This is a major derailment and I have things to do, but the idea that the US Government doesn’t have the legal right to strong arm money from company A solely to give it to Company B purely for Company B’s benefit flies in the face of history.
Cite: Long Term Capital Management (especially Bear Sterns), 1997
Cite: Bear Sterns and Chase (AND the $8 adjustment), 2008
Cite: Wells Fargo & TARP, 2008
(I can go on, but I’m sure the point has been made.)
Graft is for personal enrichment and benefit. Like in the article you linked to. National security is not the same thing as personal enrichment.
Magiver, you have been proven wrong in theory, history, and in this specific case*. It’s time to let this one go.
Always interesting to see which Dopers can admit they’re wrong, and which cannot.
I’m not sure what part of ILLEGAL you don’t understand but demanding someone give up property as a condition of a contract is not “attempting to influence”. It’s GRAFT. There is nothing nuanced about it.
It’s bizarre that you think a President would engage in this.
The government has already done things like this, many times. During WWII and at other times. Influencing and pressuring private companies for national security concerns has a long history in the US.
Saying it over and over again, without a cite specific to national security concerns, is not convincing to anyone.
First, we are not at war so there are no provisions to envoke any form of emergency procedures. Second, there are no provisions to take property in time of emergency without compensation.
Neither of those are applicable to this circumstance. The company doesn’t have to comply. But the government has the authority and even the duty to consider private companies’ contributions to national security efforts when deciding whether or not to hire a company for government work.
And still no cite. You’re just making things up. Again.
…You do know what a contract is, right? Almost all contracts include one or both parties to the contract giving up property. That’s kind of the purpose of contracts.
Yes, I know what a contract is. And insisting someone give away a product for free as a condition of getting another contract is illegal. I’m done with this.
Can’t provide a cite so you’re done.
ATT was forced to give away Western Union as to be allowed to compete in the local phone markets. They then spent the next ten years buying up the local and regional exchanges and, when challenged by the US government about their monopoly, they pointed to this commitment, one where they were forced to give up something in exchange for the rights to do something else, a legal strategy which worked until 1983, 70 years later.
This is 1913, do I need to go on?
The router is irrelevant. It’s ten or twenty dollars.
The “dish” is not actually a dish; it’s a phased-array antenna. It has several hundred individual transmitting elements which time their transmissions so that that their sum has a strong peak in one direction and less in other directions.
The advantage over a physical dish (which does the same thing, by physically bouncing the radio waves to a single point) is that it can “move” instantly. A dish has to physically slew over, which takes many seconds; changing the timing of the antenna elements takes microseconds. That’s how you can put Starlink on a moving vehicle, with the satellites moving rapidly overhead, and even select a different satellite when one goes behind a tree, and have it all still work seamlessly.
But it’s expensive. No one is doing this at the same scale (there are some devices that have maybe 2-4 elements).
They are bringing down the cost, but it takes time.
Thanks.
This is called Cost Plus accounting, and except for a few narrow scenarios, has proven to be a really fucking bad idea. Big established corps love Cost Plus accounting, which should maybe tell you something about it.
The problem is that it ruins the incentive structure. “Profits” are not the only way that corporations survive. They also benefit just by having more money flow through them. They’d rather have $1B in revenue @ 10% profit than $100M at 20%.
Documenting all expenses is of no help, because it is trivially easy to add make-work to any given project. Was some step really needed there? Did they really need to buy that advanced equipment? Was it really impossible to reduce the costs on some particular step?
This is absolutely rampant in aerospace, particularly anything military related. Because you really don’t want them cutting corners, but you do want them cutting legitimate excess expenses.
You might be thinking, so what, maybe they can boost the price by 10% by exploiting some wiggle room in the terms. But in reality it’s more like 1000%, or even more. And no one know how to write the terms in such detail to avoid this (and even if you could, it would be a bad idea).
SpaceX has mostly avoided Cost Plus contracts, unlike their competitors. We don’t know their profit margins, but we do know their bids compared to other providers, and they are well-priced. There’s a reason they win so many bids. They are also more successful at delivering on said bids.
