> In 2022, revenue doubled to $4.6 billion, helping the company reduce its loss last year to $559 million from $968 million, the WSJ reported.
> The company reported about $5.2 billion in total expenses for 2022, up from $3.3 billion the year earlier, according to the report.
That $5.2B of expenses got 61 successful, production Falcon rocket launches in 2022. Vs. some pretty-reasonable estimates put the total cost of NASA's "Space Launch System" at ~$5B per individual launch.
You can't compare SpaceX's figures to NASA because NASA has many, many more reporting obligations than SpaceX.
Every report on Falcon 9 costs has made this mistake forever. SpaceX does not release their full costs. What numbers we have for them are PR releases. Meanwhile, NASA's budgets are public and comprehensive, and they have legal parameters on what they have to include in their statements about costs that SpaceX does not have.
SLS was on the schedule to launch humans several years ago. However, failing to qualify means that NASA can NOT ask them to launch a human
Is SLS even certified to carry people into space yet?
It better be because Artemis-II will have people aboard Orion.
> The SLS was created by an act of Congress in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, Public Law 111–267, in which NASA was directed to create a system for launching payloads and crew into space that would replace the capabilities lost with the retirement of the Space Shuttle.
SLS was "asked" 13 years ago to launch humans, and we are still waiting for that to happen.
10 missions
A crewed mission to the ISS every 6 months plus a handful of commercials.
Your numbers are way off.
I think this was an xkcd.
10 flights with humans so far and more planned: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon_2
Not really relevant.
The correct metric to make the comparison on is the fully amortized cost to the government per launch. The government doesn't pay for SpaceX's facilities or development - all of those costs are rolled into the launch price. But that's not true of SLS.
I don't know why you're so obsessed with cost. The only thing that matters when it comes to commercial providers is price. And SpaceX, (as far as I can tell) stands alone among the medium-heavy lift providers by providing a price directly on their website.
Of course, for government launches the government typically wants extra services, which does boost the prices different levels for different missions (I think the Europa Clipper mission is particularly expensive for example). But all of those missions are competitively bid, and SpaceX tends to be the low price bidder, so those extra fees seem like they're probably pretty reasonable.
https://spacenews.com/starlink-may-account-for-up-to-40-of-s...
The documents WSJ viewed are for SpaceX as a whole, not "SpaceX's launcher division". Even if the launcher division charged the Starlink division 9000 megazillion dollars per launch, that would be exactly balanced by the Starlink division having to book 9000 megazillion dollars of expense per launch.
Again, according to the documents WSJ viewed, SpaceX overall has achieved profitability. That's a major accomplishment given it being by far the lowest-cost launch provider in the world.
I don't think you understood what I wrote. GP claimed "SpaceX is profitable, so they're not pricing below cost", but the bulk of SpaceX's revenue can be attributed to the company owner transferring his money around.
Your comment is so far off it reads as something outputted by a poor machine learning model.
My point is that even if SpaceX books Starlink launches as revenue,[1] it would still have to be accounted for as an expense on Starlink's side, so SpaceX's overall bottom line would not change. If SpaceX's confidential internal financials show that SpaceX has achieved profitability then, yes, that indicates that SpaceX is not pricing its launches below cost.
>Your comment is so far off it reads as something outputted by a poor machine learning model.
Sorry, not my fault that you can't comprehend the fact that revenue can't come out of nowhere. It has to always be balanced by expense, and this isn't some magic way for Musk to generate "fake profits".
[1] A fairly common business practice, in and of itself. When an Apple employee receives a new Apple computer for use at work, that computer is booked as revenue for Apple; after all, Apple is acting as a customer for a product, albeit its own. The division that employee works for in turns records the price of that computer as an expense. The revenue amount is going to be lower than what an outside customer would pay—basically, Apple as seller will charge Apple as customer zero markup—but some revenue will be recorded all the same.
1. As far as I know, no one has presented any evidence that SpaceX sells Falcon 9/H launches for less than cost. ArianeSpace used to really talk up this point, but even they've mostly given up.
2. I'm not really sure why it matters. If SpaceX can sell for less than cost at their current volume, well... good for the tax payers - we're getting a deal.
> Elon loves to do this btw.
Really? I thought Tesla was known for it's high margins? I don't think any of Elon's other businesses are public.
At the cost of killing all other competitors and letting SpaceX monopolize so we are stuck with whatever quotes from SpaceX?
