6 ms·

Hank Green did a video recently advocating for an "orbit value tax" -- like a Georgist Land Value Tax, but for orbits. This tax would, among other things, help

Hank Green did a video recently advocating for an "orbit value tax" -- like a Georgist Land Value Tax, but for orbits. This tax would, among other things, help fund orbital cleanup and internalize the externality of polluting orbital shells. It's an idea that deserves more discourse IMO. Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLjW6zuYmos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLjW6zuYmos

nba456_ 3mo ago
And who does the tax get paid to? Some mythical Global Government that will totally work this time?
- mukbangpervert 3mo ago
  The video discusses this directly.
- LunaSea 3mo ago
  Any company removing space debris from orbit. Like a carbon capture price to offset your launch.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - nba456_ 3mo ago
    What you're describing is a global government, otherwise that can't be enforced.
    - jqbd 3mo ago
      US can enforce US satellites, no?
      - swiftcoder 3mo ago
        Provided they are launched in the US, on a US-owned carrier? Most likely Can't necessarily stop a multinational firing things to space on Russian/Chinese/ESA launch vehicles
      - rvnx 3mo ago
        Maybe but if so, it would mean that US spontaneously would go against one of their main strategic interests for the planet ? Doesn't makes too much sense. It's like this bicycle meme where the person puts a stick in its wheels. It's for the same reason that petrol cars are encouraged in the US. Punishing SpaceX will lead to a bigger financial crisis, an upset Elon Musk who might refuse to fund the next democratic election and dozens of thousands of lost jobs (fortunately they already became millionaire, riding the right rocket) for a problem that most of the rich population doesn't care about. Because in the city, it's about your petrol car, big trucks, and nobody to see the stars and a bit more pollution doesn't change much at that scale from their eyes. CFCs (these gazes destroying ozone) were a notable exception, because it would lead to death of everyone (the same way that petrol with lead), except death, universally there was no advantage to defend. But a space filled with US satellites is a great advantage for the US, since they are the only ones with the capabilities to deploy thousands of them, and it's a big business for military intelligence. I can imagine the main reason they are going to regulate, is so that older satellite debris don't destroy the new shiny satellites, but beauty of the sky is going to be the very least important factor.
        someonebaggy 3mo ago
        CFCs were solved because we found new chemicals that were more profitable than CFCs. Global warming may eventually be solved because renewable electricity is (already) more profitable than fossil electricity (but only when it's working, which is the major sticking point). In neither case did thinking about the bad things that would happen if we continued along a path actually stop us continuing along that path. It was always about profit.
    - NDlurker 3mo ago
      US could sanction countries/corporations/people who don't comply.
      - sakjur 3mo ago
        Could the US effectively sanction BRICS these days?
        NDlurker 3mo ago
        Hmm, probably not
    - Sanzig 3mo ago
      Not at all, it can be handled via international treaty. Frequency allocations for civilian satellites are already handled this way, a UN body (the ITU Radiocommunication bureau in Geneva) acts as a neutral party that handles satellite spectrum coordination between UN member states. The ITU has no enforcement power, but fundamentally that doesn't really matter much, since enforcement is handled by the member states. Are there attempts by various member states to skirt around the rules or favour their own national interests? Of course, and sometimes these are successful - but nobody just outright ignores the rules, because they know it very quickly leads to a tragedy of the commons. Administering an orbital LVT is exactly the kind of thing that could slot cleanly into an expanded ITU mandate. Where the money goes would be up for debate, but I think the cleanest solution would be ITU rebates most of it back to the government of the country that applied for the orbital slot provided that they demonstrate it's going into a space sustainability fund. Is it perfect? No, but it's based on a rickety-but-mostly-works international model and it doesn't require global government conspiracy theories to come to fruition.
      - notahacker 3mo ago
        Also, the number of countries with practical space launch capability is very small. US / China agreement isn't trivial, but if you can get them agreeing to ITU-administered slots, getting ESA, Japan, India, NZ etc is pretty straightforward (and Russia's capacity isn't huge even if they don't want to play ball)
  - pantalaimon 3mo ago
    In low earth orbit, space debris removes itself after a few years
    - Sanzig 3mo ago
      Eh... no, not really. At low altitudes (<500 km), sure, but much above 600 km you are starting to look at decades for a passive deorbit depending on solar cycle and ballistic coefficient.
      - vasco 3mo ago
        Decades is a few years in a trash conversation. Things stay longer in a regular dump.
    - numpad0 3mo ago
      But that's the problem. The debris disperse whatever heavy metals and compounds into the atmosphere. Removing the debris and taking it somewhere, even just landing them protected in a heat shield, could reduce those vaporizing particles, if those are going to be a problem.
- steveBK123 3mo ago
  My new startup, SPECTRE. It's a new SaaS play - Satellites As A Service. That is, your satellite gets to stay in orbit as long as you pay me. Otherwise my satellite killer eats them.
  - glitchc 3mo ago
    Extortion is my business -- Ernst Blofeld
- athrowaway3z 3mo ago
  The Dutch figured out how to do collective dike maintenance a millennium ago without inventing mythical super government. Collective rules worked just fine. I encourage you to reflect on this bias. I suspect you're taking the American state as a template, and extrapolating its incompetence. The history is filled with different ideas - some of them far older than America itself. Hell, I'd call America a place so naturally rich, it's practically the case study how much dysfunction can be papered over with money instead of statecraft.
