For half a billion dollars Google has purchased satellite company Skybox Imaging.
The competition heats up: For half a billion dollars Google has purchased satellite company Skybox Imaging.
Google plans to use Skybox’s satellites to make better maps with “up-to-date imagery,” the company said in a statement. “Over time, we also hope that Skybox’s team and technology will be able to help improve Internet access and disaster relief—areas Google has long been interested in.” Skybox has only a single satellite in orbit right now but plans to fly a fleet of them to cover the entire globe at all times. Constantly updated satellite images would be of interest to everyone from agricultural companies and hedge funds to hardware stores. A demonstration earlier this year showed how Skybox satellites could be used to monitor oil reserves from space.
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In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
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The competition heats up: For half a billion dollars Google has purchased satellite company Skybox Imaging.
Google plans to use Skybox’s satellites to make better maps with “up-to-date imagery,” the company said in a statement. “Over time, we also hope that Skybox’s team and technology will be able to help improve Internet access and disaster relief—areas Google has long been interested in.” Skybox has only a single satellite in orbit right now but plans to fly a fleet of them to cover the entire globe at all times. Constantly updated satellite images would be of interest to everyone from agricultural companies and hedge funds to hardware stores. A demonstration earlier this year showed how Skybox satellites could be used to monitor oil reserves from space.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
“The competition heats us/”
Well, I wonder. Used to be, or so I imagined things to be, years ago, that a new market opened up — automobiles say, or aircraft — and hundreds of companies tried to get into that market. Some wanted to build cars themselves, some wanted to build boilers to go into steam-powered cars, some saw an opportunity in marketing hand tools drivers would need, some realized that building bicycle tires could easily progress to building automobile tires, some forecast opportunities in macadamizing roads or refining petroleum.
And so on, eventually giving rise to an industry with half a dozen or so major manufacturers, several dozen top-ranked suppliers, and thousands of smaller firms, all the way down to little machine shops with three employees in Kalamazoo doing nothing but make 3./16″ screws to fix brake pads into place in Ford Fairlanes. Remember those days?
So now, instead of an evolving market, we’ve got a handful of giants — Lockheed, Boeing, Google, etc. — picking up little firms and mashing them into the corporate structure. Which can be good in some ways — I suspect employees at Scaled Composites feel happier about their pension prospects now that Northrop owns the firm — but not so good in other ways — what exactly new and innovative has been done at Scaled in the last ten years? And a batch of little firms which have been ignored by big companies will languish and eventually fold. Granted, failure is a risk of doing business, but we’re talking about companies which failed because they couldn’t sell themselves to one of half a dozen really big companies, not companies which failed because they couldn’t sell a product to 200 million consumers.
There’s a name for this if I recall correctly: “Oligopoly.” It isn’t the same thing as free enterprise, it doesn’t lend itself to the sort of social structure most conservatives or liberals would like to see, I don’t think it leads to the same kind of evolution of technology that we have seen in the past.
Okay, the space business isn’t so big that tyranny is rushing at us at a thousand mph just because Google bought some little startup last week. But over a longer period, if Google picks up a hundred or so little space-affiliated firms in a decade or so, and Lockheed gets its hands on another hundred, and Boeing grabs another hundred or so …. is this going to give us the future in space many of us have been dreaming of since we were children? Or is it going to reduce to corporate vice presidents flashing viewgraphs at Pentagon brass, explaining how their “culture of expertise” justifies multi-billion dollar contract awards?
Maybe I’ve cause to worry, and maybe not. The future isn’t nailed down, and I don’t see any sort of obvious “right-vs-left” division of thought here. There’s scope for differing analyses.
And, if you want to expand on this kind of topic, I’d really like to know your views.
Actually, I think your concerns here are entirely valid, though I am not as worried about them as you are.
The key to avoiding this “oligopoly” of course is always freedom. This means as little interference in the open market by government as possible. In that case the competition will help keep everyone on their toes, and will force the inefficient companies out, whether they are big or small.
The trouble today of course is that government does interfere a lot in this new space industry. My hope is that by reducing NASA’s role from a creator of hardware (SLS, Constellation, the shuttle, etc) to simply a customer buying the products built by independent private companies we will reduce that interference and instead foster the competition the industry needs.
What will actually happen is still unknown. However, if we push for freedom and less government interference, we might be able to make this open industry prosper the way it should.
Oligopoly is not bad. The industries which lead development and wealth creation for society are often oligopolies, like CPUs or smartphones. As long as anyone is free to start competing, the market is efficient. When one is superior, it would be efficient to try to compete. That’s why monopoly arises in free markets at times. No one believes he could do it better or cheaper and so focuses on something else instead.
Competential:
The issue with “oligopoly” isn’t that only a couple of firms dominate the market; it’s that non-market phenomena work to ensure that the market is dominated by just a few firms.
An example: Intel and AMD control most of the market for personal computer CPUs, but they slug it out continuously with new products, and some other significant firms are always waiting in the wings, so to speak, with products that might replace them if they falter — ARM, Zilog, National Semiconductor, etc. And AMD Radeon and Nvidia compete for video card market, etc, I have dreams about a wonderful alternative world in which the Intel 8008 chip couldn’t be successfully upgraded and Microsoft’s MS-DOS 1.0 was just too pukey for IBM to invest in, so that the wonderful world of personal computing as we know it was derived from CP/M and the Zllog Z-800. But … well that’s a dream. And that’s competition.
Oligopoly is about evading competition, about having a market without having to compete for it. Think of the way NASA launched the Space Shuttle for many years: Lockheed and Boeing joined together to form a “company” which provided the services necessary to launch the Shuttle, and for twenty years or so there was no competitor. Nobody, and nobody was allowed to be a competitor. And for many years, Lockheed and Boeing have combined to provide expendable launchers for US military spacecraft, and the government has not had the least interest in opening that market to competitors. Even though there now is an outsider firm — SpaceX — which might be capable of competing. It’s law and arbitrary choice which determines who wins in the military launch business, not price and performance. No doubt the “customers” who make these buying decisions — USAF generals — mean well, and have many factors to consider other than cost — reliability, maintainability, compatibility, etc — but those factors don’t lead to an open market and expanded competition with more and more firms swarming in and all the payoffs that occur because of competition. On the contrary.
So that’s what I’m grumbling about. Suppose there are 50 different companies with ideas about fitting cameras and other sensors into tiny (1 cubic foot say) satellites for monitoring polar ice conditions and ocean temperatures and C-13/C-14 ratios in Amazon vegetation and the like. And in one possible world five or six of these firms are still battling it out fifty years from now, monitoring minutia of climatic details we can’t yet imagine and providing similar capabilities (He-3 vs He-4 ratios?) throughout the solar system. And in another world, Boeing bought one of these companies, and got all the climate monitoring satellite contracts because “Hey! That’s Boeing” and Boeing never found reason to develop more compatible climate monitoring systems and nobody else bothered to enter that market, because “Hey! How can you hope to compete with Boeing?”
Get the idea? Sometimes we have what looks like limited competition because the competition is so damned extreme. And sometimes the competition is limited because investors perceive competition isn’t actually allowed or qon;t lead to anything. We’d like to eliminate this second thing, because it obviously leads it less than optimum futures, both conservatives like Mr Zimmerman and dangerous radical leftists like me.