Tying it to a donation of USD 100mm to charity is a very good PR move. It's much harder to be upset about private space being a billionaire's club when society stands to gain from the ride.
Well, Blue Origin donated to Blue Origins' Club for the Future [1]. This was probably for the first flight only though.
I haven't found a public financial or integrated report about it though, so I can't vouch how these funds are spent and if this is a charity as in what most of us consider a charity.
> a three-day journey around the Earth that will benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
I might be too cynical but I actually get turned down by the tentative of diversion. When I read that, I struggled to see how the St Jude hospital is in fact benefiting from that flight. They benefit from the donation that is artificially coupled to. I read this as - that person is trying to divert the impact on his image away from burning Ms of $ in fossile fuel.
The one redeeming factor I see from that claim are these 12M raised from sweepstake, but even then I don't think it covers the costs of launch.
> When I read that, I struggled to see how the St Jude hospital is in fact benefiting from that flight. They benefit from the donation that is artificially coupled to.
St Jude Hospital is benefiting from the flight because they are receiving a $100 million donation that they otherwise would not have received if the flight was not scheduled to take place.
I think the point here is, this is the first "private" space mission that wasn't using government/military hardware or staff.
It is a rocket designed by a commercial company, flying people who just made a few calls and then paid to do it.
It is pretty wild when you think about it - not so long ago (10 years maybe?) this sort of thing would have been unthinkable.
Say what you will about Elon Musk, but you've got to give the guy credit for SpaceX and Tesla for that matter - I suspect history will look back on SpaceX and Tesla as being quite significant inflection points. It feels like we are at the Model-T or early commercial jet flight stage here but for spaceflight and EVs. What was once only for the super rich and gov/mil is now becoming available to more people, with rapid iteration/improvements and lower prices. More of it please!
When we're drooling over these accomplishments, we should direct more of our praise to the thousands of really, really good engineers who did the work, built on the accumulated experience of millions, over decades. People seem to be very eager to ascribe success to heroic individuals, and while leadership is certainly something remarkable, I think that there is a severe imbalance in who we're thanking for these achievements.
It takes both engineering and leadership. There's no shortage of talent at NASA, but much of it has been and still is squandered over political machinations almost entirely unrelated to the task at hand. Case study: how the Space Shuttle was crippled by Air Force requirements that turned out to be completely unnecessary in the end.
Totally agree! I have been avoiding Twitter the last few years but was recently going through Elon’s tweets. Something I noticed is that he is often giving credit to the teams at SpaceX and Tesla. There are a number of times where he responds to a tweet and point out how it was the teams at X company, and sometimes calling out people by name for their work. It was also something during his presentation during the Model S Plaid release. He said numerous times how important the teams at Tesla were to its success.
This is a pretty new development. The cynic in me thinks he's finally listened to some PR people on how to get people to like him. It sort of coincided with the SNL appearance, too.
No it's not at all. It's something he's done since the very beginning. You can go back to the 2000s with the first few public interviews he's given since starting Tesla and SpaceX after accomplishments (first few years of both had no accomplishments to redirect praise) and he's constantly redirecting to the team. It's always driven me nuts how many people misquote him and consistently ignore all these redirections of praise.
Sorry, but why does one go through someone elses tweets? Twitter is focused on current events - and they do not age well. So why read up on the past utterances of anyone? This seems.. strange.. sorry, if that offends.
Absolutely no offence at all! I tend to avoid Reddit these days and wanted to catch up on some SpaceX stuff. Avoiding Reddit means my main source of SpaceX news, a mix of r/SpaceX and r/SpaceXLounge, was something I was avoiding. Going back through Elon’s tweets seemed a decent way to catch up in a general sense. He seems to really like tweeting about SpaceX.
I learned through that attempt at going back through his tweets that, as you pointed out, Twitter is really not built for that. I guess I hadn’t really put much thought it in at the time, was just on my phone, curious about SpaceX, and thought it might be an OK way to get some updates.
