SpaceX Astronauts Begin Spacewalk, Putting New Spacesuits to Test
https://www.wsj.com/science/space-astronomy/spacex-launch-polaris-dawn-space-walk-bfed7f84If you have enough money you can ring them up and say "I want to go into space" and they can make that happen. That is a pretty big deal.
Until SpaceX and post-Apollo most of the space program was really a pork distribution system and a way to keep certain high-skill labor areas 'hot' in case we need them again. It wasn't a serious effort to learn about the universe or build a real presence in space. Some of that did happen but it happened almost as a side effect.
Edit:
Honestly I think SpaceX is just a decent aerospace company. They've appeared superhuman by contrast with companies like Boeing that have done nothing to innovate in the sector since the 1970s. When the comparison is with people completely asleep at the wheel, mere competence looks striking.
To whoever wants to be the first one to drop acid in space, the doors are open
Seems unlikely we'll ever definitely now, but I suspect that whomever does it next won't be the first (or second, or third).
https://www.reddit.com/r/KamalaHarris/comments/1eunob4/elon_...
In the Isaacson biography there's a theme across his ventures, sparked by early misfortune, about being in control of things end-to-end because then you have more flexibility to optimize, make more leaps that can come from orchestrating creative adn bespoke integration options.
More likely they lease launch facilities from the government to minimize regulatory interference from… the government.
But you know it ISN'T private, because every rocket ever designed will end up in public space, either literally in outer space, or dropping parts in the ocean, or a tiny tiny tiny tiny chance of exploding somewhere less convenient.
This idea that you can just make your own little closed off launch pad and therefore ignore society is stupid.
Some of the more onerous pushback comes from people who have been ignored before and turned out to be right. For example, when Dupont and friends first started producing PFAS, someone out there was crying foul about "hey maybe we shouldn't just dump this everywhere", and they were ignored, it was dumped everywhere, and now we get to deal with the consequences because nobody listened to those people.
This has happened hundreds of times, including serious things like lead paint and leaded gasoline, which we KNEW caused direct and measurable harm to people, and yet was completely ignored. A portion of the public has obviously lost ALL trust for the private sector claiming any sort of "this couldn't possibly cause problems" and are willing and able to take action.
If you are a "big" enough entity, there is no such thing as "private". Anything you do, affects a lot of people, and you should be treated that way.
there aren’t many technical issues to pouring concrete in a good lat-lon
Other than when a powerful and explosion-prone rocket destroyed its launchpad, hurling chunks of steel-reinforced concrete thousands of feet. But it's almost 18 months since that happened.
That launch was on 20th April 2023, and the next prototype test launch was only 212 days later on 18th November 2023, although I think the pad redesign/rebuild/repair work was complete by the end of July 2023.
So only 3-4 months to redesign/rebuild/repair the pad (although it's probably reasonable to assume some design work had already occurred).
I'm no rocketry expert, but I'm old enough to remember the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; I'm pretty sure if you've got falling chunks of steel-reinforced concrete hitting your space vehicle during launch, that's an issue.
But it was also a prototype being deliberately tested to destruction, so the context as compared to Columbia was quite different. (And it wasn't just the rocket itself that was a prototype, the pad and tower were at least a little as well).
And this has always been SpaceX's approach, rapidly iterating their design by building, testing, destroying, rinse/repeat - so it sometimes feels a little difficult to compare to a more NASA-style design process where a (usually) small number of items are produced with a significantly lower tolerance for failure.
(Edit: And how much better is it to learn these design lessons before the cargo is more fragile/delicate/squishy?)
Having chunks of the launchpad go flying isn't just an inconvenience - flying debris during launch can damage critical rocket systems, as the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster demonstrated.
SpaceX doesn't have real competition after Boeing failed.
What happens in such a monopoly?
The prices rise.
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.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2023/10/18/this-aster...
One of us will be correct.
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.
Similarly, space operators who can't launch goldie-locks efficiency payloads are paying for multiple inefficient small loads instead.
Tesla : Rivian/Lucid :: SpaceX : Blue Origin/ULA
Tesla : BYD :: SpaceX : LandSpace [0]/Galactic Energy [1]
1. https://www.space.com/galactic-energy-ceres-1-sea-launch-vid...
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.
But now the companies need money for AI and prices rise.
Without real competition what stop SpaceX from rising its prices?
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.
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.
Remember the time when cloud services made things cheaper?
Guess what happened next?
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.
No. When was that? Cloud made things easier and faster not cheaper. You trade money for convenience.
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.
What happens if a commercial companies beats its competitors?
Prices rise.
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.
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.
I think they look pretty cool. I wouldn't want to survive alone on Mars with one, but they look like they've had some brand design input.
A lot of space technology is purely functional, but these clearly have poor design taste put into them. The old suits that the Apollo era used were probably almost only functional, yet even they look better.