81–89 of 89 posts
How many decades until these launches are the way we go from LA to Hong Kong for the price of a plane ticket again?
Infinite decades, or a few years in Elon time. The cost will always be too large, the safety will never be there, and the total mission time including fueling, space suits, transportation to and from launch site, will dwarf airplane time.
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I don’t see why anyone involved in this being a billionaire is relevant at all. Billionaire is thrown about as an insult these days. I don’t understand why being done by a very successful person detracts from the achievement. Isaacman has built a business that provides valuable services and employs a thousand people paying them a decent wage to do useful work. There’s nothing bad about that, but he’s talked about as…
> Billionaire is thrown about as an insult these days. There are plenty that believe the very existence of billionaires suggests an obscene imbalance in our system of capital. (I happen to agree.)
Let's take Isaacman as a fairly randomly selected example. At age 16 he identified poor practices in the payments processing market and started a business. Instead of having to wait a month for card processing to be set up for a business, he would have them up and running in 1 day. How much money has that saved the US economy? Apart from the company itself, how many jobs at other companies has that cumulatively supported?
Aside from that, through his control of the company, Isaacman has steered it to greater and greater success, supporting every more jobs and customer businesses. Clearly he knows what he's doing and is the right person to run the company. So what's the sense in confiscating his share of the company? Who should it be given to, and therefore who instead of Isaacman should run it?
Marxism says Isaacman shouldn't have had the opportunity to start the company in the first place. All capital allocation should be controlled by the state, putting bureaucrats in charge of everything. Collectivists say the employees should own it, but employees don't want to assume the risks that owners and investors do. They generally don't want to have to assume the responsibilities either. There's nothing to stop employee owned companies thriving in most developed countries, that doesn't happen because the dynamics of such enterprises just don't work in practice. Yes of course there are exceptions, great, but why are they so desperately few?
I'm not against employees having a say in company affairs, they're legitimate stakeholders and should rightly have a voice, but control and ownership must be earned and it must come with responsibility and acceptance of risk.
Maybe I'm jaded but I find no "inspiration" in one billionaire sending another one into space. I know they took along "guests" but I can't imagine there's any significant science in this.
And the 100 million he donated to St Jude Childrens Hospital? Or the 220 million target for donations during the flight? I do not understand how some people can be such a wet blanket. This is history. Civilians, further out from Earth than anyone has been in 20 years...and they were able to buy a ride. This is the beginning of commercial space flight. It's the equivalent of driving a gold spike in the Transcontinenta…
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Is this the right way to think about flight pricing given that the vehicles are not expendable?
SpaceX doesn't sell the vehicles, they sell the launch services. From an external perspective it's still a cost per launch. From an internal perspective they launch enough that it amortizes nicely as a cost per launch.
Considering the Bezos/Branson debacle, I think it's easy for people to get lost in the "This is just another billionaire paying to go to space" thing... and it is, but that's a small part of it. The passengers themselves are basically unimportant compared to the bigger picture. Who cares if the passengers are some random billionaire and a group of people carefully chosen purely as a publicity stunt, let him have his…
We've finally realized it's very important, & have setup systems similar to what exists in the US. Hopefully there'll be more & increasingly tighter collaboration, as the decades pass.
Considering the Bezos/Branson debacle, I think it's easy for people to get lost in the "This is just another billionaire paying to go to space" thing... and it is, but that's a small part of it. The passengers themselves are basically unimportant compared to the bigger picture. Who cares if the passengers are some random billionaire and a group of people carefully chosen purely as a publicity stunt, let him have his…
Agree. The challenges are still real in that with enough of these you'll lose people (just like you do in airplanes occasionally) but this is a pretty significant moment. I haven't seen any mention of any "science" they are going to do which was a late add to the qualification list for astronaut, and it was really apparent the difference between having access to the NASA deep space network vs not having that access.…
It's at least three, is it not? Vandenberg, Wallops, the Cape?
Edit: there's also Kodiak.
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Agree. The challenges are still real in that with enough of these you'll lose people (just like you do in airplanes occasionally) but this is a pretty significant moment. I haven't seen any mention of any "science" they are going to do which was a late add to the qualification list for astronaut, and it was really apparent the difference between having access to the NASA deep space network vs not having that access.…
> So this will force the issue of launch air traffic control which appears fairly primitive given that the US only has 2 launch locations. It's at least three, is it not? Vandenberg, Wallops, the Cape? Edit: there's also Kodiak.
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> Billionaire is thrown about as an insult these days. There are plenty that believe the very existence of billionaires suggests an obscene imbalance in our system of capital. (I happen to agree.)
Some degree of concentration of capital is good. It helps fund long-term projects.
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> Billionaire is thrown about as an insult these days. There are plenty that believe the very existence of billionaires suggests an obscene imbalance in our system of capital. (I happen to agree.)
Sure, it's a fairly commonly expressed sentiment. My question to that is, where are the big, successful, innovative products, services and companies going to come from? Who is going to create them, and who is going to own and control them? Let's take Isaacman as a fairly randomly selected example. At age 16 he identified poor practices in the payments processing market and started a business. Instead of having to wai…