Well, there is a mass grave of failed private space companies that predate SpaceX so Mr. Musk was entering some pretty hazardous territory, business wise. While the engineering work is of course non-trivial, in this case I would not downplay Mr. Musk's role in creating a company that put payload to orbit before becoming bankrupt.
We'll see. I feel like the key differences this time are reusable boosters (order of magnitude supply cost reduction) + Starlink (order of magnitude demand absorber).
It's as though some smart people said "Hmm, what if we realize the ability to launch payload into space more cheaply than anyone else? What's the most durable moat we could build with that advantage?"
Compare Musk taking questions with one of the engineers. They answer it; he sells a vision.
Vision is how you get the best out of people - colleagues, customers, suppliers, investors. Like Steve Jobs, he loves the best part of his engineers more than they do themselves - how can you not respond to that?
Extending the circle of gratitude is certainly a good practice. Don’t forget all the husbands and wives supporting the families of these people either.
When you follow the process, you realize this is an accomplishment of humanity.
Popular history is being written in a way allowing it to be easily consumed. So no, it shouldn't contain a list of thousands of engineers. I'm not arguing that it is good or bad, just stating how it is.
In a way it is a progress. Wars had thousands or even millions of causalities, but history says mostly about generals. No one interested enough in a fate of a private John Smith. Now education came to a point when privates of army of brilliant engineers is not interesting enough, because there are too many of them for a cognitive abilities of a regular consumer of a history.
Maybe some day in a future, we'll come to a history ignoring individuals from an army of Elons, and focusing instead on some superhuman who led them.
In fact there is quite a bit of research on 'John Smith' just as people are interested in the engineers at SpaceX (multiple books, podcasts, talks and so on).
What is bothersome is that some people that do not like Musk have come out of the woodwork with the 'but he is not responsible' argument. Its is such a tiered line of argument by now.
Everybody knows a company is not one person but equally everybody knows that Musk is most responsible for SpaceX by literally any definition. I hope at some point we can evolve past this endlessly repeating line of argument.
as much as it pains me to say it, but those "really really good engineers" are just cogs in the machine, providing services for money; the management running the machine, ultimately decide which direction the machines runs.
it's a cynical take, but cogs are replaceable, and would (often with not that major of an adjustment) easily fit other machines, ones that perhaps run in directions we don't like or care about.
(like seriously, tech companies like SpaceX etc burn through engineers like crazy, they literally take this metaphor to heart, iirc most fresh engineers last barely the vesting period, much cheaper to replace them with the fresh batch from the next semester)
Therefore the people running the machine are the ones that matter, since they are responsible for the good and the bad.
> I think that there is a severe imbalance in who we're thanking for these achievements.
There you go.
The hard work from brilliant engineers of any giant tech company to make all of this actually work and become a reality is always overlooked and the spotlight is focused on the individual who gives out unrealistic deadlines for the engineers to meet.
If they meet the deadline, no one cares and it's business as usual. If they miss it; angry meetings, delays, reshuffles and layoffs happen.
> It is pretty wild when you think about it - not so long ago (10 years maybe?) this sort of thing would have been unthinkable.
10 years ago many people thought it would happen well before 2021. The "first operational Dragon spacecraft was launched in December 2010" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX) and commercial flights to the ISS were right around the corner (cargo first happened May 2012).
I remember going to Disney Epcot Center as a kid and it showed how we would be living on the ocean floor by the year 2000. That is what I consider wild.
If you told me as a kid that I will go my whole life without owning a robot and that the main difference is we will replace a rotary phone with a hand held phone I would want my money back.
I guess poor Christa McAuliffe has been totally forgot about also.
If you told my kids not only will they own a robot, their grandmother actually owns one, they wouldn't believe you. Just before they tripped over her roomba.
> I guess poor Christa McAuliffe has been totally forgot about also.
Wasn't that a government flight aboard a government spacecraft that notably didn't make it to space? Not sure how that's related to a civilian flight aboard a civilian spacecraft.
