| ▲ | ericd 15 hours ago |
| They're blowing up their own money, unless you still count it as being the taxpayer's after the government pays them for launch services. |
|
| ▲ | pclmulqdq 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| R&D for starship has a several-billion-dollar NASA grant. Something like 30-50% of the money being blown up on this program is taxpayer money. |
| |
| ▲ | Workaccount2 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The savings Spacex has promise of delivering to NASA make every dollar given to them probably an easy 2x-3x ROI. Without Spacex, the typical cohort of gov contractors would have been happy bleeding NASA dry with one time use rockets that have 10x the launch cost and carry 1/4 the cargo. | | |
| ▲ | pclmulqdq 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sorry, Artemis carried more than one banana and actually made it to orbit. SpaceX has not provided any ROI yet. You can't compare the (very optimistic) promises of SpaceX against the actual returns of the rest of the industry. | | |
| ▲ | vardump 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Zero ROI? Isn’t SpaceX the largest launch provider in the world and for the U.S. government? Many times than the rest of the U.S. space industry combined. | | |
| ▲ | pclmulqdq 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | *Starship has zero ROI and has sucked up a lot of federal funds. Falcon 9 has had plenty of "ROI" but it wasn't really federally funded. Let's not get carried away though about "more than the entire US space industry combined," though. | | |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | ericd 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Fair. I think that was for HLS rather than the launch systems, but I guess if it’s already been disbursed, it’s probably all commingled. But that still means it’s not just taxpayer money, it’s mostly theirs. They’ve been raising equity rounds this whole time. | | |
|
|
| ▲ | drillsteps5 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Starship program is funded in part by NASA as part of Artemis program. So some of this money is ours. |
| |
