5 ms·

So space will become more expensive.

by croes 2y ago

teekert 2y ago
Yeah, the way capitalism made goods more expensive. /s
- rbanffy 2y ago
  The way monopolies do.
  - seneca 2y ago
    There is no monopoly bigger, or more expensive, than government, which was previously the only player in the space.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      Funny... Government is the only monopoly you get to elect, and the only that can be undone by voting against it.
  - dialup_sounds 2y ago
    I don't think you can monopolize going up.
    - croes 2y ago
      If it costs a shitload of money you can.
- croes 2y ago
  You mean like Insulin in the US? Or healthcare or housing or education etc.?
  - adventured 2y ago
    You're referring to extreme government regulation making it prohibitively expensive to start up insulin providers that compete with the established government protected monopolies. Which is anything but Capitalism in action. The same goes for healthcare in general. It's one of the most regulated sectors of the US economy and the government places an extreme cost on doing most anything in that sector through hyper regulation and very epic scale barriers to entry. The US is very far from being a Capitalist healthcare system, it's in fact the worst of both systems: it's a hyper regulated corporatist system, intentionally protected by the government from competition, captured by corporations.
    - hylaride 2y ago
      Many states even have Certificate of Need (known as CON in the industry) laws where incumbent medical providers, including whole hospitals, can effectively veto new entrants. Add in limited licensing for doctors (the number of medical spots in schools as not kept up with population) among other things and you've got a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need
      - biomcgary 2y ago
        This is part of the reason why I distinguish between free-market economics and capitalism, where the people with capital make the rules (including social capital, like current doctors). At the level of persuasion, I don't understand why people use and defend "capitalism" rather than "free-market economics".
  - teekert 2y ago
    Is lobbying and a broken IP system really capitalism?
    - sham1 2y ago
      Yes. Those sorts of things are exactly the kind of skullduggery and shenanigans that the term capitalism was invented to be a critique of in the 19th century. The kinds of stuff pulled by the owning classes to secure their position and capital, up to and including influencing, and in some cases usurping, governments. I guess this would need a new term since the word has been seemingly reclaimed by the capitalists as a good thing.
api 2y ago
It would be hard to make things worse than big classical aerospace.
- croes 2y ago
  Boeing
brigadier132 2y ago
Will become more expensive? Are you willfully ignoring the actual data?
- croes 2y ago
  The actual data doesn't show the future, does it? What happens if a commercial companies beats its competitors? Prices rise.
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    No, not necessarily. Trivially, in a monopoly, raising prices infinitely for a product does not maximize profit. SpaceX has effectively had a monopoly on commercial space launch since it was first able to actually use reusable rockets. Because the innovation of reusing rockets has brought the marginal cost of launching so far down prices will continue to go down. Right now SpaceX is supply constrained, not demand constrained. All of their launches are booked. As SpaceX's supply increases they will be able to bring launch costs down even further until they hit an equilibrium of monopoly pricing that does maximize profit.
panick21_ 2y ago
Yeah its gone be more expensive then literally not able to buy something. Practically infinity expensive. Because this literally something you couldn't buy before. Maybe if you went to Russia and gave them a lot of money. SpaceX has made everything cheaper in Space cheaper and many things possible that literally weren't a commercial thing before.
- croes 2y ago
  Like cloud computing made things cheaper. But now the companies need money for AI and prices rise. Without real competition what stop SpaceX from rising its prices?
  - sbuttgereit 2y ago
    You do realize one of the best ways to attract competition is to raise prices and increase profit margins to the point where it's worthwhile for competitors to enter the market to take some of that profit? If you look back historically, the idea that monopolies were broken up because of their ability to raise prices without the check of competition just isn't really telling the full story. Consider this from the Congressional Record of the House (1890) by a proponent of the then under debate anti-trust act (https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/05/01/house-section https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/05/..., page 4100): "Some say that the trusts have made products cheaper, have reduced prices; but if the price of oil, for instance, were reduced to 1 cent a barrel it would not right the wrong done to the people of this country by the "trusts" which have destroyed legitimate competition and driven honest men from legitimate business enterprises." The argument wasn't that the "trusts make products -cheaper-" idea was wrong, but that it didn't matter. The only way to maintain a natural monopoly is the ensure that the barriers to entry for competition are sufficient to make new entrants unviable. One way to do that is to leverage economies of scale to lower prices to the point where a new entrant simply can't compete on price.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    Do you think companies should be able to pay for all their IT needs with their IT budgets from 1995 and if they can't 'capitalism bad'. You realize how dumb this is? Yes, if you want to do new things, like AI, you need to pay more. If you want to only do what you were able to before, the price of that is lower. Wtf are you talking about.
cwillu 2y ago
Go look up the cost of a soyuz launch, let alone a shuttle launch, and then tell us more about how this is making space more expensive.
- croes 2y ago
  That's why I wrote will become. SpaceX doesn't have real competition after Boeing failed. What happens in such a monopoly? The prices rise.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - adventured 2y ago
    Despite their slow pace, it's quite clear Bezos and Blue Origin + ULA will continue to plod forward. They're real competition with plenty of money behind them.
  - adolph 2y ago
    SpaceX is ahead for now and may continue to be ahead but does have very real competition domestically and abroad. Tesla : Rivian/Lucid :: SpaceX : Blue Origin/ULA Tesla : BYD :: SpaceX : LandSpace [0]/Galactic Energy [1] 0. https://x.com/AJ_FI/status/1833761435362447760 https://x.com/AJ_FI/status/1833761435362447760 1. https://www.space.com/galactic-energy-ceres-1-sea-launch-video-may-2024 https://www.space.com/galactic-energy-ceres-1-sea-launch-vid...
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Not necessarily. First, the competition is international, and some is from governments who need a non-US supplier. Second, the goal in most corporations isn't maximum profit per item but maximum profit per year, and if they can indeed deliver the prices Musk is speculating about of getting a million people to pay 100-200 thousand USD each to go to Mars, that allows the overall market to be much larger than if he can only charge 150 million (or even 1.5 billion) for 4-seat rides to a low orbit space station every six months.
  - 2y ago
chaostheory 2y ago
Did you miss the fact that reusable rockets have made it cheaper? Have you kept up with the economics of space travel?
- croes 2y ago
  That why I wrote will become. Remember the time when cloud services made things cheaper? Guess what happened next?
  - adventured 2y ago
    Cloud services have a lot of competition. I can choose Hetzner, which is a high quality low cost provider of basic cloud services. I can deploy open source options onto their cloud and push costs quite low. The cost of cloud services has not soared. And companies like Cloudflare have continued to undercut AWS at every opportunity. Oracle, Microsoft and Google all have strong incentive to hold AWS in check on what they can charge, and they do exactly that through rampant competition.
  - TiredOfLife 2y ago
    > Remember the time when cloud services made things cheaper No. When was that? Cloud made things easier and faster not cheaper. You trade money for convenience.
  - chaostheory 2y ago
    As opposed to the traditional astronomically expensive public launches which haven’t had any real innovation since the 1960s? The cloud services analogy isn’t a good one because it wasn’t mainly about cost. It’s about not having to deal with the logistics of a commodity layer.

