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Article looses a lot of credibility when it claims that space launches make up 10% of commercial aviation. "Space launches still represent a small proportion o

Article looses a lot of credibility when it claims that space launches make up 10% of commercial aviation. "Space launches still represent a small proportion of the commercial airspace — about 10% in 2023" the stat referenced is actually that human crewed spaceflights are 10% of spaceflights...

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
From a random top link in search, > In 2022, U.S. airlines generated nearly 279.6 billion U.S. dollars in operating revenue Would absolutely believe space is a 30b industry in the US.
- rKarpinski 3y ago
  > Would absolutely believe space is a 30b industry in the US. SpaceX did 4.6b a year in revenue in 2022 [1]. But this is besides the point, they grossly mis represent the GAO report they cite for the statistic[2] which says. "The number of commercial launch and reentry operations carrying humans is a small proportion of the overall number of commercial space operations—about 10 percent in 2023—but it is growing."[2] BusinessInsider's sloppy reporting turned it into "Space launches still represent a small proportion of the commercial airspace — about 10% in 2023" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX [2] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106184 https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106184
  - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
    Number of flights, number of people, total payload weight, total gross weight, total delta-v/kg, revenue ... there's a lot of ways to measure %. Fwiw, I was counting satellite costs in my napkin math, where 30b seems reasonable. And I wasn't counting only spacex. There's obviously clearly zero chance there's even 0.001% of the number of space astronauts a year as there are people who flew, and I just refuse to believe anyone would actively be making that claim, so it seemed logical to me to search for better things to assess that space flight seems like it might possibly perhaps be 10% of.
    - rKarpinski 3y ago
      You don't need to search for anything they literally link to https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106184 https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106184 when they give that stat... they practically plagiarize the section & grossly misrepresent the statistic "a small proportion of the overall number of commercial space operations—about 10 percent in 2023" -> "a small proportion of the commercial airspace — about 10% in 2023"

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

From a random top link in search, > In 2022, U.S. airlines generated nearly 279.6 billion U.S. dollars in operating revenue Would absolutely believe space is a 30b industry in the US.

rKarpinski 3y ago
> Would absolutely believe space is a 30b industry in the US. SpaceX did 4.6b a year in revenue in 2022 [1]. But this is besides the point, they grossly mis represent the GAO report they cite for the statistic[2] which says. "The number of commercial launch and reentry operations carrying humans is a small proportion of the overall number of commercial space operations—about 10 percent in 2023—but it is growing."[2] BusinessInsider's sloppy reporting turned it into "Space launches still represent a small proportion of the commercial airspace — about 10% in 2023" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX [2] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106184 https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106184
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  Number of flights, number of people, total payload weight, total gross weight, total delta-v/kg, revenue ... there's a lot of ways to measure %. Fwiw, I was counting satellite costs in my napkin math, where 30b seems reasonable. And I wasn't counting only spacex. There's obviously clearly zero chance there's even 0.001% of the number of space astronauts a year as there are people who flew, and I just refuse to believe anyone would actively be making that claim, so it seemed logical to me to search for better things to assess that space flight seems like it might possibly perhaps be 10% of.
  - rKarpinski 3y ago
    You don't need to search for anything they literally link to https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106184 https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106184 when they give that stat... they practically plagiarize the section & grossly misrepresent the statistic "a small proportion of the overall number of commercial space operations—about 10 percent in 2023" -> "a small proportion of the commercial airspace — about 10% in 2023"