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Due 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 n
by mrloopex 2mo ago
Due 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.
- asdff 2mo agoMostly because government today pays out the nose for contracted labor rates as doing anything in house has been blown apart by free market reaganists over the years.
- rayiner 2mo agoThe soviet union, the only non-capitalist country ever to have a technology comparable to ours, was really fucking inefficient. E.g. Soviets had 50% higher CO2 output per ton of steel than the U.S. due to poor energy efficiency.
- asdff 2mo agoThere was a time when american steel was inefficiently made too.
- jocaal 2mo agoThat utopia exists, the only problem is it is a communist country where you have no individual rights and can't own land.
- asdff 2mo agoIt exists here too in small subsets of government. A parks dept that hires their own landscapers instead of contracting with a landscaping company is such an example of this utopia. A municipal power company with greatly reduced rates in comparison to a private utility. A university that runs its own prep kitchen facility over prepackaged GFS/cisco.
- inemesitaffia 2mo agoIt's never existed in this industry.
- asdff 2mo agoSo what? If you needed precedence for everything to happen, nothing new would ever happen.
- inemesitaffia 2mo agoPeople talk about the industry like there was a time the government built it's rockets, then SpaceX stole money that was meant for NASA and now NASA can't build rockets anymore.
- asdff 2mo agoI am aware the US has operated in this reliance on for profit contractor model for a very long time. I just think it is stupid, costly, and only really serves to make connected individuals extremely rich, at the cost of wider innovation potential. People balk at the cost of large government in house projects like the manhattan project, well imagine that cost if the government had to pay contractor rates on that project instead of doing it in house. Twice as high perhaps given how these contracts usually are pricing in cost overruns in addition to profit margin?
- LaffertyDev 2mo agoSo your argument is that NASA, by virtue of being a government entity unburdened from profit seeking, could launch 18 rockets for less than $1.6B total or $88 million per launch?
- asdff 2mo agoTheoretically, absolutely. Of course it gets messy in reality. But theoretically there is no reason they couldn’t. If someone in a certain office snapped their fingers they could nationalize spacex for example and remove profitability requirements while preserving institutional knowledge and team structure. Just musk will no longer be the richest man on the planet.
- LaffertyDev 2mo agoThis is now an argument I can start to get behind. There isn't a need for profit seeking or "dollar optimization" and I fully subscribe to the argument that the government can just "do things". I likewise fully subscribe to the argument that the ability for the government to just "do things" has been eroded over time systematically. But, like, that's divergent from "This SpaceX contract is pure grift" that OP was not so subtly implying.
- sinuhe69 2mo agoWhen has NASA got even close to that number of dollar per kilo payload in its long history? AFAIK, never.
- asdff 2mo agoSo what? I'm guessing spacex can be even lower dollar per kilo if they didn't have to make profit. That is my whole point. People are missing that point and going "well nasa doesn't have the talent blabla" that just misses this point entirely. Profit is a cost. You can never convince me profit is not a cost.
- panick21_ 2mo ago
- Pragmata 2mo ago>What is profit margin but waste? Compensation for the risks taken and opportunity cost lost by doing this instead of something else. Are you serious? I suggest you re-evaluate your priors because you're spouting things that demonstrate a severe lack of consideration for 1st, 2nd and 3rd order effects.
- asdff 2mo agoPlenty of brilliant work is achieved on this earth without bribing c suite with yacht and private jet money. Funny too how it is never really the engineering team tasked with actually doing the thing that gets top compensation at an org. Always the finance bros who have shoehorned themselves in between this team and capital.
- Pragmata 2mo agoThe c-suite are also employees, they are not entitled to the profits you were complaining about. Once more you demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the topic you're talking about.
- asdff 2mo agoI'd be shocked if any c suite compensation packages don't include significant equity
- Pragmata 2mo agoYou understand any non-c-suite employee can also purchase equity if they work for a publicly traded company (like spaceX), right? You're complaining that c-suite are being "forced" to own equity, while regular employees get the choice of doing so or not?
- asdff 2mo agoC suite compensation is completely bonkers compared to what they actually do. That is all waste, whether paid out in base, equity, bonus, or whatever other benefit.
