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I've worked in aerospace and have been reading HN for over a decade. Here's some adult advice, for both the OP and HN in general. Space is a waste of time unl

I've worked in aerospace and have been reading HN for over a decade. Here's some adult advice, for both the OP and HN in general. Space is a waste of time unless you're a government or a bored billionaire. Objects are too far, and lift is now a commodity. (SpaceX will probably end up shutting down due to lack of lift demand, hence their polluting the sky with micro satellites now.) So if you really want a career in space, go join an existing company or agency. However, there's a lot of smaller aviation-related projects that are equally challenging, but more affordable. Examples of recent remarkable aviation advances are: - Robinson Helicopter (world's largest-volume mfg) - Williams small jet engines (started in cruise missiles, now certified for civil use) - uAvionix ADS-B tailBeacon (first affordable ADS-B transponder) - Scaled Composites' projects. The whole reason Rutan used composites was to make wings 10x faster. You can do that too. There's room for anybody (who wants to spend their savings) on: - composite mfg. techniques - applying the latest in electronics (without competing with Garmin) - willing to navigate the FAA TSO process - installing ADS-B. It's literally a gold rush until 2021. - be like Mike Busch, the world's top aviation entrepreneurial mind: https://www.savvyaviation.com/ https://www.savvyaviation.com/

