No. It just makes you a “socialist” because you are receiving income from the government for doing nothing
?? Now I really must have missed a post. How is that quote from msmith537 a response to the question I asked?
I don’t exactly understand what benefit was gained from having Bezos and Branson in the aircraft. Elon Musk, at least, lets real pilots fly his ships.
Post 115
Blue Origin is trying to eventually do normal boring space stuff, but the entire goal of Virgin Galactic is to provide a toy for the ultra-wealthy, so having their ultra-wealthy publicity-hungry founder on a flight probably made sense.
Yeah, I don’t really understand the response either, even if I were being sarcastic.
Anyhow, the point isn’t really that velomont or anyone else should use all their disposable income to help the less fortunate. The real point is that (at least here in the USA), it is absurd to blindly praise a system that creates billionaires like Bezos and Branson while leaving millions unable to afford basic needs. Not that they people like that shouldn’t be extremely wealthy for building extremely successful companies. But it’s not enough to create a system that only rewards the creation of wealth and tells everyone else to go fuck themselves. For the simple reason that society will always need teachers and cops and store clerks and millions of other jobs that will never earn six figures, let alone set someone on a path to becoming a billionaire.
Eh, not quite ultra-wealthy. The standard ticket price is $250k. That’s less than a year’s salary for someone in the 97th percentile of income. Doable for a well-paid professional that saves up for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Potentially millions of people, if they wanted to.
They’re well-off of course, but I wouldn’t call that ultra-wealthy. It’s the same order of magnitude as a trip up Everest.
What this hate for the rich ‘space cowboys’’ misses is that the very rich have been doing this forever - to the great benefit of the people.
Howard Hughes was the equivalent to Bezos or Branso in the first half of the 20th century - an era when ‘rich playbpys’ raced airplanes and yachts for fun. They were criticed for their ‘foolishness’ at the time, but some of our major innovations in aircraft came out of Shneider cup air eacing. The Supermarine Spitfire derived from a racing plane. Advances in airfoils and airplane designs increased speed and efficiency, and that trickled down to everything.
Take Spaceship Two. Its predecessor, Spaceship one, won the Ansari X-prize for the first private craft to reach space. Burt Rutan designed it, along with the Yoyager aircraft that flew non-stop around the world. Rutan was a pioneer in composite constructiin for aircraft. His incredibly efficient designs helped pave the way for light composite homebuilt and LSA certified aircraft that substantially lowered the cost of aviation and made it accessible to the middle class after governmrnt regulations and other factors drove the price of airplanes up to the point where only the rich coild afford them.
The popularity of yacht racing in the 19th and 20th century led to improvements in hull designs and materials that improved the efficiency of many commercial ships, lowering the energy cost of transporting goods.
Even the suborbital flights Bezos and Branson are doing have advanced technology. I already mentioned the Rutan connection to Branson. And even though that plane doesn’t make it to orbit, they advanced high mach flight, using a ‘feathering’ mechanism to make a plane controllable and increase drag at high altitudes to allow safe descent from the stratosphere, etc.
We don’t know what all this tech will be used for in the future, and that’s the point. It’s the same point used to justify NASA - that space tech trickles down to other industries creating spinoffs you couldn’t forsee.
There’s one big difference.
NASA is not a profit-making business. Neither is the European Space Agency. They allow free use of their patents within limits, or charge small amounts.
I’m pretty sure that any new technology developed by Bezos, Branson, and Musk will be patented and used to make billions more profit.
If the technology trickles down, a torrent of money will flow up to the already super-wealthy. They are not going to be giving away anything they can make money from, out of altruism or benefit to the world.
Do you have any evidence of that?
The wealth gap was lower and the tax rates on the wealthy were much higher. It was a much healthier society, economically speaking.
What does that have to do with whether these activities have spin-off benefits?
Blue Origin has tried, though. They had a patent for landing rockets on a ship, which SpaceX contested for obvious reasons. SpaceX argued that the patent failed the obviousness test and in any case researchers had already put out papers describing essentially the same thing.
SpaceX did the industry a favor here. Other, smaller players (Rocket Lab, for instance) can pursue sea landing without facing a big lawsuit from Blue Origin.
Competition drives efficient use of technology, and efficient technology benefits everyone. Consider this recent story:
NASA was previously going to launch the probe with the SLS rocket, which costs around $2 billion, and NASA determined that the probe would need an extra billion in modifications to survive the ride.
SpaceX instead charged $178 million. They aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re doing it for a profit. Due to their reusability technology and general focus on efficiency, they are almost certainly earning a healthy profit on that. And half the money effectively goes to Musk (though in reality, they’re spending every dime on developing their next generation launcher system).
But at the same time, they’re saving taxpayers around $2.8B (ideally, that would go to more science programs at NASA, but we’ll see).
Also, as a general comment–the benefits to technology development from competition comes as much from “existence proofs” than it does any specific details of the technology.
SpaceX has demonstrated that reusability is both possible and a cost savings. There was an enormous amount of skepticism about this beforehand, due to the failures of the Shuttle program. Which meant that funding reusability development programs was difficult. But essentially everyone else in the industry now acknowledges the benefits and is working on the problem. They’re all working on their own version of reusability, but what they needed was an example of it working for someone. That’s not something that patents or other IP protection can stop.
As for Branson and Bezos, it’s hard to say what benefits will arise, but at the least we’ll have a better understanding of the space tourism market. Maybe there is no significant market, which will be useful in and of itself. Or maybe there’s just no significant market for suborbital flight. Also, will customers prefer rockets or spaceplanes? Hard to say, but we’ll find out once they get going. They won’t be able to hide their number of customers.
I believed you were arguing that there was a net good to these activities. I was trying to explain why it’s not a good comparison. I apologize for not being clear.
It’s obviously that Bezos has an enormous amount of surplus wealth, and he gained it partially by using tax loopholes that aren’t available to the rest of us. One can only wonder what kind of cool stuff NASA might do if these guys had an effective tax rate comparable to the rest of us.
We might have had Mars colonies by now. We might have solved climate change. Instead, we get to watch Scrooge McDuck amuse himself by taking a joyride to re-enact a mission that NASA already did 60 years ago, all for the sake of his own ego.
It’s just so wasteful, both in terms of resources and opportunity. And it’s infuriating to see chuckleheads go “see, see, private enterprise can do the same thing!” Sure buddy. All you have to do is wait for NASA to prove it can be done, and spend 60 years working out the kinks, making it extremely safe, and then Jeff Bezos can jump in and say “me too!”
That’s pretty much NASA’s mission statement, though. Even back then they were NACA, their reason for existence is to do basic research and distribute the results to American industry, which takes that research and builds it into products. It’s fully expected that the value transfer is one-way. Lots of industries benefit from this.
I do not personally like or hate these people more due to their space travel. If I had their money I might be tempted to do something similar. There is reason to like a few of the things they have done, and reason to believe they should do more towards paying a reasonable share. I think there is a bit of transference, people who do not like these guys have different reasons but are applying it to this.