Folks Are Copying SpaceX - That's How Capitalism Works

Why is it that people find this so difficult to understand?

That SpaceX is doing pretty damn well in developing the technology of rocket launches should be obvious. It is all, clearly, due to my own advice to a younger Elon Musk that couple of decades back. He once asked me - and, no, really, this story is true - whether using scandium in his rockets would make them lighter. I told him no, but they’d be easier to weld if he did. Both true - or even triply true, the event, the two facts about scandium - and here I am still scribbling for a living rather than impregnating my employees.

Ah, well, here we are.

But this from Ars Technica interests. In the sense of, well, yes, but doesn’t everyone know this?

Rocket Report: China leaps into rocket reuse; 19 people are currently in orbit

Launch startups in China and Europe are borrowing ideas and rhetoric from SpaceX.

We can approach this from either end. We’ll end up in the same place.

The most difficult thing in engineering is “Will it work?” You know, fusion, antigravity, back a time steam engines and all the rest. There’s a point in the process when it’s possible to imagine how lovely something would be but not to know whether it’s actually possible. Steam engines, for the Romans, probably weren’t - their metallurgy wasn’t advanced enough. Note probably because that’s merely an assertion from me. The base idea was known by the Greeks but building something that could do serious work? Probably - probably - no they couldn’t build boilers and transions (no idea what the fuck they are, but) and whippet flanges to make it all work. Just not the metallurgy.

The real art of engineering is to get us just over that next boundary of what can be done given the advances in all the other sciences and technical trades.

OK, SpaceX has done that. They’ve not invented all of the bits and pieces they’re using. It’s very much more true (only “more true”) to say that they’ve applied all of the accumulated learning to the specific problem under discussion.

OK. Vital stuff and I’m as, if not more, shocked as anyone else about how far they’ve got. But this returns us to that base point - the big problem is “is it possible?”

Well, now, yes, obviously it is. Therefore those same building blocks are out there in the rest of the economy that others can use. And they are. Huzzah etc.

Other people will be making rockets that are reusable, launch costs will continue to come down etc. It’s also obviously sweet to see that the EU’s Ariane program will fail. So, you know, good times, good times.

But we can approach this the other way too, looking at capitalism rather than engineering. As Adam Smith didn’t quite say (but as I do, often) capitalists are lazy, stupid and greedy. Finding that new way to make money is really difficult. So, very few try. Once someone does try and find then all the lazy - and greedy, did I mention that? - capitalist bastards copy what is being done. This hauls vast amounts of capital into that area, competition erodes the profits being made by the pioneer and the end result is that it’s consumers who make out like bandits. The result (here) is that the entrepreneur makes 3% or so of the money and the consumers near all the rest. This is the very thing that makes this capitalist and free market thing work.

Do, please, note, it’s the markets that make it work, not the capitalism. The capitalism is the trigger but the full load is the market part.

So, OK, Elon and friends have done all the hard work to show that this works. $ per kg into orbit has fallen like a stone. (Yeah, I know, there should be a joke here about prices falling from orbit. Insert your own) This is going to mean more things done up there which is good. But the big effect is what Ars is talking about. It can be done, it is possible, therefore more are doing it.

The benefit to us out here, to the mere consumer, is that the entrepreneur shows what is possible. At which point everyone copies and that’s why the system makes us, the consumers, so damned rich.

I should have told him scandium was great, right?