Elon Musk doesn't seem like the easiest person to work with, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a more accomplished human.
I mean, I guess some people here subscribe to the notion that space travel is imperative for human survival. In that case, you might argue that each step towards it is more valuable than anything else that does not immediately push towards human space travel. Human space travel will save humanity, your piddly vaccine only saves a couple of hundred million people. But that seems a bizarre argument to make (and maybe that's why one really makes it).
Edit: -3 in one hour? Wow. For what it's worth, I made this comment in good faith.
I think a great deal of the enthusiasm stems from the fact that it's a private company doing this, and not a government. Well, I'm most emphatically not enthusiastic about that. In fact, it smells rather dystopian. Governments can, with care, be kept under control. However bad corruption gets, democratic governments will always be bound to the electorate. Corporations - no. I don't want space exploration to be led by a private company, and certainly not by a small group of insanely rich individuals. As much as I admire Elon Musk - and Jeff Bezos, and all the others trying to get us back into space - these people are not the ones who ought to be leading us.
Part of my discomfort with this course of events is no doubt just my personal political views - I'm about as far left as you can go. But what's happening also reminds me of some of Heinlein's stories - when space exploration was fueled by money, human rights (especially the collective right of self determination) fell by the wayside.
If the cost of going to space is the permanent privatization of exploration, I can't be enthusiastic about it.
Private space exploration
Brain controlled robots
Free ivy-league education for all
Single atom transistors and nanotech in general
Bioengineering
While governments are cutting down their budgets for scientific research and basically accepting the status quo regarding the spaceflight, there's this guy from Africa doing something extraordinary and you see no innovation or courage?
If you describe what happened today as "there was this thing that came close to some robotic arm or something, and then the arm slowly captured it, and ... that's about it.", then I agree with you - that is boring. But, that's not what happened today.
Today we saw one guy's insane vision becoming reality. And if that is not something I don't know what is. And what's even more exciting about it is that this is just the beginning.
Governments can, with care, be kept under control. However bad corruption gets, democratic governments will always be bound to the electorate. Corporations - no.
Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?
Cute, but as a feel-good human interesting TV story, not life outlook-changing.
What happened today is only different because it was not government-funded[0]. I'm not allergic to the idea of government doing things (I agree with Barney Frank that "government is just the name for the things we decide to do together"), and so I really don't consider it to be interesting, or extraordinary, or insane. It's exactly what many others have done, just funded differently.
Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?
The obvious, cliche response is "not nowadays". But, more helpfully - who has jurisdiction in space?
That is my fear. At the moment, the power with jurisdiction in space is the power that can get to space. And I want that power to be elected.
Up until now, space operations have always been nonpartisan, co-operative, and peaceful. As eager as I am for humans to go further, I can't help but think that if we can't maintain that way of doing things - if humanity must, in order to get to space, give up on the hope of universal rights and self-determination (meaning democratically elected bodies of power) - then we're not ready. If we can't decide to go to space cooperatively, as one unit - if a few lucky individuals have to do it for us, even if they're right (which I believe they are), then we're not ready to go.
[0] That's a lie, of course. It was partially government-funded, because the promise of contracts with NASA et al is what's making this possible (to my understanding). But that's beyond my argument.
But yes, even as I read your comment, I thought, "This guy must be quite faithful to large government." In the same breath you're blasting corporations as inherently corrupt, you're saying our faith should be in the ever-controllable government, who listens to the people. THEN you claim the government isn't in control of big business: So where do you get this notion of government's benign nature?
I really can't believe there are that many people who think this way. ALL organizations are corruptible; the U.S. government even more than SpaceX.
Two things to assuage your vague unease:
- The U.S. certainly knows the design secrets of SpaceX's rockets. If SpaceX ever did anything to endanger the nation (James Bond villain-esque), the U.S. military would destroy the company and build their own rockets.
- LEO space travel is not something SpaceX will have a monopoly on for long, if ever. It isn't as if we're in danger of being beholden to SpaceX's will.
I'm much more afraid of Monsanto, Lockheed, Boeing and Raytheon than I am of SpaceX.
If SpaceX goes public (and my understanding is that it will soon enough), then government can buy a massive stake in the company to control it, if they so choose.
Can they really? I personally disagree. I believe that it is always the nature of governments to grow larger, more evil, more bureaucratic and more corrupt, until they are - by necessity - overthrown and replaced by the next iteration.
As for your disdain of corporations... I'll remind you that corporations are an artificial legal fiction that depend on the State for their very existence. They are however, arguably more accountable to the populace at large, who can vote with their dollars when it comes to interacting with said corporations. Governments, on the other hand, hold for themselves a monopoly on the "legal" use of force, and are ultimately not accountable at all. Witness the governments that have suspended elections, imposed "marshal law" or otherwise pre-empted the democratic process in the name of some "emergency" or other. Reichstag fire, anybody?
