxication leads to more bad decisions.
But sober people also make many bad decisions. A space ship needs to be resilient to bad decisions, and I assume/hope the ISS already is well fortified in that respect.
Typical bad decisions, especially by a professional crew of trained flight engineers, are quite different from "bad trip" bad decisions. Totally different risk vector and one they should have spent precisely zero seconds thinking about in the ISS's design.
It took only 17 Space Shuttle flights before a crew-member threatened to kill themselves causing them to add additional locks to the hatches. I think a few seconds considering what a malicious actor could do would be worth it.
I don’t know what argument you’re trying to make. The question is: should the ISS be hardened against someone on LSD. My answer is: that is fucking absurd, and generic hardening against malicious actors is tangential at best.
...we're not talking about force-feeding someone a fifth of whiskey here.
A stable, thoughtful, trained scientist, in the company of supportive and emotionally intelligent colleagues, does not present a significant risk when fed a normal dose of LSD.
They absolutely can present a significant risk when fed a normal dose of LSD. And I'm no prude when it comes to this stuff. Very standard advice for psychedelics is set & setting, and "don't be physically trapped in an environment you might find uncomfortable" is a reasonable derivation.
Don't be in the endless void of space which is already emotionally and psychologically taxing on human beings who are verifiably in peak physical and mental condition
Seems like a pretty fucking bad set and setting honestly. Regular astronauts already deal with powerful feelings in their normal job. Adding a drug to that is a bad plan.
> What do you do if someone has a bad trip or decides to make poor decisions?
The same thing you do on terra firma. You do your best to keep them calm, and talk them down. I've never had to physically restrain anyone, but seems like that would actually be easier to do on the ISS. Just wrap them up and let 'em float around
I'd also expect bad trips to not be as big of an issue in a NASA sanctioned experiment with a much more closely controlled dose vs some tab you got off the guy in a tye dyed t-shirt at the concert type of situation.
> I've never had to physically restrain anyone, but seems like that would actually be easier to do on the ISS. Just wrap them up and let 'em float around
A great way of restraining someone is pushing them against an unmovable object. On Earth, that is either the floor or a wall, then you can pin them somewhat against that, at least restricting them somewhat.
Walls and floors are the same in space, and the person can literally float away with six degrees of freedom, at any time.
I feel like physically restraining people would be harder in zero gravity than non-zero.
That seems crazy. There are like 10 people in space at any given time. The idea that we might have sent someone mentally unstable given that we can be that selective is mind blowing. How in the world can you qualify for this if you aren't the best of the best of the best?
I don’t see mental instability as an independent defect but as a byproduct of some of the long tail aspects needed to be the best of the best. To put another way, many people are motivated to fill a void, that same void can cause mental instability.
I think a large part of it is because of Elon Musk's obsession about controlling (if not owning) as much of stack as possible. That mentality goes into even the things you do not own, but lease.
In the Isaacson biography there's a theme across his ventures, sparked by early misfortune, about being in control of things end-to-end because then you have more flexibility to optimize, make more leaps that can come from orchestrating creative adn bespoke integration options.
No, in this case it is much more pragmatic. Elon has commented on this aspect himself. When he started he thought of just buying rockets and related equipment from Russia on the cheap but quickly found the exuberant prices states want to charge. He then made a first order approximation of how much it’d cost to just manufacture things he needs and it was an order of magnitude lower - thus he bit the bullet and started doing just that. Had the states let him buy things at a fair price may be the controlling of the stack would not have happened.
> Significantly, the Merlin engines—like roughly 80 percent of the components for Falcon and Dragon, including even the flight computers—are made in-house. That’s something SpaceX didn’t originally set out to do, but was driven to by suppliers’ high prices. Mueller recalls asking a vendor for an estimate on a particular engine valve. “They came back [requesting] like a year and a half in development and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just way out of whack. And we’re like, ‘No, we need it by this summer, for much, much less money.’ They go, ‘Good luck with that,’ and kind of smirked and left.” Mueller’s people made the valve themselves, and by summer they had qualified it for use with cryogenic propellants.
