Starlink is a big deal so I wouldn't discount it. It's significantly expanded the satellite networking market. It's also a key military asset.
Aside from that the F9 rideshare missions have made space accessible to a whole new class of space startup that wouldn't exist otherwise.
Prior to F9 there was no competition in the US market. The result was government customers paid ULA through the nose. Commercial customers largely used Ariane. F9 saved the government money directly but also forced other launchers to lower their prices.
The current list price of Falcon-9 flight at 74 millions is a third more than what Russia used to charge for commercial payloads. Production cost of Russian rocket is below 15M USD and probably was below 10M at the peak of Russian comercial services. This is comparable with Falcon-9 amortized cost per flight.
Also don't forget what a state their launch facilities are in. Just because they could do something before does not mean they can do it now. They haven't invested properly in their infrastructure.
Wouldn’t this imply the SpaceX costs need to adjust for the infrastructure they didn’t pay for? Not slighting them, just acknowledging an apples to apples comparison is hard
You can't compare rocket vs rocket. Cheap Russian rockets are way smaller. Falcon 9 destroyed their market even before it was reusable.
You are also missing that Falcon 9 costs as much as costumers pay, SpaceX internal cost are significantly less. They just don't have competition to make it cheaper.
We don't have to look past it. Musk said it failed because engine underperformance caused too little fuel margin. He added that they have upgrades due on future flights.
If they ran out of fuel with 50 tons of payload it certainly begs the question of whether they will get to the goal of 100 tons of payload even with upgrades.
They also had engine fail on boostback. Reliability has been a persistent problem, they'll have to fix it for refueling and manned operations.
There are a few that are sailing, they are pretty modest size. There are plans for more and larger vessels but I don't think anyone expects widescale deployment anytime soon.
We didn't see exactly what was done but there was probably some amount of setup, refinement, etc that occurred. Perhaps it could be packaged as a skill. And probably the actual archeologists know more about how it could be more generally useful, ie different geospatial formats, feature knowledge, processing libraries, etc.
Land is not a constraint in many places, definitely not in the US. Something like half the corn harvest is already used for solar energy in the form of ethanol. PV produces 20x the useful energy that corn for ethanol does, converting that land to PV would produce 3x the electricity we currently consume. On top of that there's other bio-energy crops like soy bean oil, or land that shouldn't be used for farming at all due to unsustainable water practices.
In my mind Jan 6 was not the most dangerous moment regarding the transfer of power. That came earlier when Trump was trying to get the DoJ to declare voting irregularities, ie "Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen." His acting AG at the time refused, and his predecessor Barr had refused to get involved as well. Had Trump had the forethought to pack DoJ with toadies (like he has now) things could have gone very differently.
It will be interesting to see if the security implications of unreliable fossil fuel supply brings forward the date of peak co2 emissions. Adoption of EVs and solar PV is really spiking, particularly in the developing world.
Its also entirely possible things go back to "normal", like happened after the ME oil shocks of the 70s.
You have the harness pick the appropriate model for the appropriate task. Most high level software development projects can be broken down into tasks, many which do not need the smartest model.
Yeah, by basically ignoring regulation. That's going to be a lot tougher since the midterm results. The government will no longer be giving him any easy passes.
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