alt Hacker NewsR&D for starship has a several-billion-dollar NASA grant. Something like 30-50% of the money being blown up on this program is taxpayer money.
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ericd • 01/17/2025
Fair. I think that was for HLS rather than the launch systems, but I guess if it’s already been disbursed, it’s probably all commingled.
But that still means it’s not just taxpayer money, it’s mostly theirs. They’ve been raising equity rounds this whole time.
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The savings Spacex has promise of delivering to NASA make every dollar given to them probably an easy 2x-3x ROI.
Without Spacex, the typical cohort of gov contractors would have been happy bleeding NASA dry with one time use rockets that have 10x the launch cost and carry 1/4 the cargo.