growlist 7y ago
> (SpaceX will probably end up shutting down due to lack of lift demand, hence their polluting the sky with micro satellites now.) I guess morale is low at Arianespace these days ;)
- hef19898 7y ago
  Why would it? Ariane 5 is still doing reasonably good and Ariane 6 seems promising too. SpaceX needs a ton of launches to make reusable rockets financially feasible so.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - growlist 7y ago
    It was kind of a joke but come on, Arianespace's leaders have been pretty salty about SpaceX in public so clearly there is some jealousy. And as I understand it most of the oldspace launch providers aren't significantly cheaper than SpaceX even if latter operate their rockets in expendable mode.
    - hef19898 7y ago
      True that! The one thing that really sets SpaceX and Ariane Space apart if development. Less the capabilities but more the amount of politics and red tape. In that area SpaceX has a clear advantage.
      - growlist 7y ago
        I really wish Arianespace were smashing it like SpaceX. No doubt they have great engineers, if they could just be let off the leash a little.
diminoten 7y ago
Don't we need a bunch of "bad" investments to get the space tech to move forward faster? Like, maybe this guy will convince a bunch of "fools" to invest, and in his path to failure, he'll find some more efficient way to... something. Or are you saying, even if everything was efficient, there are things you can't fix, like how far away valuable stuff is, that makes it all pretty pointless?
amayne 7y ago
> SpaceX will probably end up shutting down due to lack of lift demand... The launch business is tiny compared to what's possible when you can do large volume industrial research and manufacturing in microgravity. I take the approach that space right now is like the computer industry in the early 1970s. We're about to have our microprocessor moment with fully reusable rockets. This means ridiculously cheap access to space which could yield entirely new industries in biotech, semiconductors and other areas of research we haven't even imagined. We're only done the tiniest amount of research so far and have found put that you can grow much larger and purer crystals, antibiotics work in unpredicted ways and a hundred other examples of interesting areas of research. If launch costs are commodity, then do something with all that capacity. Cisco may have struggled when computer server prices fell, but that made companies like Google and Facebook possible. We're now living in a world that benefits tremendously from one thing becoming a commodity.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  The thing is even if SpaceX gets actually cost down to ridiculously low prices it's still going to be extremely expensive and very very hard. We have practically speaking no experience manufacturing in space, the only thing that's been made have been small test quantities of ZBLAN fiber and until we get asteroid mining and refining setup the extra cost of lifting all the raw materials is going to make manufacturing in space only viable for a few small things with high margins of return.
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    At least for semiconductors you won't have to haul up all that high vacuum equipment :)
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      You'd still need it LEO at 500km varies between 10-700 nPa and UHV is a max of 100 nPa. It's too variable an environment to really develop chips in due to space weather and the variability in the extreme thin reaches of the atmosphere in Earth orbit.
fsloth 7y ago
" lift is now a commodity ... SpaceX will probably end up shutting down" I take this that the price of orbital launch is insignificant compared to the cost of preparing and operating the cargo. Are there any signs that space born cargo with lower capex and opex (and hence whose operators would have higher price sensitivity) would arrive?
- taneq 7y ago
  The cost of the payload is huge today because the launch is so expensive that you have to make the most of it. If it's $25/kg to low Earth orbit, you can afford to be a lot more experimental and take a lot more risks with your cargo.
xz0r 7y ago
> installing ADS-B. Can you tell me a bit more about it?
- vectorEQ 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance_%E2%80%93_broadcast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillan...
mikojan 7y ago
> I've worked in aerospace and have been reading HN for over a decade. > Here's some adult advice, for both the OP and HN in general. > Space is a waste of time unless you're a government or a bored billionaire. Objects are too far, and lift is now a commodity. > (SpaceX will probably end up shutting down due to lack of lift demand, hence their polluting the sky with micro satellites now.) You are misidentifying the source of revenue. Space, like military equipment, is an incredible market for corporations equipped to operate in. There are huge government subsidies, private-public partnerships designed to assist research and development, there's an unsatiable market to offload excess production in (government demand), you get to profit off of commercial spin-off products. SpaceX is on the receiving end of all of this. Furthermore, the public does not care what it is that you are doing exactly. That's important because of all the tax money involved. The moment your enterprise has a significant impact on the public ordinary people will scrutinize it. That's bad for business. Even more so when your business depends the government which is somewhat accountable to the public.
zpeti 7y ago
This shows a complete lack of knowledge about how most industries evolved in the past. Every industry was in the phase you describe the space industry in. History is full of example of industries where no-one could imagine the potential before it got really cheap. From mobile phones to cars. Once something gets cheap the opportunities explode. Which is SpaceX's plan. At $20/kg a space hotel would be possible to build, even a moon hotel. I'd imagine at some point it becomes seriously viable as an alternative to a luxury holiday in the maldives. I for one am interested. Or - apparently much better repeaters can be built in 0g for fiber optic cables. Already there's talk of factories in space. Did you think of that one? But it's almost silly to speculate because it's impossible to imagine the industries that will be created.
- imtringued 7y ago
  Exactly, you're not going to have the first mover advantage if you are waiting for someone to be ahead of you.
  - wasdfff 7y ago
    But if you are someone like lockhead you have money to wait for spacex to fizzle out, headhunt their talent, and outperform with your military industrial complex connections and 70 years of working in aerospace.
    - zpeti 7y ago
      Yeah, just like Ford and GM waited out Tesla to fail... (and SpaceX is profitable as opposed to Tesla)
      - dobleboble 7y ago
        Tesla made a profit of $143 million in Q3 2019 on record deliveries https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/10/tesla-made-a-profit-of-143-million-in-q3-2019-on-record-deliveries/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/10/tesla-made-a-profit-of-...
ryanmercer 7y ago
