Rockets to get to get a small payload to LEO can be modified to be ICBM’s relatively easily but a Saturn V or Starship cannot easily be used as an ICBM lol

VO was spun off from galactic at some point.

Star Trek is probably the one exception to this lol

*automakers

Car companies as is are mostly fine with a 2035 deadline because most of them are going to phase out ICE by then anyways

Yes, produce enough boards that scalping isn’t an issue

Otherwise there is a supply/demand mismatch and someone is going to take advantage of that by increasing the price, whether it’s a scalper, the Pi foundation increasing prices, or store markup.

There’s not a lot Elon can actually do in that scenario since they are reliant on NASA and the US government letting them launch to do so. Private space flight is another story, but SpaceX has only started doing manned flights somewhat recently so I actually do think they would do the right thing in that scenario because no one is going to fly on a rocket that they think will kill them.

Also remember that SpaceX has been gung ho about testing in ways that don’t risk anything other than the vehicle, like the Starship test flights they did earlier and failing to land the booster stage of the F9 thousands of times before doing it consistently. It took a long time before they started flying people on the Falcon 9 and we’re not going to see Starship fly people for years.

lol

I get people like to claim Elon is overcharging for space access and here’s currently the punching bag of the week for how he’s handling twitter, but the opposite is pretty true. Space access is a lot cheaper now that SpaceX exists compared to legacy space companies like blue, NG, ULA, etc. The Falcon 9 is a good, well designed rocket that works really well and is way cheaper to launch than any other commercial space rocket before it.

Mostly. There are some downsides, like I increased emissions from more launches, a risk of Kessler syndrome happening (this is mostly overblown unless two satellites hit each other and even then that will just increase the price temporarily as less LEO orbits are available) but IMO things like Starlink/swarm are a net benefit for humanity (while Musk isn’t being a jackass and trying to stop Ukrainian people from using it) because it’s incredibly useful to people in rural areas who would otherwise never have good internet, and there’s other benefits like being able to restock the ISS/send new crew/send new scientific missions into space for cheaper, which means NASA and other space agencies can stretch their thin budgets a bit more. The biggest real downside is probably increased carbon emissions from more launches, which sucks but rockets are also an incredibly tiny contributor to global warming and the physics involved make it difficult to use non fossil fuel sources other than hydrogen produced from electrolysis, and also to a lesser extent mad astronomers since more satellites = less of the night sky being visible and more artificial star looking things they need to filter out.

Elon actually provided the launch for a reasonably good price. If you went to any other launch provider, you would have gotten a quote over 2x the price of a SpaceX launch. SpaceX has its flaws, like poor working hours, but the price to put things in orbit has gone down massively because of them, not the other way around. It’s the least bad of Elon’s companies by a long shot.

Oh yeah that I think it’s hilarious that people think it’s more likely for it to be a coverup than for Northrop Grumman to be incompetent at designing the fairing adapter

Detecting things in orbit is trivially easy using a camera if you know the possible trajectories for an orbit for a rocket launched at a given launch site in a general direction.

Yep the passenger version of the 747 has been out of production for years except for one-offs like the new versions of AF1.