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Your 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 S
by LaffertyDev 2mo ago
Your 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.