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What It Took For SpaceX To Become a Serious Space Company
An anonymous reader writes: The Atlantic has a nice profile of SpaceX's rise to prominence — how a private startup managed to successfully compete with industry giants like Boeing in just a decade of existence. "Regardless of its inspirations, the company was forced to adopt a prosaic initial goal: Make a rocket at least 10 times cheaper than is possible today. Until it can do that, neither flowers nor people can go to Mars with any economy. With rocket technology, Musk has said, "you're really left with one key parameter against which technology improvements must be judged, and that's cost." SpaceX currently charges $61.2 million per launch. Its cost-per-kilogram of cargo to low-earth orbit, $4,653, is far less than the $14,000 to $39,000 offered by its chief American competitor, the United Launch Alliance. Other providers often charge $250 to $400 million per launch; NASA pays Russia $70 million per astronaut to hitch a ride on its three-person Soyuz spacecraft. SpaceX's costs are still nowhere near low enough to change the economics of space as Musk and his investors envision, but they have a plan to do so (of which more later)."
That's often how people become rich: first you steal from the poor, then you steal from the rich.
Example: there's a guy in my neighborhood who ran one of those "cheque cashing businesses" for a while. People so poor and destitute they can't even get a bank account. So he charges them 15% or whatever, it doesn't matter because poor people can't afford lawyers and in any case it's hard to do legal research when you're hungry or too tired from a day at the warehouse. (A job where incidentally you need to bring your own workboots and gloves).
Then he just sits there for a few years with his "holdings company" while the money comes in and he pays no income tax...
When he got enough money he brought in a real estate agent and a development team into the same neighborhood and started evicting the working class people that rented there and put in fancy restaurants, upscale hair salons, tattoo parlours, you name it. All the useless shit people with too much money buy.
Here the people willingly go in to spend money.
Ta dah, he's set for life. University? Education? Hard work? No, no, and no.
Steal from the poor so you can steal from the rich.
I'd bet he also made sure that banks didn't have to offer bank accounts to "riskier" people (wait, I thought businesses were all about taking risks? Oh wait, YOU take the risk, they'll take the money! I get it!)
Mostly random stuff.