Huh, good point, I never thought about that. Makes sense. I only ever heard about options to get shares when the company becomes publicly traded. Of course, publicly traded is what I meant.

Do the owners also get money based on the shares?

Which shareholders do you mean? SpaceX is private company, no shares.

Launch vehicle development by NASA is by their own admission slower and more expensive. It’s no coincidence that the whole industry started moving forward much faster when a driven private company with financial interests at heart and without strong dependence on politicians started their own serious development.

As for the tax money paid to SpaceX, NASA simply bought services. They also helped with development. But whatever the expenses were, they were much lower than they would be if NASA did it the old way. By the way, the old way is similar, but instead of SpaceX, the money went to Boeing, Lockheed Martin etc. and there wasn’t a limit on how much money it will be in advance. Now you know that if the costs exceed the agreed sum, it won’t be paid by public money, but by the company. As seen with Starliner, which went so badly that Boeing said they are never doing fixed-price contracts ever again. They are used to the excess money paid from the public budget. In exchange for these advantages to the public, SpaceX can use the vehcle developed unther the contract on their own, without NASA. Therefore you can get missions such as Polaris, Inspiration4 or Axiom. Your opinion on these may be different, but I think private missions and influx of private money into spaceflight is good for spaceflight in general. It makes it more financially sustainable and more efficient.

I think it’s supposed to be a better-paid test flight. It sound like nobody dares to send a crewed test flight and Boeing doesn’t want to lose yet more money on uncrewed test flights.

To date, the company has reported losses of $1.85 billion on Starliner. As a result, Boeing has told NASA it will no longer bid on fixed-price space contracts in the future.

Wow, they really messed up big time and obviously don’t think they can do better. I really wish SpaceX had competition, but they really don’t. Sad.

That’s the case for most species.

As a very specific and highly functional example of critical viral proteins in other organisms, there wouldn’t be any placental mammals without viruses. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placenta

Mammalian placentas probably first evolved about 150 million to 200 million years ago. The protein syncytin, found in the outer barrier of the placenta (the syncytiotrophoblast) between mother and fetus, has a certain RNA signature in its genome that has led to the hypothesis that it originated from an ancient retrovirus: essentially a virus that helped pave the transition from egg-laying to live-birth.

I actually don’t know. I didn’t dig into it, I just read an article about Russians praising Starlink bought through third parties used at the front. It seemed similar enough to other captured communications previously shown as accurate. But it doesn’t definitively prove anything for sure. It could’ve easily been propaganda from any involved party.

Based on some old tweets, I think Musk believes Putin wants to use nuclear weapons. Then, the army put some pressure on him to keep supporting Ukraine, but he is still also working on his own. I’m sure he could block the Starlink terminals Russian army is using, if he wanted to try, for example.

I don’t, Musk is too influential. And honestly, I don’t think there needs to be much concern about space launch part of the business. I’m under the impression that it is already regulated enough to be relatively safely under control. And I would be sad to see it taken away from SpaceX and probably even Musk specifically. He is an incredible idiot and dangerous person, but the progress they did and triggered in others is undeniable and I’d like to see it continue.

But Starlink is a completely different matter. Private company strongly lead by a single, somewhat crazy person, is very dangerous. I think few people expected it to be such a game changer in the beginning, I certainly didn’t. But it is important and very influential. Maybe ideal would be if it was controlled by the government, if it had the final say in geopolitical decisions etc., but the profits (or some part), development and such remained in the hands of SpaceX. Well, some international body as isolated from political influence as possible would be even better, but there’s no chance of that happening.

To get an extra boost from the homepage sorting algorithm. More people will get a recommendation, of a newly released game is selling well.

There’s probably quite a few people who couldn’t play during the week. There were hudnreds of thousands copies sold in the last few days, not everyone could play right away. I got lucky and managed to squeeze maybe 10 hours in…

There also might be people who bought it from Steam, since the word got out it’s better for Wube, but then went to factorio.com and got a copy unconnected from Steam. But yes, even before, there was a surprising number of people who didn’t get any achievement ever.

Then I suggest that you don’t look at achievements.

It might also be dangerous to browse research tree, but it isn’t based on anything specific, as I didn’t do so myself. Yet.