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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I used to think the future would be like Star Trek, but in reality, the space ships and space stations won't be able to dock with each other because there will be 3-5 oligarchic manufacturers, and they will use 20 different docking standards in order to segment and lock in their customers. We're never going to have Nice Things because shareholders want another 0.5% back from their investment.

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I'd imagine something as important as docking would go more like USB-C adoption. There will be a standard, but a powerful holdout will insist on their proprietary solution because it's "safer" or something. Meanwhile everyone is shouting at them to just use the standard, until it's finally enforced by legislation.

The difference is something like phone ports and docking are things which end users readily benefit from having interoperability, so it's a selling point and there's market pressure to conform. Factories are bespoke installations and they often run without major changes for many years at a time. There's less pressure for them to have interchangeability when they don't move and don't interact with each other.

There is an international docking standard

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

But if ever (hopefully) colonize space, would there be a single government to legislate standards? I'm less optimistic here: a feudal model seems more likely with widely spread, isolated communities.

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