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Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

> It's impossible to say for sure but had not a lot of resources been taken from civil society for these projects, there is a chance that there'd be a demand to do it in a more effective and long-term way from the very beginning, and this is my point.

What would have been the economic imperative that would have jump started the development of rockets in the first place?

Like there has to be some sort of reason for people to develop rockets in the first place, otherwise they're not going to do it, even on a whim because it's so outrageously expensive and required the development of so many technologies to make it possible.

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Just "what's up there?" was driving some early experimenters before WW II. Smaller rockets are not so complex and large (and expensive). Small-scale exploration of the upper atmosphere with sounding rockets would have proceeded, which would have driven development of better small rockets. At some point, someone would start seriously thinking of putting a small telecom or geonav satellite up there.

But I do tend to think that without the public investment we saw along military and PR lines that space research would have been very seriously delayed. Something like $100+ billion in public funds between the US and USSR to develop ICBMs, which then translates to heavy satellite launch and etc.

What was the economic imperative to build a ship to cross the Atlantic? Why send humans to their death out into some unknown massive ocean? Why get together funding for that?

Wealth. Columbus wanted in on the spice trade and convinced backers to support him.

At the time, we had ships that floated on the ocean.

The space race's initial run was motivated by national pride and defense. The costs to keep it up have been high, which is why SpaceX's approach at reducing fixed pre-launch costs have found success.

Its the same with SpaceX. Musk wants to build a Libertarian utopia on Mars under his personal control in his own lifetime.

Elon Musk actually advocated direct democracy.

Without constitutional constraints, a direct democracy can presumably vote to make Musk dictator-for-life, right? If there are to be constitutional constraints, the nature of that democracy is very much undefined at the moment.

(His being in complete control over the mechanism required to immigrate helps shape that direct democracy, too.)

Which would certainly be an interesting experiment for his one million person mars colony.

Libertarian, but under his direct control? I don't think Libertarian means what you think it means.

On the other hand we managed to end up with a suspiciously high number of communist dictatorships, which is equally contradictory, so who knows.

Interestingly enough, you're using a state-sponsored[1] program as an example here…

[1]: yes, I know the “state” was “a bit” different in that early modern world, but still Columbus would not have done that thanks to market forces alone.

I wasn't commenting on state or market forces.

I was replying to a very insightful comment saying "Why would anyone build a rocket??"

You answered a comment talking about how market forces would have lacked for the private sector to build rockets (in opposition to how the public sector didn't need such economic reason to do things):

> What would have been the economic imperative that would have jump started the development of rockets in the first place?