Study Finds SpaceX Investment Saved NASA Hundreds of Millions (popularmechanics.com) 156
schwit1 shares a report from Popular Mechanics: When a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft connected with the International Space Station on May 25, 2012, it made history as the first privately-built spacecraft to reach the ISS. The Dragon was the result of a decision 6 years prior -- in 2006, NASA made an "unprecedented" investment in SpaceX technology. A new financial analysis shows that the investment has paid off, and the government found one of the true bargains of the 21st century when it invested in SpaceX. A new research paper by Edgar Zapata, who works at Kennedy Space Center, looks closely at the finances of SpaceX and NASA. "There were indications that commercial space transportation would be a viable option from as far back as the 1980s," Zapata writes. "When the first components of the ISS were sent into orbit 1998, NASA was focused on "ambitious, large single stage-to-orbit launchers with large price tags to match." For future commercial crew missions sending astronauts into space, Zapata estimates that it will cost $405 million for a SpaceX Dragon crew deployment of 4 and $654 million for a Boeing Starliner, which is scheduled for its first flight in 2019. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but Zapata estimates that its only 37 to 39 percent of what it would have cost the government.
Is anyone surprised by this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, when you're being compared to notoriously expensive "cost-plus" contracts with (largely) military contractors, it's not hard to emerge as the cheaper option.
In other news... (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting details (Score:2)
Actually, yes, I found the actual details in the numbers to be quite surprising.
Working through the details, most of the cost of using the shuttle to resupply the station turned out to be due to the fact that one flight per year was enough to deliver the cargo to station, but that's not enough to cover the fixed cost. The main reason that the shuttle was too expensive as a resupply vehicle was that its cargo was too high (all of the cargo that sixteen flights of both Dragon and Cygnus carried to ISS, from
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From table 6, on page 30, the cost is $365 million per flight at a rate of one flight per year, and drops to $96 million per year at a rate of five flights per year*.
Does that include the $1B+ infrastructural costs? Because the $365M can't possibly be total cost. Shuttle's total amortized mission cost was $1B+ per flight on average. There's absolutely no way that five Shuttle flights in a year only cost $500M total for that year. The only relevant number I see in your "table 6" is 365 thousand dollars per kg of cargo, not 365 million per launch. The per-launch cost is 2.5 billion dollars in the 1-flight-per-year scenario, 1.3 billion per flight for five annual flights.
More accurately [Re:Interesting details] (Score:2)
So, the dollars per kilogram drops by a factor of 4 as the launches per year increases from 1 to 5, but the actual cost remains at 1.3 billion per launch even at a flight rate of five per year. But because the cargo capacity is so high, the cost per kilogram is about the same as the Falcon 9/Dragon, and somewhat lower than the Antares/Cygnus.
Looking more carefully, the recurring cost does include a budget of $1 billion per year for shuttle upgrades. So
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A quick google says the shuttle was $18,000/kg to LEO and SpaceX is $5,500/kg to LEO. Over 3x more is hardly "about the same".
TFA [Re:More accurately [Re:Interesting details]] (Score:2)
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Given that Shuttle's original mission was supposed to be to _build_ a space station and bring large pieces back down if necessary - not to run supply missions - is that a great surprise?
Most of the lifespan of the vehicle was wasted flailing around trying to find missions to justify having humans in space, in what was primarily a propaganda flag-waving exercise. The massive size of the thing (and its wings) resulted in the dangerous design decision to piggyback the orbiter instead of stacking it - with the
Cost plus (Score:2)
Seriously, when you're being compared to notoriously expensive "cost-plus" contracts with (largely) military contractors, it's not hard to emerge as the cheaper option.
Cost plus contracts only make sense when the costs are difficult to ascertain at the time of quotation. When you are talking about something like the Apollo program, nobody really had any clear idea how much the whole thing would cost in advance because so much of it had never been done before. No sane private company would entertain such a deal unless the government was willing to absorb essentially all the risk. But at this point rockets aren't new technology so it should be reasonably straight forward
In other words (Score:1, Troll)
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In other words, NASA shot itself in the foot and could have had a much bigger budget. That's the problem with saving money in a bureaucracy: it will be used against you as an argument to cut your budget next year. Better not to do it in the first place.
Well, NASA as an entity has the problem of politicized goals. The on again-off again cycle they went through every 8 years surely wasn't conducive to anything but wasting money on research that got cancelled when the next president and party came on board ( and since I went there, O'Blama did not cancel the Space Shuttle program)
All I see is that the system is working. We have private groups taking over what is more mundane work, and tweaking the candles for better return. NASA can do the science, and som
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I don't think you understand how it works in government. If you don't want your budget reduced next year, you spend ALL of your budget. There is a very perverse incentive to spend it all, otherwise you lose it. When I worked previously at NIH, when it came around to the end of the fiscal year, everyone was asked what was on their wish list and we needed to figure out how to spend X dollars.
