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Comment by GMoromisato | Hacker News Reader

If data centers in space end up being economically viable, then I don't see how anyone can catch SpaceX. They are ten years ahead in both launch capability and satellite manufacturing.

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Chinese rockets companies are evolving at insane pace, including RLVs. A couple of big milestones have been achieved this year alone, like first stage landing.

Also Stoke Space, YC startup, is interesting. They could even beat SpaceX to fully reusable if SpaceX find the refuel it and send it up again thing challenging.

They have a different approach - rather than a ceramic heat shield they have a metal shield to be cooled by the liquid H2+O2 fuel. https://youtu.be/3V6lfs7xFJM?t=191

I certainly hope ‘economically viable’ includes properly priced externalities for e.g. side effects of burning hundreds and hundreds of tonnes of aluminium and other materials in the high atmosphere.

As opposed to the 225 tons of aluminum burning up in the atmosphere from meteors every year?

Not as opposed, in addition. And it’s awfully hard to get meteors to pony up for their pollution.

Fifteen years ago the argument against anthropogenic climate change often included a variation of "… but volcanoes spew a lot of gasses containing carbon, and wildfires pollute also …" while conveniently ignoring that human industrial emission are _in addition_ to what is already happening. The current rate of aluminium oxide and titanium oxide and such particles accumulating in the upper atmosphere is detrimental to the ozone layer. It's not good today, but manageable, the answer should be "let's make it more responsible and try to minimise the damage", the answer should never be "more pollution is okay since a little pollution didn't outright kill everything".

Have we ever in human history correctly priced externalities?

No western company, no. That's why I can only hope SpaceX can get thru more red tape faster, and future administrations don't try to slow them down.

Even while current administration is kind of positive towards them, they are still even now just having to wait for no good reason for a FAA go-ahead. These kinds of stalls don't really exist in China.

That's the fun part, they don't need to be viable. It's just the excuse to shovel tons of money to Trump donors, by rerunning the scam that was SDI.

And they never will be because it's always going to be cheaper to build them on the ground.

Its only cheaper to build them on the ground if you aren't factoring security concerns. No insurgents in space. Not every application needs this hardening, but you can imagine there are many applications that do.

Any nation with the ability to lift a sack of ball bearings into space can trigger a kessler cascade on your plane, so the is is fucking nonsense

This guy is obviously long SpaceX

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