[iamtheworstdev]

Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep space by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap space flights. I'm sure SpaceX and others will be against this until suddenly, they're not, when they realize they're one of the few that can even afford to pay it.

Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.

[Centigonal]

One of the arguments Hank makes in the video is that SpaceX is (via starlink) rapidly occupying large portions of useful LEO shells, which crowds out future competitors or users of that orbit (i.e. you can't put more satellites into the orbit without risking collisions, especially satellites that aren't part of the existing constellation), and that the natural consequence of not regulating orbital space in some way would be to lock in the first movers in an orbital shell as the only organizations that have access to that orbit.

[someonebaggy]

The natural consequence then seems like the competitor might as well launch into that orbit anyway and destroy Starlink?

[harrall]

I 100% agree but Starlink is the only profitable space division of SpaceX.

The truth is diverting money to space exploration is not that popular.

We only got the moon because we were in a battle with the Soviet Union about capitalism vs. communism. It was never about space or science. The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets.

So while I’m not a fan of the circumstances, I need some way for money to go to space exploration and I’m riding this like people rode the Cold War as an excuse to build a moon rocket.

[dreamcompiler]

> The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets.

The instant we beat the Soviet Union to the moon we reduced NASA's projects and budgets. That's why the Space Shuttle was such a ridiculous kludge.

[b112]

Yes, and you're 100% right, but context is needed here for others even if you know this next bit.

The original shuttle designs were much, much better. I remember reading tech specs and looking at schematics in Discover and Popular Science years before the final design. Maybe Omni too.

Then it ended up in committee, politicians got involved, and funding was cut in parallel (even before the wall came down, it was clear the Soviets were done). The design was a shadow of what it could have been.

I remeber being sad as a kid.

Also, my drive down nastologia avenue made me realise, I really miss science magazines. The publishing date of the three I mentioned seemed to be staggered a bit. So I always had a bit of science news, and I really miss the format.

Phones aren't the same, tiny, tablets are unwieldy and smaller than a magazine, they were distraction free, and I really liked it just being all in one package.

I even liked the ads! Typically for some computer peripheral, or a new calculator, or some scientific apparatus. The ad just sat there too, it didn't bounce around or scream at you or cover an article's text.

Or the worst modern scourge, popups while you're reading, I mean !'?"#+#-#/ off I'm reading here!

[ilamont]

There used to be a space science mags for kids.

Odyssey was published by the same person who operated Astronomy magazine, and in my tweens and early teens I gobbled up the stories about the space shuttle and the images coming back from various missions such as Voyager.

I don’t remember if I saw it in the school library and asked my parents to subscribe or they subscribed for me, but it really helped to maintain a lifelong interest in space flight and astronomy (along with whatever science fiction I could get my hands on).

[dreamcompiler]

I only recently got rid of my entire collection of Omni. No room to keep stuff like that any more. But I kept v1i1.

[Dylan16807]

If you don't leave junk it won't cost you much. I really don't see this as gatekeeping.

> one of the few that can even afford to pay it. Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.

That's not accurate at all. They could always afford to pay it, and so can other companies. What changed is that they stopped counting as "online sales tax" so they didn't care about those laws anymore.

If they could get out of sale tax, they very much would still want to. If they could get rid of sales tax for everyone, they would be for it. Sales tax isn't benefiting them by acting as a gatekeeping force.

[cbsmith]

Better a financial barrier than a physical one. If satellites and spaceships are literally smashing in to each other, I have a hard time interpreting it as anything other than a regulatory failure.

[treyd]

Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep radio by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap communication. I'm sure RCA and the others will be against this until suddenly, they're not, when they realize they're one of the few that can even afford to pay it.

(RCA is a bad swap-in in this example but I'm struggling to think of an apt analogy for this era.)

[cucumber3732842]

Radio was kind of the original internet. They had to restrict the crap out of it so that some jackoff couldn't just get on the airwaves and interview some random conspiracy theorist who says the government is gearing up to kick the bonus army out of DC.

[mschuster91]

> People already trying to find ways to gate keep space by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap space flights.

Space flight is a typical "tragedy of the commons" scenario. Like radio waves (especially on HF), space orbits are a finite resource... and not just problematic for other satellites, because ground-based space observation gets more and more impeded by satellites.

[charcircuit]

It may be finite, but satellites are tiny and the earth is huge. We barely cover the Earth's surface where we don't even have to deal with launching it into space.

[Alpha3031]

Things on earth don't move at 8 km/s so understandably less worries about collisions there.