> “That vendor, they iced us for a couple of months,” Mueller says, “and then they called us back: ‘Hey, we’re willing to do that valve. You guys want to talk about it?’ And we’re like, ‘No, we’re done.’ He goes, ‘What do you mean you’re done?’ ‘We qualified it. We’re done.’ And there was just silence at the end of the line. They were in shock.” That scenario has been repeated to the point where, Mueller says, “we passionately avoid space vendors.”
I suspect one of the reason behind that is that the supplier is asked to provide a part that cost only a few thousands bucks, but could potentially blow a multi-million rocket. So, each part end up having a sort of implied insurance and over-the-top quality control, to avoid liability. When SpaceX build something itself, it can evaluate the proper risk of each part and doesn't need to add unnecessary markup.
That’s s problem in classic microeconomics: The right price is anything between the marginal cost of manufacturing and the total price of the rocket minus $1.
Every parts manufacturer tries to extract as much as possible from the leeway in the middle.
I work in medical devices and when I read such stories I often wonder how quickly we could develop things if we reexamined the company processes that have been developed over the last 30 years. Maybe everything we do is fine, but I suspect we do a lot of stuff very inefficiently.
Life-critical devices are generally subject to a lot of regulations. Regulations that were in many cases written in blood. However I suspect you're correct that there isn't much periodic, retrospective review of these regulations and whether they still make sense or can be simplified. Especially when there are overlapping or possibly contradictory regulations.
We know what wide-open unregulated markets result in when lives are at stake. It would be nice to think that engineers and executives would never sacrifice human life for profit, but we know that some of them will.
I also think about all the advice I read on this forum to "raise your rates" and "charge based on the value you deliver, not what your costs are." But when physical engineering companies take this approach, it's somehow just greed or complacency. Of course any potential client can just decide to hire their own staff and do the job in-house if your quote is viewed as unreasonable.
> We know what wide-open unregulated markets result in when lives are at stake.
We know much more about what happens with regulation: prohibitively expensive nuclear power and unbearably slow progress in simple medical devices. Opportunity cost is enormous here.
> It would be nice to think that engineers and executives would never sacrifice human life for profit, but we know that some of them will.
This is really simplistic. We wouldn't use anything if it cost what it cost to make it 100% safe. Everything has risks and prices.
We also know what happens without any regulation: milk with lead added to make it look white, cars that kill their passengers when crashing, polluted rivers, polluted air and much more.
We certainly need to constantly revisit things but without regulations our society wouldn’t be fun to live in.
It's good that we no longer have cars that kill their passengers or polluted rivers or polluted air, I suppose.
See what I mean? What's the point of misinterpreting?
No one is ever saying "zero regulations are best". There are hundreds of thousands of regulations. Because there are so many, lots of them are not great or constrictive, and we never got to the world where the US is powered by 1990 by majority nuclear power, and the following developing China followed suit, and businesses sprang up there to roll out the same technologies worldwide, and we had far, far less climate change.
> I dunno why this myth that without government ...
/s?
(Look at the quality of life in failing/failed states, where there's effectively no government. Libertarian paradises are extremely rare; deadly hellscapes are all too common.)
More seriously, I wonder as a human species if we’ll evolve beyond certification being the only way to prove a work was done properly. I suspect the civilization who does that will save an order of magnitude more human workers.
What made SpaceX capable of being able to design and build the valve themselves faster and cheaper than the vendor? It makes a good story, but I worry about other companies trying to emulate it when the economics of space vendors might be far different from other industries.
I'm not sure if this applies to smaller parts like this, but traditional aerospace suppliers are allergic to iteration. Everything must work the first time. You can see this in how many rockets SpaceX has blown up vs. how many ULA has blown up.
I imagine it's similar to what we see in software, where we see mega-waterfall projects delivered for the government cost way too much and still fail, and where tech companies & literal hobbyists can deliver higher quality software more quickly by avoiding an overbearing planning process.
It doesn't look like that. You are saying it like it was a symptom of a mental disorder, while he is stating that is the most practical and logical decision.
As a benchmark, Aerojet will charge NASA between $70 and $110 million for each new-build RS-25 engine for Artemis. And that's a design that dates back to the 1970s and which flew as the SSME on the Shuttle.
SpaceX builds all 33 engines on a Starship for that amount.
In my opinion, it's not that he wants to control so much as that his goal is going to Mars.