I agree its fucked up in general, but remember that many government jobs are make work type employment.
Long ago NASA
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It may be quicker and easier than zero-based budgeting, but I doubt that represents much in the way of savings from efficiency over time. Maybe mix it up with a zero based budget once every four years, with baseline budgeting in between?
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Baseline budgeting is BS. I don't know if that has anything to do with why private enterprise can build a rocket for a third of what it would cost the government, but it probably doesn't hurt.
Having worked on a few interesting things, the profit is only ever expected when the project moves to private Industry. Even then, the amount of work to transfer the technology is sucked up on the public end.
The research is ridiculously expensive. Smart people and dedicated people who are paid a lot. Expensive tests. Things "go away" as we say, which require facilities being rebuilt. Private enterprise starting from scratch to build an F1 engine with no input other than "is it profitable?" It ain't gonna
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While still not suggesting that we don't need NASA, I do want to point out that SpaceX is privately funded, designed and built it's own engines and vehicles as much from scratch as possible for technology that has already been invented, and can now supply NASA with launch vehicles for less than it would have cost going through the traditional process. Does that mean NASA is unnecessary? No,
NASA: get back to exploring (Score:2, Interesting)
Zapata estimates that [ the cost of a SpaceX crew deployment ] its only 37 to 39 percent of what it would have cost the government.
Sounds like it's time to sell-off NASA's space operations (or maybe just the non-exploration parts) to SpaceX.
They seem to be doing a much better job of it. More innovative, cheaper, faster turnarounds. Is there really any reason for NASA to do anything in LEO any more?
Re: NASA: get back to exploring (Score:5, Informative)
I was literally touring kennedy space center yesterday, the theme of the guided tour was commercial contractors are going to take over LEO and NASA will focus on deep space with SLS/Orion
Re: NASA: get back to exploring (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, we know they're not going to be doing that either. Even ignoring the continual delays, SLS is simply an impractical launch vehicle. Way too expensive per launch, and they'll never have enough launches to refine it.
NASA needs to accept that it's not going to be a launch supplier, and switch to what it does best: R&D and exploration missions. And the new launch environment should be embraced. Think of what can be done when launch costs are much less than spacecraft development costs: suddenly you have a much stronger incentive to mass-produce spacecraft designs, since the incremental cost becomes so much less than the single-unit cost. Picture the era where we don't launch, say, 1 Dawn spacecraft, we launch a hundred of them, each to different bodies. We don't launch 1 Mars rover, we launch a couple dozen, each to different parts of Mars. Etc.
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Of course, we know they're not going to be doing that either. Even ignoring the continual delays, SLS is simply an impractical launch vehicle. Way too expensive per launch, and they'll never have enough launches to refine it.
NASA needs to accept that it's not going to be a launch supplier, and switch to what it does best: R&D and exploration missions. And the new launch environment should be embraced.
Quite right. And it took an outsider (Musk) to ask a game changing question ("Can first stage rockets be salvaged and reused to save money?") because when NASA got started doing launches, that wasn't possible at all. So over the years as technology changed, nobody at NASA ever thought about it because they were too entrenched in the old way of doing launches to ask any new questions.
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Quite right. And it took an outsider (Musk) to ask a game changing question ("Can first stage rockets be salvaged and reused to save money?") because when NASA got started doing launches, that wasn't possible at all.
That was true when NASA first started doing launches, which was in 1950 (project Bumper 2). The first re-usable rocket to launch to orbit was, of course, the space shuttle. So, NASA started doing reusable rocket launches back when Elon Musk was 11 years old.
So over the years as technology changed, nobody at NASA ever thought about it because they were too entrenched in the old way of doing launches to ask any new questions.
Or, more to the point, for the thirty years after developing the shuttle, NASA was not given the authority to work on developing a next generation booster.
When they finally did get to replacing the shuttle... the replacement was to fund SpaceX to devel
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The first re-usable rocket to launch to orbit was, of course, the space shuttle. So, NASA started doing reusable rocket launches back when Elon Musk was 11 years old.
Total pork-barrel. Some of the "re-usable" shuttle was actually more expensive than building new each time (largely due to the work being geographically allocated by political influence, not logistical sanity), but the pork must flow.
SpaceX made "economically re-usable" happen. The more corrupt the government, the more the private sector makes sense (and vice versa of course).
