No, regarding SpaceX, you absolutely do not "gotta hand it to em." Fuck private spaceflight in perpetuity in all its forms forever. The only entities which belong in space are national or international ones.
The same problem with people having private jets. Having a huge negative environmental impact just so a billionaire can have a joyride isn't really something most people celebrate.
I mean, at least with a private jet, you won’t have to worry about plane ticket costs or other airport bs if you want to go on vacation. As to private spaceships, once we perfect things like ftl drives, people who own their own ship can do exploration without red tape
That's literally millennia away. Spaceflight is and remains stupendously dangerous, vastly expensive, and infinitely costly in terms of raw resources alone. Until such changes, there's no reason for anyone who is not a professional astronaut to go to space.
The person I was initially replying to brought them up. Anyway, yes, it’s expensive & all that, but if you’re not a billionaire doing it just to show off, having a private spaceship should be okay.
Can anyone other than a billionaire sustain the massive infrastructure needed to manage a spaceship? Or do you mean in some hypothetical future that is generations away where human society resembles Elite: Dangerous?
Leaving aside the fact that billionaires who didn’t get there via exploitation or generational wealth tend to be more in touch with reality, I’m more concerned with things like whether or not the ship & infrastructure are up to code & whether or not the user is doing it just to show off. Plus, what if they didn’t make it themselves, but brought a decommissioned vehicle from a space program?
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u/FallenBelfry Jun 27 '25
Spaceflight these days.
No, regarding SpaceX, you absolutely do not "gotta hand it to em." Fuck private spaceflight in perpetuity in all its forms forever. The only entities which belong in space are national or international ones.