Someone that goes to work to do the tasks assigned to them (which applies to both managers and those on the line) vs. someone that goes to work because they want something (e.g. maybe a certain product made with certain features) thinks very differently. The latter has a whole plan and the plan has certain sub-requirements that all feed back into the greater goal.
As part of going to Mars, you will likely have to send many supporting missions, which drives the requirement to lower costs. When designing bespoke systems, contracting it out to third party vendors can be expensive. Usually you contract out to third party vendors because they can utilize economies of scale because they have many clients who are asking for the same thing, but there are no economies of scale here because no one has reusable rockets in their catalog.
It's really because SpaceX is Musk's hobby company with the singular goal of putting a colony on Mars. The commercial launches and Starlink are just a way to leverage all the infrastructure they've had to build to make it pay for itself.
Given the incredibly hostile regulatory environment they've faced in Texas trying to operate their own private launch site, I think there are very clear benefits in using an established public facility that isn't under threat by constant attempts (often in outright bad faith) to curtail its activity or even get it shut down. It's not a question of money or capability.
But you know it ISN'T private, because every rocket ever designed will end up in public space, either literally in outer space, or dropping parts in the ocean, or a tiny tiny tiny tiny chance of exploding somewhere less convenient.
This idea that you can just make your own little closed off launch pad and therefore ignore society is stupid.
Some of the more onerous pushback comes from people who have been ignored before and turned out to be right. For example, when Dupont and friends first started producing PFAS, someone out there was crying foul about "hey maybe we shouldn't just dump this everywhere", and they were ignored, it was dumped everywhere, and now we get to deal with the consequences because nobody listened to those people.
This has happened hundreds of times, including serious things like lead paint and leaded gasoline, which we KNEW caused direct and measurable harm to people, and yet was completely ignored. A portion of the public has obviously lost ALL trust for the private sector claiming any sort of "this couldn't possibly cause problems" and are willing and able to take action.
If you are a "big" enough entity, there is no such thing as "private". Anything you do, affects a lot of people, and you should be treated that way.
> there aren’t many technical issues to pouring concrete in a good lat-lon
Other than when a powerful and explosion-prone rocket destroyed its launchpad, hurling chunks of steel-reinforced concrete thousands of feet. But it's almost 18 months since that happened.
That incident probably underscores the parent poster's point quite effectively.
That launch was on 20th April 2023, and the next prototype test launch was only 212 days later on 18th November 2023, although I think the pad redesign/rebuild/repair work was complete by the end of July 2023.
So only 3-4 months to redesign/rebuild/repair the pad (although it's probably reasonable to assume some design work had already occurred).
At the end of the day it wasn't a major problem. SpaceX tried something new, it didn't work out, so they had to fix it. Nobody was hurt. Property damage was minimal. The repair didn't take very long. All in all a good example of learning from your mistakes without spending too much time or money overthinking it.
In civil engineering terms, if falling apart with debris thrown thousands of feet doesn't count as a "technical issue" what does?
I'm no rocketry expert, but I'm old enough to remember the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; I'm pretty sure if you've got falling chunks of steel-reinforced concrete hitting your space vehicle during launch, that's an issue.
The launch pad didn't explode, the rocket on the launch pad exploded. A fully fueled falcon 9 has about as much energy as a small nuclear bomb, it's not a technical issue if your structure is unable to survive that at point blank range.
Oh, definitely, of course it wasn't a good or desirable outcome.
But it was also a prototype being deliberately tested to destruction, so the context as compared to Columbia was quite different. (And it wasn't just the rocket itself that was a prototype, the pad and tower were at least a little as well).
And this has always been SpaceX's approach, rapidly iterating their design by building, testing, destroying, rinse/repeat - so it sometimes feels a little difficult to compare to a more NASA-style design process where a (usually) small number of items are produced with a significantly lower tolerance for failure.
(Edit: And how much better is it to learn these design lessons before the cargo is more fragile/delicate/squishy?)
That building a rocket launch pad is in fact more difficult than pouring a slab for a garage, and there some nontrivial technical issues involved.
Having chunks of the launchpad go flying isn't just an inconvenience - flying debris during launch can damage critical rocket systems, as the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster demonstrated.
and they figured out how to prevent this happening by the next launch just a few months later. So it turned out to be fairly trivial after all. SpaceX is able to iterate in months what it takes Nasa and its contractors years to do.
