alt Hacker NewsDue 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.
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This whole series of launches costs about the same as 1 SLS launch. Plus SpaceX is probably more aligned with DOW goals than NASA
“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.
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.
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?