  - ericmay 3mo ago
    And how did the Dutch collect the toll and who received the tax benefits for it? I’m interested in understanding your comparison here and how it would be applicable to space and how you envision it working based on your comparison.
    - athrowaway3z 3mo ago
      You wish to take up a specific space, and with the right to use it come obligations. There was no tax or toll to consider. People naturally self-assembled under the idea that if you benefited, then you had to contribute. The calculation was: how much land did you have, how valuable was it, how much benefit you'd get from some waterworks (it wasnt just dikes but also rerouting rivers etc). Obligations were denominated in labor. My point is not that this was some perfect idyllic corruption-free scheme - it wasn't - but it was very transparent. All you should need for a stable system is for the majority of interests to align. One addition you can add is to have the labor be turned against individuals/groups that decide to unalign - i.e. instead of trashing space debris your next labor is to de-orbit a satellite if 1 company decides to try their luck at tyranny over cooperation. Things hinge on a shared understanding that its always possible to go back to the salted earth solution.
      - ericmay 3mo ago
        Ok but that's not what I asked... You're just saying "we should have some system that benefits everyone". Ok sure that sounds nice, but you compared it to a specific framework with an off-hand "we've solved this so long ago" type of comment. Surely if it's so simple and straightforward and the Dutch "already figured it out" you'd have at least some idea of a proposal or implementation details. How will the toll be collected? Who will collect it? How will it be fairly distributed?
nradov 3mo ago
Do you think Russia will be willing to pay a tax on their new Rassvet constellation?
- ceejayoz 3mo ago
  Seize a few shadow fleet tankers to pay for it. (This is already happening, today, for other bits of their misbehavior!)
  - nradov 3mo ago
    I'm not opposed to seizing shadow fleet vessels operated by Russia (or any vessel sailing without a valid flag registration). But as a practical matter Russia is now legally registering much of the shadow fleet under their own flag, and even giving them armed escorts in some cases. So this is going to make additional seizures more difficult.
DarmokJalad1701 3mo ago
[flagged]
iamtheworstdev 3mo ago
Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep space by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap space flights. I'm sure SpaceX and others will be against this until suddenly, they're not, when they realize they're one of the few that can even afford to pay it. Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.
- Centigonal 3mo ago
  One of the arguments Hank makes in the video is that SpaceX is (via starlink) rapidly occupying large portions of useful LEO shells, which crowds out future competitors or users of that orbit (i.e. you can't put more satellites into the orbit without risking collisions, especially satellites that aren't part of the existing constellation), and that the natural consequence of not regulating orbital space in some way would be to lock in the first movers in an orbital shell as the only organizations that have access to that orbit.
  - lstodd 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - jazzyjackson 3mo ago
      Lead by example, my guy, I don’t know what side of the argument you’re even on
      - brookst 3mo ago
        Can’t speak for the person you’re replying to, but many of us are more interested in best outcomes than we are in team sports.
    - Sanzig 3mo ago
      Nobody is arguing that space isn't big. The argument is space is big but dynamic, and launching enough stuff up there means that over a sufficiently long time horizon, you will have a collision between uncontrolled objects. This is not a theoretical concern, it has already happened [1]. Collision risk is significantly reduced by having maneuverable spacecraft with good conjunction prediction systems in place. But fundamentally, nothing is perfect and accidents can and do happen - you set a maneuver threshold based on an expected collision probability, but it's an engineering tradeoff: "spend the fuel to maneuver out of the way of everything, no matter how remote, or accept a small collision risk?" And of course, when you are launching thousands of satellites, you will have a few failures that will become unmaneuverable hazards. Just the way it goes, you can't realistically engineer your way to perfect reliability. So sorry, I have to reject your claims that it's "utter bullshit." Space debris risk is a well studied field, so much so that satellite insurance companies are starting to fold those calculations into insurance premiums. So yeah, it's real, and it deserves more than a pithy dismissal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision
mikepurvis 3mo ago
Lots of cynical replies here unfortunately, but that proposal is similar to other ones that seek protection for various other natural commons. John Michael Greer discusses a bunch of this in Wealth of Nature [1], basically arguing that merely taxing "externalities" like pollution is insufficient, you need to see the true primary economies that generate the fundamental value of nature as being those that operate without human involvement at all, and also incorporate awareness of the different cycle lengths: a pollinator garden can establish in just a season or two, a forest takes decades, replenishing an aquifer takes centuries to millenia, and putting minerals and oil in the ground, millions of years. Any human activity which degrades, disrupts, one of these cycles, or consumes an output from it needs to compensate the rest of us accordingly. Now obviously governance is the tricky piece. The two obvious ones are to give the money back to the taxpayers or put it in a sovereign wealth fund to be invested on their behalf, since at the end of the day, the commons should be the equal entitlement of all citizens. [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11382620-the-wealth-of-nature https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11382620-the-wealth-o...
mr_toad 3mo ago
Difficult to tax something you don’t have jurisdiction over.

