I agree with this but… there’s a general misconception that SpaceX does not rely on government funds. This is false. NASA, DARPA, and the Air Force have all been early partners on SpaceX’s investments. The difference between SpaceX and legacy space industry businesses is that SpaceX is selling launch services essentially as commercial items, as opposed to virtually all other companies that negotiate different contracts for development of items, production of items, etc. under the esoteric laws and regulations that apply to whichever agency at hand.
However, in the absence of these contracts, SpaceX would have lost out on several billions in revenue that it has absolutely put to good use in developing the Falcon 9 v1.2 and of course the Falcon Heavy. That doesn’t mean that the government was charged for the development of those items, but it does mean that but for taxpayer dollars, they would not exist today (though very likely someday further in the future).
The one rocket company that I can think of that is probably very pure in terms of not being interested (yet) in government contracts or funding is Blue Origin. They really do seem to be doing everything so far (so far as I am aware) out of Bezo’s fortune.
It’s very odd to conflate “government-funded” with “has the government as a customer.” (Not accusing anyone in particular of doing this, but the sentiment seems to be floating about.) The business I work for is a small private company. Amongst our clients are various government organizations. Some of our invoices are paid with tax dollars, but that doesn’t make us a publicly funded organization.
There has been some direct funding of SpaceX development with tax dollars, but pointing to the money they’ve received from CRS and NROL missions and claiming that contributes to them being government funded is just loony. Any orbital launch provider is going to have the government as one of its most important customers, just because the government buys more launches than anyone else. If Blue Origin succeeds in taking a significant portion of the orbital launch market, they’ll have the government as a significant customer as well. Unless the government is paying more than the going rate for those launches, it’s not “funding” the development of the rockets used for them in the sense sometimes implied.
That question in critical. While his point about physical manufacture is correct, it’s a completely idiotic* point to make. When Trump says he’s going to build the wall, people argue because it’s a stupid idea, not because Trump won’t be the one who is personally digging holes for the posts. Everyone understands that, in this context, the meaning of “build” is not merely the physical manufacture.
In this thread, the topic is how SpaceX and other Musk companies are doing things differently. Some people favor it, some people think it’s stupid and doomed to failure. But no one until this idiot* tried to make the argument that SpaceX was just like the other companies because all those companies manufactured rockets, and we’ll just ignore the fact that it’s a completely different funding model with different direction and goals, and tie that argument to a restrictive definition of a single word. What is the point of that argument in the first place?
Re: “idiot” - There’s a time and place for creative insults. Then there are other posts and posters who just don’t warrant any effort. I’ll proudly stick with the classics for those.
You can point the finger at me, that’s okay. The difference is that the government has, through different mechanisms, bought commercial services from SpaceX before they really had a commercial item. Take for example DARPA’s purchase of two demo flights of Falcon 1: while concluded via a commercial contract, the contracts were for the demonstration of new technologies. It clearly isn’t a traditional government R&D contract. It clearly isn’t SpaceX using private financing for two demo flights. It’s somewhere in the middle, in an arrangement that was certainly beneficial to NASA, to the military, to SpaceX, and also to the taxpayer. (Setting aside the issue that the first two launches were failures, I’ll still call that a good thing overall for the taxpayer.)
However, there are Elon fanboys who reeeeeeeaaaaaally want to believe that Elon built the company all on his own, when in reality the Government was a very big part of his success. Elon himself says fairly often that NASA and other Government investments and partnerships greatly helped his company.
To put it another way, SpaceX signed contracts with NASA and DARPA several years before they had a rocket, period. The progress payments were essential to continuing development of an actual rocket. There is literally nothing wrong with that… but it is not as some portray it as Elon did this on his own, and is just selling what he built. The Government was right there with him through the hard early years.
But, at the present time, Blue Origin appears to be planning to privately finance the development of its engines and various launch vehicles up through testing, to the point that an actual commercial item exists and will very likely be sold to the Government. Hell, it is even almost the reverse of the SpaceX experience, in which Blue is developing the BE-4 engine on its own dime to sell to ULA, which is actually subsidizing the Government, because the Air Force has been perfectly willing to pay Aerojet Rocketdyne to develop its AR-1 as a competitor.
So we had Elon deciding to build a rocket, and getting the Government as an early customer was a key part of development; wheres Bezos has decided to build a rocket, and so far doesn’t want Government helping him at all. (I’d bet that changes in time, BTW.)
This is where I think Elon’s money and drive are paying off big time. Design and build it yourself, to offer “turn-key” get-your-shit-to-orbit service. no need to beg Congressvermin for funding and having them quadruple the cost and development time with their demands for where and how stuff is designed and built. it’s not that ULA lacks the engineering/technical capability to get SLS done, it’s that they’re handcuffed by the slime holding the purse strings.
No one talks about the VCs that funded snapchat, instagram, twitter, etc. Of course those companies got tremendous assistance from their investors, but it’s pretty typical to focus on the front people rather than the financiers no? It just happens that the VCs behind SpaceX were/are the feds.
Maybe, but could anyone have a cooler name than “Elon Musk”? Every time I see it, I think of “Aeon Flux” (Charlize Theron) in the movie of the same name.