Soon to change with Starship launching from Boca Chica. And planned to be able to launch from essentially anywhere, eventually (in Musk Time so give it a decade).
I have seen no plans for a 4th launch/catch tower.. has he even hinted at more sites? Or are you referring to the historical BFR design when musk planned on landing them on the ground like falcon?
The government took all the good land for this in the 60s. So the government mostly just has the land in the right places, that's a really important part. Building most of the ground infrastructure, is still custom to every rocket company.
First, the competition is international, and some is from governments who need a non-US supplier.
Second, the goal in most corporations isn't maximum profit per item but maximum profit per year, and if they can indeed deliver the prices Musk is speculating about of getting a million people to pay 100-200 thousand USD each to go to Mars, that allows the overall market to be much larger than if he can only charge 150 million (or even 1.5 billion) for 4-seat rides to a low orbit space station every six months.
Boeing hasn't completely failed. Their ship actually worked just not with enough confidence to put people in it. That doesn't mean they're out of the game. There's still Blue Origin and also a bunch of smaller competitors working on different segments besides human transport. Astroforge seems ready to start mining asteroids and got up and running with shockingly little money due in no small part to the growing supply chain of components for commercial space travel.
Rocket Lab is growing into being a real competitor. They've been very innovative and successful in the small satellite market and, given what we've seen so far, I have confidence they will also succeed with Neutron which is their upcoming fully reusable medium-lift launcher aimed at supporting launch rates needed for megaconstellations. https://www.rocketlabusa.com/launch/neutron/
With the Starship the price to get a 100 ton object to orbit or one that is greater than 5 meters in diameter will suddenly become possible. Something previously cost infinity dollars will then be whatever price SpaceX charges. This is a decrease.
That's not true because your lack of a rolls Royce has forced you into buying a Kia, and not only suffering the cost of that vehicle, you are paying the lost utility and comfort of the rolls Royce.
Similarly, space operators who can't launch goldie-locks efficiency payloads are paying for multiple inefficient small loads instead.
This is a very strange way to think. You could apply it to anything that could not exist in the past that people happily pay for today. "Medical care was much more affordable in middle ages!"
Despite their slow pace, it's quite clear Bezos and Blue Origin + ULA will continue to plod forward. They're real competition with plenty of money behind them.
Tesla is another company that had a near monopoly in their market space for a couple of years, but that didn't stop competition from showing up. It is notable how their margins have dropped as competition heated up however.
Trivially, in a monopoly, raising prices infinitely for a product does not maximize profit.
SpaceX has effectively had a monopoly on commercial space launch since it was first able to actually use reusable rockets. Because the innovation of reusing rockets has brought the marginal cost of launching so far down prices will continue to go down.
Right now SpaceX is supply constrained, not demand constrained. All of their launches are booked. As SpaceX's supply increases they will be able to bring launch costs down even further until they hit an equilibrium of monopoly pricing that does maximize profit.
You do realize one of the best ways to attract competition is to raise prices and increase profit margins to the point where it's worthwhile for competitors to enter the market to take some of that profit?
If you look back historically, the idea that monopolies were broken up because of their ability to raise prices without the check of competition just isn't really telling the full story. Consider this from the Congressional Record of the House (1890) by a proponent of the then under debate anti-trust act (https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/05/..., page 4100):
"Some say that the trusts have made products cheaper, have reduced prices; but if the price of oil, for instance, were reduced to 1 cent a barrel it would not right the wrong done to the people of this country by the "trusts" which have destroyed legitimate competition and driven honest men from legitimate business enterprises."
The argument wasn't that the "trusts make products -cheaper-" idea was wrong, but that it didn't matter.
The only way to maintain a natural monopoly is the ensure that the barriers to entry for competition are sufficient to make new entrants unviable. One way to do that is to leverage economies of scale to lower prices to the point where a new entrant simply can't compete on price.
Do you think companies should be able to pay for all their IT needs with their IT budgets from 1995 and if they can't 'capitalism bad'. You realize how dumb this is?
Yes, if you want to do new things, like AI, you need to pay more.
If you want to only do what you were able to before, the price of that is lower. Wtf are you talking about.
I can choose Hetzner, which is a high quality low cost provider of basic cloud services. I can deploy open source options onto their cloud and push costs quite low.
