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Comment by thepasswordis | Hacker News Reader

Estimated project cost is $13B

Or: about 130,000 $100k single family homes.

In other words, you could build and gift a single family home to nearby every single homeless person in California for this cost of this rocket.

Would I rather waste money on a redundant, congressional committee rocket, or waste money giving people houses?

Without spacex, the rocket is worthwhile. But with spacex, it is a complete waste of time and money.

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Where are you finding all those $100k single family homes? The median CA house is $760,800 [1]. (I know there's houses cheaper than the median, but if you are buying up 130k houses, likely more than the entire available stock, you will have to go quite high up the price listing.) At that price, you're talking 17,087 houses. There are 161,548 homeless people in CA [2]

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/median-home...

[2] https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/ca/

I’m saying build them. 800 square foot slab on grade 2 bedroom homes with block construction just like we did in the 1940s.

You absolutely could build these for $100k/ea at scale.

Even mobile homes cost more than that: "the average sale price of a new manufactured home was $111,900 in November 2021" [1] and that's not even California specific.

[1] https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/articles/how-much-...

Average cost per square foot (low end) is $130 in Tennessee[1].

130*800 is: $104k.

[1]: https://innovativebuildingmaterials.com/how-much-does-it-cos...

soo... there are about 70k homeless people in L.A. right now. How do you suggest we airlift them to Tennessee?

The value of the structure rounds to $0 when compared to the cost of the land it's sitting on.

I don't understand people who paint the house and plant flowers outside before selling. The buyers aren't looking at that. They just want to see the dimensions of the lot and then bid a few hundred grand over asking. Once the paperwork is squared away, one morning an excavator and a dump truck will pull onto the beautiful manicured lawn and by late that afternoon the site will be an empty lot. A few months later the new McMansion on the site will be sold for a significant markup. On the order of 1-2 million dollars more than it sold for earlier in the year.

This is the real estate reality in California because people actually want to live here.

Not legally you can't, not in California. Maybe in Somalia.

The comparison is with blowing up hundreds of tons of fuel below and around a capsule filled with people, like half a dozen times. Give them a little flexibility on building codes. NASA rockets explode and catch fire due to weather and normal flight.

Is someone giving away land for free? Because in places where people want to live, the land costs more than the house.

Yes: https://www.wideopencountry.com/free-land-in-the-us/amp/

including all the fringe costs.. power lines, sewage, roads, schools etc etc?

because the 13B includes all that.

Would you want to live in that? Because I wouldn't, nor would I want to live anywhere near a development like that.

I CURRENTLY live in that. Holy shit what an unbelievably insulting comment.

“Would you really live in that?!?!!” Uh, yeah? Because I already do? And love my house? And maybe that’s why I’m suggesting that specific style of house as a solution? Because I currently live in one with the rest of my family.

And before you start thinking “oh poor him”. I can almost guarantee you that I make more money than 99% of the people posting here.

Could you believe the poor sap who might live in a place like this?

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/935-E-56th-St-Austin-TX-7...

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4507-Depew-Ave-Austin-TX-...

I agree with everything you’re saying here. But I would not want to be the poor sap that paid $625k to live in a place like that. Those prices are insane.

Completely agree these prices are nuts. Most of it is location though. Even still: lots of these places were selling for 100-200k 5 years ago.

Those are nice except for the price. It's not the size, it's the sprawling developments with thousands of identical cookie cutter houses that I was talking about. I personally wouldn't want to live in one or near one.

I was thinking this: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/levittown-new-york

The people moving into those houses wanted to. You don’t want to.

Do you think living in a suburb is better or worse than living in a ditch or under a bridge?

Lots of Europeans live in places that small and are very happy with them.

I'm talking about building these "at-scale" which results in massive developments of soulless cookie cutter suburbs. There is nothing wrong with the house by itself- quite the contrary. People shouldn't buy more than they need.

See: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/levittown-new-york

Money has never been the issue. There has always been money that could have been diverted to "fix" the homeless problem, at both the state and federal level. If that's all it was, we'd have solved it by now. Homelessness is far more complicated than just money, and throwing it at the problem won't fix it.

$13B isn't that big of a government expenditure, all things considered.

That pork pays for a lot of engineering salaries in places like Alabama. Senators will fight tooth and nail to keep it.

With only SpaceX, there's a risk of the technology becoming expensive or not doing what the government wants. This hedge de-risks that scenario and is worth the cost alone.

Once we have several commercial rocket families to choose from, we can reconsider. In the meantime, we've already paid for SLS and it isn't going away - and that's not a sunk cost fallacy. There are mission specific payloads SLS will be better suited for.

Is wasting money on rocket builders in Alabama more valuable than wasting money on home builders in California?

It is always preferable to support high tech industry which can move whole country forward instead of few bricklayers, which won't move country forward.

Arguably NIMBYism is a bigger factor to the lack of housing than the cost of building the houses.

yes, everyone says there ought to be more housing, but not here...

Still bothers me that un-serious folk will post about how much spacex is 'wasting' on space travel, yet say nadda when the gov wastes like 4000x more.

Kudos on running the numbers!

I think the complaint is (usually) a bit more nuanced than that. I, for example, am totally encouraging of SX to take over all earth orbital works, as well as the moon. NASA is wasting its time and our money in those areas. However, I think it’s a waste for anyone, SpaceX or NASA, to send people anyplace outside of the moon. (And even putting people on the moon again is of questionable value.) NASA should stick to what it does best: Remote robots and instruments.

When the government gives money to NASA, where does it go? You all make it sound like it goes to about 5 greedy old geezers in a cigar smoke filled room. It mostly goes to tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, and laborers.

It goes to engineers and materials scientists? And welders and builders and truck drivers and everything else.

And what about if that money was spent on building homes? Those guys framing the houses aren’t as valuable as the guys running modeling software in an office? Do you think the truck drivers in Alabama are more valuable than truck drivers in California?

Put in the same input of labor, and either get 130,000 single family homes AND the economic benefit of all the work to build them, or get a few big rockets which are about 20 years behind their nearest competitor.

> get a few big rockets which are about 20 years behind their nearest competitor.

What existing competitors are built to bring humans to the Moon?

Lots of empty houses already exist in low LCOL areas. Don't even need to build new ones.

For $100k, you can get 1/8 of a tiny home for a homeless person in LA.

In other words, if you leave it to the government to pay for the work, you will just be astounded by how much it costs.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-05/lopez-co...

Portland made house for unhoused and it was astonishingly $400K/person.

I would guess it'd be around that in CA.

Only twice as much in LA

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