1. Are you suggesting that SpaceX will bankrupt Japan (HIII), India (GSLV/PSLV), and Europe (Ariane 6)? That seems unlikely to me.
2. There's very little evidence that SpaceX will jack up prices when they're a monopoly. I mean, they're a defacto monopoly right now (in a limited sense) with ULA transitioning to Vulcan, and ArianeGroup transitioning to Ariane 6. And their prices haven't budged.
3. The DoD (as part of NSSL) and NASA work very hard to split large contracts between multiple launch providers - effectively ensuring that there is no monopoly in US medium-heavy launch providers.
If anything SpaceX has lead to an explosive increase in competition.
This can and is considered predatory pricing, which is a criminal offense in some jurisdictions.
SpaceX has shown these numbers to investors and have received money on good valuation. If not even there core buissness was profitable why would anybody invest in Starship?
The argument that SpaceX subsudizes their launch prices is just a nonsense argument that doesnt hold up to study.
These companies will lose billions for years with this single intention.
The true cost minus the listed price adjusted for years of interest and extremely high VCreturns are all useful numbers to know because that adjusted by a risk multiple will tell you how much wealth the investors are expecting the monopolization to transfer from the taxpayer to their pockets.
1. SpaceX will never have a monopoly over launch because it's competing with lots of governments who will never give up their rocket programs. ArianeGroup, Japan/Mitsubishi, Russia, China, and India all have active launch programs (although Russia and China are isolated right now).
2. There are a truly stupid number of startups trying to compete for a slice of the launch pie. Most of them are in the small-lift launch segment for some reason, even though it's probably impossible to run a profitable rocket launch business in that segment of the market. But there are enough companies that aspire to launch larger rockets that SpaceX needs to be on its toes.
Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Relativity are probably the main future competitors to SpaceX. And both Rocket Lab and Relativity have talked up prices that are equal to or lower than what SpaceX is currently offering.
3. The DoD and NASA are actively working to prevent SpaceX from forming a monopoly in the US market.
This whole discussion is centered around cost. The only argument presented in favor of paying SpaceX for launches is launch cost.
If it wasn't for costx why would an org like NASA even consider delegating a critical part of their mission to a third party?
Its just a convieniant attack on SpaceX because they are private. It has no bases in reality.
I disagree. The whole theme of these corporate worship sessions is to praise how efficient they are, and how inefficient everything in comparison.
Claiming that these corporations are free to lie and omit expenses from their reporting to appear efficient goes directly against their supposed superiority.
> The correct metric to make the comparison on is the fully amortized cost to the government per launch.
Not really. The goal is to assess if a government institution meets it's goals in a fiscally responsible and efficient way.
The main goal of NASA is to "Expand human knowledge through new scientific discoveries." This involves all aspects of rocket science. The likes of SpaceX were only possible because NASA invested in research which SpaceX took advantage to design its production services.
Another goal of NASA is to "Address national challenges and catalyze economic growth." This also covers creating and funding demand for skilled high-tech professionals in places where there would otherwise be none. This also contributes to create opportunities in a workforce to support and develop highly specialized and experienced engineers, the likes of which can then transfer their knowledge and experience to the likes of SpaceX. Take, for example, SpaceX's own Gwynne Shotwell, who started her career in aerospace by working in government contracts for the Space Shuttle.
It's perfectly ok to argue that a government can and should buy services from private companies. It's awfully disingenuous to misrepresent both the private companies' offerings and alleged efficiency and the actual roles and responsibilities of government institutions like NASA.
So in total if you split your vehicle up and assemble it in orbit you can launch one that's almost 5x the size for the same price. Maybe more like 3x + extra engineering overhead costs for the orbital assembly, but still much more bang for the buck. The lunar gateway is planned to be a station anyway so those costs will have to be paid regardless.
Thus far, SLS has only done once what Falcon does on the regular: Launch a payload into orbit
The figures are easy to compare as well. Just include these factors in your comparison! Even if we don't know exactly what those factors are, we can make a ballpark estimate the total difference and add that as a percentage to spaceX's final figure.
The idea that things can't be compared because they are different is nonsense. When things are different is the only time comparisons are meaningful to make!
They have quite different fairing capacities, in a playfield that does not scale linearly.
It is like saying that the Boeing 737 is cheaper than the 777, and we can compare them because they were both designed to fly people in the sky.
