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So, I know nothing about any of this. Is Elon funding all this personally? How are they doing more shit than Nasa? Does he just have that much money?
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So, I know nothing about any of this. Is Elon funding all this personally? How are they doing more shit than Nasa? Does he just have that much money?
CaughtCross
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SpaceX's goal is Mars. Elon is keeping the company from going public for that reason. SpaceX is able to spend money on blowing stuff up in an attempt to get to Mars since it is a private company.
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But is it all just him funneling money? Are they making any money from anything currently?
CaughtCross
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SpaceX has tons of contracts for launches with both government and private companies which brings in money.
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Ukerric
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They're probably cheap (all things considered). When you're putting several tens of millions of capital every two weeks, those dev costs are relatively "low-key".
It still adds up, but it's less catastrophic than, say, a SLS destructive testing would be. They can probably afford to blow 50 SN-xx for the price of a SLS, failed or not (since the SLS is not recoverable anyway).
Ukerric
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They have a lot of customers lined up:
- April: Crew 2 for NASA
- May: Sirius XM radio
- June: CRS 22 (Commercial Resupply Ship)
- Also June: multi-satellite rideshare launch
- Also June: Turksat
- July: GPS satellite
- Also July: USSF massive launch (Falcon heavy triple-booster launch with classified paylaunch - do not expect streaming beyond first stage)
- August: CRS 23
- September: Crew 3 for NASA
- Also September: MAXAR
- Also September too: Classified German (!!!) payload
etc ...
But they are expecting a major part of their revenue to come from Starlink (for which they're launching in-between other customers) soon™. The service is in beta, and people are lining up to purchase satellite kits already.
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Ukerric
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Yea. In pure terms, they don't have customers lined up for Spaceship yet - besides that Japanese billionaire and his mission around the moon, which he wants on Spaceship rather than the cramped dragon capsule refitted for a week-long trip. But SpaceX is almost certainly in the black if you separate it from Starlink and Spaceship development costs.
(of course no one really knows, since the finances are not public. But most specialists think they're now profitable per launch. Very much so)
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That's amazing man. And genius they are profitable doing these things. Was Nasa ever profitable when it launched satellites for other companies? Or was Nasa ever setup to even be "profitable"? I'm in line for some of that Starlink goodness too.
LachiusTZ
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Diversity & Inclusion - NASA
A diverse and inclusive workforce fueled by innovation and united in achieving mission success for NASA.
www.nasa.gov
We might never know
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Ukerric
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It's government agency. Except for a very, very tiny window when the Space Race against the Soviets was everything, the one thing it is responsible for is sending money to the appropriate contractors in the districts (or rolodexes) of the senators and congressmen sitting on the appropriate committee.
Which is why they are raging against SpaceX, because the SpaceX prices make it very obvious how much graft NASA exists to provide. They've sunk tens of billions of dollars developing the SLS rocket and infrastructure, which will cost over one billion per launch (after ignoring the development costs). And that's after reusing old space shuttle hardware. The SLS has yet to launch, and there's a limited number of them possible - after that, they have to restart the old production lines that were there for the Shuttle, most of which don't exist anymore.
(yes, the SLS is a dead-end. They tout it for "Artemis", but unless you evacuate your first moonbase just after constructing a first dome, they can't resupply it using that piece of overpriced junk)
Meanwhile, the Falcon Heavy delivers "merely half" of the payload, for a tenth of the price per launch, it has launched, and SpaceX's equivalent to the SLS... well, we're seeing them blowing it up by the dozens to test, so cheap those prototypes are. And more and more people are starting to raise questions about how NASA is forced to spend that kind of money, and the congress is finding itself harder and harder to reply.
(NASA, as the agency, would probably like nothing more than cancel most of its launch and just rely on SpaceX, and use the rest of the money to fund probes and satellites and more stuff. But they can't - the itemized budget they get from Congress make it very clear that they have to spend money on the usual grifters, no matter what)
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LachiusTZ
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NASA wasn't that stagnant until the mid 90s.
Which was when the diversity push really started.
The graft etc is real, not debating that.
But the entire federal govt started the diversity push in the mid 70s? And it hit hard science / math / engineering agencies by the mid 90s.