[brookst]

I really don’t see how making people pay for their externalities is “gatekeeping”.

If your business model relies on spewing litter everywhere, complaining about gatekeeping when someone makes you pay to clean it up isn’t even disingenuous, it’s transparently manipulative.

The public is tired of privatized profits, socialized costs. Space seems like a great place to draw that line: if you can’t afford to clean up your mess, you don’t get to make the mess. Sorry.

[stinkbeetle]

The problem is regulations like these rarely "pay for externalities".

They impose compliance costs or costs to skirt the regulations.

CO2 emissions have not been solved despite all the regulations and taxes, quite the opposite they keep increasing and will continue to do so for a long time before even thinking about coming down. In large part because production was moved off shore to countries which have less regulation and higher emission intensity of production, which actually has the opposite effect.

Workers rights were not solved, the abuses were just off-shored to countries that still enslave people and abuse workers and allow child labor.

Tax evasion has not been solved, it's just permitted under complicated legal structures.

All these things are a godsend for bloated multinational corporations who can pay the compliance costs without blinking, and have little to worry about organic competition.

Space regulation and taxes won't solve anything. If the government had any kind of track record you might be a little open minded about it, but at this point the burden of proof would be on the people claiming that this time, taxes won't be used for corruption and graft. If there is money to be had in it, the government will take their cut and in exchange allow multinational corporations to offshore the problem to other countries.

[Teever]

Maybe CO2 emissions haven't been regulated successfully because attempts to regulate the came far too late, and the attempts to regulate similar issues in space are coming right on time?

It's a lot harder to stop a very, very large group of people from doing something that they've been doing for generations. It's much easier to stop a much smaller group of people from starting something new.

[Chu4eeno]

How would starting earlier have stopped industries from outsourcing CO2 emissions to other/exempt countries? If you look at graphs of global emissions it's like they didn't skip a beat once legislation and treaties in the west kicked in.

[Teever]

If we hadn’t designed our economy around carbon emitting processes from the beginning there would be no incentive to continue to do this by exporting industrial capacity to authoritarian states.

But because of that original sin we see exactly what you describe — a system with too much inertia to change easily.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

[stinkbeetle]

Seems like a reach. Not that economies were particularly ever designed, at that level, but they were also "designed" around sailing ships, horses, rail locomotives, steam power, hand harvesting wheat, weaving fabric by hand, mail for communication. Lots of things that rapidly melted away and changed entire economies and even structures of society in much shorter time than governments have been pretending to fail to address carbon pollution.

[Dylan16807]

> CO2 emissions have not been solved despite all the regulations and taxes

All the?

We barely regulate CO2 at all.

If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.

And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.

[stinkbeetle]

> All the?

All the.

> We barely regulate CO2 at all.

Not sure who the "we" is, but many jurisdictions do regulate CO2 heavily. Not only immediate direct taxes, but subsidies to competitors, increased regulatory impositions and effective moratoriums on approvals, sovereign risk factors with many countries legislating and committing to CO2 phase out.

> If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.

Again not sure which we you are talking about, but lots of places have carbon taxes. They do make massive changes when they are priced to do so -- see, the EU. That was the point of my comment. I didn't argue markets don't respond to economic incentives, I clearly was agreeing they do. The effect has not been to solve climate change, it has been to move production offshore to markets that have much higher carbon emission intensity of production!

> And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.

And the fact that these not-hard-to-stop loopholes are not stopped still doesn't make you stop to think? The taxes aren't going to solve problems or pay for externalities, they are funding graft and corruption and stifling competition.

[Teever]

Regulations designed to prevent the rise of negative externalities in a nascent industry is exactly the role of government.

If you don't believe in a role for government in regulating access to space despite (despite it having that role since the development of the technological means to access it) than can you suggest a solution to the negative externalities that we unfolding this very moment?

[nearlyepic]

> Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep space by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap space flights.

This reads like a parody of libertarians.

[Sanzig]

I mean, presumably, the tax would apply per-spacecraft with a price adjustment for orbit lifetime and how busy a particular orbit is, so a small constellation of 5-10 short lived microsatellites wouldn't have a huge entry barrier.

[xp84]

How else are the entrenched interests who control most of what happens on Earth to guarantee their continued dominance off world? And yes, it’s exactly like the creep of taxation, copyright police[1], and censorship into the Internet when they realized people were going there in part to avoid those.

[1] I’m not really mourning the loss of Napster, but rather rolling my eyes at the way YouTube has made having more than 6 seconds of any song a death sentence for the video, killing fair use dead, since demonetization directly halts distribution of a video.