20 ms·

If there is any corporate entity I'd happy giving public funding, it would be SpaceX. Their end goal is to settle Mars and potentially other bodies in the solar

If there is any corporate entity I'd happy giving public funding, it would be SpaceX. Their end goal is to settle Mars and potentially other bodies in the solar system. Compared with the absurd amounts of money wasted on defense contractors, I am perfectly happy with funding SpaceX in every way possible.

sneak 6y ago
SpaceX is also a defense contractor. https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/10/05/nro-reveals-plans-for-previously-undisclosed-launch-with-spacex-this-month/ https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/10/05/nro-reveals-plans-for-...
- remarkEon 6y ago
  Good. They seem to be the first defense contractor in a long time, maybe ever, with a specific eye on controlling costs. It may not be this way forever, but for now the taxpayers should get the savings where they can.
  - vsareto 6y ago
    Maybe they can relax the work/life balance now
    - tF73d78kq8t3R6n 6y ago
      That’d cause their costs to skyrocket.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > Maybe they can relax the work/life balance now Nobody should feel forced to work more than they want to. (The abjectly lazy aside.) But we should also be free to work as hard as we want. And to freely associate with those with similar preferences. I used to love burning both ends of the candle. It was invigorating. I didn't ruin my health for it. And it gave me life lessons I could not have learned any other way. The fruits of those years, as well as finding other interests, nudged me to a different preference. Which involved new (or changed) colleagues. I don't see why, to be satisfied with one arrangement, we must denigrate the other--they're just different solutions. Work and life don't balance on a scale. The dynamic is more like homeostasis. One's stable ratio depends on a variety factors, extrinsic and from within, and what makes one person happy will be ruinous or lethargic for another.
    - Strom 6y ago
      > Maybe they can relax the work/life balance now Surely SpaceX employees are there by choice. How many of their employees have no better work/life balance employment choices? I would guess a rare few.
  - serf 6y ago
    1) Every defense contractor mentions interest in controlling costs; they bid against each other with these specific values in mind. The problem is over-run and underestimation, and the govts' lack of flexibility with regards to contract termination in most instances. 2) Defense spending has been historically hovering between 15-25 percent in the United States. 'Taxpayer savings' does not, nor has it ever, indicated more money in the hands of the taxpayer -- it indicates how many new projects will be budgeted. In other words : The tax payer saves nothing, but the military is given extra toys within the same budget. Now, whether or not you are for or against the further arming of our troops and allied fighters -- that's a personal question.. but let's not pretend this equates to saved cash for the citizenry.
    - bumby 6y ago
      >The problem is over-run and underestimation I would argue this is a bug for the taxpayers but a feature for the contractor. Much of their profit comes from change-orders after they win a poorly administered low-bid contract. It seems the M.O. often is "bid low to get the contract, and then argue/nickel-and-dime the taxpayer to pad the profit margin"
- smithza 6y ago
  SpaceX is a defense contractor that is disrupting the market considerably. While much of the existing industry is slowly adopting modern development strategies (design, manufacturing, etc. in SW and HW), SpaceX is leading the agile front here. More distinctly, SpaceX has the corporate intention of interplanetary exploration and settling. SpaceX's integration into the established defense/NASA business table will help this end come to fruition.
- hobofan 6y ago
  Is there any launch provider that is not a defense contractor?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
staunch 6y ago
Imagine what we could do if it was possible to identify and fund a thousand Elon Musks with hundreds of millions each? He's eliminating gas vehicles, improving solar adoption, fixing rural internet, improving space science, making life interplanetary, etc. It may be that Elon Musk types are extremely rare but I doubt they're as nearly as rare as most people think and we only need a thousand out of billions. The thing that makes him extremely rare, I think, is that he lucked upon a windfall of $200+ million from PayPal, a startup success that he had almost nothing to do with. Now that I think about it, an Elon Musk Prize funded and designed by Elon Musk would be viable. His current net worth could fund 600+ Elon Musks. Elon Musk could create more Elon Musks...it's almost too simple!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- notthemessiah 6y ago
  He also lucked out on inheriting fortunes from his parents diamond mines. But, there are lots of people who inherit fortunes and do nothing with it. There are lots of people with drive and intelligence comparable to Elon Musk who don't have the privilege necessary to accomplish anything. Seems we're still a long way away from a meritocracy.
  - nickik 6y ago
    This old bullshit anti-Musk propaganda nonsense again. Some people will just do anything to prove that actually there are no special people. Everything is just privilege, we would have 100s of Elon Musk if only not for income inequality. And if reality doesn't actually line up with that, hey why not just invent a bunch of stuff. We can do this infinity. Somebody that grew up poor in the US has success. Well, he had food as a child, 100s of starving African could have done the same, but 'who don't have the privilege necessary'. So lets not give credit to anybody ever. If you were not a slave in Somilia at 13 that swam across the ocean by yourself and then build a new technology from the ground up, you deserve nothing and you are just one of those no good privileged people.
