The key is local control. I live in a city where the municipal government owns the power company. While there certainly is some local corruption and some problems with how politically correct the investment into electricity generation facilities happens (for example, investing in a solar & wind farm instead of a coal plant... you may even agree with the decision of the municipal government on this issue), it really does help that the local "board of directors" for the power company has to face a general election every four years among ordinary voters.
I certainly prefer this arrangement for a power company than what neighboring cities deal with, where I seriously doubt that the board of directors for that company has even heard of those towns in the first place (and happens to be Warren Buffet with his Berkshire Hathaway company). Given the alternatives, I really do like the local control much better.
Cuba isn't really doing all that well either, although I think their PR efforts are better than what Haiti does. It really isn't a fair comparison and Cuba has definitely been hurt with the various blockades and embargoes done against it. Don't forget, Cuba is still being ruled by a communist dictator that has even more control and authority over that country than Adolph Hitler had over Nazi Germany. About the only thing I can really say that is positive is that Cuba seems to be doing better than North Korea, but then again Cuba isn't investing in a nuclear weapons program either. Cuba wouldn't have survived at all if it wasn't for the generous patronage and support given by the Soviet Union, who gave that support primarily because keeping Cuba prosperous also was excellent PR.
Don't even get started with the Bay of Pigs invasion. There is no possible way that Cuba could have held out against the actual U.S. military, and why Kennedy let that abomination of a military action happen in the first place still is something to this day makes me say "Huh?"
In other words, comparing one former French colony that nobody cares about to a former American colony that is a deliberate thorn in the side of every occupant of the White House is not even a realistic comparison at all. Perhaps the worst part about American administration of Cuba was the singular failure to dismantle some of the even earlier Spanish institutions that should have been removed but weren't until Castro came to power.
Easy fix, one that established auto manufacturers have already dealt with: franchising.
The problem is that many of the dealers in these states requiring franchisees for consumer sales also have local dealers who have a lock on who can become an automobile dealership within that state. In other words, even if Tesla was somehow able to recruit somebody who wanted to be an independent franchisee and was very friendly to Tesla, that state would prohibit that franchisee from opening the store even if they were a citizen of that state. The number of dealership licenses is limited in that state, thus Tesla is literally forced to sell a franchise to their competitor who in turn has no legal requirement to even sell that brand of automobile.
Quite literally those dealers can sit on the franchise and do nothing. They can also demand a percentage of sales done "in their territory" (aka anything sold on-line) even though they have invested nothing into even trying to market those cars other than the nominal purchase of the franchise.
This is the corruption Tesla is fighting. This is why it is so sinister and what really is at stake because it is local businessmen in these states who are trying to squeeze Tesla for a cut of the profits.
If other auto makers were allowed to do direct-to-consumer sales, this might be a valid point.
They are allowed direct to consumer sales. It is the franchise agreements which prohibit the direct sales instead, but that is an automaker-dealer relationship that was mutually agreed upon in advance and has nothing to do with statutory laws that are passed by a state legislature. These automakers also can't arbitrarily change that contract, so they are stuck with that provision unless they get the dealers to agree to new terms.
Tesla isn't even prohibited from selling automobiles in Texas or other states, all they are prohibited from doing is setting up a local sales office and showroom as well as offering local support services like parts sales over the counter or a repair shop that the customer can drop off the vehicle and then come back once it is repaired.
Texans, for instance, can even drive to New Mexico or Louisiana and get their Model S repaired. The state is merely making it very inconvenient if you want the car repaired in Austin or Dallas.
No, states are explicitly denied the power to regulate commerce between states. They can still regulate businesses that operate within their state and engage in commerce with citizens of that state.
That is precisely what these state governments are doing, and what Tesla is trying to do within those states as well, thus Tesla is subject to the regulations of those respective state governments. Tesla is trying to build brick & mortar stores in several states as a way to increase sales, thus by building the store and applying for a local business permit to sell automobiles they subsequently subjected themselves to the regulatory authority of that state government.
Texas still can't stop Tesla from selling automobiles to citizens of Texas, but the Texas legislature can require only franchisees are permitted to have actual buildings containing automobiles available for purchase. Or in the case of Tesla they may not offer any automobiles for sale at their showrooms. Freedom of speech permits Tesla to hand out a flier that links to the Tesla website, but that is the only end-run currently allowed with regards to the Texas law.
I'll also note that the 10th Amendment does not say anything about interstate commerce. That clause is in Article I, in the list of powers that are explicitly granted to Congress. I could also go into the semantics of "regulation", as I don't think "regulation" as written by the founding fathers is the same word you think it is here. Regardless, you are simply wrong with your assertion and no court has ever interpreted the Interstate Commerce Clause as broadly as you have presuming state legislators lack any authority even over intrastate commerce as well.