nba456_ 3mo ago

And who does the tax get paid to? Some mythical Global Government that will totally work this time?

mukbangpervert 3mo ago
The video discusses this directly.
LunaSea 3mo ago
Any company removing space debris from orbit. Like a carbon capture price to offset your launch.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- nba456_ 3mo ago
  What you're describing is a global government, otherwise that can't be enforced.
  - jqbd 3mo ago
    US can enforce US satellites, no?
    - swiftcoder 3mo ago
      Provided they are launched in the US, on a US-owned carrier? Most likely Can't necessarily stop a multinational firing things to space on Russian/Chinese/ESA launch vehicles
    - rvnx 3mo ago
      Maybe but if so, it would mean that US spontaneously would go against one of their main strategic interests for the planet ? Doesn't makes too much sense. It's like this bicycle meme where the person puts a stick in its wheels. It's for the same reason that petrol cars are encouraged in the US. Punishing SpaceX will lead to a bigger financial crisis, an upset Elon Musk who might refuse to fund the next democratic election and dozens of thousands of lost jobs (fortunately they already became millionaire, riding the right rocket) for a problem that most of the rich population doesn't care about. Because in the city, it's about your petrol car, big trucks, and nobody to see the stars and a bit more pollution doesn't change much at that scale from their eyes. CFCs (these gazes destroying ozone) were a notable exception, because it would lead to death of everyone (the same way that petrol with lead), except death, universally there was no advantage to defend. But a space filled with US satellites is a great advantage for the US, since they are the only ones with the capabilities to deploy thousands of them, and it's a big business for military intelligence. I can imagine the main reason they are going to regulate, is so that older satellite debris don't destroy the new shiny satellites, but beauty of the sky is going to be the very least important factor.
      - someonebaggy 3mo ago
        CFCs were solved because we found new chemicals that were more profitable than CFCs. Global warming may eventually be solved because renewable electricity is (already) more profitable than fossil electricity (but only when it's working, which is the major sticking point). In neither case did thinking about the bad things that would happen if we continued along a path actually stop us continuing along that path. It was always about profit.
  - NDlurker 3mo ago
    US could sanction countries/corporations/people who don't comply.
    - sakjur 3mo ago
      Could the US effectively sanction BRICS these days?
      - NDlurker 3mo ago
        Hmm, probably not
  - Sanzig 3mo ago
    Not at all, it can be handled via international treaty. Frequency allocations for civilian satellites are already handled this way, a UN body (the ITU Radiocommunication bureau in Geneva) acts as a neutral party that handles satellite spectrum coordination between UN member states. The ITU has no enforcement power, but fundamentally that doesn't really matter much, since enforcement is handled by the member states. Are there attempts by various member states to skirt around the rules or favour their own national interests? Of course, and sometimes these are successful - but nobody just outright ignores the rules, because they know it very quickly leads to a tragedy of the commons. Administering an orbital LVT is exactly the kind of thing that could slot cleanly into an expanded ITU mandate. Where the money goes would be up for debate, but I think the cleanest solution would be ITU rebates most of it back to the government of the country that applied for the orbital slot provided that they demonstrate it's going into a space sustainability fund. Is it perfect? No, but it's based on a rickety-but-mostly-works international model and it doesn't require global government conspiracy theories to come to fruition.
