Comment by askl
Comment by askl 16 hours ago
It's just taxpayer money they're blowing up, so it doesn't really matter.
Comment by askl 16 hours ago
It's just taxpayer money they're blowing up, so it doesn't really matter.
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.
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.
It hasn't been disbursed yet (entirely). They get rewards for certain accomplishments.
Starship program is funded in part by NASA as part of Artemis program. So some of this money is ours.
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.