Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight

You are mixing up the Gulf War of 1990, which was in defense of Kuwait, with the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 based on false pretenses.

"Giving weapons and ammo to Saddam Hussein?"

Pentagon is giving weapons and ammo to Azov [0], Ukrainian neo-Nazi ultra-nationalists.

And giving weapons is not everything that France is doing now. Think about other measures too, like cutting off American banks from SWIFT, let them use their ACH.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Brigade

France is a nuclear power. But you are right, a vassal can't fight his suzerain.

I think where the economics around that get screwed up is that supply demand are very disconnected from each other here - tens, if not hundreds of millions and in a few case billions of dollars are spent on the payloads for Falcon, and Starlink - SapceX itself is 2/3rds of their own volume. Before Starlink started launching there were clear signs that SpaceX was building more capacity then the market could bear.

If you don't gain any additional volume by lowering cost, it doesn't make any sense to lower your cost.

It also doesn't help that Rockets (for fairly obvious reasons) are highly regulated, which further distorts this market.

Beats me, it wasn't my post.

The main thing is that Russia needs to pull its troops out of all of Ukraine; return those 20,000 abducted kids; set and adhere to a timetable for paying full reparations; and re-affirm its commitment to respecting the inviolable sovereignty of all of its neighbors, permanently and irrevocably.

After that we can dissect past NATO transgressions, and fix all the poorly thought / ahistorical comments on HN.

Depends. The original Falcon 1 funding mostly came from Musk and a few friends.

Then for the Falcon 9, they got the COTS contract for resupply of the station. Or rather they got a contract that would pay money if they were successful in executing. This funding was mostly for the Dragon Space craft, but it also funded Falcon 9. But that was a much smaller number then Ariane 6.

Then SpaceX got Commercial Crew, for 2.6 billion $. That mostly funded Crew Dragon space craft. But it also required human rating of Falcon 9. So those 2.6 billion $ were not assigned X amount for Dragon, Y for Falcon 9. SpaceX was just required to launch people to ISS and bring them back with NASA overview. During this time SpaceX finished the Block 5 version, and that was human rated.

Beyond that SpaceX did most of the development on the re-usability of Falcon 9 on their own money. They used costumer missions to do a lot of the testing. But importantly, SpaceX never got any money from NASA to develop re-usability.

Same goes for Falcon Heavy. SpaceX sold Falcon Heavy to DoD but they didn't get any development contract for the rocket itself. Falcon Heavy was fully developed by SpaceX on their own money.

SpaceX did miss out on a major DoD development funding when they bid Starship and DoD did want it. Other companies like BlueOrigin and ULA got a huge amount of money.

Both Raptor and Starship were mostly on SpaceX as well. A very early version of Raptor, when it was very different from what is now, once got a DoD research contract. Only when there was a competition for Human Moon Lander System, and Starship got selected, was government spending any money on Starship. And HLS is milestone based, so that will help SpaceX a little to pay for Starship. But a lot of that money will go into the customized version of Starship for use as a moon lander.

Starlink is basically fully funded by SpaceX. There never was any development money.

So in totality, SpaceX doesn't really get much development money for rockets or engine. They get money for spacecraft (Dragon 1, Crew Dragon, Cargo Dragon), and they just have to make sure they have a rocket that they can launch on. They could also just buy somebody else rocket, but of course that's not what SpaceX wants to do.

For all this stuff, Starship, Starlink and so on, they did raise like 10 billion $. That the majority of their major developments.