The first, and so far only, reusable spaceship (Score:2)
The first re-usable rocket to launch to orbit was, of course, the space shuttle. So, NASA started doing reusable rocket launches back when Elon Musk was 11 years old.
Total pork-barrel.
Pork barrel or not, it was nevertheless the first re-usable orbital launch vehicle.
...And, so far, the only reusable orbital launch vehicle ever flown. (Falcon 9 recovers and re-uses the first stage: the easy one.)
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Falcon 9 recovers and re-uses the first stage: the easy one
The part that makes sense, you mean. Nothing good will come of the nerd obsession with "just like the cover art of my SF novel" SSTO approaches. Re-use of the orbiter is just dumb until the day comes when re-fueling in orbit is so cheap that aero-braking isn't needed.
The goal isn't "reusable" but "cheap".
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Of course, we know they're not going to be doing that either. Even ignoring the continual delays, SLS is simply an impractical launch vehicle. Way too expensive per launch, and they'll never have enough launches to refine it.
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Sorry, but one size does not fit all. As well, payloads that might take three launches on a smaller rocket that can be handled by 1 SLS launch will be less expensive. Its why we have a stable of different Rockets. Smaller ones naturally being cheaper.
As well, it turns out that we come up with things to put in orbit that weigh as much as a rocket can handle. If it's available, someone will find something that needs it.
I think it's kind of like no matter you big your garage is, it'll always be full of s
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Sorry, but one size does not fit all. As well, payloads that might take three launches on a smaller rocket that can be handled by 1 SLS launch will be less expensive.
Since the SLS will most likely never launch a heavy payload into LEO (not even Saturn V did it in its three-stage version), you could easily handle that with just one launch on a Falcon Heavy plus some refueling flights. The same goes for the BFR of course, since that's a dedicated LEO launcher, too (without refueling). But after refueling, the BFR goes *way* above the SLS performance.
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Sorry, but one size does not fit all. As well, payloads that might take three launches on a smaller rocket that can be handled by 1 SLS launch will be less expensive.
Since the SLS will most likely never launch a heavy payload into LEO (not even Saturn V did it in its three-stage version), you could easily handle that with just one launch on a Falcon Heavy plus some refueling flights. The same goes for the BFR of course, since that's a dedicated LEO launcher, too (without refueling). But after refueling, the BFR goes *way* above the SLS performance.
The amount of lift ability of the Falcon 9 is not the maximum that will ever be needed. 63,800 lbs to LEO 26,700 lbs to Geostationary orbit, or 16,800 lbs to Trans-Mars injection is nice, but it is a limiting factor.
SLS block 2 will be 130,000 lbs to LEO, and 50,000 pounds to Trans-Mars Injection, and that is a significant difference.
Are you a NASA employee who knows for a fact that there is absolutely no need for the SLS? It is very unusual for a Rocket to be built that there are no projects ever ne
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Are you a NASA employee who knows for a fact that there is absolutely no need for the SLS? It is very unusual for a Rocket to be built that there are no projects ever needed to be launced with it. If a single launch will put 130,000 pounds into LEO, you can bet that there will be payloads approaching that.
And if you want to make 2 60,000 launches of payload with the Falcon Heavy (it will probably be 3 because someone is going to have to assemble the objects in orbit, as well as the payloads being designed to be assembled in orbit, your costs are going to go up, and probablity of success is going to go down.
Are you a Lockheed employee? Because if you are, you just missed Mars. Again.
Falcon Heavy Payload to LEO is 63,800 kg (140,660 lb) [spacex.com]. Falcon Heavy will have a considerably higher lift capacity than Block 2 of SLS.
As of September 2017, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy both are slated to be retired. SpaceX will produce enough of the various cores to satisfy their current launch manifest and then stop building them in favor of producing only BFRs, which are projected to have a 100% reusable payload to LEO capacity
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Falcon 9 has NEVER lifted even 10,000 kg into LEO.
That's not quite true. Iridium flights are listed as 9600 kg payloads, which is almost your 10000 kg. Also, Falcon 9 already lifted 6700 kg into GTO which directly translates into way more than 10000 kg to LEO capability - there's a ~2.5 km/s delta-v difference between LEO and GTO, and the Atlas V version with 6700 kg to GTO capability is listed as having around 14000 kg to LEO capability despite its upper stage being less useful for heavy LEO lifting. Expendable Falcon 9 (whose high-delta v performance dec
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Hey genius, 10,000>9,600 So you are conceding that Falcon Heavy CANNOT lift 30,000 kg into LEO.
