Prince William Vs commercial spaceflight

Flyaway

ACCESS: USAP
Senior Member
Joined
21 January 2015
Messages
10,603
Reaction score
12,149
The fact that he’s attacked commercial spaceflight likely indicates it’s regarded as a safe target by his advisors. As I am sure if it was deemed to be more controversial to attack commercial spaceflight he wouldn’t have touched the topic. That’s a pretty depressing state of affairs if that is the case

Prince William: Saving Earth should come before space tourism https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58903078
 
Meh Royals come out with stuff all the time, will anyone take any notice? Probably not.
You could come up with tons of "Prince X Vs X" topics and most of them nobody cares about.

I think he has a valid point but then billionaire entrepreneurs who have made their fortunes by actively using natural resources and getting the people to buy lots of consumer products that 95% of which will end up in landfill within 5 years aren't likely to be the most logical choice to be become environmental saviors of planet earth.
Just like the millionaire landlord who hasn't insulated his properties or his own house but gladly wants to disrupt the nation to make the government pay for it instead .

And yes Prince George and COP426 in 2051 will be saying exactly the same things.
 
One has to be comprehensive with William. NASA once tried to fly his father Charles in orbit, but had to scrap the idea: its ears wouldn't fit any reasonable size helmet.

(that was lame, I know. Blame "Spitting image" and its French development by Canal+: les Guignols de l'info. They created a puppet of Charles: it was just a huge nose with two big ears glued to the sides: and no face between them. The head was the size of a pea. First time I saw this as kid, I couldn't stop laughing. I loved that puppet, it was so silly...)

Oh gosh, I've found a picture of Les Guignols Charles & Diana puppets. They are even uglier, and funnier, than in my memories. LMAO. And boy, was the Jose Luis Zapatero puppet ugly, too ROTFL. I'm laughing like a brain retarded typing this.

a-guignols-info-zapatero-copie-1.jpg
 
Last edited:
And yes Prince George and COP426 in 2051 will be saying exactly the same things.
Or maybe it will be: “How did we know we’d need to install a giant sunshade at L1 to avoid disaster when we closed down commercial space flight in the 2020s?”
 
A slightly different tack on this perhaps? Have certain billionaires related to commercial spaceflight not pretty much declared themselves our environmentally-protective demi-saviours? Electric cars and climate pledges come off as a bit two-faced next to these sub-orbital next-generation barn-storming stunts and William has my support in calling them on it.

Sending meatbags on sub-orbital hops is frankly pointless. If humans aren't going to the ISS (on actual science missions :rolleyes:) and maybe in the near-future the moon, don't bother with humans at all. Send a probe. Far more useful endeavours. I'd love to see a Cassini+ mission to either of the ice giants before I die. Or both!

install a giant sunshade at L1 to avoid disaster
LOL everything humanity has launched so far wouldn't cast a shadow on my home town at L1!
 
And yes Prince George and COP426 in 2051 will be saying exactly the same things.
Or maybe it will be: “How did we know we’d need to install a giant sunshade at L1 to avoid disaster when we closed down commercial space flight in the 2020s?”

I'm really not a fan of geo-engineering to solve global warming. Except for that very idea, actually.
The reason ?
a) it doesn't screw Earth proper, as would "iron in the oceans" or "sulfur in the sky" schemes.
b) if it eventually start screwing Earth by dimming the Sun (for some unexpected reason), at worse let the "sunshade" scatter away under Sun-Earth-Moon gravitational influences and solar pressure.

That's the one and only geo-engineering scheme against global warming I could eventually support.
Provided of course it doesn't become a pretext for a new "carbon porn fest" and "CO2 orgy".

"Hey, global warming is stopped, let's bring back coal and oil by the gigatons !"

In passing, it wouldn't mitigate ocean acidification since that scheme attacks global warming through the Solar flux - rather than CO2 emissions.

There is also a very real risk of destroying the lunar environement by seizing billions of tons of regolith to provide the starshade basic materials.

I wonder if somebody is calculating a "lunar dust shade against global warming" via BFR-Starship flights.
Imagine the headlines
"SpaceX stops global warming and save the day". For good or worse, Musk would become the all time hero of our era. This would be like "Tesla solved the electric car issues" except cubed.
 
Various rebuttals of Prince William’s viewpoint;

View: https://twitter.com/Astro_Jonny/status/1448651936446570496

This ongoing fascination with "spaceflight OR save the world" continues to irk me. Blue Origin et al are business at the end of the day.

Why not call for all Hollywood movie production to cease? Football to be scrapped? Royal yachts to be sold?




