You realize Iran is pretty big with lots of people and Iran can't run around with detector van across all those regions and people. Specially when they potentially lose control over certain areas. And those vans can be disabled pretty easily as well, specially in a proto-war zone.
That said, this would only be true if there were enough people with terminals.
So sick of this dumb conspiracy theory. The whole theory boils down to 'many people have worked in the US space industry since the 80s'. It very fucking dumb.
The increasing in funding for Space companies by DoD in the early SpaceX area (early 2000s) was related to DoD realizing they don't have enough assets over the middle east and wanted smaller companies and rockets to do faster deployment. This evolved further from DoD and since then with Firefly having done a number of missions based on that. Keyword is 'responsive launch'.
Space based missile defense in this period was clearly not the priority and communication, spy sats and navigation sats were getting the overwhelming amount of funding.
NASA on the other hand certainty didn't create COTS for missile defense reasons even if the leader of NASA was a supporter of investment missile defense (as many space people were and are). And the people who designed the COTS program certainty didn't think of that. There are detailed interviews with many of the people involved where they explain their reasons and how and why they came up with the programs.
As for Musk himself, there are details interviews with pretty much everybody that was involved early in SpaceX. And it quite clear that from the beginning Mars was the focus. Musk was not very well informed or interested in US space defense policy early on. And just like literally everybody, he knew much more about NASA then the DoD side of space. Remember that back then, there was much less information available about these things. Musk lived in Canada and then was busy with Internet stuff, he hardly was some kind of US defense nerd.
Its only when SpaceX moved on from the 'Greenhouse on Mars' project to a rocket company that Musk had to start seriously learning about the funding opportunities and commercial opportunity for small rockets. And eventually this lead him to sue DoD over access to contracts.
This whole conspiracy theory hinges on reinterpreting everything that happened in US space development from 1980 to 2020 as some hidden behind the scenes crusade to create Golden Dome and only collects evidence for this to be true and ignores literally all evidence that suggest this isn't the case.
The only thing that is totally clear, and nobody has ever disputed is that many space people in the US have thought about space missile defense since the 80s and always hoped that it would eventually happen.
Missile defense was always part of wider US space consideration, but claiming it was always the driving force for everything is simply not true.
The 'Mars concept' by SpaceX was not grounded in the same 'strategic goals' as anything NASA or DoD were planning at the time.
NASA at the time primary was doing a moon program called Constellation. And DoD was not really thinking much about deep space at all.
If you are talking about the other Mars program then I don't why that would be relevant in this context.
> Many forget the DC-X.
Not sure what you are implying here. NASA and DoD had periodic programs to do various things and test various things, including reuse. See X-33 and Rotary Rocket. But all those concepts involved Single Stage to Orbit and were arguably pretty dumb and incredibly unlikely to ever work.
If the question were about, did SpaceX invent re-usability or vertical landing then your point might be relevant, but it isn't.
Even if it was true that DC-X is the pure expression of some kind of missile defense obsessed deep state, then this would still be irrelevant for SpaceX.
Very strange assessment. First of all Europe isn't democratic socialism. Its social democratic and in pretty much every European country the social democrats kicked out the socialists from the party or marginalized them.
By the actual numbers, social spending and so on, the US isn't that incredibly different from Europe. And Europe is by any definition capitalist.
And the US has plenty of regulation, so its not really unchecked, its just differently checked.
> finally kills this "unchecked capitalism" virus for enough time for humans to enter the next era successfully.
This is just incredibly simplistics marxist 'stages of history' thinking and almost completely useless. If the US adopt European regulation we wouldn't 'enter a new era'.
Yes what the Bernie people are proposing isn't really a 1:1 match of what Europe has. Thats too ambitious and only a small percentage of the left even believe we can strive for that. The rest of the progressive left is thinking smaller because they feel that some progress is better than nothing.
>By the actual numbers, social spending and so on, the US isn't that incredibly different from Europe. And Europe is by any definition capitalist.
Do you live in the US? The US is the worst of all worlds, spending (ie taxes) similar to Europe in many respects but the value is extracted at many layers along the way so the results are nowhere near what Europe can produce. Just look at the outcomes from healthcare, education, infrastructure etc.
>And the US has plenty of regulation, so its not really unchecked, its just differently checked.