    - notahacker 3mo ago
      Also, the number of countries with practical space launch capability is very small. US / China agreement isn't trivial, but if you can get them agreeing to ITU-administered slots, getting ESA, Japan, India, NZ etc is pretty straightforward (and Russia's capacity isn't huge even if they don't want to play ball)
- pantalaimon 3mo ago
  In low earth orbit, space debris removes itself after a few years
  - Sanzig 3mo ago
    Eh... no, not really. At low altitudes (<500 km), sure, but much above 600 km you are starting to look at decades for a passive deorbit depending on solar cycle and ballistic coefficient.
    - vasco 3mo ago
      Decades is a few years in a trash conversation. Things stay longer in a regular dump.
  - numpad0 3mo ago
    But that's the problem. The debris disperse whatever heavy metals and compounds into the atmosphere. Removing the debris and taking it somewhere, even just landing them protected in a heat shield, could reduce those vaporizing particles, if those are going to be a problem.
steveBK123 3mo ago
My new startup, SPECTRE. It's a new SaaS play - Satellites As A Service. That is, your satellite gets to stay in orbit as long as you pay me. Otherwise my satellite killer eats them.
- glitchc 3mo ago
  Extortion is my business -- Ernst Blofeld
athrowaway3z 3mo ago
The Dutch figured out how to do collective dike maintenance a millennium ago without inventing mythical super government. Collective rules worked just fine. I encourage you to reflect on this bias. I suspect you're taking the American state as a template, and extrapolating its incompetence. The history is filled with different ideas - some of them far older than America itself. Hell, I'd call America a place so naturally rich, it's practically the case study how much dysfunction can be papered over with money instead of statecraft.
- ericmay 3mo ago
  And how did the Dutch collect the toll and who received the tax benefits for it? I’m interested in understanding your comparison here and how it would be applicable to space and how you envision it working based on your comparison.
  - athrowaway3z 3mo ago
    You wish to take up a specific space, and with the right to use it come obligations. There was no tax or toll to consider. People naturally self-assembled under the idea that if you benefited, then you had to contribute. The calculation was: how much land did you have, how valuable was it, how much benefit you'd get from some waterworks (it wasnt just dikes but also rerouting rivers etc). Obligations were denominated in labor. My point is not that this was some perfect idyllic corruption-free scheme - it wasn't - but it was very transparent. All you should need for a stable system is for the majority of interests to align. One addition you can add is to have the labor be turned against individuals/groups that decide to unalign - i.e. instead of trashing space debris your next labor is to de-orbit a satellite if 1 company decides to try their luck at tyranny over cooperation. Things hinge on a shared understanding that its always possible to go back to the salted earth solution.
    - ericmay 3mo ago
      Ok but that's not what I asked... You're just saying "we should have some system that benefits everyone". Ok sure that sounds nice, but you compared it to a specific framework with an off-hand "we've solved this so long ago" type of comment. Surely if it's so simple and straightforward and the Dutch "already figured it out" you'd have at least some idea of a proposal or implementation details. How will the toll be collected? Who will collect it? How will it be fairly distributed?