  - Reedx 6y ago
dkdk8283 6y ago
I wouldn’t characterize defense spending as waste. China is a significant threat, for example, and maintaining superiority over them is of national importance IMO.
- bawolff 6y ago
  I guess we are in cold war 2.0!
- Retric 6y ago
  Some defense spending is reasonable, but we could get a lot while limiting things to say 200 - 300 Billion per year. That’s 4-6 times what the UK spends for example and they have 2 aircraft carriers etc.
  - aroch 6y ago
    Calling the British navy a battle ready fleet would be rather a positive attitude. Their submarine and surface ship captains don't know how to navigate, running aground and into other boats. And their aircraft carriers don't even have enough crew/planes and will deploy US Marine Corp units to meet their full complement. It will likely take the UK 15-20 years for the two new Carriers to be at full operating capability (2009-TBD, probably 2024 at the earliest). That being said, the US could stand to spend less on military funding.
    - saberience 6y ago
      What are you saying about UK ships not knowing how to navigate? The US navy is far, far worse in that respect, the British navy hasn't had anything near as bad as this happen anytime recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Fitzgerald_and_MV_ACX_Crystal_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Fitzgerald_and_MV_ACX_Crys...
      - aroch 6y ago
        Over the last few years there have been several (4-5) instances of British subs nearly striking surface ships in their home waters. Also running aground right outside their home port in 2010. Not exactly reassuring. The US Navy is much bigger and has global operations. They're just as guilty of being careless but they also have proven war fighting capabilities. No one is asking the British to sail by as a show of power and solidarity.
peey 6y ago
"Mars Terraforming Not Possible Using Present-Day Technology" https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terraforming/ https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terrafo... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0529-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0529-6
- markdown 6y ago
  If we can't even stop our own planet from warming...
  - cromwellian 6y ago
    It's not an either-or. This canard comes up a lot. The US federal government invests in an enormous number of things, think of it as a huge portfolio. NASA's budget is less than 0.5% of the federal budget, it's existence won't harm policies needed to mitigate climate change (e.g. carbon taxes), and indeed, a chunk of NASA's investment helps climate science.
    - markdown 6y ago
      Oh I didn't mean what you think I meant. I'm sorry I wasn't more clear. I'm not one of those "why spend money on space when humans are starving on Earth" people. My point was more about the actual technology required to terraform a planet. Why talk about terraforming Mars when our own would be saved by the same non-existent tech.
      - cromwellian 6y ago
        Oh sorry, my bad. I'm just triggered from seeing that argument so much. I agree, we need to terraform earth first. 1) stop the damage from getting worse 2) if it doesn't reverse itself, we may need geo-engineering, carbon capture, orbital mirrors, etc
- Forge36 6y ago
  And that's fine in the future maybe it's possible. Parent reply doesn't mention terraforming.
bumby 6y ago
I don't know if those who would argue against funding SpaceX take the "either traditional defense contractors or SpaceX" bait. I think a major argument is that there are better ways to spend the money here on Earth. I.e., it's nobler and more feasible to protect and improve this planet than settle another one. As a former space industry worker, I don't know if I subscribe to that, but that's the best steelmanning I can come up with.
- derekp7 6y ago
  The counter argument to that, is that it is worth while to do things, even if there are other things that are worth while to do. For any single item one can pick out "Why spend on X, when Y has a need", someone else can come along and say "Why spend on Y when Z has a need".
  - bumby 6y ago
    I think that's exactly the point. It's a disagreement about what gets priority to get optimized. The problem is exacerbated when there are multiple giant sinks for resources (e.g., colonizing Mars, combating climate change). In a world of limited resources, some things have to get sidelined.
    - aquadrop 6y ago
      I think colonizing Mars is pretty small sink compared to climate change and many others. With how SpaceX going, I think for the first stage it's comparable to something like one modern Olympic games event cost.
      - bumby 6y ago
        >first stage it's comparable to something like one modern Olympic games event cost. To continue on with the steelmanning, the first stage is probably a drop in a bucket compared to the entire effort. How much freight do you think it would take to colonize a planet with a population large enough to be relatively self-sufficient? Just the payload cost would be huge and that's just to park it (not to assemble, maintain etc.) I think the steelman argument would be to focus on things immediately needed, like healthcare, before space adventurism. Edit: to put a finer point on it, the commercial space industry is essentially subsidized by the government precisely because it's not currently economical. In other words, if the government wasn't a customer there would be no commercial space industry. There's nothing inherently wrong with this because it's how high-risk industries often get started (e.g., the airlines), but the fact that it is subsidized by the government points to the fact that it is (currently) inherently uneconomical
