Totally different scales. A falcon 9 rocket weights in at 550 tons, and most of that is fuel and the rest can be broken down into small parts. The average cargo ship might be 50,000 tonnes, literally orders of magnitude larger, and none of the major parts are road-mobile. The logistics are just totally different. Space X also competes in a rocket industry that is maybe 60 years old. Shipping is a 1000+ year-old industry making it, again, a couple orders of magnitude more mature. One might even argue that commercial cargo ships have existed for two, three or even four thousand years. Pharaoh paid someone to ship those blocks down river for the pyramids.
Then do the obvious thing - don't start with 50kt cargo ships. There was a funny article the other day about how some group - possibly the Columbians? I forget - was getting into sub manufacturing because they needed to transport drugs. That isn't military grade nuclear subs but it is on the path to them if for some weird reason they keep chugging away.
No company in the world starts with massive state of the art. It is a recipe for failure, the engineers need to learn in a lower-risk environment.
Building crab fishing boats doesn't have an evolution that leads to building nuclear submarines anymore than manufacturing charm bracelets or ready-to-eat delivery meals. The requisite materials, logistics, and labor expertise are effectively unrelated to one another and separated by mountains in terms of capital and material resources.
As was said before, the only way in is basically to buy into an existing operation, at which point where you got the money from originally is irrelevant.
> Building crab fishing boats doesn't have an evolution that leads to building nuclear submarines
You're putting words in my mouth because that is probably not how people would start out.
But the literal incorrectness of that statement is so wrong it is puzzling. The shipbuilding industry, which builds nuclear submarines, started with some extremely modest boats. The path we followed to get to where we are was precisely starting with little fishing boats and evolving to where we are now. There is obviously a path from small boats to large boats. To suggest otherwise is absurd. As is the idea that small companies can't become big companies or move to make more sophisticated products.
You might be about to make the argument that government funding is necessary or something, but the big problem here is unusually simple - the US is not globally competitive at manufacturing, a startup would be expected to fail if left to compete in the market and that is why nobody is going to try (or succeed). They've already been beaten out of the market.
> You're putting words in my mouth because that is probably not how people would start out.
I'm making concrete your vague handwaving, feel free to provide a more complete explanation of how you think this goes.
> But the literal incorrectness of that statement is so wrong it is puzzling. The shipbuilding industry, which builds nuclear submarines, started with some extremely modest boats. The path we followed to get to where we are was precisely starting with little fishing boats and evolving to where we are now. There is obviously a path from small boats to large boats. To suggest otherwise is absurd.
No it didn't. And certainly not the military shipyards discussed in this article. While a couple (Newport News, Brooklyn Navy Yard) have origins as more modest shipbuilding sites, the vast majority were purpose-built sites for military construction built with US government dollars. Like the Manhattan Project or the Hoover Dam, there wasn't a smaller initiative that gradually developed into a massive industry. Massive industry was the go word.
These types of projects, continental railroads, interstate highways systems, and military naval shipyards, they can have private-public partnerships but they do not grow organically from more modest roots without public dollars.
> You might be about to make the argument that government funding is necessary or something, but the big problem here is unusually simple - the US is not globally competitive at manufacturing, a startup would be expected to fail if left to compete in the market and that is why nobody is going to try (or succeed).
This is irrelevant, pick your foreign military shipyard and you will find that the story is the same. Bohai, Zelenodolsk, Cherbourg, any of them. The government recognized a need for a new, larger, more powerful class of ships and either built or expanded the logistics necessary to construct the vessels.
> I'm making concrete your vague handwaving, feel free to provide a more concrete explanation of how you think this goes.
Imagining counterfactuals is fundamentally vague. Someone would need see an opportunity to move in to shipbuilding at the low end and take it. But that is the low end, ie, probably not starting at 50kt tankers. You're imagining scenarios where it doesn't work. That is really easy, most business ideas don't work. But successful companies come from the unusual situations where ideas do work, so the fact that you are good at imaging how things won't work isn't really material. You're one of the approximately 8 billion humans that isn't capable of founding a shipping startup. I am too. But nonetheless we can be confident that the best positioned people in the US could do it.
The issue is not the path, the issue is that US companies can't compete. The existing, established, US shipbuilders got whipped by the Asians. The question here isn't whether startups work, the issue is the market that they'd inherit if they got big doesn't support US shipbuilders.
> No it didn't.
You are, and I'm speaking quite literally here, absurdly wrong. Modern ships didn't pop into existence from nothing. Nothing does. The whole modern economy is just iterations of smaller simpler designs starting with wood fires and spears. It is just a basic fact that there is a path from any industrial activity to any other.
And companies tread it fairly regularly. It isn't unusual for people to move from one vertical into another.
> Like the Manhattan Project or the Hoover Dam, there wasn't a smaller initiative that gradually developed into a massive industry.
The Manhattan project is within startup budget. OpenAI is talking trillions to develop AI, that is like 50 Manhatten projects. Nuclear science turns out not to be that hard once people know that splitting atoms is a very energy-plush operation.
And the dam example is silly. Are you suggesting the Hoover Dam was the first dam? No, the US had a huge dam building industry. It was a big project, but it was done by existing companies.
> Modern ships didn't pop into existence from nothing. Nothing does.
They didn't evolve from some minor capital investment. The problem is not one of ideas it is one of scale. In that sense, yes, they popped into existence from nothing.
The Panama canal is the result of centuries of technological development in the technology of canal construction generally, but fundamentally it is not the result of a startup or even a hundred startups building tiny canals until they had enough capital and expertise doing so to build a big canal.
It is a result of governments (plural, the first attempt failed), in a one-off immense expenditure of capital and manpower unable to be mustered by the entirety of the global shipping industry (for everyone with eyes and a map could see the potential), constructing something that was not there before. "From nothing".
What will the startup do that's so much better than the existing shipbuilders? China has much cheaper labor, and produces a huge amount of steel domestically. They build big ships and smaller ships. What does your hypothetical startup do that will let it compete against existing incumbents that have established incumbents with much more experience?
With drug trafficking, it need for new manufacturing is because they had an illegal use case. And those subs usually don't last more than one journey. It's not really comparable to the shipping industry at large.
