| > Well it's more than you may think Currently, no its not. > don't take only the fuel for the flight, but consider the whole construction of the thing Making them reusable is a huge gain in efficiency. > What? I very strongly disagree. But I won't elaborate more than you did. Earth observation sat measure climate change. We measure the atmosphere with sats. We conduct planetary science. Sat imagery is vital when looking at ecosystems like the Amazon. Space based monitoring is valuable for all kinds of application and can increase efficiency of farming, mining, infrastructure and so on. Weather satellites are vital in many way, including preventing harm people. GPS is a vital technology for so many industries. Space based communication brings modernity to many people who don't live close to major infrastructure. You simply can't separate modern humanity from space. Granted space isn't anywhere close to the most important, but it does play an important role. Generally energy production, heating, transport and steel/cement are the real issues. And where the overwhelming focus should be. > If SpaceX hits their target of 10M per flight... rich people will go have lunch in space. Just like with aviation we need to consider what regulation we want to apply to these things. I am not against regulating these things. Your attitude of nobody is allowed to show any pride in anything related to fossil fuels and its general bad and shouldn't be done is simply no way to go forward. |
Not saying it should not be done at all. Reusable rockets would be nice, if they were used like the non reusable ones (i.e. rarely). But that's not how technology works: if the technology becomes cheaper, we don't use the same amount for cheaper; we use more.
Can you seriously look at SpaceX and think that they just want to send a few rockets per year, for a fraction of the cost?
> Just like with aviation we need to consider what regulation we want to apply to these things.
That's the thing: if you regulate the rockets market such that it does not start polluting orders of magnitudes more, then it is not a viable market.
> Earth observation sat measure climate change. [...] GPS is a vital technology for so many industries.
We did not need SpaceX for that. Compared to Starlink, Copernicus and all the GNSS satellites (GPS, Galileo, Glonass, ...) just don't count. GPS is something like 30 satellites. Starlink wants to send tens of thousands.