Global future space architecture thread

[gelgoog]

This depends on whether the United States wants to maintain its current position in space (as a global leader).
How did America achieve its status in space? Through proactive, ultra-large-scale investment, comprehensive technological leadership, and a precipitous lead.

Back then in the 1960s you needed state investments to provide the capital concentration required to go forward with space technology. But right now the technology for space launch is accessible enough that private companies can do it.
The fact SpaceX has a de facto monopoly on Western space launch also means they have access to huge amounts of capital. Which is why they can waste so much money developing things like Starship and Starlink.

Today, China is the only country besides the United States with sufficient political will, financial scale (China's advantage lies in the efficiency of its capital use), technological reserves, and talent reserves to execute ultra-large-scale space projects.

Once China has its own reusable launch vehicles, in my opinion, it should focus on the next generation space transportation technologies. Beamed powered propulsion or nuclear propulsion. If they want to get ahead of the US that is their best bet. Because for that you need the kind of cross-field collaboration US corporates are weak with.

NASA's fantasy of relying on commercial services to maintain its competitive advantage is frankly ridiculous.

NASA invests a lot in leading edge technology like electric propulsion or the integrated powerhead demonstrator.

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NASA help get technology from the concept to the prototype stage. As you guys usually say to get from 0 to 1. The private sector is supposed to then pick that up and comercialize it. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
As government funded research, everything developed with those NASA programs is freely accessible to US companies.

The biggest problem with commercial enterprises is that they are inherently short-sighted. When faced with economic risks and shareholder demands for profitability, they must adjust to ensure the company's survival. In this process, they will cut much of the advanced technology R&D that requires 10-30 year cycles to build up a reserve, in order to save money. This is because these areas cannot generate short-term returns.
Therefore, NASA must be the one to pay for this, using fiscal allocations from national taxes to sustain the relevant departments of these private companies and maintain control over the technology (ensuring state ownership).

NASA does this. Try reading how SpaceX got the technology for the PICA TPS in the Dragon capsule. It is NASA and DARPA which create this reserve.

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You may not understand why I say the act that truly destroyed NASA was sown 40 years ago. The core of it is the Reagan administration's overarching national strategy of shifting entirely towards a private, free-market economy. In the eyes of true Chinese professionals, the root of all of America's current societal problems stems from this.

Not really. The issue was lack of vision in my opinion. It is amazing how you can say commercial space was a mistake when you got SpaceX and Blue Origin out of it.

Reagan mostly paid lip service with regards to commercial space. He talked a lot but often he did the opposite of what he said. Like his rhetoric about free trade while simultaneously putting bans on the sale of Japanese supercomputers in the US.

America cannot even correct it, because Reagan's policies ultimately led to the complete demise of state-owned enterprises (which began with Roosevelt, who introduced some communist measures to solve the American crisis at that time).

IMHO the biggest issue with Reagan was when he changed the rules so corporations stopped investing and instead became extractive and financialized. It is easier to just milk the customer than develop something new.

Now, some top scholars within China believe that the biggest problem with the U.S. government (the essence of its inability to solve and mitigate crises) is that it does not control real corporate resources (state-owned enterprises). This results in truly low executive capability and a lack of control. The Chinese government's greatest resource, the one it has always used to solve many practical problems, is in fact its state-owned enterprises.

China needed this more than the US because it had to concentrate capital from a very low base to build up. You either do that with state companies (Soviet model) or you start private conglomerates (Japanese model).

The problem is that each company relies on financing (not fiscal funding) for technological R&D, and the intellectual property is private.

Like I said by US law all government funded research is freely available to the US private sector. Do not dismiss this.

This, in fact, creates barriers to technological cooperation.
For example, the United States is not short of 10-ton class hydrolox engines. But for SpaceX to integrate these products, it would have to ask competitors like ULA.

Not really. The way the sector works is you have companies, with subcontractors, and those also have subcontractors. ULA gets hydrolox engines from Rocketdyne and Blue Origin. And you can bet a lot of work on the engines is in turn also subcontracted.
Did you know SpaceX subcontracts the construction of turbopumps in their engines? They are not 100% vertically integrated as some would like you to believe.