Obvious non sequitur is obvious. Obvious troll is obvious, too! :D
Of course I'm not conceding your false conclusion. If F9 can lift 20mt to LEO which it obviously can, FH can lift 30 mt with ease.
Iridium satellites are listed as 689 kg each launch mass. 10x Iridium = 6890 kg
Actually, it's 860 kg each [orbitalatk.com], plus the deployer at least (it's not obvious if hosted payloads, which are a priori unknown, are a part of the satellite mass listed, but even if they aren't, the deployer itself can easily weigh a tonne - it has to transfer over 400 kN of maximum force to the satellites and feature ten
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because right now you sound like a fucking idiot.
No, I sound like someone who's not ignorant of high-school mathematics and physics, unlike you.
You admitted F9 has NEVER even lifted 10mt to LEO.
You ARE aware that many American rockets never lifted anywhere near their advertised LEO payload capability? So the Saturn V never lifted anywhere close to 140mt to LEO, Delta IV Heavy never lifted anywhere close to 28 mt to LEO, Atlas V never lifted anywhere close to 20 mt to LEO, and SLS will never lift anywhere close to 130 mt to LEO either. The fact that Falcon lifted around 10 mt to orbit is not exclusive wit
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Are you a NASA employee who knows for a fact that there is absolutely no need for the SLS? It is very unusual for a Rocket to be built that there are no projects ever needed to be launched with it. If a single launch will put 130,000 pounds into LEO, you can bet that there will be payloads approaching that.
I'm not sure I have to be NASA employee to know that. No official published SLS usage proposal to my knowledge ever asked for 130,000 kg (I think you made you made a unit mistake there?) to LEO. Everything assumed the high-delta-v capacity of the EUS will be used to lift things to cislunar space at least. After all, the EUS will be expensive so using it for LEO lifting is stupid. Plus, the cancellation of J-2X and the focus on the lower-thrust version of EUS is actually the direct consequence of no heavy LE
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After all, the EUS will be expensive so using it for LEO lifting is stupid.
Kind of depends on who the customer is, and what they need lifted. I cannot make myself any clearer on that, so take it or leave it.
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"SLS block 2 will be 130,000 lbs to LEO, and 50,000 pounds to Trans-Mars Injection, and that is a significant difference."
Sea Dragon was intended to be 500,000 pounds to LEO and that was designed in the mid 1950s.
Since the end of the space race the thing that's hamstrung developing bigger rockets hasn't been the technology but the _demand_ - and the demand has been set by countries building lainchers telling customers what's available.
An analogy is the way the telcos used to dictate how much bandwidth was n
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Sea Dragon was intended to be 500,000 pounds to LEO and that was designed in the mid 1950s.
You are actually bringing up Sea Dragon?
It's like on a football team, the best player is the second string quarterback that has never played.
The Sea Dragon has compiled a perfect launch record, you have to give it that.
Hard to imagine that this wonderful Rocket has never been built, the humongous engine never even been tested. A company that has no experience with liquid fueled turbopump rockets should be able to build the huge Rocket Nozzle, the fuel costs are fairly cheap, and Compressed Lquid NI
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"payloads that might take three launches on a smaller rocket that can be handled by 1 SLS launch will be less expensive."
Assuming that SpaceX or someone else hasn't come up with a booster capable of 3x the payload already.
Fuel costs are the least important part of the rocketry equation.
They didn't mattered hugely in the space race days either. The _actual_ problem was getting enough payload (including fuel) into space in a single launch to do the job at hand (going to the moon and back without the crew dyin
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Think of what can be done when launch costs are much less than spacecraft development costs:
I think a lot of software devs are going to be.... wait for it...... "upset".
eh? EH? Shout-out to the one over-worked RF engineer in the back who gets it. I'm here all week. Try the veal.
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Obama didn't want SLS either. SLS is a congressional creation.
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Obama prematurely killed Constellation
"Prematurely"? I'm pretty sure you meant "belatedly". Every year spent on Constellation was a year when something better could have been done instead.
Re:NASA: get back to exploring (Score:4, Informative)
Zapata estimates that [ the cost of a SpaceX crew deployment ] its only 37 to 39 percent of what it would have cost the government.
Sounds like it's time to sell-off NASA's space operations (or maybe just the non-exploration parts) to SpaceX.
They seem to be doing a much better job of it. More innovative, cheaper, faster turnarounds. Is there really any reason for NASA to do anything in LEO any more?
Hey I have an idea. Spacex is so good, we need to Eliminate NASA, destroy the launch facilities, and restore Cape Canaveral to the wildlife only refuge is is, and Spacex will take over and we'll save so much money we'll finally be winning.
