re: Bet the pro net-neutrality tweets age as well as this Neil deGrasse Tyson tweet

How can Musk be classified as private enterprise? He lives off the government tit

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I understand that Musk's flight was a victory for private enterprise, but I still think large-scale space missions will be the purview of governments, as governments are more insulated from risk and expense. As we see the burgeoning programs from India and China, it will be interesting to see what reaction the government at large will have.

By and large, rocketry technology was funded by governments, based off the research of numerous individuals such as Robert Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, neither of whom were funded by corporations, although Goddard received a large amount of pre-war funding from the Guggenheim Foundation. I don't think Esnault-Pelterie, nor Hermann Oberth were involved in the private sector either. I haven't even mentioned von Braun either, who only joined the private sector after his time with NASA. In the pre-war era, that rocketry research wasn't all useful to either the private or public sector (hence why Goddard had to find funding through a foundation).

What has been a major success has been the public-private partnerships that NASA has used to fund research, through which a whole litany of devices were developed.

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I agree with almost all of that.

There's a little bit of me who questions what the space race would have looked like under private enterprise, though, especially they had people who were really visionary and truly enterprising - with people who could envision a world with satellites and instant global communication and so forth. That stuff was being thrown around as early as the early 1960's.

Space is an interesting beast, though. It falls in that nether region between obvious public good (like a dam or highway) and a radically transformational private good (like the mobile phone or any number of recent pharma developments in the last thirty years).

How was NdGT tweeting over 140 characters in 2015?

Nice, and I agree, but let me know when Elon Musk is hitting golf balls on the moon.

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capitalism and private enterprise wins again

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Perhaps you could explain what capitalism and private enterprise have to do with NN.

SapceX and Tesla would be long gone if not for government support. This was not a privately led event.

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capitalism and private enterprise

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It's fair to say taxpayers paid Musk $5b -ish bucks.

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Space exploration is discovery, and there’s no returns on that. Any business dedicated to exploration and eventually colonization would go bankrupt before realizing anything of value

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That's a very narrow view. All discovery in the past has lead to huge returns.

Resource mining is huge when it comes to space. There are more valuable elements floating around in space than we could dream of.

why create a fake tweet for this?

why not link the article from which that quotes come from which give it more context?

LINK

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I know, because I interviewed Tyson himself a few weeks ago, and one of the things we talked about – which didn’t make it into my piece then – was his disappointment with how private space efforts seem to be leapfrogging the government’s interest in funding and pursuing such things.

Sure, the famed astrophysicist is happy these kinds of things get us collectively looking to the stars. Indeed, each new advancement by space-obsessed billionaires like Bezos, Elon Musk and others tends to be met not only with predictably breathless coverage about how much closer we are to conquering the final frontier but also how these accomplished men with a singular vision are pressing forward at a time when governments don’t seem to have as much appetite for exploration anymore.

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Has this idiot ever been around the oilfield? I don’t give a damn what the risks are, private enterprises (Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Anadarko, etc) will find a way. I’ve been a part of Drilling 11,500’ off the coast of Brazil. If this self described “intellectual” comprehended the challenges faced with drilling a simple vertical well on land, let alone the challenges faced in the depths that we were at, he’d understand just how far private enterprises can and will go. I’ll put any American oil company against any other countries state owned company any day of the week. Private American company will always succeed, whereas the state owned will not.