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Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

So space will become more expensive.

Go look up the cost of a soyuz launch, let alone a shuttle launch, and then tell us more about how this is making space more expensive.

That's why I wrote will become.

SpaceX doesn't have real competition after Boeing failed.

What happens in such a monopoly?

The prices rise.

Not necessarily.

First, the competition is international, and some is from governments who need a non-US supplier.

Second, the goal in most corporations isn't maximum profit per item but maximum profit per year, and if they can indeed deliver the prices Musk is speculating about of getting a million people to pay 100-200 thousand USD each to go to Mars, that allows the overall market to be much larger than if he can only charge 150 million (or even 1.5 billion) for 4-seat rides to a low orbit space station every six months.

Boeing hasn't completely failed. Their ship actually worked just not with enough confidence to put people in it. That doesn't mean they're out of the game. There's still Blue Origin and also a bunch of smaller competitors working on different segments besides human transport. Astroforge seems ready to start mining asteroids and got up and running with shockingly little money due in no small part to the growing supply chain of components for commercial space travel.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2023/10/18/this-aster...

Rocket Lab is growing into being a real competitor. They've been very innovative and successful in the small satellite market and, given what we've seen so far, I have confidence they will also succeed with Neutron which is their upcoming fully reusable medium-lift launcher aimed at supporting launch rates needed for megaconstellations. https://www.rocketlabusa.com/launch/neutron/

That's the same kind of will be as mine.

One of us will be correct.

With the Starship the price to get a 100 ton object to orbit or one that is greater than 5 meters in diameter will suddenly become possible. Something previously cost infinity dollars will then be whatever price SpaceX charges. This is a decrease.

Things you don't do, no matter why, cost $0.

My Rolls Royce which I can't afford is a lot cheaper than the car I can afford which got more expensive than my previous one.

That's not true because your lack of a rolls Royce has forced you into buying a Kia, and not only suffering the cost of that vehicle, you are paying the lost utility and comfort of the rolls Royce.

Similarly, space operators who can't launch goldie-locks efficiency payloads are paying for multiple inefficient small loads instead.

This is a very strange way to think. You could apply it to anything that could not exist in the past that people happily pay for today. "Medical care was much more affordable in middle ages!"

SpaceX is ahead for now and may continue to be ahead but does have very real competition domestically and abroad.

  Tesla : Rivian/Lucid :: SpaceX : Blue Origin/ULA
  Tesla : BYD :: SpaceX : LandSpace [0]/Galactic Energy [1]

0. https://x.com/AJ_FI/status/1833761435362447760

1. https://www.space.com/galactic-energy-ceres-1-sea-launch-vid...

Despite their slow pace, it's quite clear Bezos and Blue Origin + ULA will continue to plod forward. They're real competition with plenty of money behind them.

Tesla is another company that had a near monopoly in their market space for a couple of years, but that didn't stop competition from showing up. It is notable how their margins have dropped as competition heated up however.

Competitors from China.

I doubt that will happen for US satellites

There's plenty of competition, especially from China.

It would be hard to make things worse than big classical aerospace.

Boeing

Yeah its gone be more expensive then literally not able to buy something. Practically infinity expensive.

Because this literally something you couldn't buy before. Maybe if you went to Russia and gave them a lot of money.

SpaceX has made everything cheaper in Space cheaper and many things possible that literally weren't a commercial thing before.

Like cloud computing made things cheaper.

But now the companies need money for AI and prices rise.

Without real competition what stop SpaceX from rising its prices?

You do realize one of the best ways to attract competition is to raise prices and increase profit margins to the point where it's worthwhile for competitors to enter the market to take some of that profit?

If you look back historically, the idea that monopolies were broken up because of their ability to raise prices without the check of competition just isn't really telling the full story. Consider this from the Congressional Record of the House (1890) by a proponent of the then under debate anti-trust act (https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/05/..., page 4100):

"Some say that the trusts have made products cheaper, have reduced prices; but if the price of oil, for instance, were reduced to 1 cent a barrel it would not right the wrong done to the people of this country by the "trusts" which have destroyed legitimate competition and driven honest men from legitimate business enterprises."

The argument wasn't that the "trusts make products -cheaper-" idea was wrong, but that it didn't matter.

The only way to maintain a natural monopoly is the ensure that the barriers to entry for competition are sufficient to make new entrants unviable. One way to do that is to leverage economies of scale to lower prices to the point where a new entrant simply can't compete on price.

Do you think companies should be able to pay for all their IT needs with their IT budgets from 1995 and if they can't 'capitalism bad'. You realize how dumb this is?

Yes, if you want to do new things, like AI, you need to pay more.

If you want to only do what you were able to before, the price of that is lower. Wtf are you talking about.

