Proud to say I've found that asshole annoying since WAY before it was cool.
They even have a page about them: https://www.tesla.com/support/incentives
Customers: DARPA, DARPA, DOD/NASA, mass simulator (instead of the intended payload after the first three launches), Malaysia (the intended payload of the fourth flight).
"pre-arranged commitments by NASA to purchase several operational flights" is a subsidy, as were the milestone payments along the way.
I'm a huge SpaceX fan, but let's not pretend they could've done this alone. They very nearly went bankrupt on Falcon 1, per Musk - https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/29/elon-musk-9-years-ago-spacex... - and had they needed to self-fund those launches/payloads entirely they would not have survived. It's a beautiful example of how powerful public/private partnerships can be.
There is no indication that these commitments were underpriced by the government, so to call them subsidies is at best baseless misinformation.
No; both parties in the deal have successfully accomplished their respective roles repeatedly before. The airline isn't doing anything new; the oil company isn't doing anything new.
(And they both absolutely get subsidized!)
> There is no indication that these commitments were underpriced by the government...
They got paid for a launch of an untested platform and a student-built payload, regardless of success, in hopes it would result in a good tested platform. What else do you call it?
That's false.
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/189228main_s... - start at page 34.
The first demonstration mission is paid milestone #13. If I'm adding it up correctly, about $200M paid out prior to that first demonstration flight.
We made money off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program, but it was 100% a subsidy.
I just take issue with pretending they aren't subsidies, and incorrect assertions NASA/government had little/nothing to do with their success.
I'm an enormous fan of SpaceX - you could probably have heard me scream a mile away when they caught the booster last month - and have a personal dislike for Musk since the Twitter acquisition and his hypocrisy there. Nothing in this thread from my end criticizes SpaceX for being subsidized. In fact, I'm all for it.
SpaceX absolutely dominates the commercial launch market. No one forces companies from abroad to buy launches from SpaceX - only their reliability and lower prices.
For fully subsidized organizations that nevertheless cannot compete on the commercial market, see Roskosmos and Arianespace.
That is not actually such a big deal when you realize they are just ferrying fuel on a reusable rocket. They're also doing it well in advance of the mission. There is a massive logistics chain making it possible to buy fuel on your road trip, this is similar.
> That's a clear regression from the Saturn V.
Not exactly, as the fuel provided in orbit by these other missions will allow a much larger payload to reach the Moon's surface and return.
StarShip can already deliver a similar payload to orbit as Saturn V (though a bit less due to reusability) - it is the extra mass to the moon which requires the refuelling.
Amortized over the number of launches it takes to get a single moonshot.
> StarShip can already deliver a similar payload to orbit as Saturn V
But Saturn V's purpose was not getting things to orbit. We have plenty of rockets capable of getting to orbit. And given that satellites have differing needs when it comes to orbital trajectories, it's unclear whether we even need that capability. By analogy, we've had jumbo jets for decades, but most air routes are not flying on jumbo jets, because the demand isn't there.
Yet it was used to put Skylab in orbit.
Saturn V was completely destroyed by each launch with only the payload surviving. It's not exactly an apples to apples comparison when you compare # launches.
Those 10-15 launches of StarShip will be a lot cheaper than a single Saturn V launch because at the end you still have all the StarShips you launched and all you used was some methane and oxygen.
Minus the maintenance for the wear-and-tear of expending (ahem) astronomical amounts of energy to propel the largest rocket ever built into space and then return through atmospheric re-entry ten or more times. Just because you have built a machine that might, at scale, be more economical than an expendable rocket does not mean that the economics will actually materialize such that it ever makes sense to realize that scale, especially if you dectuple your expected operating costs.
The way rocket staging works - each stage delivers the next stage to a predefined orbit / trajectory or energy level. It is not Saturn V that went to the moon, it just lofted a payload (final stage) into orbit that could perform a TLI.
This was the final stage of the Saturn V rocket for TLI (123,000 kg): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-IVB
In orbit refuelling with StarShip is a major innovation, meaning that we don't need to separate payloads into parts and assemble them on orbit. Instead we can refuel a reusable boost stage.
In any case, a reusable rocket architecture is way ahead of the Apollo model, not a regression.
By that measure has humanity ever even been to space?