You can get much better than two orders of magnitude savings off of conventional rocketry alone. Also note that fuel cost is one of the least important costs of rockets, even though the rocket equation requires you to carry that basically meaningless cost stuff up with you. What makes rocket fuel expensive, in orbit, is the cost of getting it there in the first place.
For example, with a Space Shuttle launch, the catering budget for the press corps covering the launch was more than the cost of the fuel used for the launch, at least for the liquid fuels being used. Far more was spent simply on the general labor that was used to essentially rebuild the Space Shuttle after each launch... especially the SSMEs.
I'll admit that perhaps some other alternative approaches to spaceflight including the classic Orion nuclear fission launch system might end up being cheaper and more efficient (definitely NERVA), but you need to consider infrastructure costs and regular maintenance as well when considering these other alternatives for getting into space.
Space Elevators in particular must be made with a mythical substances that as of right now simply does not exist. This Unobtainium must exhibit properties that no known substance has ever been demonstrated to hold at astronomical scales of construction that have never been attempted in the entire history of humanity. I also think that infrastructure costs for a space elevator are likely to be far more than proponents claim they will be, and more importantly a space elevator is completely incompatible with any other launch system. I think it is that last point which completely destroys at least a terrestrial-based space elevator.
A space elevator on the Moon is much easier to construct and can be done with high tensile strength materials that currently exist, and it wouldn't conflict with most other transportation systems including rail guns and most classical orbital inclinations that could avoid at least a few space elevators on the Moon. Some larger asteroids might especially be excellent candidates for space elevators, so I don't think the concept is completely devoid of consideration.
I am merely suggesting that an Earth-based space elevator is a hopeless dream until we have several hundred years of additional technological development in material sciences alone.
You nailed it with regards to the Obama administration with regards to space policy issues in particular, and defense issues in general. Apathy is the only word you really need to understand.
On the positive side for SpaceX and Elon Musk in particular, he was a major donor to the Obama campaigns in both 2008 and 2012, which I'm sure has paid off somewhat here as well. I'm not saying that Elon Musk endorsed Obama, but he definitely saw a rising star and made sure he was covered with a legitimate bribe (*ahem* campaign contribution) making sure that his bases were well covered. In other words, a proper businessman who knows he can be screwed over by an arbitrary government if he doesn't curry favor immediately with those on the way up.
.... that you can fill with algae and harvest much faster and easier than solar farms not to mention the algae also provide their own energy storage. The algae also can be converted into hydrocarbon chains..... that can in turn make gasoline and other petroleum-based products and fit into the existing energy distribution channels.
Pretty soon (for various values of "soon") we're going to need power in space.
That is the reason why the ISS has a 300 kW power supply (essentially similar to the power production of a small municipal power plant for a couple of neighborhoods).
This is also one of the things that anybody talking about space-based solar power singularly refuses to acknowledge, and for reasons I really don't understand other than the insane costs that were involved with installing that much power into space in one place. If you want to understand the challenges and trade-offs of large scale power production in space, you must be a blathering idiot if you ignore the ISS as a data point in any of your calculations. The ISS power supply is a real example of a real device that is producing power for actual applications, having done so for a lengthy period of time.
The next step is to have other space-based assets that need large quantities of power, and regardless that implies trying to get the cost of launch into space much cheaper no matter how else you cut it. Extraterrestrial mining operations are something I expect to see by the beginning of the next century, but I'm not expecting much progress before then. We have a long way to go before something like asteroid-based Silicon is used for manufacturing photocells in deep space projects, where I also expect to see Martian colonization well before that happens.
The cost of sending 10 metric tons to LEO and about 5 metric tons to GEO is claimed by SpaceX to be slightly under $60 million USD, or about $6k/kg. That seems to be at least a competitive price (few companies say they can beat SpaceX on launch costs). From this figure, sending 10000 metric tons to GEO would be something like $120 Billion. Some cost savings could definitely happen, although the reusable Falcon 9 with all parts being reused on multiple flights is still about $7 billion each, or dropping that price down to about $14 Billion.
Regardless, a guy who knows the figures for the solar power industry, Elon Musk, who also happens to own a spacecraft launching company as well as a completely separate solar panel manufacturing company (in the form of Solar City) has repeatedly said that spaced based solar power for terrestrial consumers makes absolutely no sense and is something he refuses to become involved with because he thinks it will be a financial disaster if anybody tries to get one going.
You very likely don't know the first thing about these draft horses in general and the carriage horses in particular, and I seriously doubt you've seen any of them outside of simply passing by one of them on a street as you were busy getting your latte or spritz after work.
