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SLS is a jobs program. It's not economically viable at over $1 billion per launch. As for Blue Origin and New Glenn, this is an object lesson that simply throw

• dubcanada 2y ago
  You seem to assume a good CEO equals a successful company, and a good CEO also needs to have industry experience. I don't know if either of those are actually true, there are plenty of good CEOs who came from zero experience in the industry. And plenty of bad CEOs who came from plenty of experience in the industry. Both of these run successful and not successful companies. For example the currently Boeing CEO does not have experience in airplanes, came from a business background. And is considered a bad CEO by the average person (though considered a good CEO by stockholders, or at least was before the past few months).
  • notatoad 2y ago
    >You seem to assume a good CEO equals a successful company the only assumption i see is the counter to that - a bad CEO equals an unsuccessful company. and i don't think that's a very controversial assumption.
    • dubcanada 2y ago
      > And the new CEO (David Limp) used to be in charge of Kindles. Seems to imply there is an issue with a CEO of a space company previously working on Kindles. > Bezos had the former Honeywell CEO in charge of Blue Origin, which to me was such an odd choice Also seems to imply the CEO is bad because their previously only worked at Honeywell on thermostats. In my mind none of the above has anything to do with how good or bad a CEO is. Perhaps I am misreading it. In which case ignore me.
      • resolutebat 2y ago
        All things being equal, you'd want a CEO who understands the business, either by coming up through the ranks or a long career at another company in the same business.
        • AtlasBarfed 2y ago
          Which is basically Gwynne Shotwell, if I read her bio correctly.
      • bigjimmyk3 2y ago
        Honeywell is also an aerospace company: https://aerospace.honeywell.com/ https://aerospace.honeywell.com/
    • gibolt 2y ago
      A bad CEO can look great on paper and in the stock price. The product however will likely not keep pace, charging more for a product providing less value. Long term value, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction are all intertwined. New management is more likely than not to harm at least one of those 3 .
  • cletus 2y ago
    I reject the notion that a good manager can manage anything. I also reject the financialization of modern companies where we put accountants in charge who aren't subject-matter experts whose only playbook is to cut costs and jack up prices. It's exactly what's wrong with Boeing today. Obligatory Steve Jobs quotes on "idea people" [1] and Xerox [2]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdplq4cj76I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdplq4cj76I [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&t=2s
• starik36 2y ago
  True about founding before SpaceX. But wasn't it just a think tank for a while?
  • bboygravity 2y ago
    How does that make it better? :p
  • Maxatar 2y ago
    In many ways it still is just a think tank.
• jvanderbot 2y ago
  Any sufficiently large acquisition is indistinguishable from a jobs program.
• dyauspitr 2y ago
  Oooh the founding before spacex is a huge surprise. I always assumed it was bezos trying to keep up with the joneses with musk.
• johng 2y ago
  Whatever happened to armadillo aerospace?
  • throwaway2037 2y ago
    Wiki says: > In August 2013, Carmack indicated that following the crash of the STIG-B rocket earlier that year, he had wound down the company operations and had put the company in "hibernation mode." > In 2015, the assets of Armadillo Aerospace were sold to EXOS Aerospace Systems & Technologies, Inc.
  • mikepurvis 2y ago
    Excessive hubris around solving hardware problems in software, they blew up their rocket and ran out of money as Carmack couldn’t justify it any longer: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/82qkvl/john_carmack_about_what_happened_with_armadillo/ https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/82qkvl/john_carmack_...
    • modeless 2y ago
      I think it's just more that Carmack didn't want to go all in with his entire life and net worth the way Elon did (and without which SpaceX would certainly have died exactly the same death). And who can blame him?
      • WalterBright 2y ago
        Musk went all in with Tesla, too. At one point he was down to about $200,000 and was a few hours from bankruptcy of Tesla and himself. Musk is an enormous risk taker.
        • sillysaurusx 2y ago
          Would you mind providing a source?
          • WalterBright 2y ago
• mr_toad 2y ago
  > You can't fail if you don't launch. The BE-4 was launched earlier this year. I wouldn’t assume that late means never.
  • blkhawk 2y ago
    the BE-4 is an engine - it was finally used in a rocket january yes - after being in development for almost 15 years. That us still kinda slow compared to spacex.
• dylan604 2y ago
  > You can't fail if you don't launch There's a phrase "failure to launch" that would imply the opposite sentiment
  • jasongill 2y ago
    I believe that the parent commenter means "you can't fail if you don't try"
    • dylan604 2y ago
      If you're too risk adverse to even try, then just sit down and get out of the way. I want to put the shut up part of that quote in there too as in quit fighting for contracts/bids that could go to people that aren't afraid. You can't fail if you don't try, but you can't succeed either.
• aksss 2y ago
  It's also a hedge against SpaceX imploding/compromise/whatever. In that role, cost is less important than having a provably functional product. I'm not saying anything is likely to happen to SpaceX, just saying that having SpaceX as a SPOF in the US space program would not be the best strategy.
