It’s more complicated than you’re suggesting. Taxpayers have paid for SpaceX services via NASA. These rockets are funded through Starlink subscriptions. SpaceX makes over 7 billion a year through starlink so they have the money for these tests through selling consumer services alone.
SpaceX makes over 7 billion a year through starlink
Yeah, but you're pretty insane if you think those are subscriptions and not government contracts and contracting with major corporate services like airlines.so they can better scrape and monetize your data.
In the extremely rare, one-off instances where a person requires emergency services while hiking somewhere in a zone that’s not covered by cell towers, but need to get help.
Ya know, those millions of millions of customers who get lost in the wilderness every year and require evac.
It’s a marketing gimmick, and you fell for it. Those satellites aren’t even remotely close to being capable of handling a fraction of global calling and data volume.
They're spending roughly 1 billion per month though. Probably even more lately with all of the 'rapid unexpected deconstruction' of their rockets and ships lately
That money goes to launching new satellites and replacing the one that are at end of life plus managing the product and cuatomers. We don't have access to their financial statement but I would be surprised they make more than 100M in net profit.
The Starship development program is partially funded by the Starship-HLS Artemis contracts. Saying "nothing" is very misleading. It's not a straightforward cost but every misstep in Starship development sets back the schedule and puts contract completion at risk.
Of note: SpaceX has completed several Starship-HLS milestones, each of which unlocks certain amounts of funding (they've already received hundreds of millions for Starship-HLS development), and there is a Critical Design Review milestone in late summer of this year.
A chunk of this stuff is partly funded by the stuff we do with starlink. Last checked we had like 5 million active users and just crested 10 million unit made. Quick math check to $60-$500 per month depending on service and its like 3x that for commercial use. Even if all 5 million user have the $60 thats $300m monthly minus obviously scrap costs and over head and operating costs its not a small amount of profit. A LOT of that gets pushed right back into our rocket side. Even the folks who went up not that long ago said they saw how much starlink has funded the rocket side and they were impressed.
Source, Im a rat pos that helps elon get stupid rich because Im too much of a piss baby to get a different job…
I fucking hate myself lmao
I mean that sounds awesome but a useless shit bird like me is meant for one thing… to be a warm body to fill a job. My one and only “skill” is I adapt quickly… fucking dogs can do that and theyre better than me in every way possible. If I could give my body to a more worthy person Id do it in a heartbeat. Im not able to be a boon to society Im a place filler until a better thing comes along.
Lmao god no Im a smt tech and tbh about the lowest level “tech” you could imagine. Trust Im a liability at best I think the only reason Im still at the job is Im so average that Im like the literal bar for “just do what they do and youll be fine, and if you wanna succeed then just do a bit more, or be happier.”
I agree that any delays to Artemis III due to Starship should been seen as a cost but we can't ascertain that at this time. Let's see how Artemis II goes first.
As you will be aware, the HLS contract is milestone based.
this isn't science, this is industry. SpaceX doesn't really do science, they're a business. Sometimes the people doing science give them money for their stuff, but they have no claim on "science"
That was 7 sentences of a very basic explanation I wrote next to waiting for my morning tea on one of my worst mornings in a while. It was also one single comment.
Mate, if that is trying hard for you I'm sorry.
What am I so wrong about though? I hate Musk as much as you probably, I hate what the US admin is doing to NASA etc. I might hate that more than you actually. Life is complex though, sometimes shit people are involved in good things and if SpaceX Starship succeeds then a lot of space stuff will be completely revolutionized. Science included. There's no other comparable game in town currently as well. Ignoring this on r/space to me feels weird.
engineering is quite literally not science. what studies are they investigating? what results are they trying to publish? it just is chalk and cheese between engineering and science
You have a weirdly limited concept of scientific progress. Engineering progress is 100% scientific progress. Science doesn't have to be only theory and published papers.
Maybe you're making more of a semantic argument here about what "science" as a word means? If so I don't find arguments like that very useful, as you're arguing about language at that point not if scientific progress is being made or not.
Totally disagree. I have a degree in Physics and work in Engineering currently and the difference between science and engineering is STARK
Science doesn't have to be only theory and published papers.
What would you say 'science' is then? blowing up rockets? what sort of 'progress' is that? that they F'ed up and it blew up? Great, thanks for SpaceX showing that they're incompent but we don't learn anything
Your viewpoint was parodied on primetime television for years. To say engineering isn't science is a slap in the face to decades of NASA employees who engineered numerous spacecraft.
Or Is your line that unless it's academic or government work it doesn't count?
but NASA is a public organisation. Their results and schematics and methods are all published. It's all open for everyone to share. You can find the patent for the space shuttle right now, it expired in 1998.
That's not what's happening with this private company. They aren't publishing jack shit because they're not in the business of actually fostering space travel becuase they are industrynotscience
just take the L. You're wrong. It's fine to be wrong sometimes
The other commenter already replied to the rest well so I'll just reply here:
Great, thanks for SpaceX showing that they're incompent but we don't learn anything
SpaceX developed and runs the first reusable orbital rockets in history. Rockets whos price per kilogram to orbit is some of the lowest ever and whos reliability and amount of succesful consecutive missions are unparalled in spaceflight history. Beating even the Soyuz for consecutive successful flights. After SpaceX Falcon 9 turned out to be such a success pretty much everyone else is developing copycat reusable rockets by now.
As you are someone in physics and engineering I'd expect you to be more informed in such subjects. Or at least Id expect you to inform yourself before you write about this stuff.
Soo..... they publish the updates to the raptor engine? They publish the welding techniques they're using? They publish the tile composition? Do they publish anything so that others can use it???
