this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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We saw what happened the last time space infrastructure was privatized.
Boeing gave all the money to the stockholders and delivered a criminally late product that ended up failing and stranding our astronauts. Boeing obviously didn't care to test if the Teflon in those thrusters could survive repeated heatings.
SpaceX decided to go backwards in rocket technology, from Hydrogen to Methane. Hydrogen is more efficient, and makes it easier to bury carbon responsibly. Sure, Boeing's rockets got made fun of for being leaky, but I think that might be Boeing more than Hydrogen at fault. Dirty Methane rockets were cheap, and could be built simple as they experienced less thermal variation without cryogenic fuel.
SpaceX undercut the competition and turned itself into a monopoly while Boeing threw their hand to the stockholders. Now SpaceX picks up the pieces of the game they upended.
NASA was supposed to manage a thriving marketplace, full of competition. Instead it managed its way to a monopolistic structure that a single entity may try to sieze.
Fun fact about autocratic structures like monopolies and dictatorships: they can't grow power themselves, they can only sieze power organized by others.
We need to build our next wave of structures in a distributed fashion such that the levers of power are not so concentrated that they may fall into the wrong hands.
Give the power to the people. All of them.
Regarding rocket propellant
Methane is more dense than hydrogen
Methane makes more thrust than hydrogen
Hydrogen rockets need to have huge fuel tanks, hydrogen rockets have low thrust - the space shuttle needed boosters to lift off
Everything in space is a trade off, kerosene is better in all those ways than methane, but you can make methane on Mars. The global warming potential isn't much as there are so few rocket launches, and hydrogen fuelled rockets use fossil hydrogen (made from fossil methane (aka natural gas)) because it is cheaper than alternatives
Space travel is exceptional in that you need an incredible amount of cooperation to get a project into space. The supply chains are insane, the component parts highly specialized and hugely expensive, and the range of expertise and knowledge required is simultaneously focused and intense and broad and varied. If human society ever does manage to transition to a genuine people power, space flight will be, to my knowledge, the very last thing we achieve, because it takes so many people working together to get it done. The scope of these projects makes you realise how easy it must have been to build the pyramids. Two brothers can build a plane that just about works, but to get a vehicle to orbit needs a city of people working together.
That's all the reason it should be easier to distribute power. More people to distribute it between!
Remember when we paid people to do those things directly?
We, the American people, paid a lot of people each a reasonable salary to get to the moon.
Privatized spaceflight has we, the American people, pay a single entity less total money (they can make it more efficient, of course!). This concentrates decision-making and power.
That vehicle going in to orbit needs a city to work together. I want my taxes to pay that city and the people in it, not Boeing's shareholders who aren't helping put the vehicle into orbit, not Musk to build a second smaller city in Texas he is king of.
Thank you for your points. I completely agree that we should be paying the workers on the ground who get us to space instead of the wealthy who claim to own it.
Yes we should, and I hope we will. I would love to be able to imagine some kind of smooth, consensual, non violent transition to a society where we keep doing the same stuff but are fairly treated, but I have difficulty with that. And I think space would be the hardest industry to revolutionise because of the above. Not saying it's impossible and I'm definitely not saying it's not preferable!
Almost like Jim Bridenstone was a bad pick….