NASA’s Voyager 2 has lost communication with Earth due to an unintentional shift in its antenna direction. The next programmed orientation adjustment on October 15 is expected to restore communication, while Voyager 1 continues to operate as usual.
A series of scheduled commands directed at NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft on July 21 led to an unintentional change in antenna direction. Consequently, the antenna moved 2 degrees off course from Earth, causing the spacecraft to lose its ability to receive commands or transmit data back to our planet.
That is just another way of saying imposes negative externalities.
I am wary of commercial anything, I don’t really trust any company. We are still having major pollution events, some being planned to this day. And even some of the smallest, most seemingly benevolent startups sometimes turnout out to be so evil they are literally scamming people out of life.
Maybe once we have real jail time for executives and the corporate death penalty by destruction of charter and a little bit of a time period without an event of awful corporate negligence, maybe then space commercialization might be a net benefit.
I think you know that you were oversimplifying here. It isn’t some weird-ass energy balance thing where all you can do is move the problem around. About half of my work is on government contracts and I can tell you first hand that it is very easy to make a bad project that costs more and gain nothing from it. I have personally been in multihour meetings with 6 or so engineers (with those billable hours) just to endlessly discuss the solution to the problem that had already been solved.
Just go ahead and pick some process you do in your daily life and try to do it inefficiently with no gain. You will find that it is trivially easy to do. There are more ways for something to be wrong vs being right. Which means that being right one way doesn’t mean that all ways of being right are equal.
I won’t tell you not to be. Go ahead and be wary of it makes you feel better. I am wary of spending another 50 years stuck in LEO.
There is and never was a space program without commercial partners. It is only the question of to what degree. As of right now the HLS operating costs are far below the space shuttle program, less polluting, and should be safer. Given that half of the program failed that is even more of an achievement with the remaining 50%.