Iirc NASA floated the idea of what space x is doing in the late 90s? And the NASA of the 1950s would have done it. But when the concern is how to show you put a women in space, and finding blacks to launch into orbit... There is no internal MO to push Congress for what is needed to really innovate.
In not saying it's all the diversity shit, I don't know if it is 90/10, 50/50, 10/90, but there are a lot of factors, not just graft
Which was when the diversity push really started.
The graft etc is real, not debating that.
But the entire federal govt started the diversity push in the mid 70s? And it hit hard science / math / engineering agencies by the mid 90s.
Iirc NASA floated the idea of what space x is doing in the late 90s? And the NASA of the 1950s would have done it. But when the concern is how to show you put a women in space, and finding blacks to launch into orbit... There is no internal MO to push Congress for what is needed to really innovate.
In not saying it's all the diversity shit, I don't know if it is 90/10, 50/50, 10/90, but there are a lot of factors, not just graft
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Tuco
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Would be interesting to see what the $$$ cost of an explosion is in terms of lost parts they were hoping to use. I imagine that it's all mostly going to get scrapped anyway, due to improved designs. So the question then becomes larger about the cost and efficiency of their prototyping approach, which is hard to argue against as an outsider because they are so wildly successful.
Another thing to keep in mind is that they are not only researching new technology, they're also scaling up production facilities to mass produce that technology. So they might be flexing that capability to create a bunch of prototypes.
CaughtCross
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A big issue with NASA is with a new president comes new goals and they have to change course every 4-8 years.
www.space.com
I work in aerospace in Los Angeles (DoD side) and know a lot of SpaceX folks. A big advantage they have is SpaceX makes the employees work insane hours for the same pay as the other aerospace companies. Went on a mountaineer trip with a guy who a guy who has a PHD in aerospace engineering and works on the merlin engine at SpaceX over the summer in Washington. The night before the climb he had his laptop and was working in the hotel room while I was going to sleep.
Obama Budget Scraps NASA Moon Plan for '21st Century Space Program'
U.S. President Barack Obama's proposed 2011 NASA budget scraps the agency's moon mission effort to make way for a 21st century space program.
I work in aerospace in Los Angeles (DoD side) and know a lot of SpaceX folks. A big advantage they have is SpaceX makes the employees work insane hours for the same pay as the other aerospace companies. Went on a mountaineer trip with a guy who a guy who has a PHD in aerospace engineering and works on the merlin engine at SpaceX over the summer in Washington. The night before the climb he had his laptop and was working in the hotel room while I was going to sleep.
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Cybsled
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blaming it on diversity is laughable. NASA stagnated because Nixon greenlit the shuttle, Reagan cleared the space station, and we basically doomed ourselves to low earth orbit activities because all the cash was tied up into those 2 things. NASA wasn’t even really tasked with a legit shuttle replacement until Bush Jr, then Obama scaled that back, but at least thankfully he opened up the gates for private industry like SpaceX
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Cybsled
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A big issue with NASA is with a new president comes new goals and they have to change course every 4-8 years.
Obama Budget Scraps NASA Moon Plan for '21st Century Space Program'
U.S. President Barack Obama's proposed 2011 NASA budget scraps the agency's moon mission effort to make way for a 21st century space program.
I work in aerospace in Los Angeles (DoD side) and know a lot of SpaceX folks. A big advantage they have is SpaceX makes the employees work insane hours for the same pay as the other aerospace companies. Went on a mountaineer trip with a guy who a guy who has a PHD in aerospace engineering and works on the merlin engine at SpaceX over the summer in Washington. The night before the climb he had his laptop and was working in the hotel room while I was going to sleep.
Good point. Administrations do fuck
up long term planning. I’m glad Biden decided not to shit on the Trump moon base plans, like Obama gutted Bush’s.
SpaceX can attract top talent for less because they have a firm vision that is really ambitious and are the cutting edge of space launch tech. It’s like NFL players that take a discount because they want to play with Tom Brady, because they want to win.
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LachiusTZ
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BrutulTM
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I can't believe they are still in business let alone launching new satellites. I don't know anyone who subscribes to satellite radio or why they would. Sirius XM could just stream its content over the internet for a fraction of the cost and have a better product.
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Gavinmad
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Wasn't it three years before Obama got around to cancelling all of Bush's NASA plans? Kinda jumping the gun here.