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by notahacker
1693 days ago
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It's a common enough view amongst industry insiders, and not exclusive to manned spaceflight. That GPS? It's fantastically useful, but its also designed and operated by the US government for defence purposes. The other GNSS PNT providers are also strategic state projects. Imaging? There are commercial markets for it (as a colleague put it, it's been "just around the corner" of realising its commercial potential since the 1970s!) but if you're putting up imaging satellite constellations you're expecting that directly as funders or indirectly as the largest customers, governments will pay for it (turtles all the way down as their commercial customers are often taking funding from ESA for research projects they hope to scale up in future, probably by selling to governments). And even much of the pure commercial Earth Observation is underwritten by "social science"-type legal obligations to monitor environmental footprints etc not by pure profit expectations. Satphones might be used by private companies paying private companies, but the only major player to start out as a VC funded entity rather than a state project crashed and burned financially before the US govt stepped in; some of the LEO connectivity providers have also headed in that direction. And satellite television is as pure a commercial play as it gets, until you start looking at who funded the first satellites for television broadcast, and try to imagine why private TV channels would have bothered investing in off-world delivery innovation without all that social investment in finding use cases for their launch vehicles and satellite tech. As for the manned space programmes, they stop looking wasteful and start looking surprisingly beneficial when you consider externalities (from cochlear implants to memory foam), but that's the ultimate example of it being a social benefit of throwing enormous amounts of money at very smart people solving new problems, not a VC-friendly commercial proposition. |
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