With Branson and his Virgin Atlantic airline, there’s also the notable fact that, a month into the pandemic, he already had his begging cup out, asking for hundreds of millions of dollars/pounds’ worth of bailouts to help his poor company weather the economic downturn.
No matter the subtleties of debt leverage and how much of a billionaire’s worth is tied up in non-liquid assets, to a general public who’ve lost jobs and businesses and then watched governments hem and haw over how (or whether) to help out citizens lower on the food chain, this is another example of a corporation that trumpets its success and then pleads poverty at the slightest hint of trouble. Basically, why are “we can’t help the public, that’d be socialism!” governments gleefully handing over money from the public purse to a billionaire who barely if ever pays taxes at all, then turns around and finances his own vanity joyride into space with the money he claimed to not have to pay his employees?
That has certainly proven to be an unfavorable investment for New Mexico (which for some reason decided to put it out in hell-and-back nearest Truth Or Consequences instead of leasing space at White Sands where it would at least be accessible and have range support) but nearly all of the support services and facilities are being provided at marginal cost or just notional fee to all of these programs, including flight range support, diversion of air traffic, and of course GPS navigation, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Despite the pretensions of entrepreneurial genius, the indirect (and in the case of SpaceX, direct) subsidies and support that these companies have received are enormous.
On the contrary, when you observe that we went from Kittyhawk to commonplace commercial flights in 50 years and to the moon in back in another 20 I suspect people’s imaginations ran pretty wild when asked “Where will we be able to go in another 50?”
A three minute up and down flight for a million+ bucks seems kind on anti-climactic.
He thanked them for paying for his joyride. Whatever benefits eventually accrue from other effects of this endeavor, the cluelessness is breathtaking.
Yeah.
The first time we really managed to get people up there, it was because of two countries in that same race. So maybe that’s the only way we’ll make any progress at it; but it doesn’t speak well for the species if so.
I don’t really see how it’s a race. Musk has won, hasn’t he?
Sure, he didn’t take a joyride himself, but he was the first commercial enterprise to put people into space, and not just a suborbital hop, but actually into orbit and onto the space station.
Competition has always driven innovation. Without competition, there is no incentive to improve. For the last 50 years, there’s been essentially no competition in space launch systems, with contracts given on a cost plus basis. There was no reason to get costs down, and in fact, there was incentive to pad them out.
Now that there is competition, costs are coming down rather rapidly.
Is there any form of competition that can’t be reduced to being called a dick measuring contest?
I wish I could find the Colbert monologue bit where he excitedly mentions Bezos going to space, and then appears to get a prompt from offstage. “Oh, he’s coming back? Well, then, never mind.”
– I know a lot of humans do work that way, and will get off their butts better if it looks like they can put somebody else down, and sometimes won’t get off their butts at all if it won’t give them, not only an advantage in their and/or somebody else’s life being improved, but specifically an advantage over somebody else. And I know that to get anything done that involves humans we need to take that into account, and to try to leverage it as best we can into better uses instead of worse ones. But I still think it’s a bug, not a feature.
Very well put, thank you.
Plus the subsidies they get they don’t need and don’t deserve. Shortsighted, dumb greed.
I wonder how long it will take one of those greedskys to claim to live in space, thus not owning tax to any country on Earth. I guess Musk’s claiming not to posses any properties anymore goes in this direction.
For little personal things, like wanting to eat a better pie, improving your cooking technique or growing a better blueberry, maybe. But even then, if you could just get a better pie from your neighbor, then why wouldn’t you?
But for big things, the reason that it is done is out of competition with others.
That’s a very negative way of looking at it, but sure, if you think that the person who works hard to win the gold at the olympics did so so that they can put someone else down, then sure, that’s exactly what motivates 99.9+% of the human population.
It’s not just humans, it’s life. Were it not for competition, we’d all just be algae mats hanging out in tide pools. If we got that far at all.
Does it have to be them? What if they put someone else up who stays for a decent length of time, say getting dropped off at the space station?
Because you like cooking? Because you like doing for yourself? Because you like feeling competent and skillful, and you don’t feel less so just because your neighbor is also competent and skillful? Improving your own pie doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with how good your neighbor’s pie is.
I don’t know about hate for the billionaires. There are enough other reasons to dislike them, but all the “space travel” BS is a terrible hype. It is not even close to space travel, it is a mere ballistic hop to an arbitrary 100 km height. They use his artificial boundary to full publicitary effect for the gullible. And boy, there are many gullible people in the media and elsewhere.
There is so much that is misleading if not outright untrue with the statements above that it is difficult to to know where to start.
First of all, it is simply not true that “competition has always driven innovation.” The vast majority of actual technical innovation hasn’t been the result of competition; it has been someone working in a laboratory (in the post-WWII era, often supported by funding from the Department of Defense or Department of Energy) on some obscure technical problem that had zero promise of commercial profitability at the time it was conceived. Nearly every modern technological innovation relating to modern computing and digital electronics has come out of public funding–again, mostly DoD–with the one major exception being the transistor, and even that development was indirectly subsidized through general government support for Bell Labs.
