this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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Space travel is exceptional in that you need an incredible amount of cooperation to get a project into space. The supply chains are insane, the component parts highly specialized and hugely expensive, and the range of expertise and knowledge required is simultaneously focused and intense and broad and varied. If human society ever does manage to transition to a genuine people power, space flight will be, to my knowledge, the very last thing we achieve, because it takes so many people working together to get it done. The scope of these projects makes you realise how easy it must have been to build the pyramids. Two brothers can build a plane that just about works, but to get a vehicle to orbit needs a city of people working together.
That's all the reason it should be easier to distribute power. More people to distribute it between!
Remember when we paid people to do those things directly?
We, the American people, paid a lot of people each a reasonable salary to get to the moon.
Privatized spaceflight has we, the American people, pay a single entity less total money (they can make it more efficient, of course!). This concentrates decision-making and power.
That vehicle going in to orbit needs a city to work together. I want my taxes to pay that city and the people in it, not Boeing's shareholders who aren't helping put the vehicle into orbit, not Musk to build a second smaller city in Texas he is king of.
Thank you for your points. I completely agree that we should be paying the workers on the ground who get us to space instead of the wealthy who claim to own it.
Yes we should, and I hope we will. I would love to be able to imagine some kind of smooth, consensual, non violent transition to a society where we keep doing the same stuff but are fairly treated, but I have difficulty with that. And I think space would be the hardest industry to revolutionise because of the above. Not saying it's impossible and I'm definitely not saying it's not preferable!