How are there so many people in this thread talking with such confidence and yet know absolutely nothing? SpaceX is the reason NASA doesn’t need to rely on Russia to get astronauts to and from the ISS, so that’s one huge benefit. And Starlink is in such a low orbit that their orbits are constantly decaying and will burn up in the atmosphere without any orbit corrections. So there will never be a chain reaction crash.
Comment on We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink
n3cr0@lemmy.world 1 day agoThen, how do we benefit from SpaceX? I’m not bashing the NASA, but I see no point in all the waste SpaceX is producing, down on earth and its orbit. These satelites are likely to crash one day in a chain reaction.
Balex@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I mean you have to realize how important it will be to have fully reusable rockets and a significantly reduced price to get to space. The goal with starship is to reduce the cost of getting to orbit by at least an order of magnitude. When that starts to happen it’ll allow for new and exciting things to happen in space.
First, we can go back to the moon and to Mars, we can explore again. But more than that, it will make some new things possible. It will eventually become feasible for resource extraction and manufacturing to move to space. That would mean processes that produce harmful waste don’t have to happen on our planet. Mining asteroids would mean again, minimal ecological impact compared to mining a mountain on Earth. And of course creating industry in space is the first step towards a future where people actually live in space, the first step towards humanity getting a real foothold off of earth.
But you literally can’t get to any of those possibilities without reusable rockets first, it’s just not feasible.