Comment Overseas? (Score 2) 47
It's also being moved from the U.S. to China
I wouldn't take home any electronic swag...
It's also being moved from the U.S. to China
I wouldn't take home any electronic swag...
How could companies justify plowing money into oil wells, semiconductor plants, toy factories, apple orchards, etc. if they don't have assurances in place that the cash will be recouped? Yet people invest in those things everyday. What makes launch services any different?
Because all of those things were able to start small, relatively speaking, where only a handful of people were necessary to get the initial ball rolling. Even semiconductors; We looked at a house for its detached garage and the previous owner apparently had a small semiconductor fab set up in there at one point.
By contrast there's no real option for someone without already established financial means to launch things into space.
No one should be left out because there should be no contract. Instead, NASA should be fostering a spot market for launches. They should have a separate bid for each launch: "We want X satellite in Y orbit, and insured for Z dollars." Then give the launch to the lowest bidder. That way each company can work continuously to cut costs and improve services, knowing that if they leapfrog the competition, they can win the next launch, instead of being locked out for years.
This won't happen either; it's very expensive to develop the tech to do the launches, let alone to build production. No one will take the risk to develop unless they have so much guaranteed production as to amortize the cost of development over those units.
This isn't like the beginning of civil aviation or even how companies that want to design planes get into civil aviation now, building small planes until their success with small planes gets them the revenue stream to let them build bigger ones, etc, this would be like coming into the market and jumping straight to long-range widebodies. To my knowledge, the only companies that have even come close to that have all been government-sponsored.
The only way that you're going to get someone to pay for the development costs themselves is to give them enough production to justify those development costs, and the only way to do that is to guarantee them so many launches. It applies to both SpaceX and to Boeing.
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin