71–80 of 93 posts
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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?
Why are you willingly refusing to look at the entire cost of SpaceX to the US economy and subsequently the taxpayers? THAT is 20x the cost of NASA. Easily.
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Yes it does. You’re trying to draw an artificial distinction between what’s possible “theoretically” and “in practice” that depends on removing basic economic understandings from “theory.”
You equated nationalizing spacex to flapping ones wings to get to outer space...
The point is that you have to account for those second order effects even in theory. The consequences that arise from those effects isn't some conflict between theory and practice. It's a defect in the theory itself, because the theory ignores relevant variables.
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So 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.
What do you think happens to this profit? Where does it go? > You can never convince me profit is not a cost. It is a cost, but with the cost you are getting something. And NASA (the US) as it happens literally got the best deal maybe in human history. The US was literally sucking in space, their rockets were shit. Their human launch was shit. All their major space project were going to utter and complete shit and we…
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SpaceX claims they launch for $20 million and thier public minimum price is lower than the charge here
Now that they are publicly traded, there may be less scope for shenanigans in those numbers. If they really had such great margins on falcon 9, an improved, cost reduced falcon rocket would make a lot of sense. Instead they're betting at all on a rocket that has a daunting list of unmet project milestones before it does what it claims it will do. That makes me think that the cost efficiency of falcon nine rests almos…
The thing is, unless you massively increase the volume of Falcon 9, you are not going to get it that much cheaper. Its already incredibly cheap given that its made out of fancy aerospace material that needs to be shaped and welded with complex processes. If they invested a lot, could they get it a little cheaper? Sure maybe a few % ever year.
They have been redesigning the Falcon 9 over and over again to optimize its manufacture and re-usability. They are mass producing the second stage about faster and cheaper then any other rocket structure of that complexity and size. What you suggest they should do they have already done, multiple times.
But you run into limits. You could replace the Merlin engine with an engine of the same size that uses kerolox but is staged. Not much more you can do on the Merlin itself, except very marginal improvements. But if you do that you need to make the rocket longer, but Falcon is already on the upper limit of rocket of that diameter.
So you need to increase the width. So you are already doing a new staged engine, and now your doing a very different structure already. Now you also need to change the shape of your downcomer, you have different thermodynamics of reentry, you redesign the engine bay and its heat protection. Basically you are building a new rocket at that point and the payoff for such a huge effort, is marginal at best.
Their design has effectively reached a local maximum. Marginal improvements are possible and they are doing that but its not going to change fundamentally and its not going to get to their goal. Any new rocket they develop, must be more then a marginal improvement. Airbus and Boeing don't develop new planes unless the efficiency (therefore cost) improves by 20-30%.
To actually reach the next level of profit opportunity you need to achieve full re-usability. That the next major step that can unlock much cheaper price to orbit. That's where your capital investment can have actual real payoff. Because it makes much larger constellation possible.
> That makes me think that the cost efficiency of falcon nine rests almost totally on streamlined operations, not technology. And that there might be a shell game going on regarding real costs.
Yeah and how is that streamlined operation possible you think? Maybe it has to do that they have a reusable fleet of boosters that have been highly optimized to be able to land and reused quickly. Maybe it has to do with them optimizing the shit out of their launch infrastructure, like pioneering automatic flight termination and 100s of other things. That is the technology.
And there is no shell game going on, they make a lot of profit from Falcon 9 but reinvest everything in Starship, thus their rocket division overall is losing money.
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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.
Practically, that's exactly what Chavez did. Where did that lead?
But of course they do understand that and the primary nationalized the resources, and have a model where the nationalized company bids for that resource against private companies as well.
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>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.
Plenty 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.
Once more you demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the topic you're talking about.
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Now that they are publicly traded, there may be less scope for shenanigans in those numbers. If they really had such great margins on falcon 9, an improved, cost reduced falcon rocket would make a lot of sense. Instead they're betting at all on a rocket that has a daunting list of unmet project milestones before it does what it claims it will do. That makes me think that the cost efficiency of falcon nine rests almos…
Yeah so you just don't actually understand the economics. The thing is, unless you massively increase the volume of Falcon 9, you are not going to get it that much cheaper. Its already incredibly cheap given that its made out of fancy aerospace material that needs to be shaped and welded with complex processes. If they invested a lot, could they get it a little cheaper? Sure maybe a few % ever year. They have been re…
> To actually reach the next level of profit opportunity you need to achieve full re-usability.
Upper stage reusability is hard, heavy, and expensive. At least 5X as hard as booster reusability. On top of that they have to bet that they can scale starship launches to the point where they can economically fly 15 starship refueling missions just to get one starship out of low orbit. As of now, completing an orbit at any elevation is a trust me bro thing.
Every one of Elon's gambles has five subsidiary gambles: if starship falls 30% short of expected payload capacity, it no longer takes 15 refueling missions but 25. That's just one example.
That's what you get when one of your software guys told you about agile, and you thought let's build a rocket that way.
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People are getting hung up on how spacex reached that cost and how yes, it took innovation, iteration, and whatever else. I'm not denying that. What I am denying is that you needed to make musk the richest man on earth to achieve this. That you needed to go to ipo. That it needed to give a dime to any initial investors. All I am saying is in another universe, Gwynne Shotwell could have ran a kickass team at JPL with…
Funny how people how hate Musk always reach for the 'but Gwynne Shotwell' nonsense. Gwynne Shotwell was incredibly frustrated with the aerospace industry. So frustrated that she thought about leaving the industry. She didn't see any chance the industry and NASA as it existed to make progress. That's exactly why she left and went to a company that tried to be different and break the mold. And guess what, without the g…
- JPL would never put Shotwell as her focus was business development (let alone Musk)
- Shotwell wouldn't have had the vision that Musk has (as she herself said, her focus when talking to Musk was making sure that the rocket being developed was something she could sell)
- JPL wouldn't ever have run the project the way SpaceX had because they have process around how to do things
- JPL wouldn't ever have hired the same group of engineers because of the way the do hiring.
- JPL couldn't ever run procurement and supplier relation the way SpaceX did because of government regulations about contracting
You are right on all this and I am not denying it, but the facts remain that doing things at cost is cheaper than doing things for profit. That is what I am getting at. People are getting hung up on specifics that frankly don't really matter to the underlying point that profitability is a cost center.
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Plenty 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.
The 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.
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I 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 proje…
Have you actually looked up the history of government owning its own defense contractors? Please tell me you have actually learned about this history. Because if you think having things like this be nationalized, I suggest you read some of that history. > 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 th…