It's a sad day today for manned spaceflight

[SkyHog]

Patents protect research investment. Getting rid of them is not a good solution. Just look at what happens in China. Companies spend tons of money on research and then, as we see in China, place there just steal that property and profit from it without the original inventors getting any benefit. If a system like that is made global why would anyone really want to invent new things? They would just be stolen. Better spend your time waiting for someone else to invent something and then just steal the idea.

Kind of like progressive taxes?

 

[Jim_R]

Your basic fallacy here is: government did X first (in its typical wasteful way), therefore government must continue doing X to the exclusion of the private sector.

Absolutely not. You are utterly misunderstanding my point. This is not a classic "government vs. private sector" debate--it's a commentary about whether there are any private customers for the types of advanced space technology that the public sector has driven.

The answer to that question is simple: No.

Thus, the only reason the advanced space tech that exists today does exist is because the government paid for it. (This is true for the entire planet, not just the US.)

Let me reiterate the point I'm trying to make that you seem to have missed: There has been, and even today continues to be, no customer in the private sector to drive a market for advanced space technology.

There are exactly two space markets with private customers that have been profitable in the last 50 years: Communication and earth observation satellites.

Every other space-related technology has been driven by government customers, because there simply *are* no other customers.