The guys who've blown up a billion dollars of tax payer money because rather than carefully design it to work the first time, they slap something together and let it fail to 'iterate'? It sounds like it's same guys working at both companies.
I'm not sure if SpaceX's approach to development is a problem. We don't have to like it, but they develop faster and cheaper than the competition... and as proven by Falcon 9, Dragon, etc, it works. The competitors designing it "carefully" are often slow and still have failures[0] while costing more.
I'm not going to say that the SpaceX approach doesn't have disadvantages or that everyone should use it because I don't believe that, but it works for them, even if you get to see more failures (and I understand that many have a fear of public failure, but not everyone is like that).
Their money comes from the same sources as the other space companies: public and private investment/contracts. If a different company takes twice as long and charges twice as much for the service and SpaceX does it faster while charging less for the same service, then if I was a tax payer, I wouldn't care much about the way they develop and test their rockets.
It's important to not allow our views about Musk to cloud our view about what some of his companies are doing. Cybertruck seems to be a bad product. Falcon 9, Starlink, etc, are good products. It is what it is.
Loath as I am to say, but the SLS has a program cost over $20 billion and has launched only once to date (it did work, to be fair). Every single one they launch will be a one-way trip, so it's going to be a long time, if ever, until they can even get the per-launch cost down to under a billion.
Starship/Super Heavy "only" cost 5 billion as a program and also has 1 successful flight (and two Earth-shattering kabooms). So far, they're the economical ones by quite some margin.
It's not like Northrop Grumman and Boeing are known for being parsimonious with their money.
James Webb alone cost NASA $10 billion, with $4.5 billion in overruns. It took 30 years to design and construct. Carefully designing things to work the first time is expensive and slow; blowing up a billion dollars is the more effective use of money here.
luuurker|1 year ago
I'm not going to say that the SpaceX approach doesn't have disadvantages or that everyone should use it because I don't believe that, but it works for them, even if you get to see more failures (and I understand that many have a fear of public failure, but not everyone is like that).
Their money comes from the same sources as the other space companies: public and private investment/contracts. If a different company takes twice as long and charges twice as much for the service and SpaceX does it faster while charging less for the same service, then if I was a tax payer, I wouldn't care much about the way they develop and test their rockets.
It's important to not allow our views about Musk to cloud our view about what some of his companies are doing. Cybertruck seems to be a bad product. Falcon 9, Starlink, etc, are good products. It is what it is.
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[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/ula-continues-invest...
gravescale|1 year ago
Starship/Super Heavy "only" cost 5 billion as a program and also has 1 successful flight (and two Earth-shattering kabooms). So far, they're the economical ones by quite some margin.
It's not like Northrop Grumman and Boeing are known for being parsimonious with their money.
colordrops|1 year ago
ToValueFunfetti|1 year ago
mavhc|1 year ago
bmitc|1 year ago
arandomusername|1 year ago
Please enlighten us how they are designing the rockets wrongly.
piva00|1 year ago
Some US$ 18 billion came from tax payer though.
rpmisms|1 year ago