Virgin Galactic only reached Mach 3 speed and was nowhere near achieving orbital velocity which requires Mach 23 (28,000 kph)
ie order of magnitude more difficult.
Serious question: while I understand making the comparison in Mach number to illustrate the difference in speed, is the speed of sound actually well defined near or above the Karman line?
Not sure why you've been downvoted, but the world classes space at the Kármán line, 100km above Sea Level. Spaceship One reached this back in 2003, but Virgin Unity didn't.
Blue Origin's New Shepard did reach 100km though, so was a "space trip". It was sub orbital though, so more Freedom 7 than Vostok 1 (Freedom 7 reached a far higher apogee and speed than New Shepard)
SpaceX has the civilian equivalent of Vostok 1, albeit larger and far more advanced. It's an order of magnitude more impressive.
The difference is, that was a state-operated flight to the ISS which sold surplus seats. Equally, the shuttle could have carried a tourist on some missions.
This flight is purely for paying customers, organized and conducted by a private company. If there were enough paying customers, SpaceX probably would be happy to have such a flight every month. With this mission, space travel has become something you can commercially book, though at a very steep price - that might come down with the Starship.
While Elon Musk deserves credit for SpaceX, I fail to see what credit he deserves for Tesla. The founders of Tesla and the designers of the first car should absolutely get credit, but Musk is neither. He delayed the release of their first car to get rid of the founder, in fact.
In all seriousness, founding a company and designing[0] a car aren't really remarkable achievements. This has been done many times. What's really impressive is moving from a glorified proof-of-concept to manufacturing at a massive scale—a feat rarely achieved by startup automotive companies anywhere in the world.
[0] Especially when "design" really just means an electric drivetrain and bits of custom trim for a Lotus skateboard.
Musk was a founding investor and Chairman of the company. The company was incorporated shortly before that. He also oversaw design of the Roadster. Before Musk's involvement it consisted of a handful of people and some plans to build a prototype adapted from an existing vehicle, the AC Propulsion T Zero. The Roadster project didn't start until after Musk's involvement and he participated in design discussions from day 1.
The first Tesla is a car for rich people only. The reason for Tesla's 700b valuation is the innovation that Tesla has made in producing the model y and model 3 and the current goal of producing the first $25k mass produced electric car.
That ship has sailed a few years ago: Volkswagen e-Up, Seat Mii, Renault Twingo, several models from BYD, Dacia Spring, Smart EQ, Fiat 500e, and even Renault Zoe or MG ZS in some markets. All under 25k€, including value added tax
Indeed. I was recently considering getting an ev and it's amazing how much choice you have in the "budget" segment. Dacia Spring is 17k€ (VAT included) and it offers 250km of range. Granted, it's equipped only with an airco and a basic infotainment, but still.
The only way Tesla can make a dent in this market is by offering autopilot and much greater range at 20k or so. Or by making a bloody fast car for young people (which will cannibalize their own sales probably).
Hayley Arceneaux will become the first individual with a prosthesis to go to space. In the 60 year history of crewed spaceflight, we have never put a human with titanium bones in orbit. Nor, have we sent anyone up who has met any of the requirements to be otherwise classified as "disabled". Until now.
It is the indicator of a profound tipping point.
The very first astronauts were required to be "perfect physical specimens" (cis-male specimens at that) that had no abnormal readings in all of their medical tests. Jim Lovell was eliminated from consideration during the Mercury program because of his elevated bilirubin levels, which turned out to be a fairly normal variation of human physiology.
The requirements loosened to the point where Jim Lovell could go to the moon. But most people, including women, were still excluded by NASA's and the Air Force's Flight Surgeons.
Then came the Shuttle program that opened the field wider to more bright minds who wouldn't have met the "perfect male physical specimen" standard, including Eileen Collins and Sally Ride. By the end of the program, the shuttle had launched multiple cancer survivors into space.
