More Rich People In Space
The next time you hear a space person cheering about a zillionaire spending $250,000 or more just to take a quick suborbital flight into space, just recall what real people in the real world spend just to get a college education in the U.S. Source: https://t.co/KvtujfCGea pic.twitter.com/tgEaoZeSDi
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) June 7, 2021
Baumol’s Cost Disease + increased numbers of administrators + deluxe housing and student amenities = costs rising faster than inflation.
In the early days of automobiles only the very rich could afford one. In the early days of aviation a ride across the Atlantic Ocean on a Pan Am Clipper was a luxury.
Today automobiles are almost ubiquitous and millions of people in the US alone fly overseas each year.
Progress is not instantaneous and complaints about “only the rich can do this cool thing right now” only show a lack of vision.
Good grief, not only did you utterly miss Keith’s point, but “schooling” the site owner is stupid funny
OK then explain how these multimillion dollar flights are going to translate into costs that common people can afford. You need to provide some detail. Seriously. Tell me how this works. I am rather certain that if you compare the cost of early air travel or early cars, adjusted for inflation, we are orders of magnitudes off.
Same way as automobiles and airplanes. Mass production and economies of scale. That is the process that Elon and SpaceX are trying to start down in Boca Chica. How you get that to happen is more money from more sources flowing into SpaceX and other space companies. One of those sources is space tourism.
I’m not saying that what happened with cars and planes will occur with spacecraft in the exact same time frame (as you said the differences in cost are of orders of magnitude). That said, once lower cost and rapidly reusable spacecraft are available there will be a positive feedback loop.
What is the point of this post ?
Comparing what billionaires do with their money to tuition cost ?
Taking a similar hyperbolic approach, all spending suborbital tourism should stop because the tuition cost in the US is too high ? Cause one causes the other ?
If you do not get it then you do not get it.