Only makes sense, Spacex will start making engines on production lines that will dwarf anything NASA ever made, I'm expecting with their expertise that 10 million pounds of thrust should be just a CAD design away.
Sorry to ridicule you, but it's a partnership. Spacex is doing the work that can be profitable.
More's the pity that people are seeing the system working like it should, and decide that the outfit that makes all this stuff possible through development of the technology then transferring it to private enterprise is somehow the bad guy.
IOW, Spacex is getting the stuff that is reduced to practice, and tweaking the hell out of it to improve it, and now NASA still provides the facilities, and doesn't have to do the mundane work, and can continue to work on the balls to the wall stuff that sure as hell isn't ready to transfer yet. You need to research the F1 engines used on the Saturn, and now the F1-b's. Many superlatives like the loudest non- nuclear detonation noise made by humans, the emplacement of Mission control based on a minimum survivable distance from the launchpad to realize that private industry isn't going to develop much less take on that responsibility.
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Spacex will start making engines on production lines that will dwarf anything NASA ever made
They're already doing it. SpaceX is now manufacturing something like 200 engines per year on their production line - the thrust equivalent of five Saturn V first stages per year. Perhaps they're manufacturing even more by now.
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Spacex will start making engines on production lines that will dwarf anything NASA ever made
They're already doing it. SpaceX is now manufacturing something like 200 engines per year on their production line - the thrust equivalent of five Saturn V first stages per year. Perhaps they're manufacturing even more by now.
Now tell me, Is Spacex doing this out of whole cloth? Thrust equivalence is severely amusing. You coulf probably take several billion Estes Rocket engines and try top make them the Equivalent of an F1B. Gonna power a roicket to Mars or launch a intel Satellite with Estes engines. Which is all to say, my comparison is as ridiculous as your attempt to combine thrust from each engine that Spacex has made.
Argue with statements that make sense, not weird cherry picking of irrelevant data.
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Now tell me, Is Spacex doing this out of whole cloth?
Of course not, you can't make rocket engines out of cloth.
Thrust equivalence is severely amusing.
Why? Thrust is roughly proportional to GLOW which is roughly proportional to lift capability. In fact, Falcons have payload mass fraction of GLOW pretty damn high compared to competition, so that makes it even more impressive. So the fact that SpaceX is manufacturing a crapload of engines right now is quite relevant to what you were asking. After all, it's the least advantageous measure of the production line you were asking for.
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Now tell me, Is Spacex doing this out of whole cloth?
Of course not, you can't make rocket engines out of cloth.
Thrust equivalence is severely amusing.
Why?
Because that means that the Soyuz Rocket is much much more powerful than any other rocket, that's why.The number of Russian engine actual launches dwarfs an anyone else. I'm certain that the number of fireworks ever set off become a substantial rocket by your metric. Anyhow, you're kind of reaching trolling territory, although I did like the cloth rocket joke. You're trying to box me into an anti-Spacex position, and it is annoying.
tl;dr version. All of Spacex's engines are not going to make one huge la
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Because that means that the Soyuz Rocket is much much more powerful than any other rocket, that's why.
Production-line-wise, it is. The high point of Soyuz was in late 1970s (1979, I think?) with 47 (!) launches of just Soyuz-U in a single year (that's without counting the less-frequent variants like the Molniyas (7 flights in 1979)), lifting ~300 metric tonnes with Soyuz-U's to LEO within that year. That's five 1MN engines per stage and 235 first stage engines just for the Soyuz-U's, and the payload lifted about doubles NASA's all-time high annual Shuttle payload of about 150mt lifted in 1985. The thing is,
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Because that means that the Soyuz Rocket is much much more powerful than any other rocket, that's why.
Production-line-wise, it is.
What a concept. I need to lift X weight to X orbit. What Launch system do I use? Tell me exactly where your pointless metric has anything to do with that.
Anyhow, Your metric means nothing and is silly. I have you seemingly claiming that the thrust isn't important, because of total number of engines produced, and another claiming it isn't but Spacex has super dooper rockets coming on line that will dwarf anything that NASA is able to create, then it changes to being important.
I't like arguing with peop
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Your metric means nothing and is silly
You meant your metric [slashdot.org]?
I have you seemingly claiming that the thrust isn't important
You mean the part where I claim that thrust IS important [slashdot.org]?
Gee, you can't even troll properly.
and that thrust isn't important until Spacex comes out with the BDR rockets and then it is really important.
What? It's equally important before and after. You can't lift off from Earth without thrust. The only time it's less important is in orbit.