The cost of cloud services has not soared. And companies like Cloudflare have continued to undercut AWS at every opportunity.
Oracle, Microsoft and Google all have strong incentive to hold AWS in check on what they can charge, and they do exactly that through rampant competition.
As opposed to the traditional astronomically expensive public launches which haven’t had any real innovation since the 1960s?
The cloud services analogy isn’t a good one because it wasn’t mainly about cost. It’s about not having to deal with the logistics of a commodity layer.
You're referring to extreme government regulation making it prohibitively expensive to start up insulin providers that compete with the established government protected monopolies. Which is anything but Capitalism in action.
The same goes for healthcare in general. It's one of the most regulated sectors of the US economy and the government places an extreme cost on doing most anything in that sector through hyper regulation and very epic scale barriers to entry. The US is very far from being a Capitalist healthcare system, it's in fact the worst of both systems: it's a hyper regulated corporatist system, intentionally protected by the government from competition, captured by corporations.
Many states even have Certificate of Need (known as CON in the industry) laws where incumbent medical providers, including whole hospitals, can effectively veto new entrants. Add in limited licensing for doctors (the number of medical spots in schools as not kept up with population) among other things and you've got a problem.
This is part of the reason why I distinguish between free-market economics and capitalism, where the people with capital make the rules (including social capital, like current doctors).
At the level of persuasion, I don't understand why people use and defend "capitalism" rather than "free-market economics".
Yes. Those sorts of things are exactly the kind of skullduggery and shenanigans that the term capitalism was invented to be a critique of in the 19th century. The kinds of stuff pulled by the owning classes to secure their position and capital, up to and including influencing, and in some cases usurping, governments.
I guess this would need a new term since the word has been seemingly reclaimed by the capitalists as a good thing.
You are implicitly claiming that corruption, special interests and broken rights protections are unique problems for capitalism, unknown in non-capitalist systems.
A clear eyed look at history makes it evident that if you take away private enterprise what you are left with is pretty much nothing but corruption, special interests and broken rights protections. Just look at the Soviet system, or Chinese state sector, or pretty much any thorough going socialist system ever. In non-capitalist industrial economies corruption isn't just a problem with the system, it is the system.
The trick is to guarantee not just private rights to capital, but private rights full stop. Rights of ownership and economic freedoms for private citizens, sure, but also political rights, legal rights, labour rights. The full package. Capitalism on it's own isn't enough, and in fact without individual legal and political rights it's not possible to sustain meaningful individual rights to capital anyway.
A good case in point in the Oligarchic system in Russia. In theory that's a capitalist system, but actually it's not. In practice individual citizens in Russia don't have meaningful capital and economic rights, if they actually try to fund and start a company that genuinely challenges the incumbents they get torn apart by the incumbents. Real capitalism means full individual rights over capital, but as with any other right that can only exist in a broadly free society.
The first person (EV1) was awesome as the Earth was visible (day-side). And it slowly went night-side. I was surprised to not see any lights at that point and that was possibly because it was over the Pacific - or the actual vehicle was pointed away from Earth.
That image of a human profile with earth in the background was kinda nice. The 40-50s lead up to the profile image: https://youtu.be/ABQBEdOzrV0?t=6868 . And as others have pointed out, the suit looks rigid.
Does anyone know if the reason they performed the EVA during the night was to prevent overheating? The crew reported temperatures (presumably of the suit) of 33.8C during the EVAs.
I think the main factor might've been crew wakefulness.
Since they launched around the same time, I think their body clocks would've been tuned to that time too. They'd want all crew to be at the peak of their alertness in case of any emergency (particularly if they ended up having to deorbit in a hurry), so it might've been a significant factor in the timing.
Imagine being inspired by something. Who even does that. Pffft. Fucking tech bro startups. Also it's not like humans were ever nomads and explorers or anything...
These space suits are very cool looking, I'm glad there was some consideration put towards aesthetics. The old marshmallow suits were iconic but definitely did not evoke thoughts of a cool sci-fi future like these ones do.
SpaceX is going to be worth more than most countries.
They are going to literally own a large portion of mars and other planetary bodies as well as the transportation lanes.
Just an incredibly exciting company that in time will become a true science fiction mega corp.
