Part 12

“-if you can’t impose the same restrictions on everyone all you’re doing is harming yourself-“

Actually, that is completely backasswards logic. Unless you are placing profit above human life and then it makes perfect sense. Climate change threatens all of humankind. A few of us consider ourselves demi-gods though.

“Just like building cars, refrigerators, TVs, and everything else, commercial space is about to be offshored beyond the reach of the US government hydra.”

Government is not the hydra. Offshoring happened because corporations chose profit over the American worker.

Hail the corporate hydra, don’t blame it on the representatives you elected. We the people decided that, whether you want to admit it or not. If we elect people who actually regulate the economy, as we used to with embedded liberalism, then the neoliberals do not get to offshore. We then build and buy American, like President Biden says.

Corporate shareholders and money managers call deregulation “FREEDOM!” and so does Fox News. They rely on the 99 percent of us who have watched the middle class disappear to be stupid enough to think that is patriotic.
What they have actually done is exchange the words “Liberty” and “Freedom” for “Capitalism” and “Greed.”

“-it will be those same uncouth businessmen- that will actually deal -“

That is not what happens, unless they are held criminally responsible. They will get bailed out. And make billions. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest of us.

That you really detest unions and always go back to that tells me at some point in your life somebody did something to you and you have transferred responsibility for that event to “unions.” You mentioned being bullied on the playground when you were a boy by “union thugs.”
President Herbert Hoover had proclaimed the 1920s “a new era” of permanent prosperity where corporations would de-emphasize short term profits, and workers would “democratize” capitalism by owning stocks and bonds, and the small number of poor would be generously cared for by private charity, this capitalist utopia collapsed in the stock market crash of 1929.

Capitalist predictions that the Depression would be over in weeks turned into months, and months into years. Communism attracted tens of thousands and huge protests and demonstrations made the news. And labor unions pushed harder than ever.
In 1935, the New Deal government of Franklin Roosevelt, elected three years earlier at the height of the Depression, would enact unemployment insurance, along with the most comprehensive public works, labor, and social welfare legislation—including collective bargaining, old age pensions under Social Security, minimum wages, and the 40-hour week. Together, they represented the most important victories for workers in U.S. history.

FDR considered his greatest accomplishment was “saving capitalism.” He knew, only 13 years after the Russian Revolution, that America could go the same way unless he convinced his fellow capitalists to leave the free market they profited so much from for a regulated market.
In 1980 the Reagan Revolution set us on the road back to 1929. The present reckless path in space is just a repeat of the dot com bomb, Enron, the housing bubble, Theranos, etc.

“That is why Gary is utterly as convinced as Xi Jinping that, in Space, private = pirate!”

The disgusting dog whistle, painting me as in league with a great satan….lies from someone who has a wounded personality and has been suckered into the far right alternate universe.

I disagree completely. Methane is actually in the middle between kerosene/oxygen and hydrogen/oxygen. Hydrogen has the most energy and if the tankage is expended it can lift far more than methane. This was the salient feature of the Space Shuttle; a Saturn V launch vehicle that expended one upper stage tank and reused everything else. Going cheap in all the ways the Shuttle did- SRB’s and sidemounting a glider to bring the SSME’s back, ruined the concept. But it was, and still is, an excellent idea. Simply screaming cheap about something shiny with so many engines is not necessarily going to be “affordable.”

If the Shuttle had been funded as needed, had liquid boosters and a recoverable engine module with the payload stacked on top of the external tank, it would still be flying. It could have lifted as much as the Saturn V as a cargo carrier or with a capsule/escape tower, both of which can be reused, it would have transported crew. And likely never killed anyone.

It would have looked much like the SLS. If the Starship fails, and since it is essentially just a bigger shuttle with many of the same faults and some new ones, it probably will, then improving the SLS will be the way to go. It is funny that fanboys think all their years of death-to-SLS wailing and gnashing of teeth actually mean something. It does not.