avmich

But Spaceship won't be ready to fly humans Earth-LEO in 2030, and likely not in 2035.

To make a manned capsule one needs about $3B and 6-7 years. It's good some are working on it - but maybe these numbers, especially time, are a bit optimistic. I would certainly prefer more activity here.

> The larger point of the government not having control of its own launch capability has been an issue since an American rocket was designed with a Russian engine - Atlas V.

You remember that at the time there were fully American alternative - Delta-IV, with a heavy modification, and it stopped flying only when other alternatives became available too?

You have quite a biased view here, extraextra.

> I'm confident Starship will be used to fly human crews at some point as well

Problem is this time is far away, and in the meantime we need something. And the best currently available system is Falcon 9 + Crew Dragon.

What do you mean? The problem is that for SpaceX it's more profitable to focus on its own internal projects. The development milestones of SpaceX are fine, in particular Falcon-9 and Crew Dragon is a pretty good way to launch people to space, and the problem is that it is becoming for SpaceX not interesting to keep launching them, because other things are better.

> Crew dragon being retired is only a problem in so far that Starship isn't ready.

Starship is not going to fly people next quite a few years. And NASA wouldn't like to have a gap with human spaceflight. And not only NASA.

That's correct, NASA would prefer Falcon-9 and Crew Dragon to remain available, among other things.

Are you sure the sales are final? That SpaceX can't renege on them and just pay for the deal breaking?

> Yeah, that's the year when the ISS will be deorbited into the freaking Pacific Ocean

So what about the other stations, supposed to replace the ISS?

> Yeah, because they will start flying the freaking Starship, which will be fully reusable (Falcon 9 is not fully reusable)

So what about launch customers? That's essentially the main point of the article, the leading company is leaving the market, which grew dependent on its services. The consequence is that many are looking for replacements, which are hard to get.

Yes it does, and the article says why and how. Other space agencies... that's a very different question. Only China can be comparable to NASA in terms of breadth of space initiatives, and China has their launch industry. Everybody else mostly doesn't use as many launches per year as SpaceX is capable of doing.

These are all different rockets, several not interchangeable by mass - e.g. Electron is pretty light, SLS is pretty heavy, some others are still smaller than Falcon 9. We'd like them to prosper, we don't have enough launchers - but to replace the capabilities of retiring Falcon-9 - not to mention Falcon Heavy - many of those rockets will have to demonstrate reusability and ability to launch frequently, which might take time.

I wonder how that is related to houses. Are houses a demand? If they are not, what's the definition of demand?

I'd be glad to see how the character-related parts of a typical VGA card are made. There were multiple modes, some of them textual, with different fonts, support for the hardware text cursor... not yet video acceleration, but still convenient functions.

Last million years we failed, but hope is still not lost - we're getting better, at least sometimes.

In general, the more specific tool you have, the more tailored to the goal approach you may have, with all features optimized for that goal. If you need those tools from the full OS, you might have their specialized versions in a unikernel.

Why do you equate government and the honorable Joe Average? The government works at the pleasure of the Joe Average, so it's natural that the said Joe is interested to watch how his servants perform their duties - after all, he elected them to do that and pays them for that. At the same time Joe might be not interested for his lowly servants to keep tabs on him - that's none of their business, after all they don't compensate him for that information, so why shouldn't we have cameras to watch the police while completely denying them to use cameras to watch us?