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Alternative title: Billionaire buys himself three new space missions. This is obviously great for SpaceX, as Jared Isaacman will be helping to finance SpaceX's

• api 5y ago
  It's amazing how much negativity this gathers compared to the more typical "billionaire buys yet another super yacht" or "billionaire throws loads of money at a dubious political think tank." It seems like people hate billionaires more when they invest money in productive things vs. when they piss it away on bullshit.
  • cloutchaser 5y ago
    A mixture of envy and cognitive dissonance about billionaires being evil exploitative rich people
    • beaconstudios 5y ago
      I think a lot of people view the billionaire space race as just another version of them comparing super-yachts. At least with the super-yachts, nobody's pretending it's an altruistic endeavour.
      • agar 5y ago
        Calling it a "billionaire space race" always makes me laugh. If orbit is a marathon, two billionaires have made it to about the 10 mile mark, while the third one has run 112 successful marathons in a row.
        • beaconstudios 5y ago
          Yeah, SpaceX is a long way in the lead, and much less like a vanity project compared to the others.
      • api 5y ago
        Super yachts are not pushing the boundaries of what is fundamentally possible and contributing to the opening of a new frontier or building infrastructure that helps us more profoundly understand our universe. That's a distinction people are really missing here. Super yachts aren't doing that much to push anything forward besides super yachts. Maybe a bit of interesting tech for ocean going vessels gets prototyped there but nothing anywhere close to the magnitude of what SpaceX and Blue Origin are doing.
        • beaconstudios 5y ago
          How does commercial space flight build infrastructure to help us understand the universe? I don't think space exploration is super important at this point in our civilisational development. I get the aesthetic appeal from scifi but lack of multiplanetary life isn't really a bottleneck for us right now. So it's not all that different from flexing with yachts. I like Elon's more environment oriented projects (solarcity and tesla) but broadly speaking he's a pretty insufferable tech bro billionaire.
          • api 5y ago
            Commercial space flight leads to innovations and economies of scale that radically reduce the cost of accessing space, which means we can do a lot more space science for less money. Reusable rockets alone are incredible in this regard, and if Starship really flies then we will be able to put up space telescopes much larger than Hubble and JWST at significantly less cost. Air travel was only for the rich and governments at first too, but if they hadn't funded it it would never have become cheaper. I don't accept the "we have too many problems on Earth" argument about space, though I do understand where people are coming from. I think if we wait for major problems to be solved here, we'll never go. There will always be huge problems. That's life. That and space is far less than 1% of global GDP. If we were spending loads of money on space people might have a point, but we spend more on porn than NASA. (Not really exaggerating... look it up...) As for Elon being an "intolerable tech bro," I don't care. He's human. Lots of amazingly productive or innovative people also have huge personal flaws. Look at some of our favorite musicians.
  • altacc 5y ago
    I think some people add a lot of that negativity themselves as they read. Anyway, this article is not about somebody buying a yacht, so it would have been odd to bring that up.
• knownjorbist 5y ago
  The first launch will happen this year using an existing Falcon 9 rocket.
• usrusr 5y ago
  The presentation does have a certain "too rich for Copenhagen Suborbitals" vibe going on...