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IOW, Spacex is getting the stuff that is reduced to practice, and tweaking the hell out of it to improve it, and now NASA still provides the facilities, and doesn't have to do the mundane work, and can continue to work on the balls to the wall stuff that sure as hell isn't ready to transfer yet. You need to research the F1 engines used on the Saturn, and now the F1-b's. Many superlatives like the loudest non- nuclear detonation noise made by humans, the emplacement of Mission control based on a minimum survivable distance from the launchpad to realize that private industry isn't going to develop much less take on that responsibility.
Everything you know is correct, and obsolete.
SpaceX pays NASA for those facilities. They have a long term lease on pad 39A now, and will have others. NASA doesn't "provide" Cape Canaveral launch pads out of the goodness of their hearts. They get paid for it, and get paid a fee every time SpaceX launches from one of them. For ISS resupply missions, that's effectively the government paying itself, but for all the myriad commercial payloads SpaceX launches, NASA's costs are covered by the fee. (Not profit
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First, we need a legitimate competitor to SpaceX to exist. At the moment the only thing keeping other rocket companies in business is that SpaceX hasn't scaled up their operations to meet all the demand. If SpaceX can manage to do that, expect bankruptcies and at that point we have a bit of a problem. It would be nice if some startup like Blue Origin could compete, but for the moment they're still pretty much a pipe dream.
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NASA doesn't build rockets (they only build paperwork). Lockheed Porkem et al does. It's just moving rocket building from cost-plus porktractors towards COTS rockets. It's the private sector building the rockets either way.
No Research Costs (Score:1)
Spacex cheaper because the bulk of the research already done by NASA and that cost was added in NASA launches but effectively Spacex got it for free. NASA likely could do a lot of mission cheaper now and in it had gone into fabrication and not contracting it out, even cheaper, with lobbyists ensuring massive hidden profit margins for contractors (set profit margin, no problem inflate costs, simply pay higher wages to executives who do nothing, active pointless nepotism and ramp up the bill and more profit a
Re:No Research Costs (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course ULA got nothing from NASA either. Nope, not a single dime from absurd cost-plus contracts.
Yet they never did. Could of, would of, should of. Too busy lining the pockets of ULA executives.
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"Could've, would've, should've," dummy.
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You need to read the Federal Acquisition Regulation and the NASA supplement.
The maximum profit most contracting officers will allow is 8%, which is lower than private industry, and they compare the hourly rates for the staff against other data sources.
Re:No Research Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why there is incentive to increase costs. More cost = more profit.
The government often asks for scads of reports and documentation to show that you are following their accounting, engineering, quality, ... guidelines and rules. This needs to be delivered in their format, that they then give to auditors to pore over for years. Then there are "compliance" folks at the contractors whose job is to ensure that all reports are being done according to the contractual requirements. These contracts will often reference multiple contradictory government and industry standards, setting the stage for a number of people to research and resolve these conflicts. All of this extra work is "allowable" (since the government cannot ask you to perform work without compensation) and simply gets worked into the contract, inflating the cost (and improving the profit). If you have a high tolerance for bureaucratic quagmires, then government contracting can be very lucrative.
On the other hand, a commercial entity simply says "rocket costs 65 million dollars". The contract is a standard purchase order. Nothing more.
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The government often asks for scads of reports and documentation to show that you are following their accounting, engineering, quality, ... guidelines and rules...
[snip]
On the other hand, a commercial entity simply says "rocket costs 65 million dollars". The contract is a standard purchase order. Nothing more.
True. But imagine what happens if you don't do the paperwork? Something takes longer than expected - this is research, remember - or, God forbid, actually fails. Whichever politician championed the project to begin with could be facing a Congressional subpoena to explain what went wrong. That person isn't going to want to wait 6 months for a post-mortem, he's* going to want all the info already compiled.
* And yes, let's assume it's probably going to be a "he".
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The maximum profit most contracting officers will allow is 8%, which is lower than private industry
That's the problem.
If you tell me that my maximum profit margin is 8%, well, I'll do the math. If I spend $100M I can charge you $108M and I make $8M. If I spend $1B, I can charge you $1.08B, and I make $80M. Plus, the bigger the budget the easier it is to hide more profit in it.
Moreover, I not only want to do this, I have to do this, and i have to do it because 8% is lower than private industry. Even on the government dole, I still need private sector investment from time to time, and I need to be ab
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Spacex cheaper because the bulk of the research already done by NASA and that cost was added in NASA launches but effectively Spacex got it for free.
That's funny because SpaceX is the only company in the US manufacturing their engines at such low costs. So if SpaceX "got it for free", why none of the other companies that "got it for free" hadn't done it before them? Only a very naive person could possibly believe there's no research involved. [youtube.com]
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Thanks, Obama (Score:2, Insightful)
Miss you, buddy.