So space will become more expensive.

by croes 2y ago

So space will become more expensive.

teekert 2y ago

Yeah, the way capitalism made goods more expensive. /s

rbanffy 2y ago
The way monopolies do.
- seneca 2y ago
  There is no monopoly bigger, or more expensive, than government, which was previously the only player in the space.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Funny... Government is the only monopoly you get to elect, and the only that can be undone by voting against it.
- dialup_sounds 2y ago
  I don't think you can monopolize going up.
  - croes 2y ago
    If it costs a shitload of money you can.
croes 2y ago
You mean like Insulin in the US? Or healthcare or housing or education etc.?
- adventured 2y ago
  You're referring to extreme government regulation making it prohibitively expensive to start up insulin providers that compete with the established government protected monopolies. Which is anything but Capitalism in action. The same goes for healthcare in general. It's one of the most regulated sectors of the US economy and the government places an extreme cost on doing most anything in that sector through hyper regulation and very epic scale barriers to entry. The US is very far from being a Capitalist healthcare system, it's in fact the worst of both systems: it's a hyper regulated corporatist system, intentionally protected by the government from competition, captured by corporations.
  - hylaride 2y ago
    Many states even have Certificate of Need (known as CON in the industry) laws where incumbent medical providers, including whole hospitals, can effectively veto new entrants. Add in limited licensing for doctors (the number of medical spots in schools as not kept up with population) among other things and you've got a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need
    - biomcgary 2y ago
      This is part of the reason why I distinguish between free-market economics and capitalism, where the people with capital make the rules (including social capital, like current doctors). At the level of persuasion, I don't understand why people use and defend "capitalism" rather than "free-market economics".
- teekert 2y ago
  Is lobbying and a broken IP system really capitalism?
  - sham1 2y ago
    Yes. Those sorts of things are exactly the kind of skullduggery and shenanigans that the term capitalism was invented to be a critique of in the 19th century. The kinds of stuff pulled by the owning classes to secure their position and capital, up to and including influencing, and in some cases usurping, governments. I guess this would need a new term since the word has been seemingly reclaimed by the capitalists as a good thing.

api 2y ago

It would be hard to make things worse than big classical aerospace.

croes 2y ago
Boeing

brigadier132 2y ago

Will become more expensive? Are you willfully ignoring the actual data?