You would be led to believe that companies like Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, Tesla, et cetera squeeze out “innovations” on a daily basis based upon their slick PR flackdom, but the reality is that these (and most large companies) do very little actual technical innovation on their own, instead taking advances in materials science, computing, energy storage, et cetera that have already been developed and matured and then inserting them into products. The iPhone, for instance, did not emerge fully formed from the technomages of secretive R&D department of Apple but instead was stitched together in a stylish form out of many existing technologies that Apple acquired, licensed, or ‘borrowed’ from previous development and then promoted by an expensive marketing campaign to convince people that they can’t live without it.
There is this mistaken belief that “cost plus”, presumably meaning Cost Plus Incentive Fee (CPIF) or Cost Plus Award Fee (CPAF) is an endless pot of money for contractors while Firm Fixed Price contracts guarantee performance within budget. In fact, there is no evidence that this is the case, and actually plenty of experience showing FFP contracts can actually be more costly. The primary reason for this is that CPIF/CPAF competitions are more focused on finding the contractor with the best technical ability to execute the contract, while FFP contracts are highly focused on the lowest bid. However, unless you are just making cheese sandwiches, the lowest bid often comes with a lot of subtle corner cutting and machinations in the proposal process, in which contractors seek to underbid one another while defining scope so narrowly that critical parts of the project are “out of scope” (not defined as requirements in the Performance Work Statement or contract deliverables), requiring contract amendments or supplementary contracts to be issued to complete the project at great expense. The problem with projects spiraling out of control isn’t due to contact structure or a lack of competition but rather poor contract execution management on the part fo the government (due in no small part to restrictions on the acquisition side that are ironically intended to limit fraud, waste, and abuse) combined with poor requirement definition and post-contact award changing of requirements.
In the case of the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program, I worked on a study that demonstrated that the United Launch Alliance (ULA) should be able to launch their missions for 60% of what they were charging without any loss of capability or reliability (and still under FAR Part 15 reporting and mission assurance requirements), and the Air Force EELV program could have dictated the recommended changes in the program to bring costs in line with that estimate. That they chose not to do so reflected the reality of political pressure and an entrenched acquisition strategy that protected the status quo. Letting SpaceX compete on EELV (albeit as a FAR Part 12 commercial acquisition with far fewer reporting and mission assurance requirements) was a way of ‘reducing’ costs without eating the elephant of confronting entrenched aerospace contractors but it also didn’t come at the advertised bare manifest costs that SpaceX promotes; with all of the costs added up SpaceX launches cost just about as much as ULA vehicles (Delta IV, Atlas V) should cost per the above-mentioned study. In other words, this has nothing to do with “innovation” and not much with competition as much as the government acquisition apparatus being not able to get out of its own way.
The actual reason that “for the last 50 years, there’s been essentially no competition in space launch systems” is because for all intents and purposes there is one customer that drives the space launch market, and that being the US government, which did actually promote competition in funding the development of multiple competing systems in adaptations of ICBMs as space launch vehicles, then in the Space Launch System (‘Shuttle’), and eventually EELV, where it finally decided it couldn’t support multiple contractors and literally forced McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) and Lockheed Martin to join into ULA, much to the consternation of both companies. There have been three distinct generations of space launch entrepreneurship on basically decadal cycles (late 'Seventies through early 'Eighties, late 'Eighties through early 'Nineties, and the current cycle), each hoping to spur on a nascent commercial space industry to support commercial launch, but even today that US government is the elephant in the room, which is exactly why SpaceX made winning EELV contractor status such a focus.
There has actually been plenty of ‘competition’ and attempts at innovation, but a lack of a consistent base of customers, financial failure of most commercial space ventures like Iridium, and the inability to acquire enough capital over a long enough period of investment to turn innovative ideas into mature operational systems have caused the vast majority of would-be competitors to disappear into the mists of aerospace history, and even those that were nominally successful such as the Orbital Sciences Corporation (now Northrup Grumman) Pegasus and Taurus have not turned out to be all that competitive without extensive government customer base. I guess we’ll see what the future holds for SpaceX (which despite its successes has not presented any evidence of profitability outside of its government customer base) and for companies like RocketLab and Virgin Orbit, but even demonstrating successful delivery of payloads to orbit is not an kind of guarantee of fiscal viability. As the old saw goes, “The easiest way to become an aerospace millionaire is to start out as a billionaire.”
It is far better that the do this for fun… and science, than they - as their GOP equivalents do- spend their money promoting a racist agenda.
The When people are starving? is bullshit. You, I and most of the SDMB waste money every day… when people are starving. We eat large, see movies, have internet, watch TV…when people are starving. NASA was sending men to the moon…when people are starving.
