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.

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Workaccount2 5 months 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.

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pclmulqdq 5 months 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.

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vardump 5 months 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.

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pclmulqdq 5 months 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.

	▲	5 months ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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ericd 5 months 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.

	▲	Alex-Programs 5 months ago \| parent [-]
		It hasn't been disbursed yet (entirely). They get rewards for certain accomplishments.