>Space is a waste of time unless you're a government or a bored billionaire. Unless you are 100% self sufficient, you rely on space to live. Freight logistics are reliant on space (GPS), farming (GPS optimized planting and harvesting), air travel (GPS), using your phone to get directions somewhere (GPS). Then all of the weather satellites, satellites are rapdily gaining use in archaeology revealing unknown sites far faster than boots on the ground can, etc etc so on and so forth. Gobs and gobs of money are waiting to be made in space with current and future technology. Some quick near-future possibilities: - Space tourism - Seed vaults on the moon for companies and countries - Archival data storage on the moon - All matter of material sciences research and possibly production of materials with qualities that we can not replicate in an Earth-based production facility (think crystals and crystalline structures) - Extremely isolated biological related experiments, such as genetic engineering, which could be be done in complete safety in a self-contained habitat remotely, with no chance of any of the material spreading outside of the lab unlike on earth
- jfk13 7y ago
  > Unless you are 100% self sufficient, you rely on space to live. Freight logistics are reliant on space (GPS), farming (GPS optimized planting and harvesting), air travel (GPS), using your phone to get directions somewhere (GPS). Perhaps you don't recall, but we somehow managed to deliver freight, grow crops, fly planes and find our way to places long before GPS satellites were a thing. Space-based systems may be a great convenience at times, but they're hardly essential to my life.
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    >Perhaps you don't recall, but we somehow managed to deliver freight, grow crops, fly planes and find our way to places long before GPS satellites were a thing. Yes and if you are older than 30 you likely remember when everything said "4-6 weeks delivery" not "same day" or even "2-3 day delivery'. That's right, even in the 1990s if you ordered something 4-6 weeks was a perfectly acceptable (and realistic) delivery time frame. You also had a fraction of the flights that you do now. GPS for aviation right out of the gate increases fuel efficiency of any given flight as well as safety. GPS went fully operational in 1995, with 2 billion less mouths to feed as well. Take GPS away from farming and you'll plant less efficiently and crop losses will increase both of which will drive prices up. A lot of the larger farms actually heavily rely on automation, assisted by GPS, for both planting and harvesting. This is a single technology using 24 satellites that is space-based, that has affected virtually every industry in the world. Imagine what other space-based or space-derived technologies might one day exist. Imagine what amount of change they might make on civilization. Imagine what sort of profits they might generate.
Symmetry 7y ago
Companies don't stop operations because they're too successful. It might be that demand for launch services won't rise with falling prices the way that SpaceX expects. That might mean they won't recoup the costs of developing the Starship and they go bankrupt. But space launch is still a $100s of billions a year industry and whoever is running SpaceX will still be making that, even if it's Elon's creditors after a bankruptcy.
skuthus 7y ago
OK, boomer. But in all seriousness, I disagree wholeheartedly. Space is viable for businesses, and launches are going to become more and more common as time goes on. People on here claiming that SpaceX was not bootstrapped - look again. It's VC funded, but only AFTER it was bootstrapped in a garage.
nabnob 7y ago
One of the few sane comments in this post. Commenting to save, thanks.
bradneuberg 7y ago
Boo, this is unnecessarily negative. Here's some cool things that are happening in entrepreneurial space. First, SpaceX is using its reusable launch capacity combined with the StarLink constellation to dramatically lower launch costs over the next decade. Here's a nice writeup on why StarLink is important (https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/starlink-is-a-very-big-deal/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/starlink-is-a-...). SpaceX is essentially using StarLink to 'soak up' all the extra, cheap launch capacity it will produce (demand generation) until the rest of the industry wakes up to this new reality. This will help SpaceX both produce fantastic profits to fund capital investments for space endeavors while also increasing the heavy launch capacity possible to space, vastly increasing commercial opportunities in the 2020s. Another healthy space area has been nanosats and cubesats. Nanoracks (http://nanoracks.com/ http://nanoracks.com/) has created a healthy business out of the ISS launching these, while Planet Labs (https://www.planet.com/ https://www.planet.com/) has created a near-earth observation constellation that is commercially doing well using these kinds of platforms. Small launch providers for nanosats and cubesats, as well as a healthy diverse ecosystem of hardware suppliers (https://blog.bliley.com/top-20-best-cubesat-satellite-manufacturers https://blog.bliley.com/top-20-best-cubesat-satellite-manufa...), has made this an accessible area of space. Space-based manufacturing has indeed been slower to launch. The Space Shuttle did pioneering work in showing that fiber-optic cables based on something called ZBLAN could be produced in orbit (https://upward.issnationallab.org/the-race-to-manufacture-zblan/ https://upward.issnationallab.org/the-race-to-manufacture-zb...), and they are an ideal space-based manufacturing product: they are straightforward to produce in orbit, can fetch a very large price, and have a very small downmass back to earth. Made in Space has done recent pioneering work demonstrating producing ZBLAN in space (https://madeinspace.us/capabilities-and-technology/fiber-optics/ https://madeinspace.us/capabilities-and-technology/fiber-opt...). Here's a great list of other startup companies pushing forward with space based manufacturing: https://www.factoriesinspace.com/manufacturing-companies https://www.factoriesinspace.com/manufacturing-companies One of the most exciting developments is Made in Space's Archinaut project (https://madeinspace.us/capabilities-and-technology/archinaut/ https://madeinspace.us/capabilities-and-technology/archinaut...), which promises IMHO to allow us to build complex structures in space from small-fairing rockets. Significantly, NASA recently gave a large grant to Made in Space for an Archinaut demonstrator mission in the near future (https://www.engineering.com/AdvancedManufacturing/ArticleID/19344/NASA-Grants-Funding-to-Made-in-Space.aspx https://www.engineering.com/AdvancedManufacturing/ArticleID/...). Not to be crass, but the last thing we need are cynical old economy space folks who have given up on moving space forward. There is a diverse, vibrant space economy under the surface if you know where to look; it's not Apollo or O'Neill cylinders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder) in space but real companies that make real profit and move humanity forward have been quietly working behind the scenes the last two decades. Much of this is due to low-cost launch, more accessible satellite platforms like cube and nano-sats, and a NASA that is more inclined to be a market-enabler for space with programs like COTS (https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-orbital-transportation-services-cots https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-orbital-transportation-servi...), CCDEV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Development), and more. Rome wasn't built in a day.