No competent owner of a horse, nor any of the drivers, are going to be intentionally mistreating a horse in the manner you describe simply from a pure economic standpoint. They are expensive to breed and take at least two years or so minimum before they are even capable of being able to pull one of these carriages, and both owners and drivers develop strong personal bonds with them. The death of a horse is a significant tragedy for both the owner and driver (who may very likely be one and the same). While in the past it may have been true that finding another draft horse was easy, it isn't so easy to do in 21st Century America so you need to have a special relationship with a farm or two where you can get the horses as well. There is definitely a limited supply of those kind of horses.
I'll also note that any driver who hits a horse is also a complete idiot. An automobile or even a truck is far more maneuverable and faster than a horse drawn carriage, where the carriage also sticks out like a sort thumb in traffic and usually can be spotted blocks away. It is a very rare situation where a horse and a car get in a collision... where not only will the driver get the ticket and the responsibility to pay for the horse (as I said,something worth a whole lot of money) or find their automobile insurance rates will skyrocket. Very likely they will also get a DUI citation because you really would need to be drunk in order to hit one of these horses.
The only part of your comment that bears anything to reality is the comparison of draft horses to slaves. If that is the case, you need to thank draft horses for ending slavery, because a well care for horse with the right bridal and harness was able to do the work of five men and eat the resources of three.... thus replacing a whole bunch of people from needing to be slaves who instead could be an ignorant college student in a 1st world country thinking they've learned everything there is to know. There is a pretty good reason why slavery wasn't common in Europe in the late middle ages, in spite of being very common in the Roman Empire, and the common draft horse was one of the reasons for that happening. You very likely wouldn't have even written your comment if it wasn't for your ancestors having access to draft horses and using them to support themselves and provide opportunities for their descendents.
You are thinking too intelligently here and are used to the idea of using competent and proven technology to accomplish your solutions.
Looking at the specs on this beast, it is lousy even for a custom electric automobile retooling job. There are plenty of custom automobile builders around the country, so I would have to presume that the real deal here is that somebody's nephew or niece was out of work and needed a job, thinking they could also reinvent the wheel at the same time.
SpaceX hasn't managed a single flight without having mayor errors. 100% of their flight had either being a catastrophic failure or a partial failure. They haven't completed a single mission without failing one or two of their total tasks.
They no longer have a 90% rate of failure, but it still over 70% failure rate. Something that is unacceptable even under the lowest of standards.
How the hell do you calculate 70% failure rate for SpaceX? You ought to see how many Atlas rockets were fired before one even cleared the launch tower.
This has nothing to do with Musk, you stupid fuck. NASA could have employed the engineers itself and done it at cost. But that wouldn't have satisfied the ideological imperative of corporatism.
NASA did employ their engineers and tried to do it at cost.... plus a small profit for the companies they contracted to do the work. That is called a cost-plus contract BTW. What they ended up with was called Constellation and the Ares I. It flew precisely one time on a sub-orbital flight and was promptly cancelled because it was too expensive to fly even for government bureaucrats to admit to... after spending several billion dollars to get that program going.
Unlike every previous launch, however, we the taxpayers are paying a fixed price to SpaceX, instead of the bloated cost-plus contracts that are large part of the reason why there hasn't been much progress in manned spaceflight in the last four decades.
Well, it's theoretically less expensive, but not yet.
You don't even need to get theoretical here. NASA does not have their own way to bring cargo (or passengers for that matter) to the ISS, so the only realistic comparison is whatever the Russian government (through Roscosmos) wants to charge the U.S. government for delivery to the ISS. Furthermore, the Dragon spacecraft is the only spacecraft built by any country of the Earth that has the capability of bringing cargo from the ISS to the Earth (except for perhaps 20 pounds or so of cargo on the Soyuz spacecraft on each launch.... basically nothing), so price comparisons are against no competition at all.
SpaceX is doing it cheaper than Roscosmos. QED, it is already saving taxpayers money.
As for private interests sending spacecraft on their own dime completely without public investment first, that is what is called alternate history. We just don't know what that would have been like and is pure speculation at best. Sort of like what would have happened had Lee won the Battle of Gettysburg or if the invasion of Normandy in 1944 would have been repulsed by the Wehrmacht.
Keep in mind that Russia is still sending supplies up to the ISS via the Proton cargo modules... including missions subsidized by the U.S. taxpayers as well.
Be careful about painting all House Republicans with the same brush. While there are certainly some either misguided or even flagrantly ignorant members of that caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives with regards to space policy issues, there are some like Dana Rohrabacher who genuinely do understand the benefits of open competition for launch services and the potential of commercial spaceflight. It doesn't hurt that his district covers the Hawthorne, California manufacturing plant of SpaceX (thus technically one of his constituents), but he talked about these issues even before that part of LA County was incorporated into his district too.
