31–40 of 93 posts
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.
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So 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?
Theoretically, 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.
That’s like saying “theoretically you could get to space by flapping your wings”—you just need to ignore inconvenient laws of physics. Economics describes forces of the real world, you cannot just wave them away.
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Brother 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.
Mostly 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.
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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 SpaceX / Space Force contract is in fact closer to ~$16B or ~$160B after accounting for tax subsidies and investment fraud?
It 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.
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.
18 launches for $1.6B sounds like a terrible deal for SpaceX. Will they even profit?
LOLLLL yea... The stink of endless corruption in the new US of A Surely is completely unrelated to Musk throwing money behind electing the people who give him these contracts. https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-stink-of-musk
SpaceX has always been the lowest bidder and always been paired. Including here in NSSL.
And there's no other launcher. A sensible company seeking profits would match SLS pricing.
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That utopia exists, the only problem is it is a communist country where you have no individual rights and can't own land.
It 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.
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.
This whole series of launches costs about the same as 1 SLS launch. Plus SpaceX is probably more aligned with DOW goals than NASA
If only the short term hype investors could get out of the market now and we can start building this thing back up.
That’s now the whole market
Sure, there’s a limited float plus meme stock/hype/etc but still, steady growth which would lead to like a $20 trillion company in a few years?
Since I’m assuming IPO investors are going to be comparing to the last decade’s history of the tech giants and wouldn’t be satisfied with a 1.25x from IPO over 5 years or something…