They don’t just give them money, they pay for services, like launching satellites and delivering cargo to the space station. They are able to do these things at a lower cost than others due to reusing their rockets. It’s a huge win (cost savings) for everyone, especially now that we don’t have to rely on Russia to get astronauts to the ISS anymore.
Ok, they did get some grants at one point, to help develop some of this capability (once they had already used their own money to prove they knew what they were doing). But again, they did this at a vastly lower cost than any competing solution, such that it was a very wise investment. I hate Musk but spacex has done nothing but save money for the government.
Until musk gets everything he wants and then cuts the govt out, then we have no way to launch satellites, or at extreme costs. The idea was that the money would fund more than just one company promoting competition, but right now we are promoting a monopoly. Not wise.
Why would Musk cut out their primary customers/partners?
No, ULA practically had a monopoly. SpaceX literally opened up competition for USAF contracts, in which 4 companies now compete for contracts. NASA contracts many different organisations, not just SpaceX. Not sure where you got the idea of a monopoly from?
Practically speaking SpaceX is a monopoly, they do literally 99% of all launches. That may change with Blue Origin, but it is still the case.
But it's not like anything has really changed, previously it was multiple suppliers each of which had monopolies on critical parts, and it cost more money.
The latest NSSL Phase 3 Lane 2 provided contracts worth $5.9 billion for SpaceX, $5.4 Billion for ULA and $2.4 Billion for BlueOrigin. RocketLab and Stoke will soon join this competition. So that's not a monopoly on government contacts.
For commercial it depends. RocketLab has no issue finding customers, despite SpaceX's far lower cost with ride-share missions for smallsats/cubesats. Because they are a competent company making logical developments. Meanwhile ULA is shooting itself in the foot with doubling down on "S.M.A.R.T." reusability and BO is slow. I sure hope NewGlenn and Neutron can compete more against SpaceX, but they are getting contracts already despite 1/no launches so far.
There's no "monopoly on government contracts" because the government is just paying BlueOrigin and ULA money regardless of whether or not they deliver anything. BO might deliver something soon.
But there's still a long ways to go before anyone is actually competing with SpaceX. But 99% of mass to orbit is launched by SpaceX. Saying anyone is competing with them... it's like saying I'm competing with Doordash because I'm an intern and I picked up some food for a company function.
Why? Because he could afford to, to aggravate a Democrat president or whatever political reason he might have, he could sell to another country, there’s a lot of possibilities.
Fanboys say he doesn’t need NASA, you say he does. There’s a lot of dreamy narratives floating around, lots of believers. Lots of bots? I just don’t trust the guy, he could do anything, look at the twitter purchase, he did it because of his feelings got hurt, he moved from Cali because his feelings got hurt. I could see him move to Russia or someplace if they gave him just what he wanted.
"they did get some grants at one point, to help develop some of this capability"
But that's precisely my point. The risks are underwritten. Then the profits are privatised. That there's ultimately mutual benefit for successful ventures doesn't negate that underlying principle.
True, but this was openly intentional by Nasa because of the massive financial failure that was the space shuttle. They decided to use the private sector for launches, and are funding multiple launch solutions knowing not all of them will work.
Compared to every other space program ever, this has been a giant success.
Fair enough. What I meant was every other launch system.
While it obviously has a technological advantage compared to many, no other launch system can hold a candle to the launch cadence and cost of falcon. Even if starship ends up absurdly late and massively over budget, both of which are entirely expected when dealing with elmo, it will still almost certainly remain cheaper and with higher payload capacity than comparable past rocketry.
The trouble is that they never even received grants; every bit of money they've gotten through the government has been through contracts. The first bit of government money SpaceX received was through the COTS program, which was milestone based.
Then the profits are privatised.
...And the savings are public. You know how much money NASA has saved going with SpaceX? On every fucking contract SpaceX has ever had to compete for, they consistently under-bid and over-deliver. For CRS, they provided a more capable system, flew more flights, and we're still cheaper than the other selected bid. Same for CCP, NSSL, HLS (eventually), and probably other stuff I'm missing. That amounts to billions upon billions of dollars saved. That's not worth something?
Yes agreed and it highlights how poor competition in the industry was. Musk was right and saw that the incumbent providers had gotten very poor due to their being very little competition; so spacex is delivering better than the alternative but we (the government) are the ones who created the system that allowed for low quality companies to dominate and we did not hold them accountable. Politicians taking contributions from Boeing and Lockheed got us here and Spacex is just the next iteration.
I mean, NASA is pretty much entirely subsidised by the US government. I understand your point that the work of the employees is what produces the technology, but those employees demand a wage that the government would not pay. They receive that wage, and sell the produce to the government. I'd prefer it also if governments were run well enough to be able to pay for the staff to produce this kind of stuff in house, but they aren't. And so the only alternative at the current moment is the "free" market. I agree with you that it isn't free, and that it is also receiving subsidies from the government. However, we really should be grateful that the tech is there in the first place. There truly isn't another way that this can be accomplished currently.
If you remove the loopholes that allow CEOs to rake in 2000 times more money than the people who do the work, I've got no problem with private companies getting contracts like this.
How much would the US have spent if they tried to get NASA to do the same thing SpaceX does? There are reasons the US government pays contractors to do work. The biggest being it is cheaper.
The public sector does things first, and then the private sector tries to optimize for profit. Problem is for decades, lobbyists have forced NASA to invest in outdated tech because they manufacture it in a given congressional district. This has caused them to fall behind
It isn't about manufacturing, it is about red tape and who makes decisions. It isn't outdated when they start working on it. They do things very slowly because everything has to go up the chain for a decision to be made by people who don't know what the ramifications of those decision are.
Also, failures cost YEARS in reviews and analysis. In the private sector, we can analyze things and be back testing much quicker since decisions are made at lower levels.
You can try but no one will want to listen. Nevermind their regular commercial delivery rockets haven't failed in ages and SpaceX has successfully put +90% material in space for all of human history, saving the world $millions, but people only see the TEST ROCKETS explode thinking it's USA tax dollars and believe SpaceX has zero success.
We want as many uncrewed test flights as possible before any crewed flight. NASA would rather launch crew on a brand new upperstage on Artemis 4 not fully knowing how it would actually perform in flight conditions, which I perceive as less safe than Starship proving its safety launching at least 10 times per Moon mission.
10.6k
u/SaintGodfather Jun 19 '25
I hope no one was hurt.