I wonder if your NASA figure also includes first launch, that may include r&d?! Because for a single launch, when you substract r&d or even spread out across all planned launches - can't be that high...
I'm just for comparing apples to apples not apples to oranges.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/nasa-does-not-deny-t...
The ~$5B figure is in the final para. And that still sounds like it excludes ground systems and Orion development costs. (Plus ~4 more years of ever-growing bloat, obviously.)
There is a much more official and up to date figure:
> We project the cost to fly a single SLS/Orion system through at least Artemis IV to be $4.1 billion per launch at a cadence of approximately one mission per year.
https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-22-003.pdf
From what I understand, that number does include ground systems.
For what it's worth, NASA leadership continues to contest this value, although they refuse to publicly give their own value.
To be fair to you, the $4.1B figure does not include development costs. I don't think there's an agreed upon way to include them, so everyone just mentions them separately. And they are quite... large.
Kind of sad that the last living pieces of the shuttle will be dropped into the ocean and left to rust away
I know a lot of people want to get them into museums, but I suspect that every museum that really wants one already has one. And I'd suggest to you that it's much more dignified that they go out as part of a rocket launch than slowly decaying in a warehouse somewhere.
I don't have good intuition for how much of the bloat comes from a top-heavy organization, from grifting contractors, and from good old fashion boondoggles -- but I'd like to add to this pile of possibilities the possibility the categories are poorly drawn and that "things which NASA should be doing but shouldn't be classified under launch vehicles" are nevertheless classified under launch vehicles.
SLS is bad, but it's not quite that bad.
A full launch of SLS + Orion is ~4.1B. A launch of SLS without Orion (a theoretical cargo mission) is "just" ~$2.8B.
This is more important than it seems on the surface and is often a good thing.
You want to train and preserve local expertise with heavy industries.
That ensures generations of successful companies rejuvenating your economy as opposed to relying on federal handouts.
These people don’t grow on trees(/classrooms).
NASA and ULA like programs trained and built expert training to create those citizens.
Being able to recruit them is a non-goal.
It is in the definition: “for the people”.
These people enjoy a cushy revolving door between several private and public sector aerospace jobs.
If we can't do something as simple as assemble modules in space, exactly what sort of future do you imagine is waiting for us in space?
SLS has absolutely no redeeming features. You're sunk deep in Stockholm Syndrome if you're still defending it.
What sort of future in space do those advocating SLS imagine for us if moving a liquid from one tank to another is too challenging?
There's a huge amount of extra risk involved in that sort of idea, which is why NASA isn't doing it, which can just be avoided with SLS and Starship.
And you didn't answer my question, so I will answer it for you. If simply transferring a liquid from one tank to another is too risky, then there is no future in space. No activities of any significance could ever be done there. With that established, we can shut down the human space program and lose nothing of value.
> Starship HLS requires in-orbit propellant transfer in its mission profile. Prior to the launch of the HLS vehicle from Earth, a Starship variant configured as a propellant depot would be launched into an Earth orbit and then partially or fully filled by between four and fourteen Starship tanker flights carrying propellant. The Starship HLS vehicle would then launch and rendezvous with the already-loaded propellant depot and refuel before transiting from Earth orbit to Lunar orbit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS
I’m a little confused why you call it a giant orbital bomb. It wouldn’t be particularly giant. Four reusable flights could only bring 600T of propellant to LEO. A single starship is fueled with 4600T of propellant, or 18400T of propellant to get that 600T into LEO. I would argue the starship itself is a much more giant bomb with all sorts of fire and stress and chances to explode. 600T of fuel exploding in orbit might not even be visible. But there’s been a number of tests of in orbit refueling and it doesn’t seem much more complex than, say, docking with a space station and transferring bags of mostly water without damaging them.
Docking isn't a safety risk.
Regardless, the plan is to use starships to build a LEO refueling platform and bring propellant for a lunar lander brought to orbit via a starship. Such a platform could also be used for Mars. It’s a much smarter move than trying to bring everything from earth in a single shot. And I can vouch for the sanity of the plan - I have almost 600 hours on KSP which makes me a bit of an expert ;-)
Falcon-9 is about as capable in terms of payload as Proton. And even without inflation the launch price is comparable. So, Falcon-9 is quite capable to get people on the Moon. It isn't really considered because there are other options and some additional requirements.
https://space.nss.org/lunar-base-studies-1996-human-lunar-re...
hey avmich, thnx 4 the memories ;)
Surely people understand redundancy in aerospace right?