Ignorance of these space policy issues cuts across the aisle as well, where Gabby Giffords (previously the chair of the space sub-committee in the House) was openly hostile to these notions as well and did everything she could to thwart the Obama administration on space policy issues. That she was a Democrat didn't seem to matter, nor did it matter to Nancy Pelosi who could have done something about that too.
This issue of space policy and support of private commercial spaceflght is definitely not a right vs. left or Democrat vs. Republican issue.
This. At least when Boeing was suckling from government teat using government engineers, launching from government land and employing publicly-educated engineers, it didn't have the gall to advertise that "Boeing successfully delivers...", just collect the money.
Oh really? Boeing has never bragged about its connections to NASA and its accomplishments in space?
So instead of just doing it themselves they write a check to Elon Musk to do it who then pockets a sizable chunk of your tax dollars as profit.
The cargo is going to the ISS anyway. Instead it could have been put onboard an unmanned version of the Orion spacecraft that U.S. taxpayers have already spent over $10 billion to develop (with its SLS launcher... earlier it should have been the Ares-1 which also had several billion dumped into developing and only flew once before being cancelled).
The point is that NASA has tried but is singularly incapable of being able to accomplish this task right now. Instead, the money goes to Russia, which is the only real choice right now. Is it better to give the money to Elon Musk or a bunch of Russian oligarchs?
There are plenty of old oil platforms the to east of Florida as well.
How far off shore are those old oil platforms from KSC? MECO takes place over the Bahamas, so saving delta-v would need to take place somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or perhaps a little bit further east. As far as I know, there are no oil platforms there unless you are talking the platforms in Nigeria.
If you are going to make a powered return to a Florida oil rig, you might as well end up back at KSC.
Actually, the landing on land, I believe is NOT meant to be permanent. It is basically testing, just as 'landing' on the ocean is. The fact is, that stopping their forward momentum is expensive, fuel-wise.
Actually, it is the permanent solution. The point is to get the stage back to the launch site for processing and to relaunch the stage with a minimum amount of work. the ultimate goal is to make it work like an airline, where a small crew of about a dozen with a crane can recycle the stage for launch again in just a couple weeks, with the assumption that hundreds of launches are going to be happening each year.
Yes, stopping their forward momentum is going to be expensive from a delta-v viewpoint, but from a dollar cost point it is far more expensive to build an fancy off-shore landing pad or even something in Africa or southern Europe as it would then need to have the stage shipped back. It simply is not the long term plan of SpaceX to be performing that kind of recovery.
CSA will do what they have done in all other industries: subsidize and dump their launch on foreign markets.
The CSA has already stated that they think the U.S. government is already heavily subsidizing SpaceX (as is Arianespace) and that the company is a plot to wipe out non-American commercial spaceflight by the U.S. government. They've also stated that they simply can't compete with SpaceX's prices using their current designs.
I don't think that strategy you are suggesting will work in this case, because it is such a major change in thinking and how things are done.
"Recover" as in "fetch the debris from the sea", or "recover" as in "have it land nicely"?
That is "recover" as in "having it land in once piece so we can perform engineering analysis on what worked and didn't work in our engines" (from the perspective of SpaceX).
The earlier recovery systems that SpaceX tried to put into place were some parachutes into the upper parts of the 1st stages. SpaceX doesn't talk all that much about their failures, but apparently the parachute recovery systems were an utter and miserable failure for SpaceX, which is one reason why they have gone to the active thrust recovery system that was tested yesterday. Gwynne Shotwell talked briefly about the parachute system in her interview with David Livingston on the Space Show, when trying to explain why SpaceX is using this particular approach.
The earlier approach would have been more like the Shuttle SRB recovery approach, where some salt and seawater would be flushed out of the system after an at-sea recovery. They really did try to do this, but the dynamic loads on the parachutes were simply too much and even a multiple drogue chute system wouldn't work... at least in terms of being able to fit within the rocket equation at the same time and being able to deliver a usable payload.
Note they weren't (and still aren't) lining up to go to the Arctic... which is a hell of a lot more accommodating than space is.
Just a bunch of oil companies who want to make claims all over the Arctic Ocean. Are you sure that nobody wants to fight over ANWR? Ever hear about Prudhoe Bay?
Yeah, nobody wants to go into the Arctic as obviously there is nothing to find there.
Don't even get me started about Antarctica. Oil and mining companies would have boom towns of over a million people crawling all over that continent if it wasn't for the current international ambiguity over property rights in that part of the world... an ambiguity that everybody involved is putting off in the hopes it doesn't trigger World War III so they try to give it a nice face by saying it is exclusively for scientific research. I don't mind the current state of affairs in Antarctica and I think all of the natural resources which can be found there are better found in some asteroid instead from an ecological viewpoint, but using the argument that we should settle Antarctica first before going to the Moon or Mars is a false argument to make because doing so is currently illegal and the governments of the world are active in preventing people from doing so.
