this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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All comes down to economics at the end of the day. Public sector projects cost so much more than the private sector. Just look at the SLS cost vs Falcon heavy for example. And no part of SLS is reusable!
i'm not gonna lie: i have yet to hear a compelling argument for why anyone should care about this when the cost is being assumed by one of the richest and unambiguously the most powerful government in the world, and possibly in human history. i guess it's theoretically cool that Elon can build a thing for cheaper than the government can, but he has a profit incentive for doing that, which probably shouldn't be a variable influencing the construction of any vehicle that is highly liable to kill all its occupants if anything goes wrong.
I'm not even positive that part is really true. I mean the cost to the government is lower, but SpaceX is spending billions of dollars a year. We don't really know what starship or their lander costs them to make. All these Musk fans always talk about how much cheaper it is, but I'd like to see the numbers.
No one will really be able to answer that until Starship has commercial pricing. In the meantime, all we have is stray interviews and tweets from "the founder" about the engines being <$1m and the total investment being $2-3b so far, plus another $2b this year. They really need to start flying any payloads before I feel good about it, though.
For Falcon, NASA said years ago that it would have cost them at least an extra $1.5b to develop in-house, and we can see that the commercial pricing and cost/kg beats the rest of the market.
I guess what I would look at is is the ability to have more space projects ongoing at once. NASA has a limited budget every year, and while it is possible for Congress to allocate a much larger percentage to them, that currently isn’t the reality. So instead of NASA managing a space station which eats up a larger percentage of their budget, a private enterprise can operate a space station (yes, with a profit motive), which frees up NASA budget to perform more missions which have at the moment only scientific value, ex probes and landers to outer solar system planets.
i mean personally? that's a tradeoff i'll make every day. the idea of ceding our last great frontier to dipshits who want to privatize access to it and close it as a common good before we even mature into a space-faring civilization is at its face unfathomable and immoral to me. i would so rather NASA do less than give even an inch of our long-term space ambitions over to private corporations.
It what way do you think the privatization has been bad so far, or could become bad soon?
3 examples that I think are positive: Crew Dragon being commercial allowed the permanent ISS crew size to go up to 7 and allow private free-flyers and ISS missions. Starship has at least 3 tourist flights booked. Among the private space stations coming soon, VAST is making something like a space RV on their own.
I don't see how any of those private activities hurt in any way.
by being private in the first place. necessarily, private corporations do not have the interests of humanity in mind, they are obliged and gladly prioritize money. simply put: i will never trust a private corporation to do the right thing if it has a profit incentive to do otherwise, because corporations are not benevolent or altruistic entities and never will be. anything they do which can be ascribed as either label should be understood as either coincidental or an intentional and cynical play to keep scrutiny and regulation off of their back. these statements i think are especially applicable to space travel.
Frankly, neither do public endeavors. Public endeavors have the interests of the politicians first and foremost, and NASA funding is, for all practical purposes, another pork program intended to draw in votes in Florida and Texas, with any gains for humanity as a side effect. In the past 50 years this model has failed to deliver improved access to space. SpaceX has managed to reduce costs (and, by extension, increase accessibility) by a hundred fold. I know everyone hates Musk, and he is well and truly an asshole, but the current space renaissance is due to SpaceX.
"The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies." -Noam Chomsky