[digitaltrees]

I am a progressive. But ownership of the commons is something that requires careful policy decisions. The same applies to utilities, the open ocean, wireless spectrum.

We shouldn’t allow monopolies in the name of progress or the monopolistic rent seeking will stifle progress.

The government could have absolutely done all of this and more if there was any commitment to the investment. Instead nasa had its budget gutted.

My kids won’t have a future with any opportunity if resources are so concentrated that their bargaining power can’t have any effect in the world.

[Dig1t]

>The government could have absolutely done all of this

Yeah they totally could have, so why didn’t they? World governments have had massive budgets for space agencies for like 70 years, yet they were never able to build reusable rockets or do anything other than send a handful of extremely overpriced novelty science projects into space.

You say they could do it, but there’s no evidence to support that they ever actually would.

[digitaltrees]

The space shuttle was reusable.

No private company would have been able to bootstrap the basic research upon which spaceX is now building its business.

The government isn’t a commercial for profit enterprise. It serves a different function, specifically providing services for which markets won’t be functional like fire departments, policing, broad categories of infrastructure.

And your argument is a distraction. Just because government doesn’t do something well doesn’t justify granting a monopoly to a private actor. And if a monopoly is necessary then it should be a regulated utility like power generation, telecom etc.

[Dig1t]

The space shuttle was laughably bad compared to SpaceX’s rockets and they were not really rapidly reusable. They required an extensive refurbishment which involved disassembling the entire craft. The process took upwards of 6 months to re-fly. It also cost close to 1 BILLION per mission to fly it (that’s more than 10x what it costs to fly a SpaceX rocket).

What exactly are you saying is a monopoly? SpaceX is not a monopoly by any stretch, they are competing with Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, ULA, Relativity, and others.

>providing services for which markets won’t be functional

We are talking about a situation (launches, satellite constellations) where the government had a monopoly for 70 years and then transitioned to a market model. Since switching to a market model mass to orbit has gone through the roof and costs have fallen off a cliff. So much so that entirely new types of missions are now possible because of the increased access to space (Starlink is one such example).

We are specifically seeing the opposite of your “markets won’t be functional” statement; the market is so much better than the state-run enterprise that the idea of returning to the old model would be unthinkable.