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269 points rntn | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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tootie ◴[] No.41888007[source]
Honestly this feels like an indictment of privatizing space travel. SpaceX is a perfect storm of a benefactor with unbelievable wealth being able to hoard the best engineers money can buy. And now the advancements they've made are proprietary. Ideally Boeing and SpaceX could just collaborate and not have fight each other and waste a load of time and money. If the point is an open, competitive field driving space exploration forward, it seems we don't have that.
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TMWNN ◴[] No.41888267[source]
> SpaceX is a perfect storm of a benefactor with unbelievable wealth being able to hoard the best engineers money can buy.

Musk began SpaceX with $100 million of his own cash, almost his entire wealth from having been the majority owner of PayPal when eBay bought it; lots for you and me, but not so compared to the budgets of the Boeings and Airbuses of the world. He and it certainly didn't have infinite amounts of capital during the years it developed Falcon and Dragon, and both came very close to bankruptcy early on. Until Tesla's market cap blew up during the COVID-19 era, Musk had a "mere" few tens of billions of dollars.

In any case, infinite capital guarantees absolutely nothing. Jeff Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group. He founded Blue Origin, his own rocket company, before Musk founded SpaceX, but Blue Origin has yet to send a single rocket to orbit. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:

>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.

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1. dotnet00 ◴[] No.41888805[source]
Plus, back when Musk and Bezos entered aerospace, a common joke was "how do you become a millionaire in aerospace? Start as a billionaire!", SpaceX was the exception to the trend, and had fewer resources than even other previous space startups.

Part of the reason NASA was so doubtful of SpaceX at first was that they had previously heavily supported other space startups, only for them to fail to deliver.

Arguing that SpaceX is hoarding all the talent is also funny when considering that many other space startups are by ex-SpaceX employees, and SpaceX is often described as having a high churn rate.