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.
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.
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.