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It's also worth mentioning that this effectively outsources much of the risk to the taxpayer. Because the govt is self-insured, there is no insurance needed to limit losses. This is particularly important in risky business ventures, like aerospace.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing. The hybrid contractor/govt model has many upsides. SpaceX deserves a lot of credit for what they've done, but that context is important when gushing about when big gambles pay off. Those risks may never occur in a different paradigm.

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This is not really true. If SpaceX fails to perform, they don't get the money. They developed things like Falcon Heavy totally by themselves on spec. They pushed the government into fixed price contracts.

If SpaceX had failed to do the human launch, the cost would have been on SpaceX. As it is right now on Boeing.

>If SpaceX had failed to do the human launch, the cost would have been on SpaceX.

This is not how govt launches work. The payload (which is sometimes worth more than the rocket) is self-insured, meaning SpaceX is not responsible for eating that cost if it's lost. They are paid for the service (i.e., the ride) but have little to no cost regarding the cargo on govt launches.

This is true but that is the costumers responsibility if they want to insure their cargo or not.

Whatever method or rocket design the govenrment uses this is always an issue. Just flying on a government provided rocket doesn't change that cargo is at risk of being lost because it is not insured. In this case the risk to the tax payer is always at risk, it has nothing to do with SpaceX as such or the method of rocket procurement.

But the way the contracting model has been changed, the fact is, if SpaceX had not performed on their development and test campaign, they would have been stuck with the cost of most of that. Just as Being likely had to eat 600M+ because of their delays.

So in terms of developing capabilities for the government to use, this was an incredibly low risk and cost effective one.

>This is true but that is the costumers responsibility if they want to insure their cargo or not.

Yes, but this is somewhat missing the forest for the trees. The larger point is that relatively untested tech is going to be more expensive to insure because there is greater uncertainty. This makes it less economically viable until it proves itself to be reliable. Can a commercial company forego that and take on greater risk? Of course, but they aren't likely to because they are more risk-adverse for a variety of reasons. But because the govt is self-insured, the economic risk considerations related to that becomes a moot point. Meaning, the govt is in a unique position to take on risk to help an upstart like SpaceX. Note that 100% of Falcon Heavy contracts are govt (military/NASA).

>Just as Being likely had to eat 600M+ because of their delays.

But this is a different point. They are being penalized for contractual delays. This has the potential to increase risk because it incentivizes rushed development. We saw this with CST-100. The only reason it came to light is because the mission did not go as planned, and as a result NASA started to trigger additional oversight (which slows down development).

This is part of why the CCP can move faster than NASA. They don't have to build to the same requirements as an in-house NASA build. To an extent, all NASA cares about is the ride. That works well as long as things go as planned. As soon as they don't, NASA will start doing engaging more oversight. This has already happened with SpaceX, too. When some unfavorable things came to light, NASA wanted more govt in-person inspections/audits.

> Can a commercial company forego that and take on greater risk? Of course, but they aren't likely to because they are more risk-adverse for a variety of reasons.

What we are seeing is actually the commercial company are far more willing to risk these things the governments.

Companies like Astra (not that I think they are good) almost celebrates blowing up rockets.

> Note that 100% of Falcon Heavy contracts are govt (military/NASA).

This is true but Falcon Heavy was developed on spec. DoD didn't pay for its development unlike for almost all other rockets the military uses or used historically.

> This has the potential to increase risk because it incentivizes rushed development. We saw this with CST-100. The only reason it came to light is because the mission did not go as planned, and as a result NASA started to trigger additional oversight (which slows down development).

Yes but it rewards those that do development well and punishes those that don't. Of course oversight and verification is still a function government has to provide for the goods they buy.

> This is part of why the CCP can move faster than NASA. They don't have to build to the same requirements as an in-house NASA build.

CCP is learning the same lessens that NASA has. They have constantly rockets blowing up. They will have to also establish internal requirements that they follow.

And honesty, in terms of rocket development there isn't much evidence that China is better or faster from what I can see. We also don't know how much China is spending on these things.

> As soon as they don't, NASA will start doing engaging more oversight. This has already happened with SpaceX, too. When some unfavorable things came to light, NASA wanted more govt in-person inspections/audits.

Sure they will check everything and want to know about potential problems. The intensive structure however is still aliened better. The functions of the different parts are aligned better. NASA can tell contracts to change some process and have done so before but that doesn't imply automatically that these contracts will then drop in efficiency to the point NASA would have been at.

NASA own efforts like Ares 1 were so catastrophic that basically convinced large parts of NASA to not try that again. And NASA had a huge amount of success with the new model.

I think we pretty much agree on all this, particularly the effectiveness of the hybrid model.

>What we are seeing is actually the commercial company are far more willing to risk these things the governments.

My personal opinion is that that NASA (less so the military) are risk-adverse in terms of political risk. When there's little political risk, they are quite fine blowing stuff up to learn.

One thing that I've noticed is that commercial companies tend to take an engineering perspective and NASA tends to take a more fundamental science perspective. For example, when SpaceX had COPV issues, they were fine to just change the design and move on without understanding the root failure mechanism. NASA funded their own studies to try and understand what was going on. This is the direction I'd like to see the hybrid model continue.

I do think that contract changes can risk efficiency drops, though. Right now, CCP doesn't have to show a lot of their work. This may mean that their "efficiency" is a product of process gaps, rather than better processes. The CST-100 software validation was a prime example. It was a definite process gap that allowed them to get to launch quicker. If they were lucky and didn't run into issues, NASA would be none the wiser.

Space is a big waste of money. At best it's a zero sum game playing field between countries. Regular people will never benefit from space.

Commentators and pundits were fooled by GPS , Sat-TV and Internet and are extrapolating loads of quality of life which would come from space if only could be cheaper to send stuff up there.

The world is increasingly urbanised. Fiber and 5G for telecomms will always be cheaper in an urban setting compared with sat-internet.

Are you saying people won't want to travel and won't need internet outside of cities?

Space is already paying for itself.

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