Odysseus has less than a day left on the Moon before it freezes to death::So what are we to make of this? Is Odysseus a success or a failure?

  • @[email protected]
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    410 months ago

    So material waste can be directly tied to cost. If you’re trying to bring down cost then you’re going to try to reduce waste correct? That’s why there is so much work being done for reusable launch vehicles

    For space debris and pollution I don’t think we can squarely blame capitalism. Under a purely communist economy there’s no guarentee that anyone would care any more about it than currently And you can attack that issue by a combination of penalising companies that create debris and rewarding those that remove it under a capitalist economy

    As for it not being entirely comparable. Sure the government spent a lot of money on that early R&D. But do we think that if we banned companies from doing this kind of work that govt agencies like NASA would be necessarily more cost effective, cause less pollution, and less debris?

    • @[email protected]
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      110 months ago

      The overwhelming cost in these projects is always engineering salaries. These companies are making the calculation that they can throw shit (rockets) at the wall (into space) carelessly to save money by wasting more material to avoid paying the salaries of people that could think through the design more carefully and come up with something that will have a reasonable probability of working the first time.

      And you can attack that issue by a combination of penalising companies that create debris and rewarding those that remove it under a capitalist economy

      Add this to the insurmountable pile of things we should theoretically regulate but never will because of regulatory capture.

      • @[email protected]
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        110 months ago

        Do you have any data to back that up? It would be quite interesting

        I don’t think regulation is impossible to achieve, look at the EU. And what I am fairly sure of is you have better odds of passing regulation than replacing capitalism entirely