How will the toll be collected? Who will collect it? How will it be fairly distributed?

Or are you doing the corporations are people thing, so if five people can agree on something in a handshake, ethos-centric deal, then surely five space companies with billions of dollars invested from millions of people should surely be able to act like those original five people?

Can't necessarily stop a multinational firing things to space on Russian/Chinese/ESA launch vehicles

It's like this bicycle meme where the person puts a stick in its wheels.

It's for the same reason that petrol cars are encouraged in the US.

Punishing SpaceX will lead to a bigger financial crisis, an upset Elon Musk who might refuse to fund the next democratic election and dozens of thousands of lost jobs (fortunately they already became millionaire, riding the right rocket) for a problem that most of the rich population doesn't care about.

Because in the city, it's about your petrol car, big trucks, and nobody to see the stars and a bit more pollution doesn't change much at that scale from their eyes.

CFCs (these gazes destroying ozone) were a notable exception, because it would lead to death of everyone (the same way that petrol with lead), except death, universally there was no advantage to defend.

But a space filled with US satellites is a great advantage for the US, since they are the only ones with the capabilities to deploy thousands of them, and it's a big business for military intelligence.

I can imagine the main reason they are going to regulate, is so that older satellite debris don't destroy the new shiny satellites, but beauty of the sky is going to be the very least important factor.

The original shuttle designs were much, much better. I remember reading tech specs and looking at schematics in Discover and Popular Science years before the final design. Maybe Omni too.

Then it ended up in committee, politicians got involved, and funding was cut in parallel (even before the wall came down, it was clear the Soviets were done). The design was a shadow of what it could have been.

I remeber being sad as a kid.

Also, my drive down nastologia avenue made me realise, I really miss science magazines. The publishing date of the three I mentioned seemed to be staggered a bit. So I always had a bit of science news, and I really miss the format.

Phones aren't the same, tiny, tablets are unwieldy and smaller than a magazine, they were distraction free, and I really liked it just being all in one package.

I even liked the ads! Typically for some computer peripheral, or a new calculator, or some scientific apparatus. The ad just sat there too, it didn't bounce around or scream at you or cover an article's text.

Or the worst modern scourge, popups while you're reading, I mean !'?"#+#-#/ off I'm reading here!

Not saying it couldn’t be bad if there were such a collision as obvi a really bad collision could in the short term damage Starlink and anyone else who decides to use that orbit, but this isn’t existential risk territory anymore.

All the.

> We barely regulate CO2 at all.

Not sure who the "we" is, but many jurisdictions do regulate CO2 heavily. Not only immediate direct taxes, but subsidies to competitors, increased regulatory impositions and effective moratoriums on approvals, sovereign risk factors with many countries legislating and committing to CO2 phase out.

> If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.

Again not sure which we you are talking about, but lots of places have carbon taxes. They do make massive changes when they are priced to do so -- see, the EU. That was the point of my comment. I didn't argue markets don't respond to economic incentives, I clearly was agreeing they do. The effect has not been to solve climate change, it has been to move production offshore to markets that have much higher carbon emission intensity of production!

> And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.

And the fact that these not-hard-to-stop loopholes are not stopped still doesn't make you stop to think? The taxes aren't going to solve problems or pay for externalities, they are funding graft and corruption and stifling competition.

That's why Iridium has the constellation planned out so that you never have more satellites in the sky than strictly necessary for full coverage on the equator (where satellite density is lowest), and outer spot beams get turned off progressively as the satellites approach the poles as they'd only create interference without increasing bandwidth due to the lack of terminal-side steering.

Now I wonder if they already changed that for the second generation sats, given that there are some steered terminals available that could probably make good use of the extra satellite density near the poles, which is also an area underserved by geostationary beams?

Which part of my argument is this an objection to?

Are you saying that using circular polarization, the same would be possible in the Ku or even Ka bands? Because that’s definitely not the case due to the different aperture/gain tradeoff vs. L-band, and that’s my point.

> This is AI slop?

Did I say anything incorrect there or do you just not like my writing?

> No, the point of using an electrically-steered beam antenna is that it improves SNR, so that you are not bandwidth limited.

Sure, but my point was: At low frequencies, you can steer to become more efficient per bit, but at high frequencies you almost have to, as you’re sending energy in suboptimal directions otherwise. And then if you’re already steering, why not use a less-scarce band?

The company won't go bankrupt if Neutron is delayed but I disagree with the "easily" part and Iridium complicates the picture. It throws off a lot of cash but comes with a $3.6 billion bridge loan that RKLB will need to deal with in the next year. If they term it out with debt, the leverage goes way up. If they term it out with equity, there's real dilution risk, especially in the scenario where the market prices in Neutron delays (because the stock almost certainly will be lower).

The reality is that Neutron is critical to the RKLB story, and that story is what supports the current valuation. Even after the recent decline from the ~$150 peak, this is a very richly valued company priced for close-to-perfection.

The biggest risk is that carbon composite approach proves not to be viable for a launch vehicle of this size and RKLB has to fundamentally change the design. While I wouldn't have invested in this company if I thought that risk was >50%, it's definitely not as close to 0% as most retail investors seem to believe.