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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

$422m per launch vs under $100m per launch.

Just imagine how many schools, bridges, cancer treatments, or who knows what else that money could be better spent on.

probably not much. that money is likely to be spent on elsewhere in military.

I'm pretty sure the military funds schools (University research funding, DARPA) and bridges (maybe in Afghanistan and Iraq). Cancer research is probably not a high priority, but traumatic brain injury treatment research and hearing loss mitigation are.

So in between various clumsy bombings with 75% noncombatant casualties, the military occasionally spends money on things universally good for society & humanity.

The military has some funding for roads and bridges in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but the heavy lifting is done by the Department of State. Most of the budget is on personnel and equipment.

The U.S. Military is universally good for society & humanity.

(Unless you're ISIS)

Indeed! They've brought peace and stability to Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. /s

To be fair, the responsibility overwhelmingly lies with the civilian leaders of the military.

If the tool never works how its users expect, it might be appropriate to blame the tool.

It might, but I think the US military is a great tool and does its actual job fantastically well. The only thing you can really blame them for is that they did not give a broad enough set of strategic options to civilians.

That said the civilian government usually gives them nonsensical task that they simply can not do.

Sometimes the military does a great job on hiding their inefficiencies too: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/pentagon-burie...

Oh for sure. But relatively to other military they are quite good and even while they waste a lot they can mostly to their jobs. Other military are very expensive and very ineffective.

It's just that USA military never seem to win any wars... or honorably escape from any conflict... or actually accomplish anything they ever claimed to have set out to do. Even if we're generous and put Korea in the win column, that was a really long time ago.

Again, the win the traditional military conflict and that is their primary responsibility. They are not equipped to do Nation building and they don't have the political support to do it. That's why they never exit a conflict very well, but they always crush in the beginning.

Korea was the last time they had a real problem winning the traditional military conflict.

"In the beginning" is when there are no reporters or other observers on the ground, so we have to just take the military's word on everything. If we just asked the Cleveland Browns how they did last season, they might tell us they played pretty well.

Besides, is it supposed to be hard to use billion-dollar stealth weapons to kill a few malnourished soldiers equipped with 1960s-era Soviet surplus? The worst part about the upcoming war with Russia that we're determined to have might be that we're going to get our asses kicked, from the beginning. Expect to see more airports completely operational within hours of multi-million-dollar missile attacks.

There were actually reporters on the ground and you can listen to interviews with them. Also, I never said it was very hard, I simply said they did it, and they did it quickly. Nobody can claim that Kabul and Baghdad did not fall quickly.

There is not gone be a war with Russia. If there was a war you can be damn sure that the US would whip Russia armed forces of the map. Also, Russia official defense doctrine is nuclear response to a lost in conventional conflict.

Again, yes the military is expensive. They do a good job of fighting traditional military conflict. The reason the US never wins is because of defunct politics, not defunct military. The military is just bloated and expensive, but not defunct.

The tactical blunders resulting in the loss of noncombatant life are only so widespread because of the civilian leadership's priorities. It's rarely the fault of any one servicemember.

Or on freeway overpasses in the middle of nowhere.

Yeah, that's a couple of F-35s...

Just imagine what you could do if you didn't do those launches at all.

Just imagine what you could do if humanity moved at the pace of the slowest individual.

We could not have GPS, and still be trying to fly planes over other countries. I'm a fan of cost reduction, but it is more nuanced than this.

Sure, there is plenty of dual purpose stuff. Think of the Hubble as a Keyhole pointing the other way. But in general money spent on defense is spent in ways that make me wonder if we could not do something more useful with it. And a world with GPS could be more annoying than a world with say better education. And then you might end up launching those GPS satellites anyway, but from a different bucket and a little later.

Piggy-backing stuff onto the military budget that is dual use is a nice fig leaf but it does not reduce the component spent on the remainder: weapons of all sorts, kinds and shapes.

> Think of the Hubble as a Keyhole pointing the other way.

I still remember one discussion on NRO where an user mentioned that it donated a space telescope to NASA [0], built around the same time as Hubble, that had better specs. And that's the spare one!

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

That was fascinating! Thank you for sharing the link.

The one thing we've proven over the last 40 years is you don't get better education by throwing money at it. Here in California we spend, in constant dollar, twice what we spent per pupil in 1970. Test scores are flat.

Could we not have invented GPS through completely civilian subsidies?

Sure DARPA produces civilian applicable research as a side effect, but what about directly funding civilian research instead?

Probably not. The compelling use cases for the first 20 years of GPS were all military with a few survey applications essentially riding free. The equipment used to be many, many pounds and tens of thousands of dollars. Almost every other industry besides had a "better" short term solution to location that met their needs at a fraction of the initial price of GPS.

And now imagine how many schools could have been already built, as just under $100m was a price Arianespace had offered for over a decade for the same launches.

SpaceX’ concept is about going below $50m in the next years per launch.

Isn't the price offered by Arianespace subsidized though? I could imagine that the EU is ok to subsidize to get market share in the private market but wouldn't be too happy to subsidize the US department of defense.

Only development is subsidized, ongoing costs are not.

The US could have easily contracted to Arianespace for these flights (especially as Arianespace is already a project of a close ally), and could have saved around 300 million USD for every single launch, of which there were thousands over the time frame that this was possible.

We’re seriously talking about dozens to hundreds of billions USD that could have been saved.

The price is not subsidized to a huge degree. What they do is pay a lot for the development and infrastructure.

The Arian 6 will get like 3 Billion and many of its parts have a history of development by government investment.

Arianespace might come close to competing on price, but they can't compete on cost.

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