akarma 6y ago
Also, when a company has such an impactful goal that will, if successful, lead to it having power, it feels important that it's at least somewhat tied to the government. I'm very capitalistic, but if SpaceX successfully colonizes Mars and builds factories there, I can imagine some frightening scenarios where it has considerable control over the U.S. rather than the U.S. having control over it.
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Musk is pretty clearly in the "my way or the high way" school of governance.
Koshkin 6y ago
Yes, sending your enemies to Mars is the best defense for sure. Nobody in their right mind would voluntarily spend the rest of their lives in a can filled with a few cubic feet of recycled air.
joecool1029 6y ago
While I absolutely agree that defense contractor spending is an abhorrent waste of public funds, this is a bad take. Literally every company in this space (ISP's, and more so ISP's that utilize satellites) have used it as a platform to grift public funds. Examples include Lightsquared, Iridium, Globalstar, and the worst of all, DISH) SpaceX has significantly reduced the cost of building a satellite ISP but you need to consider the history here and the other players that have already cost American citizens a shitload of wasted money and resource. If the FCC believed they should give assistance to SpaceX, it should have been in the form of access to the spectrum Charlie Ergen has been squatting over at DISH making the same promises SpaceX is doing right now. For those unaware of Ergan's history, the FCC for the first time decided to give a light wrist slap over setting up a constellation of fake shell corporations to bid on spectrum that included rural and small carrier subsidies. DISH has blown every build-out deadline and it's set back terrestrial carriers for years now. There were two they completely blew off that came due this year, and the only purpose they served was as an excuse to let the Sprint/TMUS merger happen, where previously TMUS had been calling out their business practices. I'm aware every Elon fanboy is going to wax poetic about how it won't be the same, but I'd caution you to consider SolarCity and what a public funds debacle that has been. There's a history of making big promises in areas and leaving a mess. Running an ISP is an easy to understand business model, either be the only option in an area or provide better service (and/or price) then incumbents. As others in this thread have said, there's already a shitload of capital flowing around, so why should this capital come from the public. Why didn't Elon just run another 'Deposit $100 to get in line for Starlink!' As it stands most of the US is stuck with shit ISP's because of a lack of competition, and giving subsidies to incumbents (like Charter) are only going to enrich them and further entrench their monopolies. SpaceX didn't launch this service as a practical or sensible business model for them, they already get paid to launch other telecommunications equipment into space, they are doing this to keep on the government, the public's tit.
- rlt 6y ago
  > Literally every company in this space have used it as a platform to grift public funds. > they are doing this to keep on the government, the public's tit $1B is a fraction of what SpaceX, and Morgan Stanley among others, believe they can make from Starlink: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/22/morgan-stanleyz-spacex-to-be-100-billion-company-due-to-starlink-starship.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/22/mor... I think this time it really is different. SpaceX has already reduced launch cost by an order of magnitude, and if Starship is successful another 1-2 orders of magnitude. This gives them a huge advantage over other LEO constellation attempts. I don’t think this money is necessary for their success but if the money is there for the taking why wouldn’t they take it?
mssundaram 6y ago
> Mars .... Compared with the absurd amounts of money wasted on defense contractors Couldn't we spend absurd amounts of money on fixing Earth instead? Surely it's easier than starting from even less resources and livable environment than Mars. There is a cultural myth in New Age communities that humans decimated Mars and came to Earth after, or something like that. We should fix Earth first
- Strom 6y ago
  > Couldn't we spend absurd amounts of money on fixing Earth instead? We're already spending more than 99.99% of our money on Earth. Are you advocating for a strict 100%?
- sumedh 6y ago
  > Couldn't we spend absurd amounts of money on fixing Earth instead? The US can use some of the trillions it wasted(and still wasting) on middle east wars for fixing Earth.
- maccam94 6y ago
  There's not much we can do if Earth is hit with another giant asteroid. Or some massive biological or radiological disaster. Or some other type of impossible to predict or mitigate disasters that could render Earth uninhabitable for humans. Musk's goal is to make the human race multi-planetary, not escape to Mars. Just as you should back up your critical data more than one hard drive, or run redundant servers to ensure your service runs reliably, populating multiple planets would ensure the continuity of the human race should some disaster befall us on Earth.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
sjg007 6y ago
Settling Mars is a waste of time. Much better to save our current planet.
dingaling 6y ago
> Compared with the absurd amounts of money wasted on defense contractors SpaceX tenders for and receives contracts from the DoD. Such as one in August for Space Command launches and another in October for Earth-bound delivery of payloads. So they're a defence contractor.

