[pbreit]

Only possible with the existence of "billionaires".

[aquaticsunset]

If by that you mean "average people pooling their billions to further advance science and technology", sure.

None of this was done in a vacuum of billionaire self funding.

[JKCalhoun]

Is that true? We live in a remarkably gilded age where a handful of people (whose names we all know) cashed in on the Dot-Com Boom. Their pleasure appears to be, for a few of them anyway, rockets and spacecraft.

A vacuum of billionaire self funding? Of course not, but would these ventures have progressed to where they are without the deep pockets of some of these billionaires?

[BlarfMcFlarf]

The funding was from nasa contracts, which is public funds. Someone would have done it even as a consortium of sub billionaires.

[ben_w]

IIRC, Musk wasn't listed as a billionaire until 2012, and that possibly as a result of (rather than cause of) SpaceX having successfully sent cargo to the ISS.

People mock him for being bad at estimating how long projects will take… but even if you agree with the critics, he's still the one-eyed in the land of the blind when it comes to space mission project planning.

[adastra22]

He did self-fund SpaceX to the tune of $100M or so. He wasn’t a billionaire, but that was awful close.

[ben_w]

That's a factor of ten, which is like calling me a millionaire when I saved just enough to buy a 35 square meter apartment in a small village just outside Cambridge (UK)… in the middle of the house price dip from the global financial crisis.

[adastra22]

He also put money into Tesla and Solar City at the time. We don’t know the true extent of his wealth (Forbes estimates are notoriously inaccurate).