[HN Gopher] ESA Votes to Suspend Roscosmos Partnerships
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ESA Votes to Suspend Roscosmos Partnerships
Author : aml183
Score : 47 points
Date : 2022-03-18 19:51 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (payloadspace.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (payloadspace.com)
| bigcat123 wrote:
| fsh wrote:
| Good. Human spaceflight is mostly symbolic anyway, and there are
| plenty other launch vehicles for the satellites that do the
| actual science.
| s5300 wrote:
| I'm wondering if we're going to end up seeing SpaceX bringing
| down the ISS cosmonauts into neutral territory by the end of this
| debacle.
| ThisIsTheWay wrote:
| I'm wondering if NASA will change their plans for Mark Vande
| Hei to return on Dragon instead of Soyuz. His return is planned
| for later this month, so I suppose we'll know pretty soon.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Might be the cosmonauts who need a ride home. The crew that
| arrived today wore Ukraine's colors on their suits.
| https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1504940601334194176
| RobertoG wrote:
| It would be a good thing coming from a bad thing if space get
| more funding in the EU.
|
| Now, without the Soyuz, maybe there is a chance of a manned
| spaceflight program. Starting from the Space Rider (1) all the
| components are there, I think.
|
| 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Rider
| bdcravens wrote:
| Bodes well for SpaceX.
| dmead wrote:
| Bodes badly for international peace prospects.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| What peace? The peace before Russia began annexing territory?
| largbae wrote:
| That one. Yuval Noah Harari in a recent TED talk noted that
| we could measure the peace of an era by the percent of
| world GDP spent on military. He suggested that the period
| between the Berlin Wall coming down and this invasion was a
| significant historical low.
| 1_player wrote:
| Does SpaceX collaborate at all with the European Space Agency?
| Still, I do not understand this thirst at seeing a private
| company monopolising space travel. It's that old "this is good
| for Bitcoin" meme all over again.
|
| I reckon I'm one of the few on this forum that doesn't hold
| SpaceX stock.
| brian_herman wrote:
| SpaceX isn't a publicly traded company. Tesla is though.
| 1_player wrote:
| Never said it was. It's a private company as opposed to a
| government funded agency.
| gliptic wrote:
| But that means almost nobody on HN can possibly hold
| SpaceX stock.
| ThisIsTheWay wrote:
| It's likely a very very small group, but I am certain
| there are some ultra high net worth members of HN that
| are SpaceX investors, either directly through family
| offices, or indirectly through private equity funds.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| It's also pretty easy to invest in them indirectly. There
| are a few Fidelity funds that include SpaceX, and you can
| also invest in other companies that invested in SpaceX
| (ulterior motives, including my employer)
| 1_player wrote:
| Fair enough, I stand corrected. Still, I wanted to point
| out that it's a company, not a government agency.
| Publicly traded or private doesn't change my point.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| private companies also build esa rockets, and the space
| shuttle, and saturn v, in partnership with government
| space programs. spacex human flight is also in
| partnership with nasa.
| [deleted]
| xoa wrote:
| > _Still, I do not understand this thirst at seeing a private
| company monopolising space travel._
|
| Probably because it's a dumb strawman you've created to knock
| down. Strawmen do indeed tend to be hard to understand since
| they aren't actually real. There is no "thirst" to see a
| private company _monopolizing_ space travel per se. What
| people are thirsty for is serious, cheap, effective,
| ambitious space travel in turn leading to serious space
| development and humanity (and life in general) moving beyond
| the cradle permanently. The irritation with government
| agencies is a matter of brutal raw fact: they have failed
| miserably at this, and they 're getting WORSE, not better.
| Debacles like the SLS or Shuttle. Zero effort to drive down
| cost, rather the reverse with space being treated as a very
| shitty bit of pork. I don't even want to say "jobs program"
| because SpaceX and co will generate WAY more jobs via space
| development in the long term, but long term thinking isn't
| very fashionable in much of government anymore. Or at least
| not in this sphere.
|
| Everyone interested in space would be delighted at more
| competitive players. And there are indeed a number that might
| manage it alongside SpaceX, eventually. Smaller players like
| Rocket Lab are in fact launching for real cargo to orbit, and
| have reasonable plans to scale up. There is certainly room
| for another provider or two. But NASA, ESA, Russian, and
| other government efforts aren't even trying to go there yet
| and show no potential to do so. They are stupendously
| wasteful cash blackholes, which is coming directly out of
| money that could be doing awesome stuff. Awesome _good
| government_ stuff even, the kind of blue sky research and
| infrastructure work that governments can do to really blaze
| the way and help industry. The billions being sunk
| worthlessly into SLS could be funding a true space station
| /shipyard/depot [0] designed around the capabilities of
| Starship, helping to further accelerate smaller hungry
| players with the capital they need to get into the medium-
| lift aspect, not to mention a lot of great science.
