this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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The 2024 privately funded moon lander is doing worse than some 1970s lunar landers by America and the failed state of the USSR. God damn.
And it's doing it for around 0,05% of the price. (~$250 billion adjusted for inflation for Apollo 1 vs ~$120 million for IM-1)
TBF that’s a cheat. They didn’t have to be the ones investigating, researching, and developing everything to make it all work for the first time.
The science today is very well established. While it doesn’t lessen the difficulty, nobody is reinventing the wheel at full price. They’re standing on the shoulders of very well established giants.
Actually they reinvented the wheel a little bit by being the first spacecraft that used cryogenic propellant for a multi day mission/moon landing. When you look into it, what they've achieved is still very impressive, even if NASA did much of the heavy lifting.
Capitalism is all about efficiency. An efficient total loss is somehow a win!
That might be the case right? Let's say there a percentage chance that would have succeeded call it 10%
Now your first attempt fails, maybe because of some miscalculation or lack of engineering precision
Even if the older way more expensive version had a 100% success rate you'd probably still rather the cheaper version right?
Also not sure how this is about capitalism, replace the above for material cost and it's the same thing
And money is the only cost that matters, right? Let's not be concerned about the material waste involved in the launch or the pollution that's building up in outer space with each failure.
This kind of business oriented mindset is why Boeing planes are falling out of the sky and dropping their bolts.
Also the cost being cited for those early space programs involved an immense amount of breakthrough R&D which the newer programs ought to be benefiting from; there's no reason to believe that a government program doing the same work as these private companies today would cost as much as they did in the early days. It's not even a meaningful quantitative comparison in the first place.
So material waste can be directly tied to cost. If you're trying to bring down cost then you're going to try to reduce waste correct? That's why there is so much work being done for reusable launch vehicles
For space debris and pollution I don't think we can squarely blame capitalism. Under a purely communist economy there's no guarentee that anyone would care any more about it than currently And you can attack that issue by a combination of penalising companies that create debris and rewarding those that remove it under a capitalist economy
As for it not being entirely comparable. Sure the government spent a lot of money on that early R&D. But do we think that if we banned companies from doing this kind of work that govt agencies like NASA would be necessarily more cost effective, cause less pollution, and less debris?
The overwhelming cost in these projects is always engineering salaries. These companies are making the calculation that they can throw shit (rockets) at the wall (into space) carelessly to save money by wasting more material to avoid paying the salaries of people that could think through the design more carefully and come up with something that will have a reasonable probability of working the first time.
Add this to the insurmountable pile of things we should theoretically regulate but never will because of regulatory capture.
Do you have any data to back that up? It would be quite interesting
I don't think regulation is impossible to achieve, look at the EU. And what I am fairly sure of is you have better odds of passing regulation than replacing capitalism entirely
Tbh I assume that with a reduced budget the man hours and capital used is also reduced.
Yes, this is embarrassing, and proves private enterprise isn't always better as is often claimed.
Mars lander Viking 1 was successful in 1976, a missions that was way harder to accomplish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1
Yes going to the moon is very easy.
Can't believe they failed that task.
I don't see how the failed state of the USSR is noteworthy when talking about historic space missions. The USSR might have collapsed but they had a lot of space successes. First human in space, for instance.
More or less that the idea of how the country that got Humans into space first eventually collapsed, but "modern capitalism solves all problems" can't do the same tasks as well was 1950's USSR, and that's coming from someone who doesn't like the USSR in general.