>Shortly after the landing burn started, SN11 experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly. Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test.
I wonder how many failures SpaceX can fund before the project ends up in trouble.
I wonder how many failures SpaceX can fund before the project ends up in trouble.
[1] https://spacenews.com/spacex-adds-to-latest-funding-round/
Musk has been quite open about how starlink will need to go through a deep trough of low revenues and high expenses, before it can become self sustaining from the monthly subscription revenue of millions of customers.
I was under the impression that most of his personal wealth was in the form of Tesla stock.
At tiny interest rates (wouldn't be surprised if he gets even better private bank rates because they want in on his other business or IPO etc).
it's basically free money - until something goes wrong... especially in the crazy dynamic we seem to be in now where fast stock growth = more access to free money = faster stock growth cycle. until pop
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1359024384200101888?s=21
(it's just steel + engines, and since there's no human or customer component, there's much less process than around the commercial launches)
They are producing SN100ish by now. A while ago they said 2 million $, already cheap for such an engine. Target is more like 200k$.
So likely its between 1-2M. That would make it only about 6M per flight based on the engine.
The really costly phase is probably already done - the design work and early experiments.
Compared to what NASA is paying for the SLS engines (over $140 million each), it’s loose change.