nradov 3mo ago

Do you think Russia will be willing to pay a tax on their new Rassvet constellation?

ceejayoz 3mo ago
Seize a few shadow fleet tankers to pay for it. (This is already happening, today, for other bits of their misbehavior!)
- nradov 3mo ago
  I'm not opposed to seizing shadow fleet vessels operated by Russia (or any vessel sailing without a valid flag registration). But as a practical matter Russia is now legally registering much of the shadow fleet under their own flag, and even giving them armed escorts in some cases. So this is going to make additional seizures more difficult.

DarmokJalad1701 3mo ago

[flagged]

iamtheworstdev 3mo ago

Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep space by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap space flights. I'm sure SpaceX and others will be against this until suddenly, they're not, when they realize they're one of the few that can even afford to pay it. Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.

Centigonal 3mo ago
One of the arguments Hank makes in the video is that SpaceX is (via starlink) rapidly occupying large portions of useful LEO shells, which crowds out future competitors or users of that orbit (i.e. you can't put more satellites into the orbit without risking collisions, especially satellites that aren't part of the existing constellation), and that the natural consequence of not regulating orbital space in some way would be to lock in the first movers in an orbital shell as the only organizations that have access to that orbit.
- lstodd 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jazzyjackson 3mo ago
    Lead by example, my guy, I don’t know what side of the argument you’re even on
    - brookst 3mo ago
      Can’t speak for the person you’re replying to, but many of us are more interested in best outcomes than we are in team sports.
  - Sanzig 3mo ago
    Nobody is arguing that space isn't big. The argument is space is big but dynamic, and launching enough stuff up there means that over a sufficiently long time horizon, you will have a collision between uncontrolled objects. This is not a theoretical concern, it has already happened [1]. Collision risk is significantly reduced by having maneuverable spacecraft with good conjunction prediction systems in place. But fundamentally, nothing is perfect and accidents can and do happen - you set a maneuver threshold based on an expected collision probability, but it's an engineering tradeoff: "spend the fuel to maneuver out of the way of everything, no matter how remote, or accept a small collision risk?" And of course, when you are launching thousands of satellites, you will have a few failures that will become unmaneuverable hazards. Just the way it goes, you can't realistically engineer your way to perfect reliability. So sorry, I have to reject your claims that it's "utter bullshit." Space debris risk is a well studied field, so much so that satellite insurance companies are starting to fold those calculations into insurance premiums. So yeah, it's real, and it deserves more than a pithy dismissal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision

mikepurvis 3mo ago

Lots of cynical replies here unfortunately, but that proposal is similar to other ones that seek protection for various other natural commons. John Michael Greer discusses a bunch of this in Wealth of Nature [1], basically arguing that merely taxing "externalities" like pollution is insufficient, you need to see the true primary economies that generate the fundamental value of nature as being those that operate without human involvement at all, and also incorporate awareness of the different cycle lengths: a pollinator garden can establish in just a season or two, a forest takes decades, replenishing an aquifer takes centuries to millenia, and putting minerals and oil in the ground, millions of years. Any human activity which degrades, disrupts, one of these cycles, or consumes an output from it needs to compensate the rest of us accordingly. Now obviously governance is the tricky piece. The two obvious ones are to give the money back to the taxpayers or put it in a sovereign wealth fund to be invested on their behalf, since at the end of the day, the commons should be the equal entitlement of all citizens. [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11382620-the-wealth-of-nature https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11382620-the-wealth-o...

mr_toad 3mo ago

Difficult to tax something you don’t have jurisdiction over.