Yes. SpaceX has done bad things and deserves to be criticized for them. But (and I think this is analogous to a lot of issues) the problem here isn’t that SpaceX isn’t NASA; it’s that NASA doesn’t have the political room to experiment and inevitably sometimes fail that SpaceX does. This is too complex an issue to fit all the layers and nuance into one honk, but “SpaceX is bad because their rockets explode” is not a good analysis. https://chaos.social/@russss/110249195107310284

@vruba Since roughly 1968 NASA has mostly been a jobs preservation program for aerospace engineers. They're seen as strategically necessary lest the sector wither up and die as it more or less did in the late sixties: engineers don't grow in fields. So NASA is like an agricultural subsidy program. Anything useful it does is a side-effect of keeping the engineers from getting so bored they take up farming instead.

@cstross @vruba Plus the objective of distributing money on congressional districts. NASA gets science done despite, not because of, its funder's imperatives. (Especially with respect to climate; remember the Bush administration congress that refused to let an earth observation satellite fly?)

Plus no known economic rationale; cheap space access does not make it up on volume and leads to fewer aerospace engineers over time. (Cheap space access Kessler-cascades itself out of business.)

@graydon @vruba TBF SpaceX seem to recognize the danger of cutting launch costs without growing the market for services, hence Starlink, a gigantic self-sucking lolipop …

@cstross @vruba Except Musk killed Starlink by making it clear it works by his whim and by giving the PRC the idea that they need to do that for military purposes. (They're not wrong.) It's no longer a commercially viable product.

It's not a bad entry in US subsidy capture, because they need it for military purposes, too, but the trick would be getting out of subsidy capture and that's highly non-obvious. (How many starship loads to a solar gigawatt at the terrestrial rectenna in Oslo?)

@graydon @vruba Actually, I ran some numbers on that last year: space-based PV cells are ridiculously light and getting cheap: a starship payload by my BOTE, is good for 50-100MW in LEO (but also needs structural mass and boosting to GEO or beyond plus a relay transmitter). Certainly it'll be cheaper than new-build nuclear within a decade, and possibly MUCH cheaper.

@cstross @vruba I believe I had some vague recollection. :)

"Cheaper than new build nuclear" creates politics, because the people who most want it can't build it. (As the black flag events start happening, all of this changes, and the possibility of ship-launched gets much more important.)

But, anyway; if (say) Norway decides to decarbonize by buying orbiting solar power at 200% redundancy at five-to-ten starship flights per gigawatt, that escapes subsidy business models for launch services.

@graydon @vruba Yup. Especially as for orbital PV you need to put the powersats as high as possible (for minimal occultation time), where there's a lot of empty, uncrowded space—unlike LEO.

@cstross @vruba For Kessler Syndrome, yeah.

There are some atmospheric chemists who have difficulty remaining calm when discussing what raining tonnes of metals into the upper atmosphere is likely to accomplish. Atmospheric dumping doesn't scale very well and even less so when stuff is coming down into the rarefied upper parts.

And once you've got Starlink, the Chinese equivalent, and the inevitable third competitor doing this, it's an awful lot of mass.