Did you miss the fact that reusable rockets have made it cheaper? Have you kept up with the economics of space travel?

That why I wrote will become.

Remember the time when cloud services made things cheaper?

Guess what happened next?

Cloud services have a lot of competition.

I can choose Hetzner, which is a high quality low cost provider of basic cloud services. I can deploy open source options onto their cloud and push costs quite low.

The cost of cloud services has not soared. And companies like Cloudflare have continued to undercut AWS at every opportunity.

Oracle, Microsoft and Google all have strong incentive to hold AWS in check on what they can charge, and they do exactly that through rampant competition.

> Remember the time when cloud services made things cheaper

No. When was that? Cloud made things easier and faster not cheaper. You trade money for convenience.

As opposed to the traditional astronomically expensive public launches which haven’t had any real innovation since the 1960s?

The cloud services analogy isn’t a good one because it wasn’t mainly about cost. It’s about not having to deal with the logistics of a commodity layer.

Will become more expensive? Are you willfully ignoring the actual data?

The actual data doesn't show the future, does it?

What happens if a commercial companies beats its competitors?

Prices rise.

No, not necessarily.

Trivially, in a monopoly, raising prices infinitely for a product does not maximize profit.

SpaceX has effectively had a monopoly on commercial space launch since it was first able to actually use reusable rockets. Because the innovation of reusing rockets has brought the marginal cost of launching so far down prices will continue to go down.

Right now SpaceX is supply constrained, not demand constrained. All of their launches are booked. As SpaceX's supply increases they will be able to bring launch costs down even further until they hit an equilibrium of monopoly pricing that does maximize profit.

Yeah, the way capitalism made goods more expensive. /s

You mean like Insulin in the US? Or healthcare or housing or education etc.?

You're referring to extreme government regulation making it prohibitively expensive to start up insulin providers that compete with the established government protected monopolies. Which is anything but Capitalism in action.

The same goes for healthcare in general. It's one of the most regulated sectors of the US economy and the government places an extreme cost on doing most anything in that sector through hyper regulation and very epic scale barriers to entry. The US is very far from being a Capitalist healthcare system, it's in fact the worst of both systems: it's a hyper regulated corporatist system, intentionally protected by the government from competition, captured by corporations.

Many states even have Certificate of Need (known as CON in the industry) laws where incumbent medical providers, including whole hospitals, can effectively veto new entrants. Add in limited licensing for doctors (the number of medical spots in schools as not kept up with population) among other things and you've got a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need

This is part of the reason why I distinguish between free-market economics and capitalism, where the people with capital make the rules (including social capital, like current doctors).

At the level of persuasion, I don't understand why people use and defend "capitalism" rather than "free-market economics".

Is lobbying and a broken IP system really capitalism?

Yes. Those sorts of things are exactly the kind of skullduggery and shenanigans that the term capitalism was invented to be a critique of in the 19th century. The kinds of stuff pulled by the owning classes to secure their position and capital, up to and including influencing, and in some cases usurping, governments.

I guess this would need a new term since the word has been seemingly reclaimed by the capitalists as a good thing.

You are implicitly claiming that corruption, special interests and broken rights protections are unique problems for capitalism, unknown in non-capitalist systems.

A clear eyed look at history makes it evident that if you take away private enterprise what you are left with is pretty much nothing but corruption, special interests and broken rights protections. Just look at the Soviet system, or Chinese state sector, or pretty much any thorough going socialist system ever. In non-capitalist industrial economies corruption isn't just a problem with the system, it is the system.

The trick is to guarantee not just private rights to capital, but private rights full stop. Rights of ownership and economic freedoms for private citizens, sure, but also political rights, legal rights, labour rights. The full package. Capitalism on it's own isn't enough, and in fact without individual legal and political rights it's not possible to sustain meaningful individual rights to capital anyway.

A good case in point in the Oligarchic system in Russia. In theory that's a capitalist system, but actually it's not. In practice individual citizens in Russia don't have meaningful capital and economic rights, if they actually try to fund and start a company that genuinely challenges the incumbents they get torn apart by the incumbents. Real capitalism means full individual rights over capital, but as with any other right that can only exist in a broadly free society.

Hmm yeah I use it in the spirit of Ayn Rand, free markets, free minds shouldn’t be forced etc.

A system is what that system does, not what it should ideally do in theory, but constantly fails to do in practice.

By lobbying you mean buying politicians?

Sounds like capitalism to me.

I see it as a disease of capitalism.

The way monopolies do.

There is no monopoly bigger, or more expensive, than government, which was previously the only player in the space.

Funny... Government is the only monopoly you get to elect, and the only that can be undone by voting against it.

I don't think you can monopolize going up.

If it costs a shitload of money you can.

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