However, so far, people who are considered "disabled" or "unfit" by the Flight Surgeon's office are still excluded. These terms cut a wide swath and include treatable conditions such as, Type-I diabetes, dysmenorrhea, endometriosis and - yes- prosthetics. Other than a call by ESA for the first disabled state-sponsored astronauts, no other astronaut corps has admitted someone like Hayley into their ranks. Yet.
With this flight, Hayley will set a new milestone in space medicine. A big one. She will become a test case that can be used to demonstrate that people with disabilities can function and operate in the spaceflight environment. It will break the cycle of disabled people being "flight proven", from a flight surgeon's perspective.
We're now at the dawn of a new age, where anyone physically fit can go to space, provided they have the mental aptitude. It's incredible.
This flight means that I can be an astronaut. And so can you.
Hayley represents a huge milestone. And we owe it to commercial spaceflight. Thank you, Elon and Jared Isaacman (and Axiom Space).
edit: This comment is one of my more downvoted comments. I'm not sure why.
Aren't you overhyping it a little bit? Crossing the Rubicon (Rubicon is a river)?
Civilians were being already sent in 1986 (unsuccessfully...) and in 1990 (successfully). What's a difference between a civilian that has or has not a prosthesis? It is not like they are going to be doing some kind of superhuman feats.
They could have sent a disabled person just as well in 1986 if they decided so. If I remember there were even discussions to choose who to send to space to show how routine and safe it is and disabled person was discussed. But in the end they decided to choose woman teacher as better publicity stunt.
The real important differences here are:
1. Falling costs of sending anything to orbit.
2. A business model and a technical plan to keep the costs falling for the foreseeable future.
3. Competition supported by free market.
4. A leader with power, means, plan, drive and ability to execute to achieve great things.
I think the poster is saying it's not really a single point if no return and therefore isn't a great analogy. Crossing the Rubicon was about a single act that so broke the status quo it was impossible to undo that. This is more about the accumulation of a bunch of small steps making minor adjustments to the status quo instead of a singular act.
That's why I would favour "milestone". I understand what is meant by the "Rubicon" statement though (it's not about a river). Separate from if I agree with it or not.
Yes, milestone would be better because it is an arbitrary point that doesn't need to have some special significance other than the fact it is easy to detect when it has been reached.
Is this something SpaceX eventually plan to commercialise, like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are doing?
Seems to me that orbital spaceflight as a proposition is an order of magnitude more enticing than scratching the Kármán line. And for the people who could afford it, they'd surely pay an order of magnitude more.
I don't know whether it's truly that appealing to the "masses". Keep in mind that unlike with quick suborbital hops, orbital flights are preceded by week-long training, medical exams and preparations.
You can't just show up in the morning an hour before launch, get some final instructions, strap in and be back home in time for lunch.
It's much more of an investment in terms of time and effort, too besides just the money. The stress on both body and mind is also significantly higher - if you do panic, you can just close your eyes for a hot minute and be safely back on the ground (in the case of Blue Origin), whereas with an orbital flight you're stuck in space for at least an hour no matter what with the worst (e.g. re-entry) yet to come.
Going to orbit on a rocket isn't the quite the carnival ride that suborbital hops are.
I don't think they intend to commercialize it from a tourism perspective, they very much intend to do point-to-point terrestrial transportation via rockets though and that will be a commercial endeavor that carries people and cargo.
I don't know if it will happen in practice, or if it will be successful when they try it but it would be damn cool.
Very cool, but a pretty worrying acceleration of fuel consumption for transit by the world’s rich. A Falcon 9 uses ~75,000 (depending on payload) gallons of RP-1, which is a type of kerosine. Meanwhile a LA to NYC flight takes roughly 5,000 gallons of kerosene (depending on direction). There’s obviously a sizable difference between the number of people in a typical cross country flight and in a Dragon crewed vehicle.
Our usage of fuel for regular jet travel is already becoming A Problem. Making it easier to burn more fuel for fewer people to travel faster is emphatically not what we need right now.
All terrestrial transport ideas from SpaceX I've seen involved Starship, not Falcon 9/Dragon.
