Private Industry in Space: Good or Bad?

There are airplanes that transport dangerous things all the time. Air Force One for example (rimshot)

Compared to space material? No, maybe the more potent varieties of military ordinance.

Still though, a plane crashing into a city is an unacceptable loss, and a rocket crashing into a population center is only slightly more likely. Maybe even less likely since businesses aren't stupid. They know what they're doing is dangerous and they won't launch unless they're 100% certain nothing will go wrong. If they do get it wrong, they'll get sued and go out of business. The government doesn't need to make an incentive to NOT crash a rocket into the Earth.

Private industry in space is baaad. Very bad.

Industry simply cannot be trusted to look after anything, especially not empty space, which they are already filling up with space debris.
Any space exploration (which in my opinion should be very little) should be government controlled, and done in a careful way that will be completely safe, not some greedy capitalist trying to make money, and not caring who he might harm in the process.

I guess there's nothing essentially wrong with private industry in space for now. I just don't want the moon to be owned by fucking Tesco or something.

Speaking of the moon and space travel, mind you, I watched Iron Sky last night. Loved it. And I'm quite comfortable with Nazis living on the moon. Just not Tesco.

You'd simply have to be blatantly ignoring the relative scales of each catastrophe to not recognize the disconnect between a plane crash and what can be compared to God himself taking a giant ball of asbestos, holding over a major city, and then clapping.

Its not the launch, its the reentry. Which has absolutely nothing to do with rockets mind you.

You don't just simply get sued for blanketing an entire geographical area with poison.

Again, you don't reenter with rockets. And yes, the local government does need to provide incentive for the local population to neither up root and destabilize the entire region and its economy, thus rendering any advantages provided by the presence of the company moot, or driving the company away.

The government is responsible for the vast majority of space debris in orbit, since, ya know, they're the ones doing most of the space "exploration."

Yeah that's true.
But Governments should be more careful, and I'm sure it would be worse with private industry.

Why on Earth would government be better than private industry? With private industry, they have an incentive to not pollute space since in the long run it will hurt them when they can't launch out. The government has no such incentive.

@Demondaze I pretty much used rockets and shuttles interchangeably in that post, and probably any other post I made about it. I meant that both a shuttle and a plane crashing into a major population center is unacceptable so the scale would be irrelevant. I meant they won't launch unless they're 100% nothing will go wrong at ANY point in the flight. Sued, arrested, murdered, whatever. The point is, the business will work damn hard to ensure they're not in that position to find out what happens to them. I'm not quite sure what you mean by your last post.

Didn't even read the rest of the thread, but what day dreams are possessing you? What could they make money doing up there? Also what could they possibly do with modern technology that would adversely effect ANYTHING?

I would look at it the other way around. With private industry,the people at the top are there just to make money, so corporations will do whatever makes their bosses money, which is very short-term.

Governments, however, have to look at the bigger picture, as, in a ideal world, politicians are there to serve the country and should be interested in the health of the world and its people far more than a businessman that just wants a bigger house.

Although clearly this is just another opinion.

Man, I made a lot of typos in that last post. I'm fucking losing it.

Anyways... I'm sure they'll prepare like crazy, but that alone doesn't necessarily rule out all of the variables, especially once the craft is actually in space. Some of that shit you simply can't prepare for. As to my last point, the local government needs to both collect its appropriate due as it would any other business and provide an incentive for the locals to even allow the company to operate in close proximity to them. This involves lots of taxes.

I like to think about it this way, who is the government going to get more taxes from, a private business or your average Joe like you or me? A private business pays more taxes than you or I do. While the populace as a whole pays more taxes than private industry as a whole (I assume), private industry is more easily able to influence politics. In my mind, the government will gain more by sucking up to private industry than it would to the general populace.

I'm sure a private business would prepare just as much as a government mandated corporation would, if not more so since the business has the added risk of going bankrupt while the government can just raise taxes or print more money or some such nonsense. Why would a space-faring company work out of a major population center? Aren't all launch pads out in the desert or on a remote island or something?

That wasn't the point. AT ALL. The point was, regardless of preparation, space travel presents a literally never ending set of variables.
And allow me to clarify another point here: In no way do I think even a government agency could, at the present moment, handle any sort of space mining industry. Overall I think you guys drastically overestimate our current capabilities.

Again, talking about reentry here. Unless the reentering craft magically teleports underground upon leaving the mining site, it has to occupy the airspace of the multiple business and population centers surrounding the landing zone.

Oh I think I've come off the wrong way. I don't think anyone can currently do that. We can barely get to the moon right now. I'm talking years, decades down the road. I realize that space travel is very risky but it seemed to me that you were implying that the government could do it better than a private business can, or rather, will be able to in the future.

Not too knowledgeable about space craft but where do they land? Surely their landing area would be just as secluded and distant from civilization as the launch site is.

Our current shuttles use airstrips. Both these airstrips and the rocket launch pads are surrounded by various centers of population. Hell, NASA Control is located in (Or was it near?) Huston Texas if I'm not mistaken.

I thought NASA launched their shuttles from Cape Canaveral in Florida, far out in the everglades away from cities and such. I believe they land in the same area, preferably.

Eh, that sounds about right. It's not necessarily the launch location so much as the surrounding area and the shared airspace. Also reentry points can be unpredictable.

I think reentry points are only unpredictable if something goes wrong with the flight since the Earth is always moving and rotating at the same speed. Unless the space craft got delayed or had some kind of engine problem that threw them off course, then I think they would be able to figure out the reentry point from before the craft even launched.

I guess. Honestly I'm getting kinda bored with this topic, someone else needs to join in and stir things up or something.