A look into the finances of SpaceX

Post by callalex » Fri, Aug 18, 2023, 3:43 AM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #247

DennisP wrote: post #50

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That thought occurred to me but I couldn't find an ETF or an easy way to find the right companies. How do you go about it?

What I do is browse aimlessly through RH until see a tag like "Industrials". Then, I click this and I can see a list of like 50 companies that do all things yellow-square in sim city. It's like fish in a barrel if you have patience to sort through the information and type fake contact info into investor web forms to get at presentation materials. You definitely don't need a Bloomberg terminal subscription to do this…

Post by ArtWomb » Fri, Aug 18, 2023, 4:16 AM UTC

avmich wrote: post #202

pclmulqdq wrote: post #154

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Falcon rockets can't get to the moon. You need a lot more fuel to do that. That's why SLS and Starship are both being developed.

In 1990's Dan Goldin, the NASA administrator at the time, was looking for ways to return to the Moon for cheap. One of the least expensive variants which was presented included launching multiple Protons and assembling lunar exeditionary complexes on LEO. The quoted number at that time was $1 billion to put boots on regolith again. Falcon-9 is about as capable in terms of payload as Proton. And even without inflation…

Post by fooker » Fri, Aug 18, 2023, 4:33 AM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #280

fooker wrote: post #93

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> funding and jobs being directed at their states. This is more important than it seems on the surface and is often a good thing. You want to train and preserve local expertise with heavy industries. That ensures generations of successful companies rejuvenating your economy as opposed to relying on federal handouts.

It's a good thing during down times. But now is not down times. Experienced, qualified space & rocket engineers are in high demand. Employing them to do useless make-work means they aren't available to work on rockets and space systems that will actually be useful in the future.

Post by inhumantsar » Fri, Aug 18, 2023, 4:55 AM UTC

nordsieck wrote: post #88

bell-cot wrote: post #83

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Brief, if almost 4-year-old article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/nasa-does-not-deny-t... The ~$5B figure is in the final para. And that still sounds like it excludes ground systems and Orion development costs. (Plus ~4 more years of ever-growing bloat, obviously.)

> The ~$5B figure is in the final para. And that still sounds like it excludes ground systems and Orion development costs. (Plus ~4 more years of ever-growing bloat, obviously.) There is a much more official and up to date figure: > We project the cost to fly a single SLS/Orion system through at least Artemis IV to be $4.1 billion per launch at a cadence of approximately one mission per year. https://oig.nasa.gov/doc…

Post by Dylan16807 » Fri, Aug 18, 2023, 5:30 AM UTC

pclmulqdq wrote: post #192

pfdietz wrote: post #157

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SLS is needed only because they were not allowed to adopt on-orbit propellant transfer. With rockets like the Falcons, propellant (which is most of the mass needed to get something to the moon) is launched in smaller quantities and accumulated. What sort of future in space do those advocating SLS imagine for us if moving a liquid from one tank to another is too challenging?

One where we just launch one rocket instead of building a giant orbital bomb slowly (accumulating fuel) and transferring all those explosives through a complex series of difficult rendezvous maneuvers? One rocket is risky enough. There's a huge amount of extra risk involved in that sort of idea, which is why NASA isn't doing it, which can just be avoided with SLS and Starship.