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The key is local control. I live in a city where the municipal government owns the power company. While there certainly is some local corruption and some problems with how politically correct the investment into electricity generation facilities happens (for example, investing in a solar & wind farm instead of a coal plant... you may even agree with the decision of the municipal government on this issue), it really does help that the local "board of directors" for the power company has to face a general election every four years among ordinary voters.
I certainly prefer this arrangement for a power company than what neighboring cities deal with, where I seriously doubt that the board of directors for that company has even heard of those towns in the first place (and happens to be Warren Buffet with his Berkshire Hathaway company). Given the alternatives, I really do like the local control much better.
Cuba isn't really doing all that well either, although I think their PR efforts are better than what Haiti does. It really isn't a fair comparison and Cuba has definitely been hurt with the various blockades and embargoes done against it. Don't forget, Cuba is still being ruled by a communist dictator that has even more control and authority over that country than Adolph Hitler had over Nazi Germany. About the only thing I can really say that is positive is that Cuba seems to be doing better than North Korea, but then again Cuba isn't investing in a nuclear weapons program either. Cuba wouldn't have survived at all if it wasn't for the generous patronage and support given by the Soviet Union, who gave that support primarily because keeping Cuba prosperous also was excellent PR.
Don't even get started with the Bay of Pigs invasion. There is no possible way that Cuba could have held out against the actual U.S. military, and why Kennedy let that abomination of a military action happen in the first place still is something to this day makes me say "Huh?"
In other words, comparing one former French colony that nobody cares about to a former American colony that is a deliberate thorn in the side of every occupant of the White House is not even a realistic comparison at all. Perhaps the worst part about American administration of Cuba was the singular failure to dismantle some of the even earlier Spanish institutions that should have been removed but weren't until Castro came to power.
Easy fix, one that established auto manufacturers have already dealt with: franchising.
The problem is that many of the dealers in these states requiring franchisees for consumer sales also have local dealers who have a lock on who can become an automobile dealership within that state. In other words, even if Tesla was somehow able to recruit somebody who wanted to be an independent franchisee and was very friendly to Tesla, that state would prohibit that franchisee from opening the store even if they were a citizen of that state. The number of dealership licenses is limited in that state, thus Tesla is literally forced to sell a franchise to their competitor who in turn has no legal requirement to even sell that brand of automobile.
Quite literally those dealers can sit on the franchise and do nothing. They can also demand a percentage of sales done "in their territory" (aka anything sold on-line) even though they have invested nothing into even trying to market those cars other than the nominal purchase of the franchise.
This is the corruption Tesla is fighting. This is why it is so sinister and what really is at stake because it is local businessmen in these states who are trying to squeeze Tesla for a cut of the profits.
If other auto makers were allowed to do direct-to-consumer sales, this might be a valid point.
They are allowed direct to consumer sales. It is the franchise agreements which prohibit the direct sales instead, but that is an automaker-dealer relationship that was mutually agreed upon in advance and has nothing to do with statutory laws that are passed by a state legislature. These automakers also can't arbitrarily change that contract, so they are stuck with that provision unless they get the dealers to agree to new terms.
Tesla isn't even prohibited from selling automobiles in Texas or other states, all they are prohibited from doing is setting up a local sales office and showroom as well as offering local support services like parts sales over the counter or a repair shop that the customer can drop off the vehicle and then come back once it is repaired.
Texans, for instance, can even drive to New Mexico or Louisiana and get their Model S repaired. The state is merely making it very inconvenient if you want the car repaired in Austin or Dallas.
No, states are explicitly denied the power to regulate commerce between states. They can still regulate businesses that operate within their state and engage in commerce with citizens of that state.
That is precisely what these state governments are doing, and what Tesla is trying to do within those states as well, thus Tesla is subject to the regulations of those respective state governments. Tesla is trying to build brick & mortar stores in several states as a way to increase sales, thus by building the store and applying for a local business permit to sell automobiles they subsequently subjected themselves to the regulatory authority of that state government.
Texas still can't stop Tesla from selling automobiles to citizens of Texas, but the Texas legislature can require only franchisees are permitted to have actual buildings containing automobiles available for purchase. Or in the case of Tesla they may not offer any automobiles for sale at their showrooms. Freedom of speech permits Tesla to hand out a flier that links to the Tesla website, but that is the only end-run currently allowed with regards to the Texas law.
I'll also note that the 10th Amendment does not say anything about interstate commerce. That clause is in Article I, in the list of powers that are explicitly granted to Congress. I could also go into the semantics of "regulation", as I don't think "regulation" as written by the founding fathers is the same word you think it is here. Regardless, you are simply wrong with your assertion and no court has ever interpreted the Interstate Commerce Clause as broadly as you have presuming state legislators lack any authority even over intrastate commerce as well.
