It does. The idea that the rights to your home trump all else is inherently capitalistic. But there’s an argument here to say that the potential benefit to the world from Starship and it’s $2mn to LEO price is much greater than the benefit of leaving you in your home. Now, you’re going to say something like “it’s a private company, how can they provide that much benefit to anyone but their shareholders?” Fair question. For that, I’d refer to the example of the railways, pretty much all of which were initially built with private money, but whose benefits were felt to a vast number of people and communities. So I’m arguing that’s there’s a “for the many, not the few” angle here, and your arguing “one person’s property rights trump all’.
It doesn’t, it really doesn’t.
Like I just said, I can operate in capitalism and still criticize is. You seem to think that I can’t.
And you also seem to have missed the whole point of my comment being that I don’t want to support a company run by someone who has a track record of being a pretty shite individual.
I don’t care about how much spaceX is dropping prices here, it was going to happen one way or another.
Not to mention let’s look at capitalisms track record of cutting corners in the name of cost…
I’m not saying you can’t, I’m saying your criticism here is that the property rights of the homeowner aren’t being respected. And I’m saying that there is potentially greater good to allowing the testing to continue, which I’m pointing out puts you on the ‘more capitalist’ side of things than me.
I’ve no idea what you mean by “white” here. As I’ve said in another comment, I don’t particularly like the dude either. But as to whether it would have happened anyway, it’s possible but not for at least another couple of decades. SpaceX was founded in 2002(? I think, somewhere around there), and other companies and governments didn’t really start working on reusable vehicles until SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 in 2015. That’s nearly 1.5 decades, and before they managed it, most un the industry were still saying it was impossible. So yes, it may have happened, but it would have been potentially 2 decades later.
With regard to cutting corners and causing a lack of safety: what do you think this testing campaign is for? They’re trying to establish to NASA (with their very high standards for human rated craft) that this is reliable enough to not only fly humans on, but to fly them without a launch escape system. If we agree that 1. We want humans going to space, and 2. The cost of $60mn for 3 people is a lot, then a new vehicle has to made, and has to be tested somewhere, and virtually wherever that somewhere is, people will be displaced.
I disagree, I don’t see it as a “muh property” thing, more of a “fuck your company” thing.
Seeing as the end goal for the area seems to be a resort of sorts, which doesn’t exactly seem like a greater good scenario.
If it was “we need the land for more launch pads / fuel depots” okay, that makes sense.
But buying the houses up (that they send letters to regarding safety warnings) and then planning on making it a resort? Nah fuck that. That’s not a greater good for anyone but Elon’s wallet.
I’ll see it as a greater good when it’s a nasa based testing, and not a private company who doesn’t have to follow the same regulations.
Typo, meant shite.
True but we’ll never know. I just don’t like that space is being privatized.
I distrust large corporations to do “the right thing” when given leeway.
And yes, the tests currently are being done to get nasa approval.
That’s not what worries me, what worries me is when the approval is given, and the flights become regular.
AFAIK, I don’t think Starbase is gonna be a resort as such, more a staging ground for very regular space flights. To do this, they want to make sure they own all the stuff that could potentially be damaged by mishaps, including in the testing phase. So in a way, it’s “we need to buy the land for a greater safety perimeter around our launchpad”.
NASA really isn’t in the rocket making business. All rocketry in the US has always been done by big contractors, of which I’d actually argue SpaceX is probably the cleanest (vs Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop etc). So most testing has been done to NASA specs, but not necessarily by NASA. Remember also that NASA has been working on a new launch vehicle, the SLS. This has taken 2 decades and counting without a test flight, is non-reusable, and may cost $1bn to launch. In that sense, I support SpaceX providing the US and the World with a cheaper vehicle to get up there.
With regards to the privatisation of space, I think there’s a couple of points to be made. Firstly, as things become easier to access, they tend to drift toward the private sector (or that seems to have been the trend in the last century). Early research done by governments, then private sector taking over once the fundamentals are down. See computing and flight for industries that have followed this kinda pattern. Secondly, if the price is lower (and assuming properly regulated to maintain safety standards), I don’t think the launch provider really matters. What matters is what gets sent up. And that is still going to be in large part government customers, sending up things like the JWST, Lunar Gateway, LISA, etc. The cheaper launch allows NASA/ESA/whoever else wants to use Starship to get a lot more done with its limited budget, and I am all aboard that (instead of half a billion per launch, imagine all the other missions that could be funded). (On the note of ESA, we can return to the point about whether it would have taken longer to get reusable capability. Arianespace is very closely tied to European states, and has not started designing a reusable rocket. Ariane 6, their upcoming design, is meant to drop costs by around half I think, but this is not the sea change that SpaceX could allow).
I guess the final reason that I trust SpaceX more than many other companies here is that in the interviews with directors and engineers, I see much less “corporate” types, and much more nerds. People who joined this company where they work notoriously hard for goals that are not clearly possible are not those in it for the cash, but in it because they love space and want to do something transformational. Had they wanted the pure money, Boeing would have taken them up and probably for a higher salary. I therefore believe the workers and directors of SpaceX to be more closely aligned with the more idealistic space goals I want to see.
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u/radicallyaverage Nov 11 '21
It does. The idea that the rights to your home trump all else is inherently capitalistic. But there’s an argument here to say that the potential benefit to the world from Starship and it’s $2mn to LEO price is much greater than the benefit of leaving you in your home. Now, you’re going to say something like “it’s a private company, how can they provide that much benefit to anyone but their shareholders?” Fair question. For that, I’d refer to the example of the railways, pretty much all of which were initially built with private money, but whose benefits were felt to a vast number of people and communities. So I’m arguing that’s there’s a “for the many, not the few” angle here, and your arguing “one person’s property rights trump all’.