The Queen should spend more time trying to repair this planet rather than preparing for her Platinum Jubilee



View: https://twitter.com/phalanx/status/1448695852919402506

It's a false dichotomy. We need space technology and the industrialization of space to help stop ecological devastation and build a civilization we can all enjoy living in.


View: https://twitter.com/Sandra_I_Erwin/status/1448677072025567234

Don't know if Prince William is aware that the U.K. is working to grow its space industry https://gov.uk/government/news/more-than-3000-jobs-created-as-space-sector-grows-across-the-uk "space growth is a key part of our plans to build back better from the pandemic, creating thousands of high value space jobs in regions right across the UK"


View: https://twitter.com/DrPhiltill/status/1448679673270054915

Response: as everyone who has been paying attention already knows, space *is* about fixing Earth & the human condition, and space tourism is about creating revenue to progress the business models toward fixing these things. Literally. And that is why we are excited about it.

View: https://twitter.com/fcain/status/1448700664637497350

The old false dichotomy of saving Earth versus flying to space. How about less military spending? Excessive lawn care? Shipping out of season fruit? Factory farming? Let's see all the choices - https://bbc.com/news/uk-58903078

Prince William blasts space tourism and says billionaires should focus on fox hunting, blood diamonds, horse racing, and yachts.

I agree second space age narrative is off track w/ media emphasis on billionaire angle. A few thoughts:

1. We all know access to space is expensive. While it is costly judge each mission on what it endeavored to accomplish and did it matter. Who paid for it is irrelevant.




2. Commercial & private investments in space matter. Governments are wasteful. If space remains domain of nations, boosters wouldn’t be landing on ships & it would never be affordable.For more people to get to space tomorrow, some people happily pay the higher price today




3. Billionaires are rightfully an ez target in Earth w/ such economic inequality. Some of the space backlash is self-inflicted & deserved & ..but not all billionaires abuse employees & don't pay taxes.


 
There is a lot of whatabboutery in those rebuttals.
Sure sending up 10,000 aging film stars, celebrities and millionaires might advance mankind but then you could equally claim every business jet sold has advanced aviation and will save the world - hmmm probably not.
 
And yes Prince George and COP426 in 2051 will be saying exactly the same things.
Or maybe it will be: “How did we know we’d need to install a giant sunshade at L1 to avoid disaster when we closed down commercial space flight in the 2020s?”

I wonder if somebody is calculating a "lunar dust shade against global warming" via BFR-Starship flights.
Imagine the headlines
"SpaceX stops global warming and save the day". For good or worse, Musk would become the all time hero of our era. This would be like "Tesla solved the electric car issues" except cubed.
Youtuber calcs for 2% solar energy reduction: ~3million starship launches
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yqi0FabHHs

*Will dig up papers on the topic some day~*

That said, I do expect it to eventually happen (give it a few centuries, the future is a long time), not to deal with 20th century 'climate change' but the ability to make weather itself under control. I don't think humanity have yet discovered a means of governance that would enable such a project. If you think paperwork for digging up random patch of land was annoying, imagine something that basically impacts the entire world at once. The geopolitical problems of something building what can be a death ray system with the ultimate high ground is also huge.

Power satellites would be a shorter term project that could be relevant to posters here. (excluding fringe longevity escape velocity events...) Sun is always shining in spaceeeeee~
 
Last edited:
The Heir to the Heir to the Throne tries to make himself relevant by using a popular theme on the BBC. My reaction is "So what".
I am sure Bezos, Branson and Musk share his views on "saving the Earth". Or rather to be accurate "avoiding the problems climate causes to humans".
Just as the lives of the over 60s put at risk by Covid were deemed more important than the livelihoods and well-being of under-60s by politicians, "climate change" has been made something that ordinary folk like me have to give up things for rather than the governments and corporations doing the serious damage.
 
I've just briefly checked Lowell Wood and Greg Benford research related to space sunshades - and my fears were true.

Main risk is people forgetting that C02 not only wrecks the climate through GW; it also wrecks the oceans via acidification - which has nothing to do with space sunshades.

And only by looking at the last 30 years of GW mitigation atempt, one can be sure of something.

That if we stop GW dead in its track via space sunshade, it will result in a brand new "CO2 orgy" - and displace the problem to ocean acidification. Coal and oil would return with a vengeance.

"Be careful what you wish for", as they say.

(note: it's a pity, because we know where to find all that aluminum to build Lowell Wood wire-mesh, 3000 tons sunshade: the Moon is packed full of it, and has low gravity. And we could boost the wire-mesh with aluminum-LOX cheap SSTOs.