Blind Squirrel (Score:2, Interesting)
"A few weeks after killing the U.S.A.â(TM)s world-famous moon-mission program, President Obama has ordered the space agency that operates it to focus on reaching out to Muslim countries."
Yep, Obama got lucky that somebody else picked up the baton for NASA.
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Maybe it actually should be part of NASA's job, considering so many terrorists are engineers. Kind of like how NASA funded the Russian space program in the 90s in the hopes that their scientists wouldn't turn to nuclear proliferation for money.
Will Space X be Musk's only profitable company? (Score:2, Insightful)
Tesla Motors, despite all the hype and love showered here, shows no signs of ever showing a profit [battleswarmblog.com].
Back in 2010 people were asking... (Score:2)
Sometimes the government does pick winners (Score:2)
Kind of a shot over the bow of the crowd suggesting the government shouldn't pick winners. Sometimes government is the only entity with a big enough footprint to get a new technology over the startup finish line. DARPA does it routinely for military tech and we have a universe of modern tech that started as a DARPA project. There's a long list of winners but what's the one 40% of America focuses on? The solar panel place. Not all of them pan out.
We shouldn't be limited to military tech for the government
This should surprise nobody (Score:2)
I'm not a zealot that demands we privatize everything, but it's practically certain that the private sector can and will do almost anything cheaper than a government agency.
Curious if anyone bothered to compare it with ISRO (Score:1)
Where are all the Elon haters? (Score:1)
I get so sick of all of the Elon haters here, where are you now?
Slow news day (Score:1)
Paying out giant bonuses, buying Russian rockets to actually do anything useful and occasionally smashing stuff into the ground or the ocean is not a formula for cost savings.
Face it, wholesale outsourcing of space would have never gotten the US to the moon.
"There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough." - Elon Musk
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Believe it or not, there is a fair bit of accountability in terms of how money is spent in the government. The folks at the Government Accountability Office can be real dicks. They answer to Congress, not the Executive branch.
Congress from time to time remembers that they do in fact control the purse strings, its the one real power they have over the Executive.
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Ahhh, obviously penned with more opinion than knowledge
I worked for County and State government for about 8 years, with private engineering and consulting work on either side of my time in government
Government workers get paid less, are held more accountable and have tighter budgets than any private organization that I have ever worked for, including past employment with Motorola, Dames and Moore, and Level(3) . The thing is that so many right-wing politicians get elected by claiming to, 'get the waste out
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Private enterprise failings (Score:4, Interesting)
Really? What I took away was, "Look how much more efficient and effective private enterprise is!"
Private enterprise is NOT always more efficient or cheaper. Private enterprise generally does a terrible job on anything that is a public good [wikipedia.org]. Roads, policing, primary education, basic research, and many other necessary things that do not have a direct and relatively short term profit motive are difficult for private enterprise to do effectively or efficiently. The notion that private enterprise is always better is idiotic, false and counterproductive. Use private enterprise for what it is good at and government for what it is good at and have them work together when appropriate.
There is absolutely no way the Apollo program could have happened with private enterprise footing the bill. Private enterprise was useful to contract for specific tasks but it never would have happened if we'd let the Invisible Hand of the market do its thing. The Hubble Telescope would never have happened as a privately owned and operated device.
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Really? What I took away was, "Look how much more efficient and effective private enterprise is!"
There is absolutely no way the Apollo program could have happened with private enterprise footing the bill. Private enterprise was useful to contract for specific tasks but it never would have happened if we'd let the Invisible Hand of the market do its thing. The Hubble Telescope would never have happened as a privately owned and operated device.
Transitioning the launches to companies like Spacex is a logical move.
But you are correct. The free market crowd moves on profit. That's fine, but brings us things like more efficient ways to make pizza, not rockets and orbital mechanics.
There is very much a place for government sponsored science and services. No private entity would have funded the space program at all. We'd only have military rockets, and likely those would be ballistic missiles only.
The USA and Soviet Union performed a major jump
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Elon Musk and SpaceX are outliers when comparing them to other private corporations
Most corporations would face rebellious stock holders and adversarial boards of directors when doing what Musk is attempting to do, as they would demand that the company focus on delivering maximum profits over the development of new products and industries.
This autistic focus on short term profits (reportable at quarterly intervals) is what prevents companies from taking risks, or reaping their rewards.
Hopefully Musk continu
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Elon Musk and SpaceX are outliers when comparing them to other private corporations
Most corporations would face rebellious stock holders and adversarial boards of directors when doing what Musk is attempting to do, as they would demand that the company focus on delivering maximum profits over the development of new products and industries.