- anon7000 2mo agoLook, you’re absolutely technically right, but SpaceX is one of capitalism’s best examples. Because… is the Falcon launch business profitable? SpaceX has spent massive amounts of money to launch their rockets hundreds of times to bring the cost this low. Because they have economies of scale and can learn from their mistakes at a volume no rocket manufacturer has ever achieved. So your question should actually be: can NASA build a rocket that can do 18 cargo launches for less than $1.6B? The answer is probably no. Because Falcon 9 isn’t a one-off design, it’s the cheapest launch system ever designed. By a massive margin. A bigger point here is that, sure, you’re right, there are many late-stage capitalistic businesses which basically only exist to increase profit and cut corners as much as possible, to customer detriment. And probably scam the government out of huge amounts of money. But SpaceX isn’t a late-stage business like that.
- xhkkffbf 2mo agoCan you go into more detail? You're clearly assigning costs to SpaceX that go beyond the invoice price.
- asdff 2mo agoThose costs are baked into the invoice price.
- inemesitaffia 2mo agoSometimes you can buy cheaper than build. Many launchers in several countries, SpaceX is the cheapest in its sector.
- asdff 2mo agoThis is only true if spacex is losing money on everything they build. They aren't, so no, buying is not cheaper than building.
- inemesitaffia 2mo agoThere's competition. So there's already evidence. Don't forget NASA has its traditionally built vehicle SpaceX also has benefits from its volume. So yes, if you buy in bulk and you'll get it cheaper. Pretty sure NASA isn't making its planes either even though it does aeronautics. It doesn't make Satellites even though it has earth observation people. We've heard accusations SpaceX is getting government subsidies, losing VC money, but they opened the books and their cost advantage is ridiculous. Don't think NASA is building a vehicle like Falcon 9 for $20 million per launch operationally in ten years.
- asdff 2mo agoPeople are getting hung up on how spacex reached that cost and how yes, it took innovation, iteration, and whatever else. I'm not denying that. What I am denying is that you needed to make musk the richest man on earth to achieve this. That you needed to go to ipo. That it needed to give a dime to any initial investors. All I am saying is in another universe, Gwynne Shotwell could have ran a kickass team at JPL with the exact same people doing the exact same thing and delivering the exact same rocket for even lower cost. Profittaking was not necessary for any of this is all I am suggesting. Shame all the replies pushing back on me in my other comment thread on this are missing the forest for the trees.
- panick21_ 2mo agoWhat is this nonsense argument? Can you share more then one sentence about this? NASA own analysis suggest that Falcon 9 development (just the initial nonreusable) version would have cost 10x as much (and that is with their estimation methods that often are wrong by 2-3x). Do you also think NASA should build its own cars and planes to move around? Should they make their own spoons too? What is your evidence that NASA could make things cheaper, or that they would be cheaper if NASA had tried to do it themselves. We don't even have to base it on the study NASA did, they did develop the Ares 1 rocket during the same time when SpaceX developed Falcon 9. And NASA rocket cost many times what Falcon 9 cost and had little prospect of becoming much cheaper anytime soon and when canceled wasn't finish developing despite being based on existing well understood technology. In fact, only a complete redevelopment of the rocket from the ground up had any chance to ever match Falcon 9. So we have both a theoretical study and a practical example that SpaceX Falcon 9 is vastly cheaper by an almost unimaginable large amount. And that is even before SpaceX on its own dime and on its own investment developed re-usability. And that made things even cheaper. So can you please outline a realistic history where either now or in the next 20 years NASA would be cheaper then Falcon 9. Please assume the same amount of funding for the relevant project. If you want to make the argument that somehow in 2050 it would be cheaper, I don't think you will win many people over with that logic.
- Rebelgecko 2mo agoThis whole series of launches costs about the same as 1 SLS launch. Plus SpaceX is probably more aligned with DOW goals than NASA
- inemesitaffia 2mo agoLess than
- rayiner 2mo ago“NASA” has always relied on private companies. It was always Boeing, Rockwell, etc., designing and building rockets under contract.