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SpaceX wins $1.6B Space Force contract for 18 Falcon 9 launches
- ulfw 2mo agoLOLLLL yea... The stink of endless corruption in the new US of A Surely is completely unrelated to Musk throwing money behind electing the people who give him these contracts. https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-stink-of-musk https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-stink-of-musk
- panick21_ 2mo agoThey are literally the only option, the other options are strongly delayed and even when they come online they will have a large backlog and missing launch infrastructure. What do you want them to do, you magic to launch the sats?
- dzhiurgis 2mo agoRocketLab's Neutron, whenever it launches, is going to be same scale as Falcon 9 which SpaceX is already planning to retire in 2028. Neutron might get first test this or next year, so literally volume launches might happen after their competitor already exited that segment lol.
- panick21_ 2mo ago> planning to retire in 2028. Yeah and that is not happened, its just the typical Musk style claim.
- inemesitaffia 2mo agoBoth Reich and you are deeply unfortunate. SpaceX has always been the lowest bidder and always been paired. Including here in NSSL. And there's no other launcher. A sensible company seeking profits would match SLS pricing.
- tw04 2mo agoHuh, DOGE didn't find any waste in spaceforce?
- zigzagtadpole 2mo agoIf only the short term hype investors could get out of the market now and we can start building this thing back up.
- dgellow 2mo agoThat’s now the whole market
- qlte 2mo agoPlus “building up” like Tesla which had many 10x multiples is kinda a different story than a company that started out in the Top 5 by market cap. Sure, there’s a limited float plus meme stock/hype/etc but still, steady growth which would lead to like a $20 trillion company in a few years? Since I’m assuming IPO investors are going to be comparing to the last decade’s history of the tech giants and wouldn’t be satisfied with a 1.25x from IPO over 5 years or something…
- dgellow 2mo agoYeah, with the public getting used to that level of growth I don’t know if we can back to something more stable and sustainable
- blitzar 2mo agoThe trifecta - fraud, waste and abuse
- mrloopex 2mo agoDue to subsidies and investment fraud and subsidized tax breaks to 1% shareholders this will cost the US 10x more than if NASA just did it. People like to say nasa was a bloated waste of money, but thinking beyond k=1 it is obvious privatization costs even more in the long run.
- LaffertyDev 2mo agoYour argument is that NASA could launch 18 rockets for ~$160 million total or ~8.8 million per launch? Or is your argument that the "real" cost of this $1.6B SpaceX / Space Force contract is in fact closer to ~$16B or ~$160B after accounting for tax subsidies and investment fraud?
- asdff 2mo agoIt is a for profit company. Therefore profit margin must be achieved. What is profit margin but waste? Government is allowed to actually run at cost or under cost. Contracting with for profit entities therefore makes no sense, other than to further the profit of those entities.
- krisroadruck 2mo agoBrother the government just labels "profit" differently. Most people would call it grift, pork, or "inefficiency". Government waste dwarfs private sector waste by orders of magnitude. The utopia where governments efficiently and wisely put our tax dollars to their best use doesn't exist, never has, and likely never will.
- thundercleeze 2mo agoThis thread is evidence of the decline in comment quality on this board.
- vardump 2mo agoAny kind of constructive discussion becomes very hard. Fake ”criticism” and cheapshots make actual criticism nearly impossible.
- bigyabai 2mo agoThis would be a better comment if your first post on this website wasn't literally a sarcastic NIMBY driveby: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48261228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48261228 The way you hurl stones from a glass house it kinda just sounds like you disagree and are upset.
- panick21_ 2mo agoMan if only SpaceX had IPO without all the xAI crap attached to it. Then it might actually be worth looking into. I wanted to invest in SpaceX for a long time but now its laughably overvalued.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2mo ago18 launches for $1.6B sounds like a terrible deal for SpaceX. Will they even profit?
- voxic11 2mo agoThe standard catalog price for a dedicated falcon 9 launch is $74 million. So this is actually up-charging the government a bit (I assume there is some custom work or extra cost for arranging for the appropriate security/secrecy).
- vel0city 2mo ago1,600M / 18 means $88.8M per launch. Supposedly they've been selling launches for ~$74M per launch. https://nextspaceflight.com/rockets/3/ https://nextspaceflight.com/rockets/3/ If its profitable at $74M then I'd imagine its more profitable at $88.8M. There could be some extra costs for dealing with government customers, but I imagine a lot of those $74M launches were also government customers. Lots of estimates of their cost per launch is somewhere <$20M.
- inemesitaffia 2mo agoSpaceX claims they launch for $20 million and thier public minimum price is lower than the charge here
- Zigurd 2mo agoNow that they are publicly traded, there may be less scope for shenanigans in those numbers. If they really had such great margins on falcon 9, an improved, cost reduced falcon rocket would make a lot of sense. Instead they're betting at all on a rocket that has a daunting list of unmet project milestones before it does what it claims it will do. That makes me think that the cost efficiency of falcon nine rests almost totally on streamlined operations, not technology. And that there might be a shell game going on regarding real costs.
- panick21_ 2mo agoYeah so you just don't actually understand the economics. The thing is, unless you massively increase the volume of Falcon 9, you are not going to get it that much cheaper. Its already incredibly cheap given that its made out of fancy aerospace material that needs to be shaped and welded with complex processes. If they invested a lot, could they get it a little cheaper? Sure maybe a few % ever year. They have been redesigning the Falcon 9 over and over again to optimize its manufacture and re-usability. They are mass producing the second stage about faster and cheaper then any other rocket structure of that complexity and size. What you suggest they should do they have already done, multiple times. But you run into limits. You could replace the Merlin engine with an engine of the same size that uses kerolox but is staged. Not much more you can do on the Merlin itself, except very marginal improvements. But if you do that you need to make the rocket longer, but Falcon is already on the upper limit of rocket of that diameter. So you need to increase the width. So you are already doing a new staged engine, and now your doing a very different structure already. Now you also need to change the shape of your downcomer, you have different thermodynamics of reentry, you redesign the engine bay and its heat protection. Basically you are building a new rocket at that point and the payoff for such a huge effort, is marginal at best. Their design has effectively reached a local maximum. Marginal improvements are possible and they are doing that but its not going to change fundamentally and its not going to get to their goal. Any new rocket they develop, must be more then a marginal improvement. Airbus and Boeing don't develop new planes unless the efficiency (therefore cost) improves by 20-30%. To actually reach the next level of profit opportunity you need to achieve full re-usability. That the next major step that can unlock much cheaper price to orbit. That's where your capital investment can have actual real payoff. Because it makes much larger constellation possible. > That makes me think that the cost efficiency of falcon nine rests almost totally on streamlined operations, not technology. And that there might be a shell game going on regarding real costs. Yeah and how is that streamlined operation possible you think? Maybe it has to do that they have a reusable fleet of boosters that have been highly optimized to be able to land and reused quickly. Maybe it has to do with them optimizing the shit out of their launch infrastructure, like pioneering automatic flight termination and 100s of other things. That is the technology. And there is no shell game going on, they make a lot of profit from Falcon 9 but reinvest everything in Starship, thus their rocket division overall is losing money.