I don't know how that compares with a typical airliner in terms of miles per gallon (probably not much better than Dragon). However Starship runs on methane and that should in theory be easy to produce from atmospheric CO2 and electricity from renewable sources.
In any case, I don't think many people took the idea of using Starship as a terrestrial passenger transport seriously.
be it methane or RP1 you're subjected to the laws of thermodynamics. namely converting CO2 to any of those will require more energy than delivered by your rocket or car. also rocket engines are already some of the most efficient thermal engines available/possible, starship won't change that.
None of which has anything whatsoever to do with the issue of AGW though. For the purposes of warming the planet, direct energy usage and emission by humanity is irrelevant (utterly swamped by solar insolation for starters). What's driving it is our changing the net levels of greenhouse gases and in turn the amount of energy retained vs radiated into space. So what matters for dealing with climate disruption is making sure our activities are greenhouse neutral (and for a while we should go carbon negative), all debates of "efficiency" or "luxury" or whatever are extremely foolish distractions. If everything is greenhouse neutral with associated prices becoming clear than people can figure the rest out from there about where they wish to allocate their extra resources.
SpaceX intends to develop direct atmospheric methane generation from CO2, which they have to do anyway for their Mars plans because that's the only way to do in-situ refueling there (plenty of CO2 in the atmosphere, not exactly a lot of natural gas fields). Taking into account any methane leaks and correcting for its few decades of enhance greenhouse effect before it decomposes to CO2, they certainly could make Starship carbon neutral and if they do it doesn't matter how much "energy" in the abstract it uses beyond price. Solar and wind power have plenty positive power factors.
Worth noting that in principle nothing is special about Starship here, carbon neutral RP1 could be made as well (at a further hit to conversion efficiency and thus price). In practice though green methane is more practical and will amortize better given its use elsewhere in the solar system.
Generating rocket fuels with renewables will only be carbon neutral when we have an excess of renewable energy. Until then, either the solar panels would be better used to replace fossil fuel generation on the grid, or the synthesised methane would be better used to replace a more necessary use of fossil methane.
It's hard to argue that a method of transport so incredibly energy inefficient will be a good thing until we're swimming in so much excess energy that we've got nothing better to do with it. Even with the massive improvements in renewables over the last few decades, we're a long, long way from that point.
>Generating rocket fuels with renewables will only be carbon neutral when we have an excess of renewable energy
Absolutely wrong. It is not a zero sum game. In terms of raw money and capability, we could have gone carbon neutral in the developed world at least decades ago. We could be aiming for that universally right now, the US alone has dumped trillions and trillions into war and pandemic response over just the last 10 years. It hasn't happened because "we" collectively have not chosen to make it happen. SpaceX, or anyone else, making themselves carbon neutral when they are under no external compulsion too is pure gain. They don't need to solve all the problems on the fucking planet first. That has always been one of the most irritating fallacies in the whole AGW discussion.
>It's hard to argue that a method of transport so incredibly energy inefficient will be a good thing until we're swimming in so much excess energy that we've got nothing better to do with it.
No, it isn't. It's trivial to argue: if it's greenhouse neutral and all the externalities are built-in then if anyone wants to pay for it by definition it is a good thing. In fact at that point it'd be a BETTER thing than traditional "more efficient" methods of transport which aren't greenhouse neutral!
You're coming up with this silly subjective morality things when the only morality involved is externalized harm. If that is eliminated and people still consider the service worth it when they can see the true price then that's all that matters.
can you explain me how spacex/tesla are carbone neutral?
i agree they had plans to develop solar panels, but AFAIK, the company just collapsed and musk is being presently trialed for bailing out solarcity in an illegal way.
silly morality? can you further explain the morality of sending rich tourists in orbit when people are dying now out of climate change?
>can you explain me how spacex/tesla are carbone neutral?
