Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | le-mark's commentslogin

I fully expect Jevons paradox to hold for cheap kg to orbit. Spacex could be the monopoly transportation provider of the Solar Alliance. Yes that’s fanciful, but it illustrates the potential.

So we are now hypothesising fully-developed multi-planetary civilisations to justify an IPO price in 2026? By the same leap of logic Coca-Cola is worth 1 trillion times its current price since it's poised to be the galaxy's drink of choice. And I'm being reasonable with my estimate here, how many galaxies could we actually be talking about in potential?

Standard Oil is a ready counter point. The advent of the automobile greatly effected its success. And if one considers the value of children (Exxon, chevron, mobile,etc) after the supreme dissolved it in 1911, it was a tremendous value.

One can easily imagine a similar scenario for cheap kg to orbit.


> There are also other space companies outside of SpaceX who have innovated and reduced the cost of mass to orbit.

They should be easy to name then. I can’t think of any. Can you?


So far everybody's playing catch-up, but there are some innovative rocket companies out there. Blue Origin is finally getting to orbit with partial reusability, Rocket Lab and Relativity Space are doing some cool stuff, and Stoke Space is working on full reusability, evaporative cooling for reentry (using hydrogen fuel for the second stage, which works much better for this than methane), can steer for landing without gimbaling the engines, and has a full flow staged combustion engine like Starship.

HODLing my iPhone 8 here. I can’t use a lot of apps, but Venmo and Lyft work on it still.

> I wouldn't have done this war, and I certainly would stop it now.

That’s the thing there is no stopping it now. Trump walks away and Iran taxes every barrel that goes through the straight. There is no return to normal.


> That’s the thing there is no stopping it now. Trump walks away and ...

Right, Short of unconditional surrender, it is very hard for one party in a war to just end it without the other side also agreeing to cease. Otherwise, walking away just lets them target your back.


> And is basically the approach the U.S. took in Vietnam.

And just like the Vietnamese, Iran doesn’t have to win against the US. They only have to not lose. They control the straight, and at $1 per barrel toll, they’ll be making $1 Billion a week. Trump owned himself. This is going to suck.


Paid in yuan, of course, because that's the currency they're allowed to use, because of the US. And then oil companies decide it's annoying to use two different currencies, and they would rather buy the oil with yuan as well...

+1000 Everyone in technology should read this.

I will never understand why SO did not lean into its jobs feature. I got two jobs from it, I thought it was great.

The comedy/tragedy of this is; whenever I talk to people outside of engineering at social gatherings, this is what they do. Tell me their resume and accomplishments. I’m like, can we just a have a conversation please?

I always asks the question “what keeps you busy”? People think my wife and I are retired because of how often we travel. I say I’m not, I work remotely and try to keep the conversation away from work.

It seems obvious to me there will be methods and techniques using solar energy to disassemble asteroids and output large structures such as cylinders or spheres that will then become habitats. Example given a spherical grid one kilometer in diameter, apply a charge to it, place several tons of steel at the the center. Focus a mirror at the steel, vaporize and electro deposit the steel on grid. Voila steel sphere.

I’d like to see someone working on this, could be done in LEO.


> For example, medical interventions against zero-g decay

This seems obvious but I’ve never heard of anyone working on a drug to address it. Strapping astronauts to a treadmill yes, pills no.


Because that’s like saying you’ll develop a fuel additive to stop the body from rusting. Physical damage and weakness can’t be stopped by a pill.

"Body" is a pile of elaborate biochemistry. The muscles don't somehow evaporate when you stop exercising - it's the processes of the body itself that trim the "excess" muscle tissue.

And if it's the body doing that, you can, in theory, find a biochemical way to make it stop doing that.


"Physical damage and weakness can’t be stopped by a pill."

If you rephrase that to correct English then it would make sense. We aren't trying to stop physical damage or weakness we are trying to prevent it from happening. Pills can prevent many things that cause this.


Seems like a very broad statement. Do you have anything to confirm this opinion?

Do you have any grounds to deny it? If it were easy it would have been done already

No, but I'm not making a statement.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: