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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 fl

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
    - xp84 3mo ago
      Whatever happens to Starlink, the debris in their new lower orbit would decay within months at the worst. It’s not one of those “thousand years imprisoned on the planet by a cloud of deadly debris” that we’ve heard about. Not saying it couldn’t be bad if there were such a collision as obvi a really bad collision could in the short term damage Starlink and anyone else who decides to use that orbit, but this isn’t existential risk territory anymore.
      - Sanzig 3mo ago
        VLEO addresses the risk, sure, but the new Starcloud space datacenter hype machine isn't going VLEO, it's going 600-850 km. Those altitudes are in the years to decades range for deorbit, and SpaceX has filed for 88,000 of them.
        lstodd 3mo ago
  - devindotcom 3mo ago
    insightful like your crude, substanceless objection?
- harrall 3mo ago
  I 100% agree but Starlink is the only profitable space division of SpaceX. The truth is diverting money to space exploration is not that popular. We only got the moon because we were in a battle with the Soviet Union about capitalism vs. communism. It was never about space or science. The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets. So while I’m not a fan of the circumstances, I need some way for money to go to space exploration and I’m riding this like people rode the Cold War as an excuse to build a moon rocket.
  - dreamcompiler 3mo ago
    > The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets. The instant we beat the Soviet Union to the moon we reduced NASA's projects and budgets. That's why the Space Shuttle was such a ridiculous kludge.
    - b112 3mo ago
      Yes, and you're 100% right, but context is needed here for others even if you know this next bit. The original shuttle designs were much, much better. I remember reading tech specs and looking at schematics in Discover and Popular Science years before the final design. Maybe Omni too. Then it ended up in committee, politicians got involved, and funding was cut in parallel (even before the wall came down, it was clear the Soviets were done). The design was a shadow of what it could have been. I remeber being sad as a kid. Also, my drive down nastologia avenue made me realise, I really miss science magazines. The publishing date of the three I mentioned seemed to be staggered a bit. So I always had a bit of science news, and I really miss the format. Phones aren't the same, tiny, tablets are unwieldy and smaller than a magazine, they were distraction free, and I really liked it just being all in one package. I even liked the ads! Typically for some computer peripheral, or a new calculator, or some scientific apparatus. The ad just sat there too, it didn't bounce around or scream at you or cover an article's text. Or the worst modern scourge, popups while you're reading, I mean !'?"#+#-#/ off I'm reading here!
      - ilamont 3mo ago
- someonebaggy 3mo ago
  The natural consequence then seems like the competitor might as well launch into that orbit anyway and destroy Starlink?
Sanzig 3mo ago
I mean, presumably, the tax would apply per-spacecraft with a price adjustment for orbit lifetime and how busy a particular orbit is, so a small constellation of 5-10 short lived microsatellites wouldn't have a huge entry barrier.
mschuster91 3mo ago
> 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. Space flight is a typical "tragedy of the commons" scenario. Like radio waves (especially on HF), space orbits are a finite resource... and not just problematic for other satellites, because ground-based space observation gets more and more impeded by satellites.
- charcircuit 3mo ago
  It may be finite, but satellites are tiny and the earth is huge. We barely cover the Earth's surface where we don't even have to deal with launching it into space.
  - Alpha3031 3mo ago
    Things on earth don't move at 8 km/s so understandably less worries about collisions there.
xp84 3mo ago
How else are the entrenched interests who control most of what happens on Earth to guarantee their continued dominance off world? And yes, it’s exactly like the creep of taxation, copyright police[1], and censorship into the Internet when they realized people were going there in part to avoid those. [1] I’m not really mourning the loss of Napster, but rather rolling my eyes at the way YouTube has made having more than 6 seconds of any song a death sentence for the video, killing fair use dead, since demonetization directly halts distribution of a video.
brookst 3mo ago
I really don’t see how making people pay for their externalities is “gatekeeping”. If your business model relies on spewing litter everywhere, complaining about gatekeeping when someone makes you pay to clean it up isn’t even disingenuous, it’s transparently manipulative. The public is tired of privatized profits, socialized costs. Space seems like a great place to draw that line: if you can’t afford to clean up your mess, you don’t get to make the mess. Sorry.
- stinkbeetle 3mo ago
  The problem is regulations like these rarely "pay for externalities". They impose compliance costs or costs to skirt the regulations. CO2 emissions have not been solved despite all the regulations and taxes, quite the opposite they keep increasing and will continue to do so for a long time before even thinking about coming down. In large part because production was moved off shore to countries which have less regulation and higher emission intensity of production, which actually has the opposite effect. Workers rights were not solved, the abuses were just off-shored to countries that still enslave people and abuse workers and allow child labor. Tax evasion has not been solved, it's just permitted under complicated legal structures. All these things are a godsend for bloated multinational corporations who can pay the compliance costs without blinking, and have little to worry about organic competition. Space regulation and taxes won't solve anything. If the government had any kind of track record you might be a little open minded about it, but at this point the burden of proof would be on the people claiming that this time, taxes won't be used for corruption and graft. If there is money to be had in it, the government will take their cut and in exchange allow multinational corporations to offshore the problem to other countries.
  - Teever 3mo ago
    Maybe CO2 emissions haven't been regulated successfully because attempts to regulate the came far too late, and the attempts to regulate similar issues in space are coming right on time? It's a lot harder to stop a very, very large group of people from doing something that they've been doing for generations. It's much easier to stop a much smaller group of people from starting something new.
cbsmith 3mo ago
Better a financial barrier than a physical one. If satellites and spaceships are literally smashing in to each other, I have a hard time interpreting it as anything other than a regulatory failure.
Teever 3mo ago
Regulations designed to prevent the rise of negative externalities in a nascent industry is exactly the role of government. If you don't believe in a role for government in regulating access to space despite (despite it having that role since the development of the technological means to access it) than can you suggest a solution to the negative externalities that we unfolding this very moment?
nearlyepic 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. This reads like a parody of libertarians.
Dylan16807 3mo ago
If you don't leave junk it won't cost you much. I really don't see this as gatekeeping. > 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. That's not accurate at all. They could always afford to pay it, and so can other companies. What changed is that they stopped counting as "online sales tax" so they didn't care about those laws anymore. If they could get out of sale tax, they very much would still want to. If they could get rid of sales tax for everyone, they would be for it. Sales tax isn't benefiting them by acting as a gatekeeping force.
treyd 3mo ago
Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep radio by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap communication. I'm sure RCA and the 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. (RCA is a bad swap-in in this example but I'm struggling to think of an apt analogy for this era.)
- cucumber3732842 3mo ago
  Radio was kind of the original internet. They had to restrict the crap out of it so that some jackoff couldn't just get on the airwaves and interview some random conspiracy theorist who says the government is gearing up to kick the bonus army out of DC.

