As a former space industry worker, I don't know if I subscribe to that, but that's the best steelmanning I can come up with.
And that’s just the beginning of the technology needed to fully achieve his ambitions.
Anytime lines like this get written, be suspect.
>I don't see anyone on here complaining about how Charter chooses to spend the profits from this deal, it's certainly not going to go to settling Mars.
I complain all the time about the cable companies, but this is a thread about SpaceX. As irrelevant as that comment is, it's even less relevant arguing that using funds to build a LEO/VLEO satellite ISP (that will probably get divested at some point) will somehow help them get to Mars. Commercially there's no point in going to Mars so it takes political willpower and nations to finance it on a scale that's many orders of magnitude greater than anything done at the moment (more than even the JWST).
How many trillions are spent on war? On corporate subsidies and kickbacks on everything else? How much money is wasted in so many other stupid things? We have a GDP rising at a faster rate than our populations and have for decades. We don't spend the that extra money helping people. We could, but we don't.
And then people look to NASA and SpaceX and say "Look at all that waste".
Meanwhile, this money is going to go to providing low-cost internet all over America (and then the rest of the world). It's going to provide a real, tangible benefit to people at a lower cost than the alternatives.
If people think there is an existential threat to their way of life, it's hard to convince them to take from that pocket to fund something more fanciful and likely only relevant generations away (if ever). That's the insidious part of the military boogeyman...and SpaceX probably knows this as well since they garner defense contracts too.
https://mobile.twitter.com/robert_zubrin/status/101347705748...
Edit: Will surely invest considerable resources to convert Earth to a national park once we have outgrown earth's economy 100x
I think greed and hedonic adaptation can also lead to this. There's no monopoly on some of the lesser angels of human nature.
That link is assuming that the ends justify the means, which I tend to believe is the road to evil. In this case, there are more foundational principals that would take precedence.
Money spent on space programs IS spent here on Earth. The money paid to engineers and fabricators and for raw materials goes to pay for house payments, durable goods, food and taxes of the individuals working on these projects. And those payments create jobs delivering these services, which benefits an ever increasing number of people.
It's not as if dollar bills were litterally burned to provide rocket thrust.
Your same argument can be used for the defense contractors as well and people will still line up to argue it’s not the best use of tax dollars
To extend that argument, is it better to give underserved internet access or spend the money on something that potentially saves someone’s life, like mosquito netting? I think even though HN is very in love with high tech problems, many would argue we could serve humanity better by prioritizing those lower tech problems that tend to solve more fundamental needs
To continue on with the steelmanning, the first stage is probably a drop in a bucket compared to the entire effort. How much freight do you think it would take to colonize a planet with a population large enough to be relatively self-sufficient? Just the payload cost would be huge and that's just to park it (not to assemble, maintain etc.) I think the steelman argument would be to focus on things immediately needed, like healthcare, before space adventurism.
Edit: to put a finer point on it, the commercial space industry is essentially subsidized by the government precisely because it's not currently economical. In other words, if the government wasn't a customer there would be no commercial space industry. There's nothing inherently wrong with this because it's how high-risk industries often get started (e.g., the airlines), but the fact that it is subsidized by the government points to the fact that it is (currently) inherently uneconomical
It is basically a larger version of the argument "Well, if you are so poor, why did you drink that cup of coffee this morning?"
At no point did I say it's a magic bullet that would "completely fix" any of that. But spending hundreds of millions directly on healthcare would likely pay more healthcare dividends than, say, some unintended materials science application that started in rocket engine development.
How exactly do you think funding gets doled out? They aren't just given a blank check...Agencies request a certain amount, then as the sausage gets made on Capitol Hill, some programs are shaved, others are padded. The people in those discussions are bringing their priorities to the table and, in some cases, will have to make concessions like not having their metaphorical coffee in order to save a higher priority project.
For example, the U.S. pays more than 40% (down from 50%) of the worlds medical R&D. They essentially subsidize healthcare for much of the rest of the world (meaning the U.S. bears more of the cost so other countries can have cheaper care). There's plenty wrong with the U.S. healthcare system that needs fixing, but trite sentences don't begin to capture the real nature of the problem.
With limited resources, you have to prioritize or else you can run the risk of being spread so thin nothing is adequately funded so nothing really gets accomplished. You can't fight a war on all fronts, all the time.
I probably didn't do a good job of explaining that I meant "constrained environment" in the operations research sense. Everything rooted in the real world is constrained. Why don't we each take a private jet to work everyday? Because we're constrained on money. If we're not constrained on money, we're constrained on time. If it's not that, we're constrained by the amount of carbon we can release and still have a reasonably favorable environment for humans.
One of the reasons the Space Shuttle became somewhat of a boondoggle was because of this. They had a constrained budget but had to meet the demands of multiple, often competing, stakeholders. Musk knows this; he knows that NASA has constraints he doesn't. He doesn't have to spread his facilities across multiple States to help ensure support from as many Congress people as possible. He doesn't have to expose himself to the same level of political risk that can change every four years. He can optimize under a different set of constraints, but it would be a mistake to assume he's unconstrained.
I mean, defense contractors look at hot wars as opportunities as well. And they do drive technology forward, perhaps even more than any other force in this discussion. But that's not to say they don't have negative externalities that shouldn't be ignored.
That's an incredibly short sighted argument. As if this planet will last forever. I don't get this attitude at all. It's like saying why plan for the future at all!
"I am no man!" — Eowyn