You can get much better than two orders of magnitude savings off of conventional rocketry alone. Also note that fuel cost is one of the least important costs of rockets, even though the rocket equation requires you to carry that basically meaningless cost stuff up with you. What makes rocket fuel expensive, in orbit, is the cost of getting it there in the first place.
For example, with a Space Shuttle launch, the catering budget for the press corps covering the launch was more than the cost of the fuel used for the launch, at least for the liquid fuels being used. Far more was spent simply on the general labor that was used to essentially rebuild the Space Shuttle after each launch... especially the SSMEs.
I'll admit that perhaps some other alternative approaches to spaceflight including the classic Orion nuclear fission launch system might end up being cheaper and more efficient (definitely NERVA), but you need to consider infrastructure costs and regular maintenance as well when considering these other alternatives for getting into space.
Space Elevators in particular must be made with a mythical substances that as of right now simply does not exist. This Unobtainium must exhibit properties that no known substance has ever been demonstrated to hold at astronomical scales of construction that have never been attempted in the entire history of humanity. I also think that infrastructure costs for a space elevator are likely to be far more than proponents claim they will be, and more importantly a space elevator is completely incompatible with any other launch system. I think it is that last point which completely destroys at least a terrestrial-based space elevator.
A space elevator on the Moon is much easier to construct and can be done with high tensile strength materials that currently exist, and it wouldn't conflict with most other transportation systems including rail guns and most classical orbital inclinations that could avoid at least a few space elevators on the Moon. Some larger asteroids might especially be excellent candidates for space elevators, so I don't think the concept is completely devoid of consideration.
I am merely suggesting that an Earth-based space elevator is a hopeless dream until we have several hundred years of additional technological development in material sciences alone.
They are pretty much the same thing, other than the unit cost of the vehicles involved.
You would rather than the country you live in be on the shit list of the U.S. government as opposed to being on a list of supporters?
You nailed it with regards to the Obama administration with regards to space policy issues in particular, and defense issues in general. Apathy is the only word you really need to understand.
On the positive side for SpaceX and Elon Musk in particular, he was a major donor to the Obama campaigns in both 2008 and 2012, which I'm sure has paid off somewhat here as well. I'm not saying that Elon Musk endorsed Obama, but he definitely saw a rising star and made sure he was covered with a legitimate bribe (*ahem* campaign contribution) making sure that his bases were well covered. In other words, a proper businessman who knows he can be screwed over by an arbitrary government if he doesn't curry favor immediately with those on the way up.
Plenty of ocean though ...
.... that you can fill with algae and harvest much faster and easier than solar farms not to mention the algae also provide their own energy storage. The algae also can be converted into hydrocarbon chains..... that can in turn make gasoline and other petroleum-based products and fit into the existing energy distribution channels.
Pretty soon (for various values of "soon") we're going to need power in space.
That is the reason why the ISS has a 300 kW power supply (essentially similar to the power production of a small municipal power plant for a couple of neighborhoods).
This is also one of the things that anybody talking about space-based solar power singularly refuses to acknowledge, and for reasons I really don't understand other than the insane costs that were involved with installing that much power into space in one place. If you want to understand the challenges and trade-offs of large scale power production in space, you must be a blathering idiot if you ignore the ISS as a data point in any of your calculations. The ISS power supply is a real example of a real device that is producing power for actual applications, having done so for a lengthy period of time.
The next step is to have other space-based assets that need large quantities of power, and regardless that implies trying to get the cost of launch into space much cheaper no matter how else you cut it. Extraterrestrial mining operations are something I expect to see by the beginning of the next century, but I'm not expecting much progress before then. We have a long way to go before something like asteroid-based Silicon is used for manufacturing photocells in deep space projects, where I also expect to see Martian colonization well before that happens.
The cost of sending 10 metric tons to LEO and about 5 metric tons to GEO is claimed by SpaceX to be slightly under $60 million USD, or about $6k/kg. That seems to be at least a competitive price (few companies say they can beat SpaceX on launch costs). From this figure, sending 10000 metric tons to GEO would be something like $120 Billion. Some cost savings could definitely happen, although the reusable Falcon 9 with all parts being reused on multiple flights is still about $7 billion each, or dropping that price down to about $14 Billion.
Regardless, a guy who knows the figures for the solar power industry, Elon Musk, who also happens to own a spacecraft launching company as well as a completely separate solar panel manufacturing company (in the form of Solar City) has repeatedly said that spaced based solar power for terrestrial consumers makes absolutely no sense and is something he refuses to become involved with because he thinks it will be a financial disaster if anybody tries to get one going.
You very likely don't know the first thing about these draft horses in general and the carriage horses in particular, and I seriously doubt you've seen any of them outside of simply passing by one of them on a street as you were busy getting your latte or spritz after work.
