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Comment by TheAlchemist | Hacker News Reader

That's OK if it's the government paying for it.

Mechazilla makes for a nice show, but Starship was supposed to be landing on the Moon by now.

Starship development has been funded mostly by SpaceX, not by the US government. SpaceX did win a contract for the Human Landing System, but the payouts are contingent on certain milestones, such as demonstrating in-orbit refueling. Also much of that funding goes towards developing the lunar lander version of Starship, not the Starlink version that SpaceX has been testing with. If they meet all the milestones, SpaceX could be awarded $4.4 billion for the Starship HLS program, most of which would be for crew-rated lunar landers.[1] SpaceX has already spent over $5 billion of their own money on Starship, so even the largest payout wouldn't cause the majority of the funding to be from the government.

For comparison, NASA's SLS has cost $32 billion in 2024 dollars and has an annual cost of $2.6 billion. They launched one unmanned mission in 2022, and plan to launch again no earlier than 2026.

1. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_80MSFC20C0034_800...

They also make $3B in profit every year so they generate a huge amount of tax revenue and will continue to for a very long time with Falcon and Starlink.

It's nice of you to assume they pay a "fair" tax rate but based on Tesla I don't see that happening: https://itep.org/tesla-reported-zero-federal-income-tax-in-2...

I'm not sure if deferred losses counts as 'unfair' or not, they exist in Canada and other western countries too. Employees, vendors, capital gains, property taxes, fees, etc generate plenty of tax revenue regardless of federal corporate tax rate. It's basically impossible for an $8 billion a year revenue business to not result in large amount of tax revenue for the various branches of gov.

Sure, but I guess what i'm implying is that some companies and business tycoons will do everything in their hand to pay as little tax as possible, and I'm pretty sure Musk is one of those people.

And yes, most companies will try to minimize taxes (shareholder obligations and all that), but I do think some use much more aggressive tactics than others and will use every loophole and every accounting trick possible.

I'm sure they're still deploying years of loss carry-forwards. Nothing wrong with that, but I doubt they're generating tax revenue yet.

That'll eventually change of course, and they'll be the best space game in town.

The government isn’t paying for this. SpaceX’s Starship contracts pay out at various milestones. This won’t have checked any new boxes.

If government wasn't paying for this, SpaceX would never be able to develop Starship. It can only afford it thanks to NASA's contract.

This flight won't check any boxes as you said, but that doesn't change the fact that the program is mostly financed by the government.

That’s fine, but every failure that doesn’t check a new milestone off is money out of their profits. I’m ok with that; we’ve done very well out of the Falcon 9 contracts.

(I suspect they’re making quite a bit on F9 to put into Starship, too.)

Unclear unless you have access to SpaceX accounts.

The Starship lunar lander program is 2.8 Billion into a 4.4 billion dollar contract [1]

SpaceX has also raised 8 billion in private equity funding since the Lunar contract was awarded in 2020. [2]

SpaceX estimated Launch revenue in 2024 was 4+ billion, and Starlink revenue estimated at 8+ billion. It has a separate 3 billion dollar contract to support the ISS.

Meanwhile, NASA is into SLS + Orion or 50 Billion so far [3]

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_80MSFC20C0034_800...

https://tracxn.com/d/companies/spacex/__UIpPfXSDe2O53VUbJNlN...

https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion

For anyone interested, SpaceX has receives tens of billions in government contracts.

"SpaceX: Provides launch services to the DoD, including the launch of classified satellites and other payloads. SpaceX's CEO Gwynne Shotwell has said the company has about $22 billion in government contracts. The vast majority of that, about $15 billion, is derived from NASA."

"SpaceX's biggest Pentagon contracts include the $733 million National Security Space Launch contract awarded in October to lift satellites into orbit. The company has been tapped for more Pentagon launch contracts potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars more."

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/elon-musks-us-department-de...

For comparison, SpaceX has raised 11B in private funding since 2012: https://tracxn.com/d/companies/spacex/__UIpPfXSDe2O53VUbJNlN...

That's wildly different from what's being discussed here. SpaceX gets paid to launch satellites by the government exactly the same way any other customer would pay to launch satellites. It's not charity, it's payment for services rendered, and SpaceX won those contracts by being cheaper than the competition.

The total contract for the development of the SpaceX lunar lander is $2.9 billion which includes the cost of the actual crewed mission to the moon. For reference, each artemis launch is $4.1 billion not including development cost.

Yes, I'm in agreement with you. Just stating the values of the government contracts they received and the private investments.

Shotwell is COO. Musk is CEO of SpaceX.

Isn't the Moon landing scheduled for late 2026? Still an absurdly unrealistic timeline even if everything had gone perfectly so far, but still.

Even the Sep 2025 mission around the Moon seems unrealistic TBH

As of December, the earliest mission date is 2027:

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-shares-orion-heat-shi...

> For the Artemis II crewed test flight, engineers will continue to prepare Orion with the heat shield already attached to the capsule. The agency also announced it is now targeting April 2026 for Artemis II and mid-2027 for Artemis III. The updated mission timelines also reflect time to address the Orion environmental control and life support systems.

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