We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Boeing capsule press conference Rand Simberg attended the Boeing press conference and has supplied some notes on their CST-100 plans.
I am glad to see there will be competition in the LEO cargo and business passenger field. As much as I like Elon and what he has accomplished, there is nothing like real competition to grow the market.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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As Boeing said in their press release, the completion of this vehicle will be dependent on government contracts. How exactly is that “commercial”?
In the same way that selling office supplies, airline tickets, automobiles and trucks to the government is commercial.
If the government designs a truck and has it built to DOD specifications and is the sole customer and the end product is of no use to anyone else, that is not commercial.
If a company builds a product or service and designs it so that it is priced and aimed at a wide market and also sells it to the government, even if the government sales are initially a significant percentage, that is still a commercial entity.
So Ares was non-commercial. No-one else had a use for it at the price and complexity of operation it represented. Falcon 9 or Atlas V, on the other hand, are designed with commercial customers in mind, and any self-respecting capitalist is going to maximize their ROI and minimize their risk by getting any customer they can, and if it is a venture with high risk, they are seriously going to want an anchor tenant to get their business case past the beancounters and through the shareholders… remember, we are in the age of Sarbanes-Oxley and constant litigation by scumbag lawyers against publicly traded companies.
You take what you can get. You only have two choices my friend: the status quo, which has lots of money and political power behind it, or a change in course which is highly unpopular to those politicians. Ain’t no 3rd way.