Nothing directly, I guess. It seems like a lot of people in the commercial/entrepreneurial space community respected Steve Fossett for his various achievements in aviation and other fields. So, it seemed worth covering even if it was not directly related to space.

Honestly, there really shouldn’t be these discussions concerning “can we really rely on Russia?” The answer is yes, you can, it’s a stable country and while the leadership has employed some controversial policies, their main frame of mind is one of international cooperation.

And in the case of the first argument, about not giving the taxpayer’s money to another country, it’s certainly the cheaper alternative. It’s sort of like, give amount X to Russia, or spend twice that on a dead-end program.

What Elon is doing is extremely difficult. It’s not easy trying to build a new rocket, especially a low cost one. I agree with everything you guys have said about the difficulty and complexity of what he’s doing. And props to him for trying.

I really don’t know if he’s going to succeed. There’s the technical aspects of getting these rockets to work reliably. And Dragon to function properly. When you make a leap from robotic to crewed vehicles, things get exponentially more challenging because you’re dealing with human lives.

And then there’s the business issue of whether you can really produce them and make money with the cost structure that they’re advertising. Low cost, highly reliable, able to launch almost anything you need into LEO. A tall order. There’s an assumption that they’ll succeed in the space community. People are certainly rooting for him. We’ll see if he can do it.

When I used “sunk,” I meant it primarily in a business sense. Sunk costs. How much money he’s invested in the venture. I didn’t mean that the company is going down financially. That was misconstrued.

Thanks again. An interesting discussion.