yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

SpaceX and Commercial Space Exploration | StarTalk


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

I think people conflate two different things here when they talk about the moving frontier of space exploration. If you're going to advance a space frontier, you have gone farther than anyone has gone before. To me, that's advancing a space frontier. Anything else could be an engineering frontier, and of course, there's overlap between the two.

So, uh, SpaceX launched, went into orbit, came back, and landed. That's great; we've never done that before. Now we ask who is going to advance the space frontier. The history of this exercise at high risk with little promise of economic return for doing it first tells me that governments do it, and they sign the tasks. The patents get made and discovered to accomplish these previous untapped goals. Once that's quantified, then you have private enterprise come in and make a buck off of it.

The first Europeans to the New World were not the Dutch East India Trading Company; it was Columbus, sent by Spain. Spain had other objectives. They have a baseline of time much longer than a quarterly report or an annual report. It's a country. Countries can make those kinds of investments, particularly if the long-term return on that investment is for the greater glory of the country itself.

I don't see SpaceX as being like the private company that's going to take us to Mars. They could do it on a SpaceX rocket; that's not a new thing. The relationship between NASA and all the rest—what would be new is if SpaceX said, "We're going to Mars, and we don't need any governmental help, and we're going to do this as a complete commercial exercise." I just don't see that happening.

Imagine the conversation: I'm CEO of a company, and I want to be the first to put a colony on Venus. But I'm a private company, so I bring in investors, and they ask me questions. They say, "How much does it cost?" I don't know, but more than has ever been spent in space before. "Okay, is it dangerous?" Yes, people will probably die. But what's the return on the investment? I don't know; probably nothing for a long time.

That's a really quick meeting. The government can say, "We want to go to Venus because that's strategic value, possible long-term economic value." That venture capitalist investors don't have the patience to wait out. So, I'm just trying to be practical here in the way civilizations have behaved ever since there's been civilization.

More Articles

View All
How Electricity Actually Works
I made a video about a gigantic circuit with light-second long wires that connect up to a light bulb, which is just one meter away from the battery and switch, and I asked you, after I closed the switch, how long will it take for us to get light from that…
Nintendo FURNITURE??? -- Mind Blow #15
A real Zelda Treasure chest? And coming soon from 7-Eleven: two cups, one straw. Vsauce, Kevin here. This is Mind Blow. A few years we were treated to a functioning NES controller coffee table. Well, here’s a brand new one with custom NES art and a place…
What Happens To You If You Never Go Outside?
You’ve heard your whole life that going outside is good for you, but is it really? I mean, don’t get me wrong; there are some definite healthy effects to going outside. Like when you’re exposed to direct sunlight, you get some vitamin D, and if you do exe…
5 Stocks the Smart Money is Buying in the 2024 Bubble
So as you guys know, I love tracking the 13F filings of the world’s super investors to see what they’re buying and selling from quarter to quarter. But there’s this really cool website I follow called Data Roma, which compiles a list of 80 famous investor…
Turning The Tide | Plastic on the Ganges
[Music] You take this incredible material that lasts for hundreds of years. We use it for a few seconds, a few minutes, and then we throw it away. [Music] [Music] I’m Heather Coldway. I’m a National Geographic fellow, and I’m the science co-lead for the …
Linear equation word problems
When Quinn returned from vacation, he turned the heat back on in his home. He set the temperature as high as it could go. Q represents the temperature in Quinn’s home in degrees Celsius after T minutes. They say Q is equal to 15 plus 0.4T. What was the t…