In our solar system the earth is perfectly placed for life.
The assumption that rivers are a key ingredient for life is speculative and correlation-driven.
It seems logical, but I’m pretty sure you can find planets with rivers and no life. We just don’t have the data to support the theory.
Spacex has long published their price lists for launching with a single payload/client.
Rideshare missions should then be more expensive than this cost divided by the number of slots/weight available as there are integration and other overhead costs to account for.
If they’re lower than SpaceX are potentially dumping prices.
However. If you have committed to flying anyway, and you want to sell the last slots, just like airlines do, it can make sense to lower the price for the remaining seats.
All that said, it seems pretty obvious that most small launch companies will struggle to compete with SpaceX on price.
Same way as it’s hard to establish boutique manufacturing that competes with mass manufacturing on price.
My bet is that RocketLab will survive and most of the others will perish or be consolidated (and then possibly perish).
You can take SpaceX out of the equation and it still is a massive money spend.
Compare the cost of the entire Apollo program (adjusted for inflation) to the SLS program.
You might be surprised.
SpaceX launching Elon Musks privately owned Tesla Roadster is hardly cross company.
There’s a side effect of good marketing for both companies and the “Elon Musk”-brand, but he’s doing a good job of tarnishing that brand on his own.
Anti-trust seems like a good thing to bring back though.
In purchasing Falcon 9 rockets, Amazon would have been, in effect, funding the further development and improvement of the Starlink service.
The core issue is likely to be whether Amazon directors gave due consideration to this, and other related matters. The meetings to approve these launch contracts, according to the lawsuit, were brief and perfunctory. Perhaps the real question is whether Amazon’s directors should have spent more time discussing whether launching its Kuiper satellites on time, and likely for about half the cost of its other options, outweighed the downside of supporting a competitor’s business.
From the article.
Hard to park given the delta V necessary to get there.
Not sure if what you propose is wholly doable due to everything always moving. Ie. even at fixed points the points are not fixed, they must orbit something.
Parking would then be to move with a “fixed” point’s relative orbit.
At least with the data we have to go indeed.
As I said, it seems logical. But black swans and stuff, right?