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I have to say, it's surprising to me that none of the megacompanies is taking on true moon shots with their billions in spare cash sitting around. Google's "Mo

• joering2 8y ago
  Megacorps are usually publicly traded. They have to be careful how they spend their stacked up billions. If Monsato starts building Moon elevator, soon enough you will have high caliber lawyers fishing for Monsato stockholders to sue the corp based on suspicious that they waste their money by going away from their main objectives.
  • ecpottinger 8y ago
    What is interest here too, is Musk is always having lawyers trying to sue him think that can get a great pay-day. But when they try to get shareholders as clients they keep finding the shareholder have already bought into Musk's dream and are not interesting in suing him.
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      SpaceX being private probably also helps. This is why I hope it doesn't go public until they deliver on Mars project.
      • reanimated 8y ago
        Musk has stated exactly that multiple times
  • jacobsheehy 8y ago
    This is what gets me though and it's so confusing. If I were a stockholder of a big megacorp and they weren't spending their money on looking climate change solutions - especially the corps causing the most damage (due to future lawsuit concerns I would expect these companies to be most on board; if they don't get on board then the future will consider them mass-murders and their money-making opportunities will shrink further than I outline in this post) - then I would be leading the charge to sue for poor use of money. The companies are leaving trillions on the table right now by not spending their money wisely. The future economy is going to be based around climate change cleanup at the rate we're going right now and most companies are trying to lose customers by accelerating global climate change to make their customers pay more money to relocate, fix environmental issues, instead of buying their products. Our society is going to be so financially strained in the future and it is a Direct result of the megacorps not spending their money in sustainable, responsible ways. They should all be facing constant lawsuits from their stockholders for not doing better to protect the environment. Since their high-payed lawyers are presumably the ones that lobbied congress in the first place to make sure environmental care was not going to be part of taxes, and in fact that they should pay nearly no taxes at all, suggests to me that they think that the public good is best taken care of by corporations. It seems the only logical conclusion of this line of thinking: if the corps don't want to pay big taxes because they think it is a waste of money, then they have to be in charge of clean air for us, bu they don't actually care about that and so we're all going to suffer and pay less for their products because we have to pay more to fix the air. I just don't get it. Edit: For example, how many people in North Carolina will be buying new consumer electronics this Christmas? Will it be fewer than normal, because they have to spend a lot of their own money cleaning up from a storm that was exasperating via climate change and had to deal with a government that made planning for climate change illegal? I think so. I think fewer people there will buy iPhones this winter and fewer people there will buy TVs are even new fancy cars too. But really why are these corporations losing these sales already? It's because an area hit by a climate-change-fueled storm was unprepared by not taxing companies correctly and by the corporations themselves trying not to be taxed; so we end up with the population themselves trying to fix the errors of their government and this process takes expected money out of the corporation's hands. But the storms will come, and come, and come, and there will be fewer opportunities to make money from people affected by climate change. I. just. don't. get. it.
  • wumpus 8y ago
    That's not why corporations get sued by shareholders. A corporation's objectives are whatever they say it is, and they can spend money on them however they like. They have to disclose what's going on and the risks thereof. They get sued for failing to disclose material info and risks. So if Monsanto wants to start an expensive project to build an extremely risky space elevator, all they have to do is make the proper disclosures and they're probably fine.
• walrus01 8y ago
  Google's moonshot department was quite thoroughly lampooned in HBO's silicon valley, when they put bighead in charge of the hooli equivalent.
  • cududa 8y ago
    Nobody that doesn’t watch the show wouldn’t have the slightest idea what that sentence meant
    • Kaedon 8y ago
      ... what are you saying?
    • SamReidHughes 8y ago
      I don't watch the show -- is Bighead a person and Hooli a company with a product that google's mimicking?
      • Kranar 8y ago
        Yes.
    • elteto 8y ago
      Nobody that doesn’t use double negatives wouldn’t have the slightest idea what your sentence meant
      • mrep 8y ago
        It is a triple negative if you count "nobody".
        • fpoling 8y ago
          I think it is double negative as “nobody” before “doesn’t” is supposed to emphasize the negation, not reverse it. With that the sentence is supposed to mean: “Only body that watches the show could have the slightest idea what that sentence meant”. Such constructions are frequent in Russian, like “it is not true that I have not done nothing” but apparently people use them in English too.
• foota 8y ago
  Sure, google's not working on any literal moonshot program (that we know of) but they're interesting and potentially largely profitable and scalable ventures coming out of it, such as loon or waymo.
• lawrenceyan 8y ago
  Google X is coming out with a bunch of a legitimately game changing companies. What do you mean?
  • lawrenceyan 8y ago
    Am I being down voted for not providing proof or something? Okay then: Waymo - https://waymo.com/ https://waymo.com/ Verily - https://debug.com/ https://debug.com/ Loon - https://loon.co/ https://loon.co/ Dandelion - https://dandelionenergy.com/ https://dandelionenergy.com/ Wing - https://x.company/wing/ https://x.company/wing/ Chronicle - https://chronicle.security/ https://chronicle.security/ And this is literally off the top of my head. All six of these companies have been spun out from projects working within X, so I don't see how you can say with a straight face that Google isn't reinvesting huge amounts of capital into innovation and technology. No other company currently exists which is as diversified in its efforts or as willing to take risks as Alphabet is.
    • Retric 8y ago
      Google is known for execution of existing ideas. Chrome, Gmail, Android etc all had other companies doing the same thing. Waymo is again solid execution but many companies are doing the same thing and waymo has zero original game changing tech. Many companies have been doing ground source heating for private homes, but again they are not changing the game just playing it slightly better than the competition. The bar is high for this stuff. Having the first stage of a rocket land on a barge changes the economics of spacecraft. That’s the kind of innovation people are looking for.