|
| You're confusing dislike for the gross waste and failures of
| old fat players and excitement with the incredible efforts
| and progress of young ambitious new players with some sort of
| silly "monopoly" thing. Try to research and think about
| things you don't actually know much about or follow yourself
| a bit more before forming an opinion perhaps?
|
| ----
|
| 0: Including helping to figure out standards so that fuel
| depots can be used by multiple players fairly.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| With the highest level person at SpaceX worried about them
| going bankrupt it is in Europe's best interest for them to
| develop their own launch systems an capability.
| xoa wrote:
| I want to say upfront that I have no issue with the
| latter half of your statement, but not the way intended
| by who I responded to. First though what I don't think is
| correct:
|
| > _With the highest level person at SpaceX worried about
| them going bankrupt_
|
| Um, no. That statement got very, very confused in the
| media and retellings. The "bankruptcy" has to do with
| SpaceX's ultimate Mars ambitions and the rapid viability
| of Starlink _without_ further investment. Very correctly,
| Musk and everyone else at SpaceX wants it to be able to
| stand on its own two feet as fast as possible, and
| further be able to be printing enough money to fund the
| enormously long term and capital intensive vision of Mars
| development. That is the point of it after all, and
| ultimately that must happen for it all to work. However,
| that 's not the same thing at all as saying that it won't
| actually be getting further funding. Musk has tens of
| billions worth of Tesla, a bunch of which he liquidated
| last year. He will indeed continue to pour money into it.
| The number of private investors who'd be happy to add in
| is not exactly tiny either, nor the public for that
| matter though both those of course bring some challenges
| around control and overhead.
|
| But that message was a rally-the-troops kind of thing, in
| stark contrast to Blue Origin for example. Musk doesn't
| want employees to think of SpaceX as a government too-
| big-too-fail contractor on safe cost-plus financing
| simply because it's backed by someone wealthy and
| dedicated. SpaceX's vision is too big even for him by
| itself. It needs to be a viable enterprise. It needs to
| stay hungry and fast even though it has earned the top
| spot in the current launch market, because they want to
| obsolete the current launch market entirely while
| expanding it by orders of magnitude. Starship (and future
| even bigger ships) has to work for all this, and for
| Starlink to work economically and help kick off the
| planned virtuous circle. And Musk is correct that the
| environment may turn hostile in unpredictable ways so who
| knows how many years SpaceX actually has to prove itself
| and really get bootstrapping.
|
| But it's still in a stupendously better position than the
| ESA, which isn't aiming humanity for the stars in the
| first place right now with Ariane.
|
| So all that said:
|
| > _their own launch systems an capability_
|
| This is certainly fine and yes I think it matters
| strategically. While I don't agree with much of what the
| EU has done, I also think much of it is wonderful and
| that fundamentally it's a great institution as well as
| Europe as a whole. Any entity on that scale should have a
| route to space in the future, just as the EU has Airbus
| for flight. And that will help the US as well.
|
| But the way to go about that isn't through Arianespace.
| The EU, _yesterday_ (a decade or more ago in fact), needs
| to get their own commercial sector going. With proven
| examples they can go much faster than NASA did if they
| want. But they need to supply the vision, big incentives,
| cut regulatory obstacles, and provide good government
| infra support and so on then let private players work out
| the actual implementation servicing those goals.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I am willing to bet a lot of money that SpaceX will not
| go bankrupt as long as it keeps up the pace of
| innovation, and even after that happens, for a very long
| time.
|
| SpaceX can turn to private investment and there are a lot
| of people willing to buy what they are selling. And
| SpaceX is incredibly innovative and a stratetic asset for
| the US so they will not let it sink. Sometimes, the
| utility of something is much more than the immediate
| economic calculation.
| ThisIsTheWay wrote:
| > I do not understand this thirst at seeing a private company
| monopolising space travel.
|
| I don't think the poster your replying to is saying that, nor
| do I think the market is headed in that direction. Currently,
| SpaceX has the only crew certified transport aside from
| Russia's Soyuz capsule for transport to ISS. That is likely
| to change in the next two years as Blue Origin continue their
| certification process and NASA's SLS gets closer to launch
| (whether or not SLS is a good decision is a totally separate
| conversation). The more options, the better.
|
| > I reckon I'm one of the few on this forum that doesn't hold
| SpaceX stock.
|
| I reckon there are only a few that do actually hold SpaceX
| stock, given the fact they are a private company with limited
| investment opportunities for the common person.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| I don't care if its private or not, we are just excited to
| see better spacecraft, and most so called public space
| programs are also being built by private companies. The
| difference a matter of nuance. Russia may have been the only
| one that wasn't largely private.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| The impression I got from the statement is that the 4 canceled
| Soyuz launches will most likely move over to Ariane 6. Exomars
| is probably SOL for at least 2 years
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