Hacker News Reader

Comment by Meegul | Hacker News Reader

That source only lists contracts where the price is known or can be reasonably estimated. Naturally, US government entities which have a semi-public bidding process are much easier to obtain a price estimate from. There's a large amount of foreign government contracts and private commercial contracts that are omitted from that list. Just from 2020 alone, SkySats 16-21, ANASIS-II, SXRS-1, SAOCOM 1B, GNOMES 1, Tybak-0172, SXM-7, and NROL-108.

Edit: I did unreasonably make the assumption that you were making the case the SpaceX was receiving subisidies for "nothing" and I see that you weren't now.

View on HN

Hell, SpaceX is private so we have limited information across all domains. I acknowledged in my first post that accurate numbers are hard to come by. But we have to work with what information we have.

Foreign govts would still be govt money; many of those you listed are still public projects. Do you have estimates for those other private launches? If not, it's just speculation. Based on the information we have, it seems like it's safe to say the bulk of their launches are for governments. It's not a knock on them, and I'm not saying this is your perspective, but there's this kinda weird sentiment that they are some paragon of free-market capitalism when in fact they are a company highly dependent on government money. But that's exactly what I think is reasonable to expect in a nascent industry.

As a side note, There are easy esimates for private launches. SpaceX widely publicises their launch pricing, which lines up pretty well for the publicly disclosed contracts.

> But we have to work with what information we have.

No sorry, if you know the numbers you have are clearly bias and wrong then you don't need to work with them.

Do you know SpaceX's cash flow? If so, please share. Otherwise, I can just claim you are speculating towards your own bias.

If you think the data is bad, at best all you can claim is "we don't know"

And this is imo what you should have done instead if saying 98%. I agree with other commenters in that this is extremely misleading.

That’s fine. I’m completely ok with someone saying “I don’t know”. But the original post was trying to make a wild claim with zero evidence. I’m at least trying to ground my claim in some actual data while clearly acknowledging the limits of that data. I’m also completely fine with the veracity of that data being brought into question. What I’ve yet to see is anyone trying to refute it being an any additional data to the discussion that is of better quality. Losing Wikipedia launches (with little understanding of the business context and no actual revenue claims) is even more specious than I was using. It’s not a more informed or more rational argument, it’s an emotional bias.

Put differently, why do you think there isn’t an abundance of people chiming in to say “there’s not enough data to make a claim” rather than jumping to defend SpaceX’s honor? If people were truly rational, the strength of their convictions would be proportional to the strength of the data being it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com