This is dishonest goalpost shifting. The original post by avian was engaging in forward looking discussion about future plans (which is necessary in any discussion about Starship since it isn't actually even in full operation yet, and even once it is there will be a host of Mars-related further systems to develop over the rest of the 2020s at least). The post said:
>avian: However Starship runs on methane and that should in theory be easy to produce from atmospheric CO2 and electricity from renewable sources.
You then responded with a nonsensical post on thermodynamics (and also incidentally were completely wrong about the rocket engine bit, the FFSC Raptor engines Starship uses have much better ISP then Merlin, but that isn't relevant either) which can only be read to imply that because of thermodynamic losses making methane somehow can't be green? But thermodynamics have absolutely nothing to do with it. We have non-greenhouse energy sources with highly positive power factors, and indeed there isn't any thermodynamic difference in harvesting incoming solar gain to useful ends before converting it back into heat vs... just letting it all become heat. In either case the net energy is the same and what determines the balance on Earth is how much is trapped vs how much is radiated.
>i agree they had plans to develop solar panels, but AFAIK, the company just collapsed and musk is being presently trialed for bailing out solarcity in an illegal way.
????? Are you somehow implying that it's impossible for SpaceX to just, you know, buy solar panels from one of the bajillion providers on the market? WTF does SolarCity/Tesla Energy have to do with any of this? They're entirely separate companies. And the trial is essentially a nothingburger at this point anyway. The absolute worst case for Tesla (not SpaceX) would be having to pay the couple of billion back in damages which with their stock and now income would be annoying but also trivial. But I doubt they get remotely 100% because it's very hard to argue a negative in shareholder suits. The civil court system in America operates primarily on the concept of damages, that you can be shown to have lost something. But Tesla stock is at an all time high, none of them can directly show any harm. Instead they have to argue that the lack of information was material (~85% of shareholders voted for it IIRC) and that if not for the purchase of SolarCity Tesla would be higher. But the defense will argue that Tesla Energy was indeed an important purchase strategically and for various reasons of direct value, some of which are definitely true (even diverting its workforce to work on Model 3, held up as an example of it not being worth as much, absolutely offered value to Tesla in the form of, well, faster Model 3 production). Courts don't generally like to get into positing alternate universes and operational details. The stuff that wasn't disclosed does seem potentially impactful enough that Elon/Tesla may face at least some damages, but I don't think it'd be the full purchase price.
None of which, again, has anything whatsoever to do with SpaceX.
>can you further explain the morality of sending rich tourists in orbit when people are dying now out of climate change?
LOL. Why the fuck are you here then posting on Hacker News? Why aren't you spending these precious minutes out saving the world? Working even a little bit more to earn a few extra dollars which could help starving families in Africa adapt to climate change or whatever? Have any hobbies? Ever buy any food beyond the most basic gruel necessary for continued bodily function? Etc etc.
That is all literally the 100% exact same thing: discussion about how to use one's luxury energy/mass budget. A core part of our entire effort as humans and human civilization has been to increase that, to get beyond the level of absolute subsistence and then be able to spend some of that on activities to our own goals for the future. If those activities don't cause harm to other people then it is absolutely bullshit moralizing to put your own subjective luxury goals above anyone else's. Morality should be about both making sure all costs are internalized and large scale actions to direct effort towards lifting up people, safety nets, protecting individual and group rights, dealing with extreme inequality, etc etc, just in general aiming to help every human maintain a reasonable level of life and have the opportunity to achieve some portion of their potential. And do it in a systemic fashion beyond individual choices.
Frankly you're a huge hypocrite to even bring it up, which is how these things typically go. You claimed in a previous post to have a PhD, which represents an enormous expenditure of resources that could have gone towards mitigating AGW or feeding the starving or whatever instead. You are a highly privileged person. And that's fine. You've no doubt worked very very hard even beyond your luck. But it should mean you think twice before turning right around and judging others. By world standards you are a rich person. Have you ever gone on a single vacation in your life? Why do you think the label "rich tourist" doesn't apply to you too?
thanks making my point clearer. presently 80% of our energy comes from fossil fuels, we need to peak emissions in 4 years max and do -50% in nine years.
putting tourists in space doesn't seems like a priority.
