Don't admire the work SpaceX is doing. It's a scam. They are a defense contractor that pretends to be about Mars. The technology is 100% about Golden Dome. Always was, read their real history,
Mars is a thin cover story to get the engineers to feed the War machine. "National security" / nuclear threat is a great excuse to get politicians to sell out the country.
I thought it was obvious that "God Emporeror of Mars" was a satirical answer. There are a whole bunch of new markets that cheap access to space open up. Like Bezos' dream of in-space manufacturing. Or Musk's dream of data centres in space. Or power gen in space. Or the "cis-lunar economy". Or space tourism. Or He3 on the moon. People will buy SpaceX stock for the potential, even if that potential is pretty much worthless and the chance of SpaceX capturing the gains rather than some other company is fairly low.
"National Security" is just one more in a big list.
No, those other "dreams" were either developed or refined by,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Advisory_Council_o... as pretexts to pursue a space militarization agenda. The history is clear but the New Space propaganda is being fed to the younger generation.
That seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. SpaceX is more important than whatever issue you disagree with Musk about. After graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering in the aughts, I switched to software because the practical alternatives were building missiles for Raytheon or going to GE and trying to figure out how to make gas turbines 1% more efficient. SpaceX jump-started a commercial aerospace industry that was utterly moribund as recently as when Hacker News started up.
Sorry to burst your bubble but SpaceX is Raytheon now. You should look at what they're doing with Starshield, SDA, Golden Dome, NRO, etc. The commercial stuff was small potato stepping stones made more palatable to engineers, but the pivot has already occured.
To be clear, I have great respect for military work. I used to work at a defense contractor. But in terms of building a career, it's a heavily regulated industry with little room for growth. SpaceX is doing defense work, but it has not pivoted to being merely a defense contractor. SpaceX's valuation is triple that of Raytheon and Lockheed put together. The market expects it to continue pushing forward on commercial space.
What’s your basis for saying that? It makes no sense. Even if Golden Dome was a trillion dollars, which it isn’t, that wouldn’t support a $1 trillion valuation. Defense contractors average around 10% profit. Raytheon got $24 billion in government contracts in 2023. Its revenue is about $90 billion, and its valuation is $277 billion.
Funding for Golden Dome was $24 billion in 2025 and 13 billion in 2026. Even if SpaceX got all that money, it wouldn’t move the needle on SpaceX’s valuation.
Traditional defense contractors have low profit margin because of the cost plus pricing on the contracts. They literally are only allowed to charge the cost they incur plus some fixed profit percentage. As such, they have incentive to drive up the costs, so that their profit, while low percentage, is on high base.
SpaceX wouldn’t need to so that. Companies like Anduril already are trying to win contracts on fixed price model, and if they succeed, they’ll have much higher profit margins than Raytheon et al.
The estimates that have Golden Dome at anything close to a trillion dollars are posited on the assumption that it will be much more expensive to build than the administration believes it will take. If it ends up as fixed price bids and costs less than people think, it will be well under $200 billion.
That's right.. and Golden Dome (which is definitely a mult-trillion dollar program if space based weapons are employed) has a bunch of convenient oligarch properties like built-in planned obsolescence with orbital decay that amplifies a launch monopoly.
Right. Not knowing human nature doesn’t mean you won’t be affected by it in ways that you just haven’t thought of or don’t believe could happen to you.
Hamas turned Gaza into a terrorist military installation with tunnels and operatives under and within a heavily populated urban environment. Their civilians were heavily dependent on foreign aid, much of which was used to buy arms and construct the elaborate tunnel system used to stage the Oct attack. If they were in my back yard and I had power and military force, I’d try to minimize civilian casualties but I wouldn’t stop until all of said military infrastructure was completely dismantled. I would prioritize the safety of my own anrmed forces over Gazan civilian casualties. The ideology of those in charge of Gaza and Iran is dedicated to killing Jews and oppressing their own people. I’m not Muslim or Jewish. I just have empathy for Israelis having to live being terrorized constantly while they live in a society that values education, entrepreneurship and freedom. No Jews got into planes to kill Americans. No Jews go out and buy assault rifles and mass shoot American cities. I think there’s a mind virus rooted in Muslim cultures that damns them as well as anyone they are hell bent on terrorizing. Oh, and no Jews killed civilians just because they drew a cartoon of their God.
A moral line is to help the right side with all heart, all mind and all might. If you know any other way to make Russia get off from Ukraine besides tons of cheap weapons - I'm listening. Otherwise, weapons are a necessity.
Musk started SpaceX with Michael D. Griffin, the guy who invented large constellations of military satellites to win a nuclear war. And then he funded Starlink.
Starlink project began after Musk and Greg Wyler parted their ways. Wyler approached SpaceX in 2014 with a proposal to build OneWeb (then called WorldVu), and initially they worked on the project together. But then they started to accuse each other of doing various underhanded things, and split. After that, Musk decided that he could do a similar and even better system without Wyler, and that's how Starlink was born in 2015.
I'm genuinely curious whether there are a substantial number of people out there who deal on a regular basis with dV's on such a minute scale. Who would that be, outside an asteriod-redirect program such as this? Satellite operators doing precision trajectory correction?
I found the meter per day conversion helpful. Through another lens, it's about 0.000036 km/hour (or about 1.5 inches per hour).
Okay but they didn't give it in meters per second, they gave it in micrometers per second. Converting to micrometers per second is exactly as much arithmetic as converting to meters per day.
1 meter per day is something most people can understand.
But even more relevant would be 1 Earth diameter in 16,000 years... which makes it very clear this isn't useful for saving the Earth from asteroids yet.
Yes, I've had exactly this ever since my first COVID experience. If I come across anyone with even a tiny level of COVID or flu, it sets of inflammation in my lungs within minutes. Haven't gotten sick in six years now but this inflammation has happened probably one hundred times and is indeed quite unpleasant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
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