The standard catalog price for a dedicated falcon 9 launch is $74 million. So this is actually up-charging the government a bit (I assume there is some custom work or extra cost for arranging for the appropriate security/secrecy).
If its profitable at $74M then I'd imagine its more profitable at $88.8M. There could be some extra costs for dealing with government customers, but I imagine a lot of those $74M launches were also government customers. Lots of estimates of their cost per launch is somewhere <$20M.
Man if only SpaceX had IPO without all the xAI crap attached to it. Then it might actually be worth looking into. I wanted to invest in SpaceX for a long time but now its laughably overvalued.
They are literally the only option, the other options are strongly delayed and even when they come online they will have a large backlog and missing launch infrastructure.
What do you want them to do, you magic to launch the sats?
Plus “building up” like Tesla which had many 10x multiples is kinda a different story than a company that started out in the Top 5 by market cap.
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…
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.
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.
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.
> Theoretically, absolutely. Of course it gets messy in reality
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.
This is now an argument I can start to get behind. There isn't a need for profit seeking or "dollar optimization" and I fully subscribe to the argument that the government can just "do things". I likewise fully subscribe to the argument that the ability for the government to just "do things" has been eroded over time systematically.
But, like, that's divergent from "This SpaceX contract is pure grift" that OP was not so subtly implying.
Look, you’re absolutely technically right, but SpaceX is one of capitalism’s best examples.
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.
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.
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.
The soviet union, the only non-capitalist country ever to have a technology comparable to ours, was really fucking inefficient. E.g. Soviets had 50% higher CO2 output per ton of steel than the U.S. due to poor energy efficiency.
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.
What is this nonsense argument? Can you share more then one sentence about this?
NASA own analysis suggest that Falcon 9 development (just the initial nonreusable) version would have cost 10x as much (and that is with their estimation methods that often are wrong by 2-3x).
Do you also think NASA should build its own cars and planes to move around? Should they make their own spoons too?
What is your evidence that NASA could make things cheaper, or that they would be cheaper if NASA had tried to do it themselves.
We don't even have to base it on the study NASA did, they did develop the Ares 1 rocket during the same time when SpaceX developed Falcon 9. And NASA rocket cost many times what Falcon 9 cost and had little prospect of becoming much cheaper anytime soon and when canceled wasn't finish developing despite being based on existing well understood technology. In fact, only a complete redevelopment of the rocket from the ground up had any chance to ever match Falcon 9.
So we have both a theoretical study and a practical example that SpaceX Falcon 9 is vastly cheaper by an almost unimaginable large amount. And that is even before SpaceX on its own dime and on its own investment developed re-usability. And that made things even cheaper.
So can you please outline a realistic history where either now or in the next 20 years NASA would be cheaper then Falcon 9. Please assume the same amount of funding for the relevant project.
If you want to make the argument that somehow in 2050 it would be cheaper, I don't think you will win many people over with that logic.
This thread is evidence of the decline in comment quality on this board.
Any kind of constructive discussion becomes very hard.
Fake ”criticism” and cheapshots make actual criticism nearly impossible.
Huh, DOGE didn't find any waste in spaceforce?
DOGE didn't find any actual waste anywhere.
DOGE didn't bother to look in the mirror, didn't it.
The trifecta - fraud, waste and abuse
18 launches for $1.6B sounds like a terrible deal for SpaceX. Will they even profit?
The standard catalog price for a dedicated falcon 9 launch is $74 million. So this is actually up-charging the government a bit (I assume there is some custom work or extra cost for arranging for the appropriate security/secrecy).
SpaceX claims they launch for $20 million and thier public minimum price is lower than the charge here
1,600M / 18 means $88.8M per launch.
Supposedly they've been selling launches for ~$74M per launch.
https://nextspaceflight.com/rockets/3/
If its profitable at $74M then I'd imagine its more profitable at $88.8M. There could be some extra costs for dealing with government customers, but I imagine a lot of those $74M launches were also government customers. Lots of estimates of their cost per launch is somewhere <$20M.
Man if only SpaceX had IPO without all the xAI crap attached to it. Then it might actually be worth looking into. I wanted to invest in SpaceX for a long time but now its laughably overvalued.
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
Both Reich and you are deeply unfortunate.
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.
They are literally the only option, the other options are strongly delayed and even when they come online they will have a large backlog and missing launch infrastructure.
What do you want them to do, you magic to launch the sats?
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
Plus “building up” like Tesla which had many 10x multiples is kinda a different story than a company that started out in the Top 5 by market cap.
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…
Yeah, with the public getting used to that level of growth I don’t know if we can back to something more stable and sustainable
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.
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.
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.
> Theoretically, absolutely. Of course it gets messy in reality
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.
When has NASA got even close to that number of dollar per kilo payload in its long history? AFAIK, never.
Practically, that's exactly what Chavez did. Where did that lead?
This is now an argument I can start to get behind. There isn't a need for profit seeking or "dollar optimization" and I fully subscribe to the argument that the government can just "do things". I likewise fully subscribe to the argument that the ability for the government to just "do things" has been eroded over time systematically.
But, like, that's divergent from "This SpaceX contract is pure grift" that OP was not so subtly implying.
Look, you’re absolutely technically right, but SpaceX is one of capitalism’s best examples.
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.
>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.
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.
The soviet union, the only non-capitalist country ever to have a technology comparable to ours, was really fucking inefficient. E.g. Soviets had 50% higher CO2 output per ton of steel than the U.S. due to poor energy efficiency.
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.
It's never existed in this industry.
This whole series of launches costs about the same as 1 SLS launch. Plus SpaceX is probably more aligned with DOW goals than NASA
Less than
“NASA” has always relied on private companies. It was always Boeing, Rockwell, etc., designing and building rockets under contract.
Can you go into more detail? You're clearly assigning costs to SpaceX that go beyond the invoice price.
Those costs are baked into the invoice price.
Sometimes you can buy cheaper than build.
Many launchers in several countries, SpaceX is the cheapest in its sector.
What is this nonsense argument? Can you share more then one sentence about this?
NASA own analysis suggest that Falcon 9 development (just the initial nonreusable) version would have cost 10x as much (and that is with their estimation methods that often are wrong by 2-3x).
Do you also think NASA should build its own cars and planes to move around? Should they make their own spoons too?
What is your evidence that NASA could make things cheaper, or that they would be cheaper if NASA had tried to do it themselves.
We don't even have to base it on the study NASA did, they did develop the Ares 1 rocket during the same time when SpaceX developed Falcon 9. And NASA rocket cost many times what Falcon 9 cost and had little prospect of becoming much cheaper anytime soon and when canceled wasn't finish developing despite being based on existing well understood technology. In fact, only a complete redevelopment of the rocket from the ground up had any chance to ever match Falcon 9.
So we have both a theoretical study and a practical example that SpaceX Falcon 9 is vastly cheaper by an almost unimaginable large amount. And that is even before SpaceX on its own dime and on its own investment developed re-usability. And that made things even cheaper.
So can you please outline a realistic history where either now or in the next 20 years NASA would be cheaper then Falcon 9. Please assume the same amount of funding for the relevant project.
If you want to make the argument that somehow in 2050 it would be cheaper, I don't think you will win many people over with that logic.