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
  - xp84 3mo ago
    Whatever happens to Starlink, the debris in their new lower orbit would decay within months at the worst. It’s not one of those “thousand years imprisoned on the planet by a cloud of deadly debris” that we’ve heard about. Not saying it couldn’t be bad if there were such a collision as obvi a really bad collision could in the short term damage Starlink and anyone else who decides to use that orbit, but this isn’t existential risk territory anymore.
    - Sanzig 3mo ago
      VLEO addresses the risk, sure, but the new Starcloud space datacenter hype machine isn't going VLEO, it's going 600-850 km. Those altitudes are in the years to decades range for deorbit, and SpaceX has filed for 88,000 of them.
      - lstodd 3mo ago
- devindotcom 3mo ago
  insightful like your crude, substanceless objection?
harrall 3mo ago
I 100% agree but Starlink is the only profitable space division of SpaceX. The truth is diverting money to space exploration is not that popular. We only got the moon because we were in a battle with the Soviet Union about capitalism vs. communism. It was never about space or science. The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets. So while I’m not a fan of the circumstances, I need some way for money to go to space exploration and I’m riding this like people rode the Cold War as an excuse to build a moon rocket.
- dreamcompiler 3mo ago
  > The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets. The instant we beat the Soviet Union to the moon we reduced NASA's projects and budgets. That's why the Space Shuttle was such a ridiculous kludge.
  - b112 3mo ago
    Yes, and you're 100% right, but context is needed here for others even if you know this next bit. The original shuttle designs were much, much better. I remember reading tech specs and looking at schematics in Discover and Popular Science years before the final design. Maybe Omni too. Then it ended up in committee, politicians got involved, and funding was cut in parallel (even before the wall came down, it was clear the Soviets were done). The design was a shadow of what it could have been. I remeber being sad as a kid. Also, my drive down nastologia avenue made me realise, I really miss science magazines. The publishing date of the three I mentioned seemed to be staggered a bit. So I always had a bit of science news, and I really miss the format. Phones aren't the same, tiny, tablets are unwieldy and smaller than a magazine, they were distraction free, and I really liked it just being all in one package. I even liked the ads! Typically for some computer peripheral, or a new calculator, or some scientific apparatus. The ad just sat there too, it didn't bounce around or scream at you or cover an article's text. Or the worst modern scourge, popups while you're reading, I mean !'?"#+#-#/ off I'm reading here!
    - ilamont 3mo ago
someonebaggy 3mo ago
The natural consequence then seems like the competitor might as well launch into that orbit anyway and destroy Starlink?