That is completely true. This is why Spacex is an imprtant bridge between Government and reduced to practice. We are no longer in the age of simplicity where a rich dude says, "Hey - let's make something called "Bushnell's Turtle, and sink a few enemy ships!" Rocketry is a great example of brinksmanship applied. When the Russians compile an incredible safety record and launch Rockets like the rest of us drive to work, we end up thinking it is easy - it is not. I salute the Russians and Musk, and do not for
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Are you saying that SpaceX is cheaper because they're in the 'build market share' stage of the corporation - i.e., they don't need to make a profit (and in fact can afford to lose billions), because it's still all about the hype and the investors are looking to a SpaceX-dominated future. If that's the case, then it's meaningless to compare costs.
Now, if SpaceX is really building a new and different future for space missions that will ultimately be much better than what NASA has been doing, and the VC's are
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>
Not sure what the ultimate downsides to a truly commercial SpaceX would be - but there are sure to be some.
Ads in space.
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Sorry shill, but it is not 'propaganda' when corporate raiders like Carl Icahn have decimated American businesses for 40 years following the same tried and true formula that keeps lining their pockets and leaving companies saddled with debt and teetering on disaster [nytimes.com]
It is inevitable that stockholders will eventually band together against Musk and force him to drop the 'dreaming' and make them some damn money. And even if Musk is smart enough to put an effective 'poison pill' in place, he will still be expos
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It is inevitable that stockholders will eventually band together against Musk and force him to drop the 'dreaming' and make them some damn money. And even if Musk is smart enough to put an effective 'poison pill' in place, he will still be exposed to stock shorters who will spam investors with negative news in hopes of slowing the growth of the company and making themselves money while strangling funding for new developments
SpaceX is not a public company. I suspect this matters a lot per your point. It is, however, not immune to difficulties in other Musk enterprises or so one would think.
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"The USA and Soviet Union performed a major jumpstart of rocket science back in the 50's and 60's "
The moon race bought many short term gains, but in the long run it severely damaged the US space effort and nearly extinguished the space program entirely - despite the expenditure for every year in the 1960s being less than americans spent on pizza deliveries in each of those years (or outboard motors)
That's because it was a race to see who could get bragging rights to be the first to plant a flag somewhere.
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I know, that's why I never said it was.
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"Private enterprise generally does a terrible job on anything that is a public good"
A balanced economy doesn't usually let private enterprise handle such things without sharp oversight, or even let private contractors bid on such things without oversight. Otherwise you get things like the nuclear plant which got utterly fucked to the point of abandonment because the private contractors cheated on concrete pours and reinforcing.
Unfortunately, in the period since the late 1960s, the US has embraced a mindset
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Really? What I took away was, "Look how much more efficient and effective private enterprise is!"
You are right, but don't forget that NASA is a broadbased entity, and Spacex is more tightly focused. Each of the different type of rockets in the stable have a different purpose, and NASA has retained the balls to the wall candles to themselves, and farmed out the less expensive stuff with corresponding lower payload to entities like Spacex.
NASA has done the groundwork, The rest of the entities are picking up just like the system should work.
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and NASA has retained the balls to the wall candles to themselves
What they've retained is lots of balls but not quite close to the wall. Sadly, it seems that SpaceX has the better wall now with Raptor getting ready in the pipeline.
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I have news for you. NASA doesn't build rockets. They are all contracted to private enterprise.
It's just that SpaceX is cheaper.
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SpaceX is privately funded; designed, built and tested their rockets in-house and for it's own reasons, and now hires them out to NASA.
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What you missed is that there's no comparison on the engineering rigor. ULA is,contractually bound to a full space rating for all launches, and manned flight rating for designing everything that MIT touch space launch. SpaceX, on the other hand, got their space rating pencil whipped by the Air Force at congresses direction. The level of engineering rigor is just not comparable. Sure, SpaceX is winning, but the game is rigged.
So, ULA failed at the game of Regulatory Capture? Interesting. And they have so much experience at it.
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Loosened pesticide regulations have a negative impact on native beelion populations.
Re:Federal Government is Monetarily Sovereign (Score:4, Insightful)
As for your obvious feelings about fiat currency, the one thing people never seem to recognize is that there is no such thing as intrinsic value. Value is an entirely human, thus subjective, concept. Every form of currency is fiat because it is based on a common agreement that something represents value - be it gold or paper. The gold standard just puts an intermediate step between the currency itself and its imagined value.
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The US federal government cannot run out of dollars, a currency it created out of thin air.
So it's like Bitcoin, but harder to fork? I need to get me some of these "doll Ars" of which you speak.
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