growlist 7y ago

> (SpaceX will probably end up shutting down due to lack of lift demand, hence their polluting the sky with micro satellites now.) I guess morale is low at Arianespace these days ;)

hef19898 7y ago
Why would it? Ariane 5 is still doing reasonably good and Ariane 6 seems promising too. SpaceX needs a ton of launches to make reusable rockets financially feasible so.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- growlist 7y ago
  It was kind of a joke but come on, Arianespace's leaders have been pretty salty about SpaceX in public so clearly there is some jealousy. And as I understand it most of the oldspace launch providers aren't significantly cheaper than SpaceX even if latter operate their rockets in expendable mode.
  - hef19898 7y ago
    True that! The one thing that really sets SpaceX and Ariane Space apart if development. Less the capabilities but more the amount of politics and red tape. In that area SpaceX has a clear advantage.
    - growlist 7y ago
      I really wish Arianespace were smashing it like SpaceX. No doubt they have great engineers, if they could just be let off the leash a little.

diminoten 7y ago

Don't we need a bunch of "bad" investments to get the space tech to move forward faster? Like, maybe this guy will convince a bunch of "fools" to invest, and in his path to failure, he'll find some more efficient way to... something. Or are you saying, even if everything was efficient, there are things you can't fix, like how far away valuable stuff is, that makes it all pretty pointless?

amayne 7y ago

> SpaceX will probably end up shutting down due to lack of lift demand... The launch business is tiny compared to what's possible when you can do large volume industrial research and manufacturing in microgravity. I take the approach that space right now is like the computer industry in the early 1970s. We're about to have our microprocessor moment with fully reusable rockets. This means ridiculously cheap access to space which could yield entirely new industries in biotech, semiconductors and other areas of research we haven't even imagined. We're only done the tiniest amount of research so far and have found put that you can grow much larger and purer crystals, antibiotics work in unpredicted ways and a hundred other examples of interesting areas of research. If launch costs are commodity, then do something with all that capacity. Cisco may have struggled when computer server prices fell, but that made companies like Google and Facebook possible. We're now living in a world that benefits tremendously from one thing becoming a commodity.

rtkwe 7y ago
The thing is even if SpaceX gets actually cost down to ridiculously low prices it's still going to be extremely expensive and very very hard. We have practically speaking no experience manufacturing in space, the only thing that's been made have been small test quantities of ZBLAN fiber and until we get asteroid mining and refining setup the extra cost of lifting all the raw materials is going to make manufacturing in space only viable for a few small things with high margins of return.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  At least for semiconductors you won't have to haul up all that high vacuum equipment :)
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    You'd still need it LEO at 500km varies between 10-700 nPa and UHV is a max of 100 nPa. It's too variable an environment to really develop chips in due to space weather and the variability in the extreme thin reaches of the atmosphere in Earth orbit.

fsloth 7y ago

" lift is now a commodity ... SpaceX will probably end up shutting down" I take this that the price of orbital launch is insignificant compared to the cost of preparing and operating the cargo. Are there any signs that space born cargo with lower capex and opex (and hence whose operators would have higher price sensitivity) would arrive?

taneq 7y ago
The cost of the payload is huge today because the launch is so expensive that you have to make the most of it. If it's $25/kg to low Earth orbit, you can afford to be a lot more experimental and take a lot more risks with your cargo.

xz0r 7y ago

> installing ADS-B. Can you tell me a bit more about it?

vectorEQ 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance_%E2%80%93_broadcast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillan...

