Size does matter in the world of launchers. Small launcher vs medium launcher will obviously show that some rideshare missions done with F9 would equate to a dozen electron launches.

I'm not downplaying as much Sx accomplishment in their active series of flawless launching and landing than you would think.

Tesla was the king of EVs a few years ago. Today i find teslas lacking in front of other EVs. SpaceX just has no real competition, and that could be a flaw for the space industry.

No paradox becasue of 3 things:

1. Unfathomably huge universe
2. TIme scales - billions of years
3. Realtively slow max speed of travel / information propagation

For example, consider "someone someplace else" detecting earth. How long have we done anything that would be detectable as a sign of intelligent life? Lets be really genererous and say 500 years. Well the universe is about 13 Billion years old, so we would only have been detectable in a teeny tiny fraction of the age of the universe. And the chances of being detected are further dwarfed by the extremely low chances of some detector looking in our direction is that same teeny tiny window of time. And where would these detectors have to be? If we've been detectable for 500 years then the detectors would have to within a 500 light year bubble around earth. A teeny tiny fraction of our own galaxy. Forget other galaxies (our closest neighbor galaxy is about 25000 light year away which means they could not detect us for another 24,500 years). And then there is that part of the universe we will never see at all because it is moving away from us faster than light speed (god knows how big that is). My point is that the chances of any contact (or even detection) are virtually zero. The universe is probably full of life. All of it alone and isolated. Forever.

I think that the Doppler effect is accounted for in satellite communications. So, this might be more a question for computer science types who can explain the details of the algorithms they use in these kinds of communications.

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>If you try and send information between the 2 spaceships. If we use light or radio waves surely the data carried on those wavelengths are corrupt due to red shift.

you KNOW the transmission frequency. you know redshift. in theory you could correct for it.

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>Making it impossible for long distance data transfer in space between 2 objects that are moving away.

it's going to be "one way" both ways.. 20 light hour delay is not conducive to conversations.

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https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/engineers-investigating-nasas-voyager-1-telemetry-data

Voyager 1 is currently 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) from Earth, and it takes light 20 hours and 33 minutes to travel that difference.

I didn’t know our moon casts shadows that far away.

I know it’s not our moon

You might be surprised to learn that SpaceX was also doing very well before Musk bought Twitter.

> So numbers, while being absolutely impressive, are inflated.

If you want to discount those then you also need to effectively discount CASC/CALT and Roscosmos, who were second and third place respectively for most launches last year, since they're launching almost entirely for themselves. (Roscomos had one commercial launch last year before they invaded Ukraine)

That puts Rocketlab in second place with 9 commercial launches last year compared to SpaceX's 27. Though of course SpaceX still crushes them on upmass given the size difference - not to mention three of those launches were Transporter missions each carrying the equivalent of like a dozen RocketLab customers.

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Only thing I can think of is Ford and the invention of the assembly line.

"Remember...you have two days."

"We can't leave in two days!"

"There may be another message after, if all goes well."

I'm being followed by a moon shadow....

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Elon lets Gwynne run the company because he is a clown and would run that shit into the ground.

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They landed their first f9 in December 2015. Some private companies will try in the next years to land a 1st stage. So i'd say 10 years.

Honestly it's frightening to see Sx's lead in launch capabilities. Hopefully we will be able to count on multiple launch companies in a few years. I'm rooting for Rocketlab (i invested in this company just fyi), but others will also try to take some space in the industry.

Another point is that Sx mainly launches for himself (starlink). So numbers, while being absolutely impressive, are inflated.

Then there is starship. I hope it will work for the future of space exploration and space economy, but they show it's not easy, even if you are SpaceX !

What's really crazy is the traditional launch heavyweights (ULA and Arianespace) are still acting like their competition are expendable Falcon 9s.

This study explains my favourite solution yet.

The paper I hyperlinked explores the possibility that low mass k-type stars are similar to our own g-type except are more stable and can outlive g-types 3-6 fold. It also explores k-type distribution density in the galaxy and concludes they are more highly concentrated and much closer together in the centre of the galaxy. Given these facts they propose that there is a migration pressure for space faring galaxies to move in towards the centre of the galaxy, and if there is a “Galactic Club” of aliens chilling out somewhere doing awesome shit, then they would have most likely just colonised the centre galaxy k-types and left all the other solar systems alone. Hence we are sitting on an outer solar system g-type that is not worth the time or energy to colonise, hence we appear alone.

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Finally, a relatable analogy

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Moon landing denial is a delusion, not an actual argument with reason behind it. No evidence, up to and including flying one of them to the landing sites, will convince them they happened.

> yet we can find a tiny plaque?

And will be till we put a dome over it.