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
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Article VI
States Parties to the Treaty shall bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or by non-governmental entities, and for assuring that national activities are carried out in conformity with the provisions set forth in the present Treaty. The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty. When activities are carried on in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, by an international organization, responsibility for compliance with this Treaty shall be borne both by the international organization and by the States Parties to the Treaty participating in such organization.
if spacex goes and builds a base on mars, that area is theirs. If they build a very large base they own a very large area. If they then decide to move their headquarters to mars, what is anyone on earth going to do about it? This is truly a possession is 9/10 of the law scenario.
A lot of space technology is purely functional, but these clearly have poor design taste put into them. The old suits that the Apollo era used were probably almost only functional, yet even they look better.
I think it's hard to make the suits look sleek and cool if only because you need to fit many layers of insulation and rotator joints, tubing, etc. Makes it very difficult to have something tailored and fitted, which seems to be what SpaceX is trying to do. There could be a mobility advantage in having a suit that is closer to your body though, as in less risk of having your suit tangled or damaged by objects around you.
I'm not really making a judgement about their competence, the results just didn't turn out well. I think these things are indeed very difficult. To hazard a guess about the competency behind this, they had some people filling double roles doing the fashion of the suit. That they essentially asked an engineer with a side gig as a designer to make it.
It seems very rigid, but it's also much less bulky than the current ISS EVA suit batch. The requirements are very different though - ISS suits are modular and designed to stay in space for as long as possible before needing to get back down for a refurbish.
I personally think this mission is amazing for many reasons. But the astronauts aren't free floating in space, they're just poking their heads out the hatch.
The average US resident produces about 16 tons of greenhouse gasses a year. A Falcon launch (like this one) produces about 28,000 tons of greenhouse gas. This guy paid to take a ride to space producing 1,700 person-years worth of greenhouse gas emissions or alternatively 6,000 car-years.
I sure hope there was real science going on in the background as I'm kind of done with billionaire space tourism.
Note: Several people have correctly pointed out that my emissions number is wrong. The actual 28,000 figure is in CO2 equivalence not directly in gasses emitted. Clearly some emissions are much worse than CO2.
"Starship launch produces 76,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (a measure combining different types of greenhouse gases in one unit). That's 2.72 times more emissions than those produced by a single SpaceX Falcon 9 launch"
78,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent / 2.72 is 27,941 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
While I recognize that some celebrities also produce a lot of pollution, I struggle to justify space tourism that produces in 3 days what Taylor Swift produces in 3 years.
It's good to keep an eye on the carbon impacts of space tourism, but if you're genuinely concerned about climate change, your efforts would be far better spent on promoting the passenger vehicle EV conversion and nuclear/wind/solar buildouts to replace coal plants. I don't think space tourism will become a significant carbon emissions source for at least a few more decades.
I happen to support electrification and renewables. It cost almost nothing (other than some negative rep) to raise a flag about the environmental costs of space tourism. I'm sure early coal fired plants said the same thing about their emissions as well. That surely one more plant or private jet could not hurt the environment. My view is if we normalize and celebrate space tourism now, then there will be no curtailing it in the future.
Plus the Starship uses Methalox which is the most efficient carbon based fuel in terms of H2O to CO2 ratio. It puts out twice as much water vapor as it does CO2.
Do you have a source for that number? The whole rocket weighs 550 metric tons fully fueled on the pad, I am having a hard time coming up with a way for that to create 50x as much greenhouse gas.
According to Everyday Astronaut's article (https://everydayastronaut.com/rocket-pollution/), a Falcon 9 emits a total of about 600 tons of various gases during a launch. The difference vs the rocket's actual mass seems to be accounted for by water vapor, which comes from ground support equipment and not the rocket itself.
> The whole rocket weighs 550 metric tons fully fueled on the pad, I am having a hard time coming up with a way for that to create 50x as much greenhouse gas.
It is in fact impossible. The rocket carries all of its fuel and oxidizer, so basic conservation of mass implies that the total amount of CO2 cannot exceed said 550 metric tons.
The total emissions a launch is responsible for is not limited to the weight of the fully fuelled rocket.
