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It's just taxpayer money they're blowing up, so it doesn't really matter.
by askl 2y ago
It's just taxpayer money they're blowing up, so it doesn't really matter.
- ericd 2y agoThey're blowing up their own money, unless you still count it as being the taxpayer's after the government pays them for launch services.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoR&D for starship has a several-billion-dollar NASA grant. Something like 30-50% of the money being blown up on this program is taxpayer money.
- ericd 2y agoFair. I think that was for HLS rather than the launch systems, but I guess if it’s already been disbursed, it’s probably all commingled. But that still means it’s not just taxpayer money, it’s mostly theirs. They’ve been raising equity rounds this whole time.
- Alex-Programs 2y agoIt hasn't been disbursed yet (entirely). They get rewards for certain accomplishments.
- Workaccount2 2y agoThe savings Spacex has promise of delivering to NASA make every dollar given to them probably an easy 2x-3x ROI. Without Spacex, the typical cohort of gov contractors would have been happy bleeding NASA dry with one time use rockets that have 10x the launch cost and carry 1/4 the cargo.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoSorry, Artemis carried more than one banana and actually made it to orbit. SpaceX has not provided any ROI yet. You can't compare the (very optimistic) promises of SpaceX against the actual returns of the rest of the industry.
- vardump 2y agoZero ROI? Isn’t SpaceX the largest launch provider in the world and for the U.S. government? Many times than the rest of the U.S. space industry combined.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago*Starship has zero ROI and has sucked up a lot of federal funds. Falcon 9 has had plenty of "ROI" but it wasn't really federally funded. Let's not get carried away though about "more than the entire US space industry combined," though.
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- drillsteps5 2y agoStarship program is funded in part by NASA as part of Artemis program. So some of this money is ours.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jacobr1 2y agoThe taxpayer money is for r&d. We should be very tolerant of failure. Aggressively testing with real hardware is a key part of how we learn to make a more robust systems. Fear of failure and waste will slow down progress.