The billionaire wants to advance his political program while preserving his power and wealth
Stupid at this point in humanity’s history? Why should it be stupid to make it cheaper to fly payloads into space when we have unprecedented demand for renewable energy? Without interference of the atmosphere we could harvest solar energy much more efficiently and reliably.
We are likely to see a space elevator build in 100 years and it will be a good thing for humanity. For example we’ll be able to remove nuclear waste from earth and send it away for good with negligible costs.
These are just two economic examples. From a scientific perspective cheap space flight is valuable because it enables a lot of advances, like the next generation of space telescopes, working as interferometers without atmospheric disturbances.
So I think it’s everything but stupid for humanity to expand it’s space operations if this is accompanied by meaningful regulations. The latter of course will require a lot of energy to achieve.
No one is saying to stop space activity. All of that could be done through government agency if we really wanted to. Inefficiency doesn’t come from some nebulous bureaucracy, it comes from actually observing regulations and taking safety and environmental considerations into account.
If space is that important for humanity, than you may as well suspend the regulations. All a corporation is doing is skirting those regulations and acting as a middle man to collect some money for doing so. Adding profit does not make an organization more efficient, as it means money is going to things that don’t support space.
