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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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To be fair, SpaceX cost of 50-60 million per launch is almost a 10x drop in price, ULA is around 400-500 million per rocket. And since they have next to no competition on price, they have no incentive to lower it. It’s just business.
And don’t bring the broken vehicle the shuttle turned out to be into this. A great vehicle on paper, but with to many cooks. The shuttle era gave us the ISS, but is cost us almost all activity outside of LEO.
Yeah, I agree with all of their points except for SpaceX, which has been an unequivocal success that doesn't deserve to be painted with the same brush Elon is. They revolutionized space flight, broke into the national security launch industry that was entirely captured by the United Launch alliance, and stand to obsolete the (93 billion dollar!) Space Launch System the moment the Starship is approved for commercial launches.
Dozens of Falcon 9's exploded while testing them and especially while attempting to land and reuse boosters, so the Starship failure was all but expected. I hate Elon Musk too, but SpaceX is arguably the most successful aerospace company at the moment. Were NASA allowed full control of their money, I think it'd be better, but as it is the viability of many of their future projects hinges on SpaceX.
SpaceX becomes NASA’s second-largest vendor, surpassing Boeing
NASA obligated $2.04 billion to SpaceX in fiscal year 2022.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/spacex-becomes-nasas-second-largest-vendor-surpassing-boeing/
SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are about to ruin stargazing for everyone
With the naked eye, stargazing from a dark-sky location allows you to see about 4,500 stars. From a typical suburban location, you can see about 400. Simulations show that from 52 degrees north (the latitude of both Saskatoon and London, U.K.) hundreds of Starlinks will be visible for a couple of hours after sunset and before sunrise (comparable to the number of visible stars) and dozens of these will be visible all night during the summer months.
https://theconversation.com/spacexs-starlink-satellites-are-about-to-ruin-stargazing-for-everyone-149516
Boondoggle
I'm a little confused, the first article glowingly supports my comment, while the second is somewhat neutral. Pointing out that Starlink satellites show up on long exposure astronomy images, while also pointing out that they've already launched a new gen testing surface dimming. Given that Starlink satellites only have an orbital lifespan of five years, there's a 0% chance of old Starlinks cluttering up the night sky. If they stop trying to improve the light reflection issue, that would be the time to be angry.
Also, boondoggles are a "wasteful or impractical project or activity often involving graft". The Space Launch System is a boondoggle, Starlink is dozens of times cheaper than laying cable, especially in rural areas. The alternative is to install radio towers for 5G coverage, which is something that developing nations have done to skip the expense of rolling out a unified power and data grid, but there are a lot of advantages to not having ground based hardware beyond the receiver.
After living in fairly rural areas for quite a while, LEO internet coverage is much nicer than watching billions get funneled the telecom giants to lay cable, only for them to just.. not lay cable.
you're right. I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with you, sorry to come off that way. I just think that any money from the public treasury given to an entity associated with Elon Musk is going in the wrong direction.
I understand that having lousy internet service sucks. I'd just prefer if no part of public spending whatsoever was going to an individual as malodorous as Elon Musk, who already has abundantly more than his fair share.
That's alright, I was just a little unsure about the mixed tone. As far as public funding goes, I'd much rather NASA funding go to SpaceX than Boeing, especially since unlike the cost plus development contracts that Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have gotten as the United Launch Alliance, SpaceX's payments are almost mostly contracted purchases. That package you linked pays for specific flights to the ISS, as well as paying for a propulsive lunar lander as part of Artemis Project.
I mean, I hate Elon as much as the next guy, but none of this money is going to him. Compared to pouring money into the telecoms or aerospace companies owned by less vocal billionaires, and then watching them go back for seconds without doing anything, I'd much rather see something productive come of public funding.
As an aside, Starlink has never received public funding, so this really isn't the project to complain about that. It was tentatively approved for 900 million to be awarded after delivering gigabit speeds to 99.7% of rural America, but the money would only have been awarded after completion, and the funding was pulled a month after Viasat (another satellite internet company) pressured the FCC, a decision that the FCC Commissioner publicly declaimed, which was kinda funny.