Sanzig 3mo ago

I mean, presumably, the tax would apply per-spacecraft with a price adjustment for orbit lifetime and how busy a particular orbit is, so a small constellation of 5-10 short lived microsatellites wouldn't have a huge entry barrier.

mschuster91 3mo ago

> 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. Space flight is a typical "tragedy of the commons" scenario. Like radio waves (especially on HF), space orbits are a finite resource... and not just problematic for other satellites, because ground-based space observation gets more and more impeded by satellites.

charcircuit 3mo ago
It may be finite, but satellites are tiny and the earth is huge. We barely cover the Earth's surface where we don't even have to deal with launching it into space.
- Alpha3031 3mo ago
  Things on earth don't move at 8 km/s so understandably less worries about collisions there.

xp84 3mo ago

How else are the entrenched interests who control most of what happens on Earth to guarantee their continued dominance off world? And yes, it’s exactly like the creep of taxation, copyright police[1], and censorship into the Internet when they realized people were going there in part to avoid those. [1] I’m not really mourning the loss of Napster, but rather rolling my eyes at the way YouTube has made having more than 6 seconds of any song a death sentence for the video, killing fair use dead, since demonetization directly halts distribution of a video.

brookst 3mo ago

I really don’t see how making people pay for their externalities is “gatekeeping”. If your business model relies on spewing litter everywhere, complaining about gatekeeping when someone makes you pay to clean it up isn’t even disingenuous, it’s transparently manipulative. The public is tired of privatized profits, socialized costs. Space seems like a great place to draw that line: if you can’t afford to clean up your mess, you don’t get to make the mess. Sorry.

stinkbeetle 3mo ago
The problem is regulations like these rarely "pay for externalities". They impose compliance costs or costs to skirt the regulations. CO2 emissions have not been solved despite all the regulations and taxes, quite the opposite they keep increasing and will continue to do so for a long time before even thinking about coming down. In large part because production was moved off shore to countries which have less regulation and higher emission intensity of production, which actually has the opposite effect. Workers rights were not solved, the abuses were just off-shored to countries that still enslave people and abuse workers and allow child labor. Tax evasion has not been solved, it's just permitted under complicated legal structures. All these things are a godsend for bloated multinational corporations who can pay the compliance costs without blinking, and have little to worry about organic competition. Space regulation and taxes won't solve anything. If the government had any kind of track record you might be a little open minded about it, but at this point the burden of proof would be on the people claiming that this time, taxes won't be used for corruption and graft. If there is money to be had in it, the government will take their cut and in exchange allow multinational corporations to offshore the problem to other countries.
- Teever 3mo ago
  Maybe CO2 emissions haven't been regulated successfully because attempts to regulate the came far too late, and the attempts to regulate similar issues in space are coming right on time? It's a lot harder to stop a very, very large group of people from doing something that they've been doing for generations. It's much easier to stop a much smaller group of people from starting something new.

cbsmith 3mo ago

Better a financial barrier than a physical one. If satellites and spaceships are literally smashing in to each other, I have a hard time interpreting it as anything other than a regulatory failure.

Teever 3mo ago

Regulations designed to prevent the rise of negative externalities in a nascent industry is exactly the role of government. If you don't believe in a role for government in regulating access to space despite (despite it having that role since the development of the technological means to access it) than can you suggest a solution to the negative externalities that we unfolding this very moment?

nearlyepic 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. This reads like a parody of libertarians.

Dylan16807 3mo ago

If you don't leave junk it won't cost you much. I really don't see this as gatekeeping. > 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. That's not accurate at all. They could always afford to pay it, and so can other companies. What changed is that they stopped counting as "online sales tax" so they didn't care about those laws anymore. If they could get out of sale tax, they very much would still want to. If they could get rid of sales tax for everyone, they would be for it. Sales tax isn't benefiting them by acting as a gatekeeping force.

treyd 3mo ago

Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep radio by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap communication. I'm sure RCA and the 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. (RCA is a bad swap-in in this example but I'm struggling to think of an apt analogy for this era.)

cucumber3732842 3mo ago
Radio was kind of the original internet. They had to restrict the crap out of it so that some jackoff couldn't just get on the airwaves and interview some random conspiracy theorist who says the government is gearing up to kick the bonus army out of DC.