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Comment by dakrisht | Hacker News Reader

So amazing to see this and experience the launch with them. You can tell how much energy, passion and personal sacrifice these people and their leader, Elon, put into this. It's absolutely beautiful to see. Real innovation, a true testament of our capabilities as human beings. Not a company with 800+ million users that can't even figure out the ad business. :) Congrats guys!

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It is kind of sad that Facebook has a $100B valuation considering what SpaceX is doing, and plans on doing. One is just one particular web-profiles-and-chat service, not that hard or original. The other is frickin rocket science.

SpaceX is a revolution, not a business (yet). In our world, Facebook's data is more valuable than a revolution. But hey, we might not be dealing with just our world any more :)

SpaceX is a business. You can pay for one of their rockets if you have something to put in orbit.

wonder if some kind of permissions would be necessary(and whom to ask) to put something in orbit. Can I put my arduino based spy satellite in orbit?

It would depend on the laws of the country you launch from.

I'd like to see someone donate money and cover the costs for these guys to put their "free internet" into space: http://shackspace.de/wiki/doku.php?id=project:hgg:faq#what_i...

eh? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Contracts

Never will I post, on HN or anywhere else, anything that I cannot support with evidence. Thank you for correcting me.

My point isn't entirely moot though. I still think knowing things about almost a billion people, namely what & when they do things, has more proof of value today than these contracts. The cool factor doesn't necessarily mean money.

(What 'money' itself means and how it represents value is a totally different discussion)

SpaceX is selling launches on its rockets to commercial companies right now: http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php

Moreover, this Falcon 9 launch was part of a commercial contract with NASA to provide supplies to ISS over the next few years (12 additional flights in addition to this demo). When someone signs a contract with you and gives you money in exchange for goods and services we call that business.

Unfortunately the majority sees it in other light - "ah yeah, another space ship, whatever, let me check what stupid photos my mates uploaded recently...". It's basically the society that's rotting, and FB just takes the profit.

Really reminds me the Idiocracy movie...

Thing is that facebook provides something of immediate utility. As exciting as this is there is not a lot we can do with it beyond go "ah! cool!"

A launch platform for mining asteroids?

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