Now I'm daydreaming about a giant lunar aluminum moria - as per Tolkien - below the Ocean of Storms... there are "100 miles long * 3 miles wide " caves out there, to start mining. Now that would make one heck of a lunar industry.)
 
Last edited:
The characters of royalty are increasingly irrelevant and from time to time they are forced to make statements of that type to get some publicity, also his father complained that the skyscrapers of London destroyed the classic image of the city and was answered by numerous architects.:(
 
Sure sending up 10,000 aging film stars, celebrities and millionaires might advance mankind
The problem there is we keep bringing them back!

It was pointed out in the BBC news earlier that the Queen, Charles and William have all been commenting on the environment this week, suggesting that there's some concerted pre-COP26 Royal messaging going on. (And Royal rather than HMG given what Ma'am had to say about world leaders).

But as Charles noted, he's been talking about this stuff for four decades, so it shouldn't be too surprising if the rest of his family have similar thoughts.
 
That if we stop GW dead in its track via space sunshade, it will result in a brand new "CO2 orgy" - and displace the problem to ocean acidification. Coal and oil would return with a vengeance.

"Return?" India and China are cranking out new coal plants effectively daily. China (and Inda, and Africa) is also stripping the oceans bare of fish. It soon won't matter whether or not the oceans have the pH of sulfuric acid or not because there won't be anything edible left in them.
 
website URL says ".uk" on it, quit bashing the prince through multitude of threads that are about the same here. Long live the queen to.
 
website URL says ".uk" on it, quit bashing the prince through multitude of threads that are about the same here. Long live the queen to.
I think you mean, ". Long live the queen too". I think we Brits have to accept that as we have our jokes/laugh's at the expense of other nations, we have to allow for them to have their go too. Fair is fair after all.
 
The British sense of humour is based on the fact that from the weather to the latest crisis (there is always one) it's a case of laugh or cry.
 
website URL says ".uk" on it, quit bashing the prince through multitude of threads that are about the same here. Long live the queen to.
I think you mean, ". Long live the queen too". I think we Brits have to accept that as we have our jokes/laugh's at the expense of other nations, we have to allow for them to have their go too. Fair is fair after all.
I believe that the British have earned the right to laugh at other countries: they have had the best empire of all, the most just, rational and productive in history with an exemplary decolonization process (compared to Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and French), they have managed to make their language universal, they have won all the major wars and have almost always avoided the ones they could not win. In my opinion all this has been achieved thanks to the influence of very intelligent people, with good advisors and great diplomatic experience, but recent events seem to show that it was a species in extinction.
 
Sadly we have had more than our fair share of screw ups over the years. Though the present bunch of clowns does take some beating.
That English is so widely spoken has more to do with those who adopted it starting with Americans, Canadians and Australians but also the pragmatism of people in Asia and Africa. Fortunately they all enjoy taking us Brits not too seriously and usually we laugh at the same things- starting with the arrogance and folly of people who think they are better than we are. I nearly left out the Irish who write and speak the language better than most of us.
 
That English is so widely spoken has more to do with those who adopted it starting with Americans, Canadians and Australians but also the pragmatism of people in Asia and Africa.
Part of the success of the English language is that it has been a magnificent example of the *success* wrought by "cultural appropriation."

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”​

― James D. Nicoll

Those who argue against cultural appropriation are arguing against the best of everything. A culture that can look at other cultures and realize "hey, they've got some stuff that's better than my stuff" is a culture that will prosper. A culture that looks at other cultures and decides to remain "pure" will stagnate. A culture that decides that its own culture is not worth defending will fall.
 
One of the nicer things about the English (as opposed to our friends in Ireland, Scotland and Wales) is that we don't defend our culture. Perhaps because we have pinched most of it from everyone else.
 
One of the nicer things about the English (as opposed to our friends in Ireland, Scotland and Wales) is that we don't defend our culture. Perhaps because we have pinched most of it from everyone else.
"Nice guys finish last." And go extinct. The English didn't always roll over; was a time when the English were proud of England and English culture. Having a prospective King smack-talking private space exploration - which the English/British are *finally* getting into - seems a very, very, very backwards step. Y'all should consider voting him out and electing a new King. Maybe John Cleese.

What you don't defend, you lose.
 
I am an English man and proud of it. None of your bloody British/English/colour crap, I am English. Talk of ethnicity aside, I am part of a multi cultural society that while imperfect, is moving forwards.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Similar threads

Back
Top Bottom