      • foota 8y ago
        As far as I know Waymo was one of the earlier serious self driving car ventures, no?
      • lawrenceyan 8y ago
        > zero original game changing tech ??? Google has been working on making self-driving a thing ever since the DARPA Challenges back in the 2000's. It's amazing to me that you would think Waymo of all companies is the second comer with no originality. I'm really trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but this honestly just shows a glaring lack of knowledge/insight.
• wcoenen 8y ago
  Google is a big investor in SpaceX. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/technology/google-makes-1-billion-investment-in-spacex.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/technology/google-makes-1...
• wcoenen 8y ago
  Google is a big investor in SpaceX. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/technology/google-makes-1-billion-investment-in-spacex.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/technology/google-makes-1... And Jeff Bezos has Blue Origin, so in a way Amazon is also funding a space program.
• InclinedPlane 8y ago
  There used to be an old joke that went like this: "How do you make a billion dollars in the space business? Answer: start out with two billion dollars." And for a long time that was not necessarily inaccurate. Making money through innovation in the space business was difficult and rare, most of the money came from just being a big, reliable government contractor or sub-contractor. Let the government do the innovating, you'll build what they want and cash their checks, easy peasy. In the '90s there was a huge wave of "New Space" companies, some with better ideas than others, most fueled by silicon valley venture capital looking for "cool game changing technology". Unfortunately, that combo was not suited to the space business. A lot of companies got set up with their eyes on essentially quantum leap "beyond state of the art" technology, the sort of stuff that would warrant mass influxes of investment because it had the potential to result in orders of magnitude RoI down the road, just like the computer/software business. Except all of it was too far reaching, too ambitious, with not nearly enough R&D expenditure to make it real at the time (it likely would have cost billions). The archetypal plan for such companies was to build a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle, likely a single stage rocket (aka RLV SSTO) and then swoop in and take over the launch business with hugely lower costs, all while launch orders would grow by orders of magnitude as well due to a booming space tourism business coupled with the deployment of multiple LEO satellite constellations. However, the investment capital dried up during the dot com bubble burst around 2000 and none of the companies had anything viable built already so they just starved to death. Meanwhile, the dot com bust also killed off the fantasies of mega satellite constellations and the launch market slowed down. It took a company like SpaceX to cut a pragmatic path toward innovation in space launch. Starting with a tried and tested design (2 stage kerolox) that dated back to the 1950s even. And being insanely practical as well as extremely cost and risk conscious through the whole process. They boostrapped into profitability with expendable launches. They built a "dual use" expendable/partially-reusable launcher so they could flight prove the technology using commercial launches. And so they could perform reusability R&D subsidized by commercial launches as well. Every single booster landing attempt they made before they nailed the process was R&D using tens of millions of dollars in flight hardware, except they got others to pay for the hardware and they just used it afterward, when normally the booster gets thrown away. Even a very smart megacompany like google wouldn't necessary have the savvy to attack the problem in that way. And if you look at what a crap-ton of money plugged into the high tech ecosystem does produce you can look at Blue Origin, who are performing a much more traditional development program. Start with sub-orbital, build and test everything in a reusable flight configuration on your own dime before offering it up commercially, etc. And the result is much slower progress plus the requirement of massive infusions of cash up front for an extended period of time.
• anonytrary 8y ago
  > Makes me wonder why they're not funding more large scale research - throw a few billion at carbon sequestration, maybe? Businesses need to ensure they can make profit before throwing money at huge problems, otherwise they'll just lose money and go out of business. This goes double for problems which have no clear solution. Even if you technically know how to solve a problem, if that technique is not profitable then it's literally not worth solving. One example: Supersonic Commercial Travel. We have supersonic jets, and we have people who want to travel faster, so why isn't Boeing throwing billions of dollars into supersonic jets? Among other reasons (e.g. they are a nuisance), it's because it's not profitable yet.
  • icelancer 8y ago
    >> Businesses need to ensure they can make profit before throwing money at huge problems, otherwise they'll just lose money and go out of business. Can you say this is true about Tesla and/or SpaceX? It doesn't particularly seem like Elon cared about those things all that much when he launched them.
    • anonytrary 8y ago
      It doesn't need to be said for Musk, since a visionary entrepreneur is the exception, not the rule. Musk's choices can be explained away -- a smart domain expert like Musk probably has a better understanding of the risks and rewards in his domain of work than most other people. There are always exceptional people in the world who can not only imagine futures, but make them reality. Hiring a think tank to solve a problem is a brute force search; almost like a random walk in the solution space. That's a huge risk for someone with lots of money and no domain expertise, but perhaps less a risk for an Einstein who has relevant knowledge and skills. Lots of solutions were found in the proverbial garage, and perhaps would have never been the product of a billion dollars and the best MIT grads you could hire. Nonetheless, spontaneity is, by definition, not something you can really throw money at and expect to happen. Even a trillion dollars will not help you find the next Einstein who can solve the exact problem you are working on.
      • 8y ago
• recharged93 8y ago
  Cause those mega companies have to fulfill short term profits. SpaceX is doing revolutionary things no doubt. But it has one clear mission compared to other companies.
  • zeristor 8y ago
    I imagine Boeing te al were started by people who had a passion to fly, loved flying, needed to fly. But time went on and like embalming replaces blood with preservatives, level headed business people took over to maintain the status quo. No doubt in decades SpaceX will succumb too, and this is why need a constant flow of new companies