No competent owner of a horse, nor any of the drivers, are going to be intentionally mistreating a horse in the manner you describe simply from a pure economic standpoint. They are expensive to breed and take at least two years or so minimum before they are even capable of being able to pull one of these carriages, and both owners and drivers develop strong personal bonds with them. The death of a horse is a significant tragedy for both the owner and driver (who may very likely be one and the same). While in the past it may have been true that finding another draft horse was easy, it isn't so easy to do in 21st Century America so you need to have a special relationship with a farm or two where you can get the horses as well. There is definitely a limited supply of those kind of horses.
I'll also note that any driver who hits a horse is also a complete idiot. An automobile or even a truck is far more maneuverable and faster than a horse drawn carriage, where the carriage also sticks out like a sort thumb in traffic and usually can be spotted blocks away. It is a very rare situation where a horse and a car get in a collision... where not only will the driver get the ticket and the responsibility to pay for the horse (as I said,something worth a whole lot of money) or find their automobile insurance rates will skyrocket. Very likely they will also get a DUI citation because you really would need to be drunk in order to hit one of these horses.
The only part of your comment that bears anything to reality is the comparison of draft horses to slaves. If that is the case, you need to thank draft horses for ending slavery, because a well care for horse with the right bridal and harness was able to do the work of five men and eat the resources of three.... thus replacing a whole bunch of people from needing to be slaves who instead could be an ignorant college student in a 1st world country thinking they've learned everything there is to know. There is a pretty good reason why slavery wasn't common in Europe in the late middle ages, in spite of being very common in the Roman Empire, and the common draft horse was one of the reasons for that happening. You very likely wouldn't have even written your comment if it wasn't for your ancestors having access to draft horses and using them to support themselves and provide opportunities for their descendents.
You are thinking too intelligently here and are used to the idea of using competent and proven technology to accomplish your solutions.
Looking at the specs on this beast, it is lousy even for a custom electric automobile retooling job. There are plenty of custom automobile builders around the country, so I would have to presume that the real deal here is that somebody's nephew or niece was out of work and needed a job, thinking they could also reinvent the wheel at the same time.
SpaceX hasn't managed a single flight without having mayor errors. 100% of their flight had either being a catastrophic failure or a partial failure. They haven't completed a single mission without failing one or two of their total tasks.
They no longer have a 90% rate of failure, but it still over 70% failure rate. Something that is unacceptable even under the lowest of standards.
How the hell do you calculate 70% failure rate for SpaceX? You ought to see how many Atlas rockets were fired before one even cleared the launch tower.
This has nothing to do with Musk, you stupid fuck. NASA could have employed the engineers itself and done it at cost. But that wouldn't have satisfied the ideological imperative of corporatism.
NASA did employ their engineers and tried to do it at cost.... plus a small profit for the companies they contracted to do the work. That is called a cost-plus contract BTW. What they ended up with was called Constellation and the Ares I. It flew precisely one time on a sub-orbital flight and was promptly cancelled because it was too expensive to fly even for government bureaucrats to admit to... after spending several billion dollars to get that program going.
Well, it's theoretically less expensive, but not yet.
You don't even need to get theoretical here. NASA does not have their own way to bring cargo (or passengers for that matter) to the ISS, so the only realistic comparison is whatever the Russian government (through Roscosmos) wants to charge the U.S. government for delivery to the ISS. Furthermore, the Dragon spacecraft is the only spacecraft built by any country of the Earth that has the capability of bringing cargo from the ISS to the Earth (except for perhaps 20 pounds or so of cargo on the Soyuz spacecraft on each launch.... basically nothing), so price comparisons are against no competition at all.
SpaceX is doing it cheaper than Roscosmos. QED, it is already saving taxpayers money.
As for private interests sending spacecraft on their own dime completely without public investment first, that is what is called alternate history. We just don't know what that would have been like and is pure speculation at best. Sort of like what would have happened had Lee won the Battle of Gettysburg or if the invasion of Normandy in 1944 would have been repulsed by the Wehrmacht.
Keep in mind that Russia is still sending supplies up to the ISS via the Proton cargo modules... including missions subsidized by the U.S. taxpayers as well.
Be careful about painting all House Republicans with the same brush. While there are certainly some either misguided or even flagrantly ignorant members of that caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives with regards to space policy issues, there are some like Dana Rohrabacher who genuinely do understand the benefits of open competition for launch services and the potential of commercial spaceflight. It doesn't hurt that his district covers the Hawthorne, California manufacturing plant of SpaceX (thus technically one of his constituents), but he talked about these issues even before that part of LA County was incorporated into his district too.
Ignorance of these space policy issues cuts across the aisle as well, where Gabby Giffords (previously the chair of the space sub-committee in the House) was openly hostile to these notions as well and did everything she could to thwart the Obama administration on space policy issues. That she was a Democrat didn't seem to matter, nor did it matter to Nancy Pelosi who could have done something about that too.
