this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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Commercial/private spaceflights are dumb and shouldn't exist. Just more trash that flies at bullet speed in our orbit.
I mean you do need satellites if you want to have satellite internet.
Critical infrastructure shouldn't be in private hands. As Musk perfectly demonstrates right now.
I mean true, but putting it in state hands encourages stagnation and will eventually leave you unable to compete globally. Also if someone tries to do stupid shit like Elon you can just nationalize the company or enforce some other harsh consequence. He does shit like this because he knows nobody can punish him.
NASA sent people to the moon in the seventies. SpaceX must be happy if their rocket gets into low earth orbit without falling apart.
It's a widespread myth that capitalism is best at innovation. Quite the contrary is true. Most (real) innovations get developed with public resources in public institutions and private companies then take it and commercialize on it.
The internet, the touchscreen, computers, heck even AI, all developed with public money.
And as we see it doesn't and will never happen in our current system.
And that's the reason why no unelected individual should have control over so many resources which usually only countries have.
Okay I'm all for Musk hate but there's a reason SpaceX came to prominence and it's not because their rockets are always falling apart. Hell, the whole reason we're now talking about a European space industry is because of Starlink, so clearly capitalism was able to innovate that. Europe is now realizing it's falling behind because they have nothing to compete with SpaceX.
It's a myth that capitalism has a monopoly on innovation, but it's also a myth that capitalism can't innovate. Public institutions and universities usually make the big breakthroughs, but the commercialization is also important. Taking something from a proof of concept in a lab into factories all over the world and then continuously improving it is innovation. Governments around the world made the computer, but it was Steve Jobs who put it in people's homes.
That seems more of a problem with lack of spine than anything else.
Ok, please tell me one thing they did to advance space exploration. And please don't say reusable rockets that bring down costs, because this is still a pipe dream.
We already had satellite internet long before Starlink. In fact, Starlink is a bad idea if you consider astronomy and space exploration.
https://www.space.com/satellite-megaconstellations-spacex-starlink-interference-astronomy
The only reason Starlink was created is that Elon wanted to play online games while on some island and didn't get the latency down for it to work well. (Source: my dog)
Jokes aside, why do you need ultra-high-speed internet always and everywhere? For emergencies or normal usage, it definitely doesn't matter if a request takes 10ms or 250ms.
But does it need private institutions for that? Innovation, at least in my opinion, means making possible something we previously thought was impossible. Production and distribution aren't.
If something is truly wanted or needed, people will manufacture and distribute it easily without the need for private corporations to tell us what we need.
If you think that money is the driving factor, how would you explain the entire open-source ecosystem?
Huh? Of whom? The billionaire-sponsored politicians?
-Wikipedia. I don't know nearly enough about space exploration to explain these advances, but again if they weren't good at what they do they wouldn't be the biggest space launch provider in the world (even counting national programs).
I don't know why but Ukraine was using it so clearly it's good for something. It's also useful for people in remote places where there's no good internet otherwise, or to avoid government censorship.
I don't think anyone in the 80s thought a smartphone was possible, nor did anyone in the 50s think the Macintosh possible. Maybe it didn't have to be private institutions making them, but it was.
No? For a lot of modern technology decades' worth of infrastructure and know-how are needed to even think about making the stuff, and most of that is the product of private investment and development. I, as someone from the Middle East, don't have access to that infrastructure and know-how and therefore am forced to pay through the nose for an American phone or a Japanese car. You can make the argument that private innovation is nonexistent or unnecessary only by using the results of decades upon decades of private innovation. You only need to look to the Global South to see what happens when you don't have that.
A lot of it (but not all) is in fact developed by developers in companies. Also there are many applications where the best option is closed source, one example being Excel.
Sure, but these are incremental improvements and not groundbreaking innovations. They surely have good engineers there. But the point that I want to make is that these improvements would have happened with or without SpaceX.
I don't know if they need low latency, but currently it looks like other providers like Eutelsat will replace Starlink in Ukraine.
Viasat for example provides 50MBit+ download speed. Should be more than enough for remote locations.
Shouldn't also be a problem with other satellite internet providers.
If Jobs and his employees had the idea for that, others would have too. They weren't some once in a lifetime geniuses. Also, it only was possible because the underlying technology was developed first.
The know-how isn't going anywhere. People have this knowledge, not organizations.
Maan, private investment is mainly responsible for the under-development of the global south. Capitalists took their resources and privatized vast amounts of land and resources. Just look it up.
But many are not. Not everybody is doing things just for the money.
Sure. But this hasn't anything to do with it being closed source, but only because Microsoft decided to not share the source code. Also, I like LibreOffice more :P
satellite internet is already a thing and there are already thousands satellites in space
None of them European.
Eutelsat?
I stand corrected.
There's no need for every country in the world to have their own starlink
Yes, but it sure helps when your internet connection can't be turned off by foreign powers on a whim.
So does every country need a satellite army in case someone decide to attack their starlink?
Unless there's some kind of treaty preventing satellite warfare and that treaty is respected, the answer will be yes.
I want Star Trek but we're heading towards Alien instead.
What about private bakeries?