  • lupusreal 2y ago
    Starliner is that hedge, SLS isn't. Using SLS for delivery to the ISS would be a crime against tax payers.
  • ikekkdcjkfke 2y ago
    Such a sad take though, SpaceX is probably filled with America loving people not matter what a PR firms bot spew online about musk
• imtringued 2y ago
  New Glenn was announced in 2016. An 8 year long development process is hardly slow in aerospace. The development costs are also somewhere between three and four billion dollars. The real problem with Blue Origin is that Jeff didn't really give a damn about Blue Origin and let himself get scammed out of his money.
  • panick21_ 2y ago
    Given how many people work at Blue, I would suggest its more then four billion $. The Ariane 6 cost 5 billion $ or more. BlueOrigin has been spending almost 2 billion $ a year.
• panick21_ 2y ago
  SLS cost way, way more then $1 billion per launch. More like 4 billion $ per launch. They hope to get it to $2 billion $ eventually but that will take a while. 1 billion $ is the end goal that they use in marketing, but that's not happening anytime this or next decade.
  • nordsieck 2y ago
    > SLS cost way, way more then $1 billion per launch. More like 4 billion $ per launch. So, the full stack of SLS costs $4.1B. But that includes the cost of Orion which is ~$1.3B when you include the European Service Module, and it includes the cost of 1 year's worth of ground support equipment including upkeep for various buildings like the VAB, etc. The marginal cost of a cargo SLS (should one ever launch, which is looking increasingly unlikely) is a bit over $2B. Which is still a horrifically high price. For people who don't know much about SLS, one way to put its cost into context is, every time the full stack with Orion launches, that's about 1/6th of NASA's yearly budget. And that doesn't count any development cost which is several tens of Billions.
    • panick21_ 2y ago
      I'm not sure that's true. I would bet with Orion its even more. It depends what you consider to be work before launch 1 as launch cost. And we don't really yet know the cost of the EUS. You can of course get higher if you add development cost as well. But that depends on how many launches there are.
      • nordsieck 2y ago
        > I'm not sure that's true. From the OIG report[1]: > We project the cost to fly a single SLS/Orion system through at least Artemis IV to be $4.1 billion per launch at a cadence of approximately one mission per year.47 Building and launching one Orion capsule costs approximately $1 billion, with an additional $300 million for the Service Module supplied by the ESA through a barter agreement in exchange for ESA’s responsibility for ISS common system operating costs, transportation costs to the ISS, and other ISS supporting services. In addition, we estimate the single-use SLS will cost $2.2 billion to produce, including two rocket stages, two solid rocket boosters, four RS-25 engines, and two stage adapters. Ground systems located at Kennedy where the launches will take place—the Vehicle Assembly Building, Crawler-Transporter, Mobile Launcher 1, Launch Pad, and Launch Control Center—are estimated to cost $568 million per year due to the large support structure that must be maintained. The $4.1 billion total cost represents production of the rocket and the operations needed to launch the SLS/Orion system including materials, labor, facilities, and overhead, but does not include any money spent either on prior development of the system or for next-generation technologies such as the SLS’s Exploration Upper Stage, Orion’s docking system, or Mobile Launcher 2. > And we don't really yet know the cost of the EUS. We have an idea of an initial cost estimate from this[2]. NASA agreed to buy 2 core stages and 2 EUSes for $3.2B. Since RS-25s are around $100M each and the SRBs are around $200M each, this pushes the cost of the rocket up to $2.4B, maybe a bit more. --- 1. https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IG-22-003.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IG-22-003.pd... 2. https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/nasa-commits-to-future-artemis-moon-rocket-production/ https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/nasa-commits-to-future-...
• hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  It's a total waste of taxpayer money and an extension of the pork of the military/government-aerospace/industrial complex. And they're still using Russian-made rocket engines on Atlas V prior to switching to Vulcan Centaur, another expensive platform. The American taxpayer deserves to have billions in waste cut out and capital used more efficiently at SpaceX and other vendors where there is value/$.
  • deepsun 2y ago
    Yet that was historically the most successful approach in XX century for most of research-intensive industries (space, transistors, energy etc) -- when government spends crazy amounts of taxpayers money for some programs that bring little $$ back, but sprawl a lot of commercial startup follow-ups. Investing in commercial approaches as the step 1 doesn't seem to work in multi-billion R&D endeavors. So yes, it's not fair, but turns out to be better for the country down the road.
    • robertlagrant 2y ago
      That works for a bit, and then all the others jostle in and start feeding on the pork. SpaceX will get this eventually too if it does well enough and settles into a routine of project bids, project management, technical project success, and more bids.
      • deepsun 2y ago
        "All others" you mean commercial companies? That's the goal, yes. "Jostle" you mean competition? That's the idea, right. So -- awesome.
        • robertlagrant 2y ago
          "All the others" being the people who don't work like that, but want pork.
    • lupusreal 2y ago
      Cost-plus contracts work during wartime when everybody is motivated by the war to get the job done fast, to end the war and get their friends and family back home safely as soon as possible. During peace time, the predominant motive is to maximize profit by dragging out the work.