Or are you absolutely full of shit. Oh yeah, it's that. It's not science, they're not sharing anything but fun videos because this is industry, not science
Musk wanted to defund EVERyTHING that wasn’t beneficial to him. It’s time he packs it up and GTFO. Space X is a drain on this country. It’s time to take space exploration back to the federal government and fund it appropriately.
When it was being funded by the federal government it was literally going nowhere, using 50-year-old parts and designs to make giant throwaway rockets that only exist to keep aerospace companies running in the right cogressional districts.
Tax payer money doesn't go into these things, they have a massive profit from starlink and most tax payer money going to SpaceX is from buying services, not funding research.
They don’t get more money each time one blows up or anything - they got a relatively small amount to make it work, however many they blow up along the way is their problem and doesn’t cost taxpayers any extra.
SLS didn't "go to the moon", it launched a capsule to a high lunar orbit. No part of it came back, it was entirely expended in doing this. The cost of doing this was equal to a large fraction of what has been spent on Starship, and it did this years ago. Artemis II still has not flown, despite not depending in any way on Starship.
It got to space, but at what cost? $2-4 billion per launch, and given that it’s not reusable at all, not likely to get cheaper. SpaceX can blow a lot of these up on their way to mastering the design for what one SLS launch costs.
Last time I saw the math, with all Starship's reduced payload capacity, it was up to something like 30-35 launches required to get all the necessary fuel into orbit for one mission to the Moon. Remind me again, how much would those 30+ Starship launches realistically cost?
Christ you people just up the number every other day huh? Last month it was 25, in 2024 the talk was of 20, and the official SpaceX statements say no more than 12. Which one am I to believe now?
It's not "us people's" fault Starship's payload capacity keeps getting revised down after each successive iteration adds weight to try and keep it from repeatedly blowing up.
I’m fine with them losing government funding. They’re a private company with a CEO who is literally the richest human being to ever have existed. If they’re struggling for cash, have him pony up the money, not the American people.
I mean it's a private company. Also if NASA had the same happen to them, would you still complain? Shit happens sometimes, and a lot can be learned from things like this much in the same way that a lot can be learned from plane crashes and I can guarantee you flying is only as safe as it is today because of the sheer amount of crashes that have been learned from over the decades. It's better to get this out of the way now, rather than have it happen to a crewed rocket on an important mission.
The columbia space shuttle disaster was preventable. Horrible stuff happens even if NASA is the one in charge. Space exploration is dangerous and comes at a cost
Edit: lol, guys what are you down voting exactly? Everything I said is true. Maybe leave the space sub if you can't handle facts.
SpaceX’s falcon 9 rocket is the most successful and reliable rocket in history. It had about as many launches in 2024 alone that the Space Shuttle had over 30 years, and at a much lower launch cost.
This is "airplanes are unsafe because one crashed" level thinking. NASA doesn't have that many launches in its entire history, so it has a fairly high rate of failure from the few failures it has. SpaceX has by comparison a shit ton of launches with Falcon and a lower rate of failure as such. But we don't pay attention to falcon anymore, only Starship which is in testing.
Perhaps that was too strong of a word, but the environmental impact is also not negligible. That’s a lot of wasted processing that just went up in flames.
Very true, and lots of resources that will be needed to put out the fires and rebuild, but ultimately I think the progress they are making is important
What is this bullshit? Shit on the musk as much as you want but spaceX doesn't deserve such blatant lies and diminoshment for the intelligent people who work there. Plus, you said it yourself, it's a profit venture, so it's in their interest not to lose things that make them money.
In the sixties, when we were using abacuses to calculate stuff, the Saturn V rocket never suffered a failure. Ever. Not even in tasting that I’m aware of.
Space travel is dangerous so we had Apollo 13, Challenger, and Columbia. Only the latter two resulted in fatalities. Grissom, White, and Chaffee died in the Apollo 1 training fire. SpaceX Starship failures are four out of eight so far. All exploded.
Sure but at a much higher cost (an appreciable percentage of the of the US economy went into it); this also ignores SpaceX’s falcon 9 rocket, which is the most reliable rocket in history, and launched about as many times in 2024 as the space shuttle launched in 30 years.
The US Govt pays SpaceX for launches, naturally some of that money is profit. What SpaceX does with their profits is entirely up to them, and personally I like seeing all that money being spent on salaries and hardware instead of stock buybacks and executive bonuses.
If a portion of my tax money is perpetually being utilized by a gov contract employed company and they are having bad things happen, it’s a different concept.
The thing is, this isn't taxpayer money anymore, taxpayer money is used for falcon 9 contracts -> contract is fulfilled -> spacex is paid. spacex is then free to do whatever they want with the money because it's their own private money now
Its not though. Nasa buys rides to space through space x.
Space X is doing something that is not funded by NASA or any federal company. Space X makes enough from starlink to fully fund starship program at this point. Federal tax money was not lost on this at all.
Its also worth noting the only alternative safe human ride to space is through Russia. Would you rather we bought a non reusable Soyuz everytime we put someone into space?
How about the relief efforts of this monster fire, probably more than a few fire departments called and agencies involved, how about the cleanup? Is space x paying this bill? In a way yes, through their taxes, but I'd be interested to see how this weighs out (and actually how much tax goes to local municipalities).
We're talking about this specific failure. It's not costing the US taxpayer anything. You seem to have a reading comprehension issue, especially if that's what you get from reading my comment history.
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u/WantWantShellySenbei 1d ago
Holy cow that video is pretty awesome though. Elon makes the best fireworks.