sneak 6y ago

SpaceX is also a defense contractor. https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/10/05/nro-reveals-plans-for-previously-undisclosed-launch-with-spacex-this-month/ https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/10/05/nro-reveals-plans-for-...

remarkEon 6y ago
Good. They seem to be the first defense contractor in a long time, maybe ever, with a specific eye on controlling costs. It may not be this way forever, but for now the taxpayers should get the savings where they can.
- vsareto 6y ago
  Maybe they can relax the work/life balance now
  - tF73d78kq8t3R6n 6y ago
    That’d cause their costs to skyrocket.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > Maybe they can relax the work/life balance now Nobody should feel forced to work more than they want to. (The abjectly lazy aside.) But we should also be free to work as hard as we want. And to freely associate with those with similar preferences. I used to love burning both ends of the candle. It was invigorating. I didn't ruin my health for it. And it gave me life lessons I could not have learned any other way. The fruits of those years, as well as finding other interests, nudged me to a different preference. Which involved new (or changed) colleagues. I don't see why, to be satisfied with one arrangement, we must denigrate the other--they're just different solutions. Work and life don't balance on a scale. The dynamic is more like homeostasis. One's stable ratio depends on a variety factors, extrinsic and from within, and what makes one person happy will be ruinous or lethargic for another.
  - Strom 6y ago
    > Maybe they can relax the work/life balance now Surely SpaceX employees are there by choice. How many of their employees have no better work/life balance employment choices? I would guess a rare few.
- serf 6y ago
  1) Every defense contractor mentions interest in controlling costs; they bid against each other with these specific values in mind. The problem is over-run and underestimation, and the govts' lack of flexibility with regards to contract termination in most instances. 2) Defense spending has been historically hovering between 15-25 percent in the United States. 'Taxpayer savings' does not, nor has it ever, indicated more money in the hands of the taxpayer -- it indicates how many new projects will be budgeted. In other words : The tax payer saves nothing, but the military is given extra toys within the same budget. Now, whether or not you are for or against the further arming of our troops and allied fighters -- that's a personal question.. but let's not pretend this equates to saved cash for the citizenry.
  - bumby 6y ago
    >The problem is over-run and underestimation I would argue this is a bug for the taxpayers but a feature for the contractor. Much of their profit comes from change-orders after they win a poorly administered low-bid contract. It seems the M.O. often is "bid low to get the contract, and then argue/nickel-and-dime the taxpayer to pad the profit margin"
smithza 6y ago
SpaceX is a defense contractor that is disrupting the market considerably. While much of the existing industry is slowly adopting modern development strategies (design, manufacturing, etc. in SW and HW), SpaceX is leading the agile front here. More distinctly, SpaceX has the corporate intention of interplanetary exploration and settling. SpaceX's integration into the established defense/NASA business table will help this end come to fruition.
hobofan 6y ago
Is there any launch provider that is not a defense contractor?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

