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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

Also the COTS award was delivery-based. They didn't get paid unless/until they delivered a working rocket. Had SpaceX failed on their first 4 attempts, which was paid for almost entirely with Musk's initial investment, then they wouldn't have seen enough of that COTS contract award.

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COTS wasn't delivery-based, they got most of the funding in the concept phase, way before a working rocket.

According to Mike Griffin who gave them the money,

  Substantial amounts of money, hundreds of millions of dollars, are being provided to the private companies. If SpaceX continues on along its current path, it will have received approximately $1.2 billion in government money from the collective programs. I’m rounding, but with this recent $400-plus million award under CCiCap [Commercial Crew integrated Capability], that brings the total SpaceX funding to something around $1.2 billion, maybe a little more.
  That’s—I will only say in my view—excessive, especially since in testimony last year the SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, indicated that the private funding involved was not more than $200 million. $100 million of his own money that he had brought in from a prior enterprise, and then he alluded to the fact—I’m trying to recall the testimony on an ad hoc basis, but the point is that there’s less than $200 million of private capital in SpaceX and $1.2 billion of government capital.

https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/hist...

(Michael Griffin worked closely with Elon before SpaceX was founded at the Mars Society and worked on Brilliant Pebbles and DC-X which the Falcon 9 was based upon)

Given all that government money, it was a low risk private investment for Elon.

The government contracts wasn’t free front loaded money, it was a maximum possible fee for services rendered. And frankly the R&D NASA paid for was largely stuff like the capacity to dock with the ISS and deliver cargo which was only relevant to them

Fix cost government contracts can look really awesome when they work out, but they are not a 1:1 equivalent to private funding. Essentially what you need to look into is what percentage of that money was profit and assuming say a ~20% profit margin it works out to something like 200 million from the government and 200 million from private investments.

You can dig into the specifics but docking with the ISS involves stuff like the: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Berthing_Mechanism

Out of curiosity, I read the COTS Space Act Agreement. It's a crazy good deal for SpaceX. They got their first $200 million just for doing presentations to the government and writing down requirements. This effectively front-loads funding because doing the qualifying milestones 1-12 are cheap (PowerPoint), yet $200M is certainly enough to actually build and launch an entire rocket.

See APPENDIX 2, milestones 1-12: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/189228main_setc_nnj...

As the sibling comment mentions, these were not front-loaded contracts. There were some initial payments made for Falcon-9 feasibility studies and stuff related to ISS rendezvous and docking. It basically paid for spinning up a small team of engineers to work on those issues specifically. But the actual rocket development was 90% paid for by Musk, and no more than 10% paid for by early customers like Malaysia and the Air Force Academy. By the time of the 4th Falcon 1 launch they were out of money, and the COTS award was entirely inaccessible to them unless they managed to make it to orbit, which they did.

I remember this quite well--I was at NASA at the time of this contract award. It is also written up in the book Liftoff if you want to see for yourself.

That's simply incorrect, see the COTS Space Act Agreement above. Those "initial payments" to SpaceX totalled $200M just to do presentations (more than double what Elon's total investment ever was).

The book Liftoff is mostly Eric Berger regurgitating an origin story Elon told him, not reality.

Those presentations required actual trade studies which take significant work to prepare. It’s not a matter of just showing up and winging a PowerPoint presentation, lol. By that metric a PhD is just a PowerPoint presentation.

They were weeks away from not making payroll before they received customer down payments and bridge financing following the successful launch of Falcon 1.

This is all covered in Liftoff. It’s a good book; I recommend reading it.

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