You've also got to include the emissions needed to extract/purify/cool/pump all that fuel/oxidiser (and any other consumables like nitrogen), a percentage of the construction emissions cost for the 1st stage, pre-flight refurb emissions, the whole of the 2nd stage, and some percentage of the Dragon capsule (including alterations made to it). Then you add all of the emissions of the ground operations needed for this flight including 1st stage recovery (and also any flight/boat diversions required from 3rd parties because of the exclusion zone).
I'm also assuming that the altitude you emit certain things at (e.g. aluminium vapourising in the atmosphere) changes their impact vs at ground level.
Personally, I think this mission is more worthwhile space tourism than Bezos who's pretending a high-altitude rocket flight that doesn't reach orbit is 'going to space'... at least they're testing new spacesuits on this mission.
If we're looking at its emissions with all those downstream requirements involved too, the point of comparison would be all the emissions involved in everything that the average American relies on, which is certainly not just 16 tons.
Yes, that seems worthwhile to do - I was just replying to the notion that the direct emissions of the rocket during launch is the limit of emissions. SpaceX is also highly integrated, so I do think the construction and ground operations cost (for everything SpaceX did that would not have happened had this mission not launched) are worthwhile including.
My feeling is that the scale of rocketry isn't large enough that 28k tons of emissions makes a difference vs, say, the much greater number of private helicopter & jet flights (or single-use plastics, or growing & watering crops in a desert, or any of the crazier things we do as a species)
Except you might be calculating the material, personnel, property costs also. The launch itself doesn't release that much, but everything leading up to the launch might.
I still disagree with the general sentiment though. Space is more important than most other pursuits.
> Except you might be calculating the material, personnel, property costs also. The launch itself doesn't release that much, but everything leading up to the launch might.
Yup, and the supply chain for all of those. At scale, that should go down to a small fraction above the direct emissions (certainly not an order of magnitude more). And if this never becomes at-scale, then we don't have a problem anyway.
"Starship launch produces 76,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (a measure combining different types of greenhouse gases in one unit). That's 2.72 times more emissions than those produced by a single SpaceX Falcon 9 launch"
Note, I did mis-quote when I said 28k tons of greenhouse gas, it is 28k tons of CO2 equivalent.
"Starship launch produces 76,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (a measure combining different types of greenhouse gases in one unit). That's 2.72 times more emissions than those produced by a single SpaceX Falcon 9 launch"
Note, I did mis-quote when I said 28k tons of greenhouse gas, it is 28k tons of CO2 equivalent.
I did the math and it's around 3 in Taylor Swift Year units. Outrageous!
EDIT: For the people who actually eat this BS (28000 tons of a thing from another thing that has a mass of just 500 tons should raise your eyebrows), the actual number is around 120 tons of CO2 for one launch of one F9 booster.
"Starship launch produces 76,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (a measure combining different types of greenhouse gases in one unit). That's 2.72 times more emissions than those produced by a single SpaceX Falcon 9 launch"
78,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent / 2.72 is 27,941 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Table 3-7 shows an estimated 83794 metric tons CO2e for 24 starship+superheavy launches, much lower than the figure in that article ( 1872000 tons CO2e for 24 launches ).
I found a 2022 paper by Andrew Wilson, the cited source for the figure in the space.com article. The estimates for carbon footprint for space tourism in that paper are generally consistent with estimate in the Starship + Super Heavy EA and are also much lower than the per-launch numbers of 78000 tons for starship / 27941 tons for falcon 9.
> In terms of orbital space tourism, two missions (one past, one planned) assumed to be typical have been analysed: a flight in Earth orbit based on the Inspiration4 mission (Falcon 9, 4 passengers), and a flight around the Moon based on the dearMoon mission (Starship Super Heavy, 10 passengers). Based on this, although different launch vehicles are used, it can be estimated that the carbon footprint of a passenger in an orbital tourism flight is about
660tCO2eq
4 passengers * 660 tCO2eq = 2640 tCO2eq for a launch, ~10x lower
In other words, he increased the carbon output of the US by .0005%, a pretty small relative increase. I am sure scientific knowledge increased more than that.
That's a reasonable calculation I suppose. The 0.0005% increase is in carbon emissions per year by the U.S. -- that same 0.0005% increase in publications would be about 15.
If you have enough money you can ring them up and say "I want to go into space" and they can make that happen. That is a pretty big deal.
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