staunch 6y ago

Imagine what we could do if it was possible to identify and fund a thousand Elon Musks with hundreds of millions each? He's eliminating gas vehicles, improving solar adoption, fixing rural internet, improving space science, making life interplanetary, etc. It may be that Elon Musk types are extremely rare but I doubt they're as nearly as rare as most people think and we only need a thousand out of billions. The thing that makes him extremely rare, I think, is that he lucked upon a windfall of $200+ million from PayPal, a startup success that he had almost nothing to do with. Now that I think about it, an Elon Musk Prize funded and designed by Elon Musk would be viable. His current net worth could fund 600+ Elon Musks. Elon Musk could create more Elon Musks...it's almost too simple!

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
notthemessiah 6y ago
He also lucked out on inheriting fortunes from his parents diamond mines. But, there are lots of people who inherit fortunes and do nothing with it. There are lots of people with drive and intelligence comparable to Elon Musk who don't have the privilege necessary to accomplish anything. Seems we're still a long way away from a meritocracy.
- nickik 6y ago
  This old bullshit anti-Musk propaganda nonsense again. Some people will just do anything to prove that actually there are no special people. Everything is just privilege, we would have 100s of Elon Musk if only not for income inequality. And if reality doesn't actually line up with that, hey why not just invent a bunch of stuff. We can do this infinity. Somebody that grew up poor in the US has success. Well, he had food as a child, 100s of starving African could have done the same, but 'who don't have the privilege necessary'. So lets not give credit to anybody ever. If you were not a slave in Somilia at 13 that swam across the ocean by yourself and then build a new technology from the ground up, you deserve nothing and you are just one of those no good privileged people.
- Reedx 6y ago

dkdk8283 6y ago

I wouldn’t characterize defense spending as waste. China is a significant threat, for example, and maintaining superiority over them is of national importance IMO.

bawolff 6y ago
I guess we are in cold war 2.0!
Retric 6y ago
Some defense spending is reasonable, but we could get a lot while limiting things to say 200 - 300 Billion per year. That’s 4-6 times what the UK spends for example and they have 2 aircraft carriers etc.
- aroch 6y ago
  Calling the British navy a battle ready fleet would be rather a positive attitude. Their submarine and surface ship captains don't know how to navigate, running aground and into other boats. And their aircraft carriers don't even have enough crew/planes and will deploy US Marine Corp units to meet their full complement. It will likely take the UK 15-20 years for the two new Carriers to be at full operating capability (2009-TBD, probably 2024 at the earliest). That being said, the US could stand to spend less on military funding.
  - saberience 6y ago
    What are you saying about UK ships not knowing how to navigate? The US navy is far, far worse in that respect, the British navy hasn't had anything near as bad as this happen anytime recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Fitzgerald_and_MV_ACX_Crystal_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Fitzgerald_and_MV_ACX_Crys...
    - aroch 6y ago
      Over the last few years there have been several (4-5) instances of British subs nearly striking surface ships in their home waters. Also running aground right outside their home port in 2010. Not exactly reassuring. The US Navy is much bigger and has global operations. They're just as guilty of being careless but they also have proven war fighting capabilities. No one is asking the British to sail by as a show of power and solidarity.

