They did meaningful mission badges in NROL a few decades ago, someone found the birds thanks to that and they stopped. Best to assume nothing.

If that were the case it'd be just another treaty violation from out of control spooks.

Ah Yes. HM were the simplest jest of enjoyment will get you downvoted.

To be fair, SpaceX did/does(?) the same thing - they use pretty opaque messaging when things went wrong early on. And do stuff like deliberately not show explosion footage on the live stream.

"An error occured. Please try again later"

SpaceX still insists on being cagey too. I watched a launch a while back where the center stage failed to land itself, and the hosts pretty obviously were instructed to beat around the bush and pretend nothing was wrong ("A telemetry failure" as you could see it in the video footage belly flopping into the ground) and do literally anything other than admit the center stage had a minor failure that resulted in it's loss. Like it's not even a big deal, the boosters were right then having a picture perfect landing.

But a profit driven company cannot be honest about anything ever. Honesty is never as profitable as being extremely controlling about the information you share.

I consider this a huge negative of the privatisation of space. When the Shuttle killed people, we could expect great transparency and a general peeling back of the curtain. The public got to learn that their government agency was suffering from management failures by loser managers unwilling to face reality.

We will not get that same transparency when a SpaceX rocket inevitably kills someone. Especially with Musk hanging around the oval office.

Literal audience. It’s a public broadcast/stream with a director and host and production design. It’s a deliberate choice to include it as part of their venture. There is value in the positive public opinion of the launch and coverage.

They have some production value in the stream though, so it looks like they’re trying to make it appealing. It’s probably a recruitment tool for them.

Audience as in taxpayers perhaps.

Whether informing the public directly or indirectly by communicating with the press about the products they want public agencies to purchase isn't critical, but it could be important. Having a public that already warmly embraces your company, or at least is warmly embraced by those that might be vocal in support or not, could make some projects easier to sell vs. a public that is indifferent or even hostile.

Future generations will be dumbfounded why didn't everyone just ask the computer to get what they need.

They have costume avionics and costume ground system. The hardware both on the rocket and the launch site is just completely different. And likely plugs into back-ends that are pretty company specific. I question how much of that code can reasonably unified.

And why only talk about software? You can make the same argument for the avionics hardware, hell you can make the argument for the whole rocket. And if you just think this far enough you can just make the socialism argument "why have 2 companies at all, only have 1 (potentially government) company (ie Design Bureau) that enough". And that argument generally doesn't work, doing the same thing multiple times to figure out what is best isn't such a bad idea.

> disease, fundamental physics, and so on

We need space and rockets to research fundamental physics. Diseases get researched in space all the time. Making access to space cheaper has lead to more companies wanting to do more with space research.

> One day our ancestors will look back on this time

"You see, capitalism was indeed a necessary and inevitable bootstrapping phase of human development. Even Marx agreed this was the case. However, by the 21st century, generations had been indoctrinated to an extent that left them assuming capitalism was an unalterable and fundamental law of nature, instead of the global existential threat it had evolved into by its late stages."

The chances of the rocket reaching orbit on the first attempt are not too bad. Ariane 6 did it and only failed on the third engine relight.

Nailing the landing is a lot trickier, but if they have any early problems they would ditch it in the sea. They would have to have a problem just before landing for the rocket to take out the barge. If you want to count tipping over as a crash, that would make it more likely, but still less than SpaceX because of the soft landing and more legs.

Either SpaceX isn't uncontested already (lots of people are developing rockets, so they aren't uncontested), or this wouldn't have changed that (lots of people developing rockets are absolutely nowhere near SpaceX, and they still wouldn't be whether or not this had worked).