I wasn’t referring to SLS, which I consider a road to nowhere. I was referring to ULA’s Atlas replacement, the Vulcan. And I don’t think Boeing or Lockheed has any interest whatsoever in paying for the development of Vulcan without Government investment. They’d probably rather spin off ULA than pay that bill, because there surely isn’t enough business to support three major launch companies (take your pick of SpaceX, ULA, Blue, Orbital, and who knows who else) and it may be arguable as to whether there’s enough business for two.
Well yeah, that’s what I was saying. I was commenting that it’s normal to tout the front man more than the VCs, even though we know the VCs had a huge role to play in the success of the companies.
I agree with most of this, but it’s worth pointing out that the prices the government paid to SpaceX were not inflated to pay for SpaceX’s development costs. SpaceX has generally received less per launch than ULA, sometimes by a wide margin. Put another way, taxpayers have paid zero (probably negative) marginal dollars “paying for” SpaceX development relative to just buying all their launchs from ULA.
Blue Origin is admittedly in an entirely different category in terms of funding, but when the boss is worth $100 billion your funding model doesn’t really matter. Also, while the New Shepard is nifty and the BE-4 looks very promising, to date Blue Origin has put exactly zero mass into orbit.
I see your point. I suppose I’m trying to be precise: if someone says, “Elon really made SpaceX happen!” I’d say, no doubt!
But when someone says, “And he didn’t need the stupid government and their dumb contracts, unlike OTHER leeches/rocket companies!” I say… that’s just not true. He did it in a different way, but man, SpaceX couldn’t have done it without the Government being in on the ground floor.
A friend of mine from grad school teaches at Elon University. I think of ‘Elon Musk’ as something they’d have if they developed a promotional line of fragrances.
I never meant to imply they were inflated. SpaceX’s prices to the government are usually commercial prices, except when the government (really the Air Force) wants additional mission assurance activities which can add up to a substantial premium that the government wants to pay. But ALL current customers are paying for development costs for future stuff, just like when you buy a Ford Mustang part of the proceeds go to future development.
But the difference I must keep pointing out is that SpaceX won several contracts before they had anything built, and this early government investment was absolutely critical to getting stuff built. Again, for the 1,000th time, that doesn’t mean it was a subsidy, or a government development contract. It just means that the government was very important to allowing SpaceX to have a product at all.
Look at it this way: if not for NASA’s early commitment for up to $400 million, do you think Elon would have forked over that much money? I don’t. He isn’t stupid – getting others to pay for a risky business is smart. Would VCs have floated that much money? If so, SpaceX would probably be wholly owned by someone else, and I’d bet you one donut that the VCs looked at NASA’s contract as the reason they were willing to take the risk they did.
that’s the big advantage I mentioned above. SpaceX- regardless of where the money came from- controlled the whole Falcon program. They control the design. they decided who they were going to contract to make parts, components, and subassemblies for them. Unlike NASA, who as a federal agency has to let Congresscritters dictate who they source work to where that work is done (unsurprisingly in said Congressweasel’s district/state) in order to secure funding. and that massively drives up costs and inefficiencies.
This is true, and it’s a valid analogy with SpaceX, but I want to take the discussion back for a moment to the larger point I was making, which was in response to the ridiculous statement that “The work doesn’t change just because a private company, rather the government, is signing the checks.” What I’m arguing against is Debillw3 taking a very narrow definition of “build” and claiming that since private enterprise “built” the Saturn V, built the Apollo module, built the LM, etc. that somehow it was private enterprise that put men on the moon, and by similar logic also put landers on Mars and sent Voyager and the other missions across the solar system. It wasn’t, and clearly none of those things would have happened without NASA, JPL, and public leadership. It wasn’t even that private enterprise didn’t have the money, it’s that they had zero interest in such initiatives, just as today they have zero interest in pure scientific research. It wasn’t private business that was motivated to build and operate the Hubble telescope or the Large Hadron Collider.
You’re right that the “front people” deserve the credit and attention, and my point is that in all such major initiatives, the “front people” – the visionaries who launched these mega projects for the benefit of pure science rather than profit – have been governments. SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, and ULA are different, and their people do deserve appropriate credit as initiators, but they have the limited scope of simply commoditizing and profiting from the business of providing launch services. Large-scale research ventures and space exploration are still very much the domain of government, and in fact increasingly are multinational initiatives, like the ISS, and the James Webb space telescope which is a joint venture between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency.
Some folks in reality-world are more than slightly miffed at Musk because of this test launch. He is sending “his” car out into the Asteroid Belt with basically nothing of value. He could have got some instruments attached to it and get some interesting data, but it just went up as not much more than a hunk of carbon fibre/metal and a mannequin.
Eh, those people are full of shit. Before the launch, even CNN was saying that the rocket might just explode on the pad, and why. It was a test in a lot of ways, which is why no super valuable cargo was on board.
Just attaching some instruments would be pretty pointless. You’d need a communications system for there to be any point. And that would require a guidance system (to point the antenna), and solar panels, and some sort of brain to drive the whole thing. In short, an entire space probe. Millions of dollars worth of equipment, all tested and integrated, all perched on top of a rocket that had a significant chance of not making it to orbit. If someone had approached SpaceX volunteering such a probe as a test cargo, probably it would have been accepted. Expecting SpaceX to build one seems a little silly.