peey 6y ago

"Mars Terraforming Not Possible Using Present-Day Technology" https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terraforming/ https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terrafo... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0529-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0529-6

markdown 6y ago
If we can't even stop our own planet from warming...
- cromwellian 6y ago
  It's not an either-or. This canard comes up a lot. The US federal government invests in an enormous number of things, think of it as a huge portfolio. NASA's budget is less than 0.5% of the federal budget, it's existence won't harm policies needed to mitigate climate change (e.g. carbon taxes), and indeed, a chunk of NASA's investment helps climate science.
  - markdown 6y ago
    Oh I didn't mean what you think I meant. I'm sorry I wasn't more clear. I'm not one of those "why spend money on space when humans are starving on Earth" people. My point was more about the actual technology required to terraform a planet. Why talk about terraforming Mars when our own would be saved by the same non-existent tech.
    - cromwellian 6y ago
      Oh sorry, my bad. I'm just triggered from seeing that argument so much. I agree, we need to terraform earth first. 1) stop the damage from getting worse 2) if it doesn't reverse itself, we may need geo-engineering, carbon capture, orbital mirrors, etc
Forge36 6y ago
And that's fine in the future maybe it's possible. Parent reply doesn't mention terraforming.

bumby 6y ago

I don't know if those who would argue against funding SpaceX take the "either traditional defense contractors or SpaceX" bait. I think a major argument is that there are better ways to spend the money here on Earth. I.e., it's nobler and more feasible to protect and improve this planet than settle another one. As a former space industry worker, I don't know if I subscribe to that, but that's the best steelmanning I can come up with.

derekp7 6y ago
The counter argument to that, is that it is worth while to do things, even if there are other things that are worth while to do. For any single item one can pick out "Why spend on X, when Y has a need", someone else can come along and say "Why spend on Y when Z has a need".
- bumby 6y ago
  I think that's exactly the point. It's a disagreement about what gets priority to get optimized. The problem is exacerbated when there are multiple giant sinks for resources (e.g., colonizing Mars, combating climate change). In a world of limited resources, some things have to get sidelined.
  - aquadrop 6y ago
    I think colonizing Mars is pretty small sink compared to climate change and many others. With how SpaceX going, I think for the first stage it's comparable to something like one modern Olympic games event cost.
    - bumby 6y ago
      >first stage it's comparable to something like one modern Olympic games event cost. To continue on with the steelmanning, the first stage is probably a drop in a bucket compared to the entire effort. How much freight do you think it would take to colonize a planet with a population large enough to be relatively self-sufficient? Just the payload cost would be huge and that's just to park it (not to assemble, maintain etc.) I think the steelman argument would be to focus on things immediately needed, like healthcare, before space adventurism. Edit: to put a finer point on it, the commercial space industry is essentially subsidized by the government precisely because it's not currently economical. In other words, if the government wasn't a customer there would be no commercial space industry. There's nothing inherently wrong with this because it's how high-risk industries often get started (e.g., the airlines), but the fact that it is subsidized by the government points to the fact that it is (currently) inherently uneconomical

akarma 6y ago

Also, when a company has such an impactful goal that will, if successful, lead to it having power, it feels important that it's at least somewhat tied to the government. I'm very capitalistic, but if SpaceX successfully colonizes Mars and builds factories there, I can imagine some frightening scenarios where it has considerable control over the U.S. rather than the U.S. having control over it.

SiempreViernes 6y ago
Musk is pretty clearly in the "my way or the high way" school of governance.