Yeah, someone over there at SpaceX should really address the issue of transportation fossil fuel use on a large scale. To only build orbital rockets while ignoring the climate crisis here on Earth would be irresponsible.
I've heard that the methane/oxygen (methalox?) used in Starship engines can be made carbon-neutral by concentrating the fuel from the atmosphere... And that the same process can be done on Mars too to refuel the rockets. Hopefully that's workable.
It was a joke about Tesla. Atmospheric carbon is fungible. You don't need to neutralize methalox emissions if you are doing anything statistically significant about automobile emissions, as the latter will be much, much larger.
To be fair, carbon capture for night time energy usage is a plausible path for us to solve the mismatch between when we use energy and when solar produces it. If we go that route as a society, turning a tiny percentage of that into rocket fuel is NBD, and probably better than burning kerosene which we currently cannot make via carbon capture.
i don't know any carbon capture technology that can be scaled sufficiently, in the proper time scales, that can do that in a way that is quick enough to do any significant dent to global warming.
No single tech is gonna be the solution here. It’s going to a mix of lowered consumption, more efficient tech, time shifting of demand (EVs selectively charging based on the sun), and a wide variety of energy storage tech.
Carbon capture is attractive because it can be used in places where energy density is a critical factor.
Yes, but it may be "superfluous" energy provided by wind turbines or solar at a moment of very high production when no one is ready to consume it. Turning this energy into something useful is actually a bonus.
ok i agree there is some tech transfer with NASA, so is with CERN for instance. this is however national space programs.
my question was more towards commercial space programs, will the tech they invent be open? if so is it worth letting it expand basically out of any regulations?
Current level of regulations of space tourism corresponds to the fact that we do not yet know much what will need regulating and what not.
Regulations around rocket launches have been hashed out over decades of practice. We do not yet have this kind of practical experience with space tourism.
As for the tech produced by commercial space programs: I do not know how open it is going to be, but the know-how established during development will move around as people leave their employees and join others or create their own space startups. I think this might be the most important effect: massive expansion of the pool of experienced engineers.
A historical analogy: contemporary Silicon Valley was basically founded by engineers (called the Traitorous Eight) who left a mismanaged semiconductor startup owned by William Shockley.
> Is this something SpaceX eventually plan to commercialise, like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are doing?
This IS commercialized. Jared Isaacman contacted SpaceX and expressed interest in buying a flight. SpaceX put him in touch with people and then he bought the flight. Other missions have already been bought as well and likely several more that haven't been mentioned.
My main thought since they first announced this trip was, what are they going to do for 3 entire days? That's a lot of time for people who haven't been trained up the way astronauts have to potentially experience some extreme mental states.
Being stuck in a tiny, tiny space with strangers and absolutely no way out seems like it could potentially cause issues even for people who have been psychologically screened. Hopefully these "experiments" they're supposed to be running will help keep them occupied & distracted.
"Trapped alone in a small room with no way out", sounds like a few experiences I've had while travelling since January 2020. Elon, if you're reading, I'm happy to volunteer myself for the next mission.
He had to wave his, had he not. Having said that, anybody got data on the pollution footprint of spaceflight. Since we are rapidly making the planet unlivable. Now the people in Louisiana want to move north unable to bear the heat.
Maybe this is just me, but I think we need a new word for people who pay to take a ride on a spacecraft but have nothing to do with the operation or mission of that spacecraft. "Payload" seems rude, perhaps "passengers"?
Or conversely, most 'real' astronauts are also 'just' passengers, and only a few ever pilot a spacecraft. I think "Astronaut" is fine for anyone who's been to space, and "pilot" if you fly the spacecraft.
They have everything to do with the operation and mission of the spacecraft.
They will do as much as NASA astronauts do on dragon spacecraft.
I understand the point that the word astronaut is reserved for highly trained individuals working for NASA, but the rants about it I keep seeing online on various forums are just so mean spirited for some reason. Calling them payload, seriously?
