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Elon Musk is in dire need of huge and profitable space-based businesses to justify his big investment in Starship, which is way overkill for any existing space
by modeless 5y ago
Elon Musk is in dire need of huge and profitable space-based businesses to justify his big investment in Starship, which is way overkill for any existing space business. And he is incredibly motivated to solve climate issues and big into solar power specifically. And he has repeatedly pursued far-fetched pie-in-the-sky business ideas that are straight out of sci-fi. This business would be perfect for him in about ten different ways, so the fact that he's not doing it means to me that he is completely convinced that it is absolutely impossible to do profitably with current or near-future technology.
- polemic 5y agoThat's.. a good point. Reminds me of the moonlanding counterfactual: if the USA did not land on the moon, don't you think the Soviet's would've said something about it? Or was the cold-war fabricated as well.
- generalizations 5y agoApparently, skepticism of the moon landing having happened is much more prevalent in Russia than in the US.
- cassepipe 5y agoI do not think the moonlanding was faked and I really like that argument but still I do wonder what were the real level of intel (and level of confidence they had in that Intel) each of the two world powers had on each other at the time when the USSR existed. Also it could have happened that the USSR decide to propagate that the moon landing was fake for propaganda's purposes.
- beecafe 5y agoWe need large scale coherent perfect absorbers [0] before we can do long distance power beaming. Other than that with a solar pumped laser (spread out over many m^2 on the ground to reduce the death-ray-ness) you could get decent efficiency. [0] basically a backwards laser. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_perfect_absorber https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_perfect_absorber