I should write a longer retrospective-with-distance on the alt-space times, but a few thoughts:
I should write a longer retrospective-with-distance on the alt-space times, but a few thoughts:
Many companies were aiming at the suborbital space tourism market. It is interesting to see Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic both spend more money to build that than SpaceX and now others took to make their first expendable orbital vehicle. BO and VG are never going to turn \
a profit on suborbital flights; the flight rate and risk profile won’t close for them. A small, scrappy company that accepted a catastrophic liability and image risk probably could have run profitably, but not companies that represent billionaires. \
“Keep learning at a small scale” was not a good plan for anyone. A few years of team building with a suborbital vehicle was probably a good idea, but it should have been “orbit or bust” soon after. I could imagine doing that for $20M with a lot of luck, but it is really \
a $100M+ effort, and @elonmusk was the only one that could pull that together at the time. It maybe could have happened earlier if Andy Beal had stuck with Beal Aerospace, but there weren’t any other good prospects. While it would have been poetic if space industrialization \
grew out of one of the tiny little teams attending Space Access, @SpaceX is still very much the stuff of dreams, and Heinlein is smiling.
@ID_AA_Carmack @SpaceX Beautiful ending sentence.
@ID_AA_Carmack @SpaceX I think that the can-do attitude with small teams has succeeded in space applications; microsat & cubesat projects flourish. I think that alt space helped all that get going too. Overlapping Space Access but not the core focus. And alt space spinout launchers may yet succeed.
@ID_AA_Carmack @SpaceX Don't forget the billions in government funding SpaceX got.
@ID_AA_Carmack @SpaceX The probability is we are being studied by more sophisticated species who have nanotech able to penetrate the awareness of who has the most convergent traits with future civilizations even stuck at earth oxygen levels presently and gravity.