Koshkin 6y ago

Yes, sending your enemies to Mars is the best defense for sure. Nobody in their right mind would voluntarily spend the rest of their lives in a can filled with a few cubic feet of recycled air.

joecool1029 6y ago

While I absolutely agree that defense contractor spending is an abhorrent waste of public funds, this is a bad take. Literally every company in this space (ISP's, and more so ISP's that utilize satellites) have used it as a platform to grift public funds. Examples include Lightsquared, Iridium, Globalstar, and the worst of all, DISH) SpaceX has significantly reduced the cost of building a satellite ISP but you need to consider the history here and the other players that have already cost American citizens a shitload of wasted money and resource. If the FCC believed they should give assistance to SpaceX, it should have been in the form of access to the spectrum Charlie Ergen has been squatting over at DISH making the same promises SpaceX is doing right now. For those unaware of Ergan's history, the FCC for the first time decided to give a light wrist slap over setting up a constellation of fake shell corporations to bid on spectrum that included rural and small carrier subsidies. DISH has blown every build-out deadline and it's set back terrestrial carriers for years now. There were two they completely blew off that came due this year, and the only purpose they served was as an excuse to let the Sprint/TMUS merger happen, where previously TMUS had been calling out their business practices. I'm aware every Elon fanboy is going to wax poetic about how it won't be the same, but I'd caution you to consider SolarCity and what a public funds debacle that has been. There's a history of making big promises in areas and leaving a mess. Running an ISP is an easy to understand business model, either be the only option in an area or provide better service (and/or price) then incumbents. As others in this thread have said, there's already a shitload of capital flowing around, so why should this capital come from the public. Why didn't Elon just run another 'Deposit $100 to get in line for Starlink!' As it stands most of the US is stuck with shit ISP's because of a lack of competition, and giving subsidies to incumbents (like Charter) are only going to enrich them and further entrench their monopolies. SpaceX didn't launch this service as a practical or sensible business model for them, they already get paid to launch other telecommunications equipment into space, they are doing this to keep on the government, the public's tit.

rlt 6y ago
> Literally every company in this space have used it as a platform to grift public funds. > they are doing this to keep on the government, the public's tit $1B is a fraction of what SpaceX, and Morgan Stanley among others, believe they can make from Starlink: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/22/morgan-stanleyz-spacex-to-be-100-billion-company-due-to-starlink-starship.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/22/mor... I think this time it really is different. SpaceX has already reduced launch cost by an order of magnitude, and if Starship is successful another 1-2 orders of magnitude. This gives them a huge advantage over other LEO constellation attempts. I don’t think this money is necessary for their success but if the money is there for the taking why wouldn’t they take it?

mssundaram 6y ago

> Mars .... Compared with the absurd amounts of money wasted on defense contractors Couldn't we spend absurd amounts of money on fixing Earth instead? Surely it's easier than starting from even less resources and livable environment than Mars. There is a cultural myth in New Age communities that humans decimated Mars and came to Earth after, or something like that. We should fix Earth first

Strom 6y ago
> Couldn't we spend absurd amounts of money on fixing Earth instead? We're already spending more than 99.99% of our money on Earth. Are you advocating for a strict 100%?
sumedh 6y ago
> Couldn't we spend absurd amounts of money on fixing Earth instead? The US can use some of the trillions it wasted(and still wasting) on middle east wars for fixing Earth.
maccam94 6y ago
There's not much we can do if Earth is hit with another giant asteroid. Or some massive biological or radiological disaster. Or some other type of impossible to predict or mitigate disasters that could render Earth uninhabitable for humans. Musk's goal is to make the human race multi-planetary, not escape to Mars. Just as you should back up your critical data more than one hard drive, or run redundant servers to ensure your service runs reliably, populating multiple planets would ensure the continuity of the human race should some disaster befall us on Earth.
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sjg007 6y ago

Settling Mars is a waste of time. Much better to save our current planet.

dingaling 6y ago

> Compared with the absurd amounts of money wasted on defense contractors SpaceX tenders for and receives contracts from the DoD. Such as one in August for Space Command launches and another in October for Earth-bound delivery of payloads. So they're a defence contractor.