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Originally Posted by samcol
You really think communication companies wouldn't of figured out it would be very profitable to use satellites?
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Why would they have figured this out? Who were their potential customers? This isn't a very good chicken and egg scenario. Telecommunications infrastructure definitely existed before telecommunications, and definitely before the telecommunications industry. Sure, it's hypothetically possible that someone might have foreseen and cashed in on cell phones and gps navigation and satellite communication as a mass market opportunity, but it's pretty unlikely, since most shareholders frown upon insanely large r & d investments in completely theoretical technology.
Even so, in this alternative universe, your bold capitalist visionary wouldn't be able to leech off the long chain of government funded research that was a precursor to the ability to send things into space because that would mean he wasn't using solely the free market. I wonder how long it would have taken the private sector to develop rocket propulsion in the hypothetical world where it wasn't developed for strategic advantage with military funding during ww2?
As kind of threadjack, do you think that weapons technology should be solely controlled by market forces? Would it bother you if this hypothetical rocket company sold rockets to anyone who had enough money for them?