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Comment by nickik | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX doesn't really use carbon fiber much just FYI.

And of course literally any company is based on the whole history of technology.

You might say that SpaceX only exists because rich people in China wanted to see fireworks (and there was likely state involvement).

But equally does SpaceX depend on a long existing private market and centuries of private investment into manufacturing, incremental improvement in all related technologies and millions of experiments and different things tried.

This arguments are kind of tiered by now.

Its true that the way European state bureaucracy works makes companies like SpaceX unlikely. Its equally true that part of US ability to have such company is based on defense spending over the last 100 years.

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The reason I mentioned carbon fiber wasn't specific to SpaceX but because it's a good example of something which had substantial up-front R&D costs which were largely paid by government investment to get it to the point where a company has a commercially-viable path to using it.

There are a ton of similar examples — microchips being the most common here — and the point wasn't that everyone should develop their stack from scratch but rather that the original claim that scientific and engineering progress depends on current US levels of inequality just doesn't fit the history. Most people who aren't committed to a particular political position tend to agree that you need both and in the U.S. we've certainly seen a lot of successes from the combined approach, as well as educational levels of inefficiency when the incentives are misaligned.

I said FYI because it was not my main point.

And carbon fiber also a had huge amount of development from commercial companies to drive it into 100s of applications. The total amount of investment in carbon fiber is dwarfed 100-1000x compared to government investment. Both are required to actually drive a technology forward consistently.

> the original claim that scientific and engineering progress depends on current US levels of inequality just doesn't fit the history

I don't think that was the claim.

Microchips depend on transistors, which were invented by capitalists.

You can't just pick one piece out of a large number of inventions and say it was the lynchpin.

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