Saudi Arabia has lowered its growth forecast and expects to post a budget deficit this year rather than an earlier projected surplus, a preliminary budget statement showed on Saturday.
The largest Arab economy expects real gross domestic product to grow by 0.03% this year, the document released by the ministry of finance showed, compared with a previous forecast for growth of 3.1%.
The document projected a budget deficit of 2% of GDP, compared with an earlier projection for a 0.4% surplus.
Meanwhile, they are spending their budget on The Line, rather than something that will have long term positive economic benefits.
they aren’t creating any value: oil will be irrelevant because it got so much weaponized that it incentivized spending for renewables. Oil rich middle eastern countries invest in laughable assets like F1 teams and airlines, anything that would promote oil use. Airlines will ultimatly go instinct once SpaceX starts shuttling people across the globe in less than one hour, instead of what used to be 12 hour flights (less than 8 hour flights shouldn’t be feasable by Starship, or aren’t economically viable). Such countries have alot of money and just keep investing in trends.
Mass point to point rocket travel will not be a thing anytime soon. The main hurdles are extreme cost, horrifically slow load and unload times, and high rates of death. Manned rocket missions have a ~1% fatality rate. That is many, many, many orders of magnitude from anything even approaching safe.
Even if you are somehow ok with such extreme danger levels just to travel, the devastatingly slow load and unload times kill the only stated benefit. You can’t just launch them from anywhere, Space X is talking about requiring a ferry trip to a platform (slow). Then you have to get everyone fitted into (and later out of) a space suit. And no, you can’t just skip basic safety and not put people in a suit that will keep them alive in the event of an emergency. That step alone takes hours.
No, the Concorde is practical in comparison.
lets see how this would pan out. also europeans didn’t make their ariane rockets as profitable as spacex did, and never achieved booster vertical landing. Spacex has a record of delivering on their promises, so they kinda should be taken seriously.
Imagine being stupid enough to be anti-union lol.
Lol @ rocket travel replacing airlines. I can’t even formulate a response explaining how ridiculous that is. But I’m more than happy to bet you very large amounts of money that it won’t happen.