mikojan 7y ago

> I've worked in aerospace and have been reading HN for over a decade. > Here's some adult advice, for both the OP and HN in general. > Space is a waste of time unless you're a government or a bored billionaire. Objects are too far, and lift is now a commodity. > (SpaceX will probably end up shutting down due to lack of lift demand, hence their polluting the sky with micro satellites now.) You are misidentifying the source of revenue. Space, like military equipment, is an incredible market for corporations equipped to operate in. There are huge government subsidies, private-public partnerships designed to assist research and development, there's an unsatiable market to offload excess production in (government demand), you get to profit off of commercial spin-off products. SpaceX is on the receiving end of all of this. Furthermore, the public does not care what it is that you are doing exactly. That's important because of all the tax money involved. The moment your enterprise has a significant impact on the public ordinary people will scrutinize it. That's bad for business. Even more so when your business depends the government which is somewhat accountable to the public.

zpeti 7y ago

This shows a complete lack of knowledge about how most industries evolved in the past. Every industry was in the phase you describe the space industry in. History is full of example of industries where no-one could imagine the potential before it got really cheap. From mobile phones to cars. Once something gets cheap the opportunities explode. Which is SpaceX's plan. At $20/kg a space hotel would be possible to build, even a moon hotel. I'd imagine at some point it becomes seriously viable as an alternative to a luxury holiday in the maldives. I for one am interested. Or - apparently much better repeaters can be built in 0g for fiber optic cables. Already there's talk of factories in space. Did you think of that one? But it's almost silly to speculate because it's impossible to imagine the industries that will be created.

imtringued 7y ago
Exactly, you're not going to have the first mover advantage if you are waiting for someone to be ahead of you.
- wasdfff 7y ago
  But if you are someone like lockhead you have money to wait for spacex to fizzle out, headhunt their talent, and outperform with your military industrial complex connections and 70 years of working in aerospace.
  - zpeti 7y ago
    Yeah, just like Ford and GM waited out Tesla to fail... (and SpaceX is profitable as opposed to Tesla)
    - dobleboble 7y ago
      Tesla made a profit of $143 million in Q3 2019 on record deliveries https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/10/tesla-made-a-profit-of-143-million-in-q3-2019-on-record-deliveries/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/10/tesla-made-a-profit-of-...

ryanmercer 7y ago

>Space is a waste of time unless you're a government or a bored billionaire. Unless you are 100% self sufficient, you rely on space to live. Freight logistics are reliant on space (GPS), farming (GPS optimized planting and harvesting), air travel (GPS), using your phone to get directions somewhere (GPS). Then all of the weather satellites, satellites are rapdily gaining use in archaeology revealing unknown sites far faster than boots on the ground can, etc etc so on and so forth. Gobs and gobs of money are waiting to be made in space with current and future technology. Some quick near-future possibilities: - Space tourism - Seed vaults on the moon for companies and countries - Archival data storage on the moon - All matter of material sciences research and possibly production of materials with qualities that we can not replicate in an Earth-based production facility (think crystals and crystalline structures) - Extremely isolated biological related experiments, such as genetic engineering, which could be be done in complete safety in a self-contained habitat remotely, with no chance of any of the material spreading outside of the lab unlike on earth

jfk13 7y ago
> Unless you are 100% self sufficient, you rely on space to live. Freight logistics are reliant on space (GPS), farming (GPS optimized planting and harvesting), air travel (GPS), using your phone to get directions somewhere (GPS). Perhaps you don't recall, but we somehow managed to deliver freight, grow crops, fly planes and find our way to places long before GPS satellites were a thing. Space-based systems may be a great convenience at times, but they're hardly essential to my life.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  >Perhaps you don't recall, but we somehow managed to deliver freight, grow crops, fly planes and find our way to places long before GPS satellites were a thing. Yes and if you are older than 30 you likely remember when everything said "4-6 weeks delivery" not "same day" or even "2-3 day delivery'. That's right, even in the 1990s if you ordered something 4-6 weeks was a perfectly acceptable (and realistic) delivery time frame. You also had a fraction of the flights that you do now. GPS for aviation right out of the gate increases fuel efficiency of any given flight as well as safety. GPS went fully operational in 1995, with 2 billion less mouths to feed as well. Take GPS away from farming and you'll plant less efficiently and crop losses will increase both of which will drive prices up. A lot of the larger farms actually heavily rely on automation, assisted by GPS, for both planting and harvesting. This is a single technology using 24 satellites that is space-based, that has affected virtually every industry in the world. Imagine what other space-based or space-derived technologies might one day exist. Imagine what amount of change they might make on civilization. Imagine what sort of profits they might generate.