You are just describing a symptom of the overall problem. Regulation is a tool that can be used incorrectly to further the goal of unchecked capitalism. Example: NYC elected a Democratic Socialist recently and he talks about corner store small business owners having to deal with extra permitting and regulation that affects them more than bix box stores because every little expense hurts them more than the big guys, this naturally leads to the small business more likelihood of failing when competing with the big guys. Its regulation weaponized due to corruption.
>This is just incredibly simplistics marxist 'stages of history' thinking and almost completely useless. If the US adopt European regulation we wouldn't 'enter a new era'.
ok. We've tried everything else and its failing. So there are really only two directions. We either try to check unrestricted capitalism or we just accept that the old way of living that we all went through will not be coming back ever and it was just a footnote of history.
Much of that money is inefficient infrastructure that didn't have that much of an effect. The car makers didn't go hard with EV because of politics. They got into it because Tesla was making 25% margin on mass market EV and it looked like EV were taking over in massive way. Politics didn't hurt but the direction was pretty clear.
The problem is the traditional companies fell all over-themselves making grand promises without having any understanding, and putting in huge amounts of money while having not enough understanding of the market and supply chain dynamics.
Announcing like 4 gigantic battery factories when you have never built a battery and you barley understand the supply chain for most of the components isn't a great plan.
With Starlink and better wifi, the time on board can also be used better. So if you end up on the internet answering mails and so on, you can do that on the plain or in the hotel-room.
There are still so many issues around Wayland and fragmentation. Gnome is the most popular and has lots of issues and sometimes is downright user hostile. Luckily some of the distributions try to revert some of the insanity sometimes. But there are still many protocols and portals needed and much more standardization.
I handed you the fix to nearly every issue you listed, and you won’t take it. That’s a you problem.
Another factor is hardware friendly to Linux. We have multiple laptops here with different components, different distros X/W etc, and all working great… at least as well as mac or win ones.
Japan isn't really disagreeing. Japan had decades of tight control and infrastructure investment led by the government. Only pretty narrow rail operations are done privately. And in a system where those companies know pretty well that if they try things that go to far, they will have political issues.
And japan is also an exception, as most other system that do work well are not like Japan at all.
> I will never understand why so many people think that companies are magically doing better because the government is running them. That’s just a myth.
That's not really the claim. The reason government running them can work well is because you can run it like an integrated system for the public good. You can actually do system wide planning and implementation and transformation. You can do targeted investment across the whole live-cycle of the system and all its components. You can drive standardization.
Sure if a single company owned everything, they could do that to. But to have a single monopoly normal private company running so much of a countries infrastructure would be patently insane. And literally nobody has or will ever run things that way.
Britain trying to privatize Network Rail is about as close to as you are going to get. And that lasted for a few years at most.
> However, the huge advantage with private companies is that customers have options thanks to competition.
In a perfect world maybe, but when we are talking about rail systems, you do not magically get many rail lines between places just because you say 'private'.
It takes 100s of years of infrastructure and investment to build up a rail network.
And to unlock the true potential of that infrastructure having competing companies run trains on it, is just one marginal potentially beneficial thing you can do. And of the things you can do, its far, far, far away from what actually impacts the consumer the most.
This is completely clear to all experts that study this topic. Complete integrated time-tabling, planning and standardization is far more important then marginal competition on few main lines.
> As for Deutsche Bahn, the government has full control over it meaning the company is run by the government. Whether it’s officially a German Aktiengesellschaft or not, doesn’t matter at all.
You are narrowly talking about legal technicalities. But you are ignoring the larger cultural and historical aspect.
The fact is, the way the German government created the DB was to be private and to make money. That lead the DB culturally to act much differently then traditional national railway companies, like SBB.
And like an actual company they started to invest widely in all sorts of stuff while not focusing on their core business.
So legally it might not matter, but historically it for sure this. It actually makes a difference if your railway company is primary a national instrument to bring affordable public transportation to the people, or if its designed to be a profit making company.
> Your argument is often brought up by proponents of a government-run railway so that they don’t have to admit that Deutsche Bahn isn’t doing well despite being run by the government.
Everybody knows that government ownerships isn't a magic pill. And most people admit that DB isn't doing well and that its government owned. What people dislike is how DB is organized and set up and how politics and DB interacts.
That said, this would only be true if there were enough people with terminals.
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