Anyway, to keep this remotely on topic, I'll say that the fact that a private entity accomplished this feat is very significant exactly because it represents a step towards the democratization of space travel. No longer will the State be in the position of determining who can and can't go into space, and picking a handful of elites to send up. Now, space travel is cheap enough that it no longer requires the trappings of the State... we're one step closer to space tourism, to a day when travelling into space is accessible to a large percentage of the population, and to a day when we decide who goes into space, as opposed to a few bureaucrats deciding. That is a big-deal as far as I'm concerned.
Disclaimer: I'm about as libertarian / voluntaryist / anarcho-capitalist as you can get.
Going backwards to shoot the low-flying birds. I don't care if SpaceX gets a monopoly - the free market is very good at some things, but human rights etc. are not on the list. And I don't forsee any danger from SpaceX to earth-dweller - I fear what space exploration will be if going to space means contracting with - and giving up various freedoms to - one of maybe 6 large space companies. NDAs? Less benign forms of censorship? It's not a pretty picture, in my mind.
> ALL organizations are corruptible; the U.S. government even more than SpaceX.
Define "corrupt". If you mean "doing things for money", then SpaceX, as a company, is inherently more corrupt. If you mean "straying from the core purpose", then I view SpaceX's uncorruptibility as a bad thing, since the core purpose of any corporation is the morally ambivalent "make money" - at least democratic governments have an attractive baseline.
Now for the hard bit to explain. To my mind, no power structure is benign. Any concentration of power is inherently dangerous, and needs to be checked by other power structures to maintain some sort of equilibrium. I think we can agree on this. The difference between our government and a corporation is that our government was set up with the explicit purpose of being properly fragmented to balance itself. It's in bad need of adjustment nowadays, but along with most other democratic governments in the modern world, it's worked pretty well. Democratic governments tend not to massacre civilians, tend to be internally peaceful, tend not to declare war on each other, and tend to care a lot about scientific progress. Despite all the mars (no pun intended), it's a pretty good track record.
Companies, on the other hand, have no such internal mechanisms for self-regulation. Their role in society is efficient resource allocation - and they're damn good at that! - but nothing more. I feel like libertarians (and others with similar views less fond of labels) want to claim that because there's competition in a free market, there are adequate "checks and balances" - but if all powerful entities are pulling in roughly the same direction, it doesn't matter how many there are. The free market was not designed to protect human rights. It was designed to allocate resources for some externally set (via regulation) good. It does that very well, but I don't think we should mistake that for it being "good" in a broader sense. For that, government's still the best thing we have.
Back to space. As things stand right now, I don't see governments being able to project any sort of guidance to push corporations towards some common, ethical good. The free market won't (I think) move in that direction on its own. And so we're left with "absentee landlords".
And now I'm afraid I explained it wrong. Ugh.
Shorter, possibly better summary: corporations are good for one thing (efficient allocation of resouces). Governments are good for another (high-level imposition of some broad purpose on human events). Neither necessarily has purely good intentions, but democratic governments are more likely to lean that way, because of their design. So I want them to have certain powers, to help push society towards respecting human rights blah blah blah.
> I'll say that the fact that a private entity accomplished this feat is very significant exactly because it represents a step towards the democratization of space travel.
Buzzword alert! I catch your gist, though. SpaceX's accomplishments bring us closer to the idea of people being able to go to space "just cuz" - the ability to buy a ticket. Ok, agreed. But I'll still content that the enthusiasm displayed here and on reddit is far out of proportion. Even within the small arena of private, LEO spaceflight, this isn't the moment I would pick as the important one. SpaceX's first launch, maybe. Or the first commercial cargo in space. Or the first commercial human in space (yet to happen, I think?). But this? It doesn't make sense to me.
Oh please. Space operations grew directly out of unbridled Cold War militarism, and have been pure political football at least since the approval of the absolutely insane space shuttle program.
I want high taxes, I want big government, I want single-payer health care, I want a welfare and social security system that makes Scandinavia look like a libertarian wasteland. I want ten times the corporate regulation we have now.
But there is no reason for the government to be the primary driver or provider of routine space launch services, especially when it's done such a piss-poor job of it since Apollo.
Private companies like SpaceX have ample incentive to advance the state of the art in launch services and are demonstrably doing so for less than the government has ever managed before. NASA can and should take advantage of that.
[] Facebook has a dual-class share structure, in which class B shares have ten times the voting rights of publicly traded class A. Zuck owns a lot of class B personally, and has proxies on much of the rest, giving him personally majority control. (If the other class B owners sell, the proxies probably go away --- but so does the voting power of the shares, which convert to class A.) The upshot is that Zuck retains personal control pretty much regardless of what anyone else does with their stock.
Markets do certain things well, and better than the public sector ever can (though I agree that the public sector is vitally important and regulation is needed). One is encourage competition so that prices for once extremely-expensive goods and services can drop rapidly. The market doesn't discriminate against evil, sure, and of course there will be abuses by mega-corporations looking to mine space for its vast natural resources. But the market also doesn't discriminate against good uses of space.
Elon Musk is helping us because what he has done will eventually let all of us into space, the good and the bad among us. To me that is a fairly democratic accomplishment.