Capping profits is a stupid and counterproductive non-solution. The right answer is to have a properly competitive bidding process, and–as much as possible–reduce the influence of lobbying efforts. This is harder, but it actually fixes the problem you want to fix instead of making it worse. NASA has slowly moved to this model and it is reaping benefits.
If it’s one of the terms of a contract, then it’s not for free.
Not true. The dishes themselves are expensive, and are getting blown up at a regular rate. SpaceX still has to pay for their connection to the rest of the internet, which has to be nearby to where the usage is happening (say, in Poland). That also means paying for ground terminal infrastructure. The war has massively stepped up their cybersecurity needs, because Russian hackers actually aren’t a joke. And finally, the network is not close to complete yet, so adding users that don’t add profits means they aren’t getting paid for new launches.
It’s true that for any given cell, the satellite costs come “for free” since they are in fixed orbits and are only useful while over a given area, but that is not the only expense.
BTW, it’s the same tech used for advanced radars on fighter aircraft. Would cost in the millions a couple of decades ago. SpaceX isn’t responsible for all of that reduction–they are riding the wave of semiconductor cost reductions like everyone else–but until recently no one was considering this for a consumer level device (i.e., hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands).
Amazon is working on their own system, but they haven’t launched a single batch of satellites yet.
They already had the chance to bid on a lunar mission. They didn’t.
Boeing did bid on the Commercial Crew program, and won alongside SpaceX. However, their bid was 60% higher than SpaceX. Worse, they haven’t put a single astronaut into orbit yet, whereas SpaceX has put 22 NASA astronauts up.
SpaceX has flown even more people up on private missions, which NASA isn’t paying for but does get a benefit, since more flights means more opportunities to tease out any system problems.
Boeing is also the prime contractor for SLS, which is many years late and tens of billions over budget. They do not have a lot of credibility within NASA right now.
Do you have a cite for that? FYI, SpaceX launched 43 private missions in 2022 so far. They launched six missions for the US government. And there were no ‘subsidies’ - the government’s missions were fee for service, with the fees being substantially less than anyone else is capable of charging.
You do know there was an open competition for the lunar lander, and SpaceX won by a large margin, right? Boeing’s entry was so laughable it didn’t even make the cut for final consideration. It also was many times the price of SpaceX’s 2.9 billion winning bid. Grumman/Blue Origin’s bid was for a less capable lander for $6 billion. But hey, what’s paying $3 billion more for less lander when there’s a hated billionaire to punish?
Also, NASA is offloading some Artemis missions from the 4 billion-per-flight SLS to the Falcon Heavy, a vehicle almost as capable but which flies for $97 million. Yeah, maybe Boeing should be the only game in town. What’s a few billion extra dollars per year when there are hated billionaires to smack down?
SpaceX launches more mass into space than every other space company and government combined. The fact is, the government needs SpaceX far more than SpaceX needs the government. Without SpaceX the U.S. does not even have a manned spaceflight capability right now. Without SpaceX, Russia would have the U.S. by the balls over the ISS and crew rotation. Without SpaceX, there would be no Starlink, which is helping Ukraine win the war. Without SpaceX, the Artemis program is dead.
Boeing’s ISS crew flights are being charged to the government at $100 million per seat. That is if they ever manage to fly astronauts on their crew transfer vehicle, which the government paid 4.2 billion to develop, vs the 2.6 billion that SpaceX got for the same thing, and actually delivered. SpaceX charges $60 million, and saves the taxpayers over $100 million every time a crew is sent to the ISS. And it saved the taxpayers 1.8 billion dollars over what Boeing charged for the same capability. It also saves huge money every time the government launches a satellite.
Elon Musk has revolutionized spaceflight, saved taxpayers billions, provided a hail-mary to Ukraine that is helping them win the war, and is helping electrify the world. So of course he needs to be destroyed, because he said something on Twitter someone didn’t like, and has the audacity to ask to be paid for the incredibly valuable service he is providing to Ukraine. The nerve.