The taxpayer money is for r&d. We should be very tolerant of failure. Aggressively testing with real hardware is a key part of how we learn to make a more robust systems. Fear of failure and waste will slow down progress.
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.
The taxpayer money is for r&d. We should be very tolerant of failure. Aggressively testing with real hardware is a key part of how we learn to make a more robust systems. Fear of failure and waste will slow down progress.
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.
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.
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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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.
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Starship program is funded in part by NASA as part of Artemis program. So some of this money is ours.