I found this tidbit interesting from the Haber process wiki page: "Nearly 80% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber-Bosch process" and yet only "3–5% of the world's natural gas production is consumed in the Haber process"
Both Uber and SpaceX are technically 'transportation companies' in a loose sense. None of the things you listed above really further any field in basic science and academia. SpaceX's achievements simply sound cooler because it is with big rockets and more tangible to write down for record keeping. They are essentially using rocket tech in a new, different way that employs a new business model for success - which, surprise surprise, is exactly what Uber does as well but with terrestrial transport vehicles.
First off, SpaceX had little/nothing to do with any of the stuff you mentioned.
Second, I am not devaluing what SpaceX has done or is trying to do. I am a big fan actually of such ventures which strive to find new frontiers.
My reply was in the context of this thread where lot of people are dissing Uber saying they are not a real technology company, and people lamenting the fact that a taxi company raised more money than a space faring company.
I was pointing out the close-mindedness (if you will) of those people. Uber is having tremendous impact in the here and now across the world, and touching the lives of millions of people. What they have done is nothing to dismiss. Also the vision of the future they are working towards could be even more transformative (possibly save hundreds of thousands of lives a year).
What SpaceX is trying is far more riskier and ambitious and its rewards for humanity (if it succeeds) lay further into the future and may end up having greater impact on the future of humanity (or it may not). In the interim its impact is limited (because it is a long-term project).
It makes no sense to compare the two ventures as some competition. The worlds needs both. There is nothing wrong with the fact that Uber has a greater valuation than SpaceX. Uber provides greater value to their customers right now. And they could provide greater returns to their investors sooner (if they chose to ). SpaceX as of now is much more riskier investment and its real returns lay farther in the future.
Space technology in the 60s certainly resulted in wider benefit. Today? There's definitely some innovation happening, but broadly (compared to, say, consumer electronics) space is an incredibly slow moving, incredibly risk averse field. It often takes decades for components developed for other fields to end up in space.
A satellite today will probably be filled with electronic components designed 20 years ago. Justifying doing anything new is hugely expensive and so rarely happens.
Ultimately, in the past designing for space was a new field with rapid development but as the field has matured the huge cost involved in launching anything has made the whole industry hugely risk averse. There is innovation happening from new players (cube sats, spacex), but even these areas are mostly about finding cheaper ways to do things rather than inventing new stuff.
Helped keep the peace between the USSR and the USA through the cold war, by giving them something to collaborate on and so build some trust and keep communication going.
Well, we can imagine another world where we still have superpowers with nukes pointed at each other but without big civil collaborative science projects going on between them.
Both worlds could end up in an all-out nuclear war, but which one do you think is more likely?
Well, without going down the road of trying to find plausible probabilities for imaginary scenarios it is difficult to chip away at either hypothesis, given we do not have a variety of different earths to test on.
There was a lot of "first" in the previous comment, which might as well be synonymous with "front" in this context.
As an example, Linux wasn't the first UNIX-like kernel or the even the first free UNIX-like kernel, but it (with GNU) was the first free UNIX-like kernel to bring a UNIX-like kernel to the mainstream PC world and span the entire vertical range of computing scale from microcontrollers to TOP500 supercomputers. I'd call that expanding the technological front.
Edited for GNUtical correctness, which makes it quite a bit harder to read