This issue of space policy and support of private commercial spaceflght is definitely not a right vs. left or Democrat vs. Republican issue.
This. At least when Boeing was suckling from government teat using government engineers, launching from government land and employing publicly-educated engineers, it didn't have the gall to advertise that "Boeing successfully delivers...", just collect the money.
Oh really? Boeing has never bragged about its connections to NASA and its accomplishments in space?
I guess you learn something new every day.
So instead of just doing it themselves they write a check to Elon Musk to do it who then pockets a sizable chunk of your tax dollars as profit.
The cargo is going to the ISS anyway. Instead it could have been put onboard an unmanned version of the Orion spacecraft that U.S. taxpayers have already spent over $10 billion to develop (with its SLS launcher... earlier it should have been the Ares-1 which also had several billion dumped into developing and only flew once before being cancelled).
The point is that NASA has tried but is singularly incapable of being able to accomplish this task right now. Instead, the money goes to Russia, which is the only real choice right now. Is it better to give the money to Elon Musk or a bunch of Russian oligarchs?
There are plenty of old oil platforms the to east of Florida as well.
How far off shore are those old oil platforms from KSC? MECO takes place over the Bahamas, so saving delta-v would need to take place somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or perhaps a little bit further east. As far as I know, there are no oil platforms there unless you are talking the platforms in Nigeria.
If you are going to make a powered return to a Florida oil rig, you might as well end up back at KSC.
Actually, the landing on land, I believe is NOT meant to be permanent. It is basically testing, just as 'landing' on the ocean is. The fact is, that stopping their forward momentum is expensive, fuel-wise.
Actually, it is the permanent solution. The point is to get the stage back to the launch site for processing and to relaunch the stage with a minimum amount of work. the ultimate goal is to make it work like an airline, where a small crew of about a dozen with a crane can recycle the stage for launch again in just a couple weeks, with the assumption that hundreds of launches are going to be happening each year.
Yes, stopping their forward momentum is going to be expensive from a delta-v viewpoint, but from a dollar cost point it is far more expensive to build an fancy off-shore landing pad or even something in Africa or southern Europe as it would then need to have the stage shipped back. It simply is not the long term plan of SpaceX to be performing that kind of recovery.
CSA will do what they have done in all other industries: subsidize and dump their launch on foreign markets.
The CSA has already stated that they think the U.S. government is already heavily subsidizing SpaceX (as is Arianespace) and that the company is a plot to wipe out non-American commercial spaceflight by the U.S. government. They've also stated that they simply can't compete with SpaceX's prices using their current designs.
I don't think that strategy you are suggesting will work in this case, because it is such a major change in thinking and how things are done.
"Recover" as in "fetch the debris from the sea", or "recover" as in "have it land nicely"?
That is "recover" as in "having it land in once piece so we can perform engineering analysis on what worked and didn't work in our engines" (from the perspective of SpaceX).
The earlier recovery systems that SpaceX tried to put into place were some parachutes into the upper parts of the 1st stages. SpaceX doesn't talk all that much about their failures, but apparently the parachute recovery systems were an utter and miserable failure for SpaceX, which is one reason why they have gone to the active thrust recovery system that was tested yesterday. Gwynne Shotwell talked briefly about the parachute system in her interview with David Livingston on the Space Show, when trying to explain why SpaceX is using this particular approach.
The earlier approach would have been more like the Shuttle SRB recovery approach, where some salt and seawater would be flushed out of the system after an at-sea recovery. They really did try to do this, but the dynamic loads on the parachutes were simply too much and even a multiple drogue chute system wouldn't work... at least in terms of being able to fit within the rocket equation at the same time and being able to deliver a usable payload.
Note they weren't (and still aren't) lining up to go to the Arctic... which is a hell of a lot more accommodating than space is.
Just a bunch of oil companies who want to make claims all over the Arctic Ocean. Are you sure that nobody wants to fight over ANWR? Ever hear about Prudhoe Bay?
Yeah, nobody wants to go into the Arctic as obviously there is nothing to find there.
Don't even get me started about Antarctica. Oil and mining companies would have boom towns of over a million people crawling all over that continent if it wasn't for the current international ambiguity over property rights in that part of the world... an ambiguity that everybody involved is putting off in the hopes it doesn't trigger World War III so they try to give it a nice face by saying it is exclusively for scientific research. I don't mind the current state of affairs in Antarctica and I think all of the natural resources which can be found there are better found in some asteroid instead from an ecological viewpoint, but using the argument that we should settle Antarctica first before going to the Moon or Mars is a false argument to make because doing so is currently illegal and the governments of the world are active in preventing people from doing so.