Symmetry 7y ago

Companies don't stop operations because they're too successful. It might be that demand for launch services won't rise with falling prices the way that SpaceX expects. That might mean they won't recoup the costs of developing the Starship and they go bankrupt. But space launch is still a $100s of billions a year industry and whoever is running SpaceX will still be making that, even if it's Elon's creditors after a bankruptcy.

skuthus 7y ago

OK, boomer. But in all seriousness, I disagree wholeheartedly. Space is viable for businesses, and launches are going to become more and more common as time goes on. People on here claiming that SpaceX was not bootstrapped - look again. It's VC funded, but only AFTER it was bootstrapped in a garage.

nabnob 7y ago

One of the few sane comments in this post. Commenting to save, thanks.

bradneuberg 7y ago

Boo, this is unnecessarily negative. Here's some cool things that are happening in entrepreneurial space. First, SpaceX is using its reusable launch capacity combined with the StarLink constellation to dramatically lower launch costs over the next decade. Here's a nice writeup on why StarLink is important (https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/starlink-is-a-very-big-deal/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/starlink-is-a-...). SpaceX is essentially using StarLink to 'soak up' all the extra, cheap launch capacity it will produce (demand generation) until the rest of the industry wakes up to this new reality. This will help SpaceX both produce fantastic profits to fund capital investments for space endeavors while also increasing the heavy launch capacity possible to space, vastly increasing commercial opportunities in the 2020s. Another healthy space area has been nanosats and cubesats. Nanoracks (http://nanoracks.com/ http://nanoracks.com/) has created a healthy business out of the ISS launching these, while Planet Labs (https://www.planet.com/ https://www.planet.com/) has created a near-earth observation constellation that is commercially doing well using these kinds of platforms. Small launch providers for nanosats and cubesats, as well as a healthy diverse ecosystem of hardware suppliers (https://blog.bliley.com/top-20-best-cubesat-satellite-manufacturers https://blog.bliley.com/top-20-best-cubesat-satellite-manufa...), has made this an accessible area of space. Space-based manufacturing has indeed been slower to launch. The Space Shuttle did pioneering work in showing that fiber-optic cables based on something called ZBLAN could be produced in orbit (https://upward.issnationallab.org/the-race-to-manufacture-zblan/ https://upward.issnationallab.org/the-race-to-manufacture-zb...), and they are an ideal space-based manufacturing product: they are straightforward to produce in orbit, can fetch a very large price, and have a very small downmass back to earth. Made in Space has done recent pioneering work demonstrating producing ZBLAN in space (https://madeinspace.us/capabilities-and-technology/fiber-optics/ https://madeinspace.us/capabilities-and-technology/fiber-opt...). Here's a great list of other startup companies pushing forward with space based manufacturing: https://www.factoriesinspace.com/manufacturing-companies https://www.factoriesinspace.com/manufacturing-companies One of the most exciting developments is Made in Space's Archinaut project (https://madeinspace.us/capabilities-and-technology/archinaut/ https://madeinspace.us/capabilities-and-technology/archinaut...), which promises IMHO to allow us to build complex structures in space from small-fairing rockets. Significantly, NASA recently gave a large grant to Made in Space for an Archinaut demonstrator mission in the near future (https://www.engineering.com/AdvancedManufacturing/ArticleID/19344/NASA-Grants-Funding-to-Made-in-Space.aspx https://www.engineering.com/AdvancedManufacturing/ArticleID/...). Not to be crass, but the last thing we need are cynical old economy space folks who have given up on moving space forward. There is a diverse, vibrant space economy under the surface if you know where to look; it's not Apollo or O'Neill cylinders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder) in space but real companies that make real profit and move humanity forward have been quietly working behind the scenes the last two decades. Much of this is due to low-cost launch, more accessible satellite platforms like cube and nano-sats, and a NASA that is more inclined to be a market-enabler for space with programs like COTS (https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-orbital-transportation-services-cots https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-orbital-transportation-servi...), CCDEV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Development), and more. Rome wasn't built in a day.