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Comment by mitchty | Hacker News Reader

Does SpaceX's cost include the original research costs that NASA incurred by actually researching the underlying principles the Dragon rockets use?

I think people are underestimating the costs NASA incurred by being first. Take the X15 for example, its first test flights were without its planned engine because nobody up until that point had ever built a throttleable rocket engine.

Now its well known how to build them and what not to do. I'm not saying NASA is efficient, but direct numerical comparisons like these unnecessarily distort the various differences in history between the two.

The shuttles many deficiencies are rather well documented as well. And it, now had, features that the Dragon rockets don't serve such as the obvious recovery of space payloads for example.

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What's your point?

That research would benefit a NASA attempt to build a new launch vehicle as well, yet there's no way they could have done so at anywhere near the cost SpaceX managed (they even acknowledged that with a study).

We're not being armchair historians here, hypothesizing about a world where NASA never existed. We're talking about rocket development in the here and now. And in the real world of today SpaceX is able to build new launch vehicles about 5x cheaper than NASA could.

The main point to me is that it's comparing apples and oranges: an organization that's mandated to do long-term fundamental research along with space travel, along with satisfying military priorities, engaging in scientific research, and on top of that, release a large amount of data to the public that others can build on.

Versus... an organization that just wants to launch a rocket, building on that data and fundamental research that others spend money doing, but which doesn't have any strong commitment to any of the other priorities (such as releasing new reusable data or basic-science research for others to build on in turn). Of course the latter organization will be cheaper, because the entire organization has a different set of priorities. In particular, NASA's mandate requires it to spend money on trying to make its results constitute scientific advances, i.e. publishable work, releasable data, etc.; whereas Space-X is happy to save money by not doing so.

For example, I've been looking for the FTP site where I can download raw data originating from Space-X and released into the public domain, and I can't find one. That's not very helpful for others who're looking to build on their advances!

We can compare apples to apples, though. Again, this isn't about defunding NASA, it's about maximizing return on expenditures. NASA doesn't have to stop doing science or exploration to take advantage of commercially developed launch vehicles. Indeed, by making such a switch it would free up money for NASA to spend even more on doing those things.

If NASA were spending $5 billion a year on developing its own automobiles when they could just buy cars from Toyota or Ford the decision would be a no brainer.

If NASA were spending $5 billion a year on developing its own automobiles when they could just buy cars from Toyota or Ford the decision would be a no brainer.

True, if Toyota exists to supply those automobiles. Not, if NASA is the first one to make a automobile.

Remember NASA was the first to make many things which are not available off the shelf.

If it is NASA or SpaceX they both can look at the original research by nasa. The question is if NOW SpaceX and NASA got requirments for a new rocket that could do X. How long and how costly would it be to do it and SpaceX clearly looks much better at that.

Nobodys claims NASAs people or its research in the last 60 years sucked.

Your point is particularly relevant since SpaceX employs former NASA engineers and astronauts.

..who were mostly creating powerpoint presentations and not rockets.

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