croes 2y ago
The actual data doesn't show the future, does it? What happens if a commercial companies beats its competitors? Prices rise.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  No, not necessarily. Trivially, in a monopoly, raising prices infinitely for a product does not maximize profit. SpaceX has effectively had a monopoly on commercial space launch since it was first able to actually use reusable rockets. Because the innovation of reusing rockets has brought the marginal cost of launching so far down prices will continue to go down. Right now SpaceX is supply constrained, not demand constrained. All of their launches are booked. As SpaceX's supply increases they will be able to bring launch costs down even further until they hit an equilibrium of monopoly pricing that does maximize profit.

panick21_ 2y ago

Yeah its gone be more expensive then literally not able to buy something. Practically infinity expensive. Because this literally something you couldn't buy before. Maybe if you went to Russia and gave them a lot of money. SpaceX has made everything cheaper in Space cheaper and many things possible that literally weren't a commercial thing before.

croes 2y ago
Like cloud computing made things cheaper. But now the companies need money for AI and prices rise. Without real competition what stop SpaceX from rising its prices?
- sbuttgereit 2y ago
  You do realize one of the best ways to attract competition is to raise prices and increase profit margins to the point where it's worthwhile for competitors to enter the market to take some of that profit? If you look back historically, the idea that monopolies were broken up because of their ability to raise prices without the check of competition just isn't really telling the full story. Consider this from the Congressional Record of the House (1890) by a proponent of the then under debate anti-trust act (https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/05/01/house-section https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/05/..., page 4100): "Some say that the trusts have made products cheaper, have reduced prices; but if the price of oil, for instance, were reduced to 1 cent a barrel it would not right the wrong done to the people of this country by the "trusts" which have destroyed legitimate competition and driven honest men from legitimate business enterprises." The argument wasn't that the "trusts make products -cheaper-" idea was wrong, but that it didn't matter. The only way to maintain a natural monopoly is the ensure that the barriers to entry for competition are sufficient to make new entrants unviable. One way to do that is to leverage economies of scale to lower prices to the point where a new entrant simply can't compete on price.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Do you think companies should be able to pay for all their IT needs with their IT budgets from 1995 and if they can't 'capitalism bad'. You realize how dumb this is? Yes, if you want to do new things, like AI, you need to pay more. If you want to only do what you were able to before, the price of that is lower. Wtf are you talking about.

cwillu 2y ago

Go look up the cost of a soyuz launch, let alone a shuttle launch, and then tell us more about how this is making space more expensive.

croes 2y ago
That's why I wrote will become. SpaceX doesn't have real competition after Boeing failed. What happens in such a monopoly? The prices rise.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  [flagged]
- adventured 2y ago
  Despite their slow pace, it's quite clear Bezos and Blue Origin + ULA will continue to plod forward. They're real competition with plenty of money behind them.
- adolph 2y ago
  SpaceX is ahead for now and may continue to be ahead but does have very real competition domestically and abroad. Tesla : Rivian/Lucid :: SpaceX : Blue Origin/ULA Tesla : BYD :: SpaceX : LandSpace [0]/Galactic Energy [1] 0. https://x.com/AJ_FI/status/1833761435362447760 https://x.com/AJ_FI/status/1833761435362447760 1. https://www.space.com/galactic-energy-ceres-1-sea-launch-video-may-2024 https://www.space.com/galactic-energy-ceres-1-sea-launch-vid...
- ben_w 2y ago
  Not necessarily. First, the competition is international, and some is from governments who need a non-US supplier. Second, the goal in most corporations isn't maximum profit per item but maximum profit per year, and if they can indeed deliver the prices Musk is speculating about of getting a million people to pay 100-200 thousand USD each to go to Mars, that allows the overall market to be much larger than if he can only charge 150 million (or even 1.5 billion) for 4-seat rides to a low orbit space station every six months.
- 2y ago

chaostheory 2y ago

Did you miss the fact that reusable rockets have made it cheaper? Have you kept up with the economics of space travel?

croes 2y ago
That why I wrote will become. Remember the time when cloud services made things cheaper? Guess what happened next?
- adventured 2y ago
  Cloud services have a lot of competition. I can choose Hetzner, which is a high quality low cost provider of basic cloud services. I can deploy open source options onto their cloud and push costs quite low. The cost of cloud services has not soared. And companies like Cloudflare have continued to undercut AWS at every opportunity. Oracle, Microsoft and Google all have strong incentive to hold AWS in check on what they can charge, and they do exactly that through rampant competition.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  > Remember the time when cloud services made things cheaper No. When was that? Cloud made things easier and faster not cheaper. You trade money for convenience.
- chaostheory 2y ago
  As opposed to the traditional astronomically expensive public launches which haven’t had any real innovation since the 1960s? The cloud services analogy isn’t a good one because it wasn’t mainly about cost. It’s about not having to deal with the logistics of a commodity layer.