> SLS is about maintaining the ability of the US to build rocket engines like the RS-25 and those massive SRBs
...but why? They're expensive and bad. Maybe the US SHOULD forget about them.
> The Government is worried about waking up some morning and China has leapfrogged us to the Moon and it'll take 20 years for us to institutionally remember how to get back there.
The SLS was indeed created back when this sounded reasonable. But it no longer does. The US can go to the moon now. They just have to pay SpaceX to do it, and failing that, Rocket Lab. But asking Boeing to do it is pretty guaranteed to be a bad idea.
> And SpaceX has not yet demonstrated the ability to land humans on the Moon while NASA has.
Boeing has demonstrated a willingness to not live up to its former glory though. And let's be honest here, this is not NASA vs SpaceX. This is Boeing vs SpaceX. That's the main contractor doing the vast majority of the work. Boeing, as you might remember, STILL haven't shown then can get humans to the ISS anymore! We are still waiting for Starliner to come online.
> They're making sure that we can definitely still use big dumb stupid expensive technology to get there.
I guess...
> If Starship works they may wind up pivoting away from SLS in the future
We can only hope! But again, Falcon Heavy exists NOW.
There's a possible world where the cut corners and the Dear Moon mission winds up with the vehicle burning up on reentry or slamming itself into the ground, killing Tim Dodd and everyone on board, with the resultant investigation looking something like OceanGate.
SLS is big, dumb and stupid and has a LES and a capsule that lands via parachutes. If SpaceX fails as a company after some accident like that, the SLS will just continue to plod along.
> If SpaceX fails as a company after some accident like [starship failing and killing people], the SLS will just continue to plod along.
Well.. yes. But note also that if SLS crashes and kills a bunch of astronauts it will certainly plod along too. That's what the Shuttle did. The difference being one of NASA/Boeing and SpaceX are accountable for killing astronauts, while the other is not.
Gigant SRB are dead technology, totally useless. RS-25 is engine that should be retiered and has no future.
So your theory of techonpgical progrss is to spend huge amount of money into legacy technology rather then actually building new technology.
The reason the US will beat China is the Raptor, not the RS-25.
What you advocate works 100% against what you want to achieve.
And just FYI the shuttle stack never lead us to the moon. In fact its terrible for this task.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/the-sls-rocket-is-th...
SLS and Orion are dead ends. I wish them well and I am huge space geek but that program is just a gigantic waste. I wish we could take that budget and use it for unmanned missions or public/private space station partnerships with some of the new space companies.
SpaceX's yearly spending would include the 61 flights, but also literally thousands of satellites, presumably a huge number of commercial dishes, their human flight overheads, their Starship development program including ground support and production and testing of about a hundred Raptor engines, their sales and outreach, their specific contract work like HLS, and their mug business by the side.
If you were to amortize SLS's total dev costs (incl. Orion and SLS-specific ground support but excluding Constellation) over its reasonably expected lifetime flights, you'll be lucky as heck to get <$10B/flight, though of course we don't know how that adds up and so report the much smaller marginal numbers instead.
There are probably 1-2 countries in the world that can afford to keep running a business with losses at around $1bn per year.
Again, that's utterly unthinkable for Mercedes or Renault or Mitsubish or Samsung or...
They'd just go under because the rest of the world still has economic gravity, i.e. everything must come down in case of no profits.
Almost all of that money was dumped back into the same economy from which it was collected, albeit inefficiently, so it didn't really disappear. They "used up" a few million dollars worth of material each time.
The damage to the economy was not as bad as you suggest. However the opportunity cost was massive. Decades wasted on a dead-end program. A staggering number of engineer careers essentially wasted, and now they're doing it again with SLS.
Apples to oranges comparison. 400km to low earth orbit is not compatible to a 384400km trip to another gravity well.
Also, Falcon 9 has delivered multiple payloads to lunar orbit. Examples are ispace's Hakuto-R Mission 1, SpaceIL's Beresheet, and South Korea's Danuri. In interplanetary space, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test was launched on a Falcon 9.
Danuri: 1,495 lbs
Hakuto-R: 2,200 lbs
DART: 1,340 lbs
Artemis 2: 112,000 lbs
Even by your examples there remains a 10,000% to 5,000% fold scale difference. And SpaceX agrees with this. This difference in scale is why they are working on Starship.