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Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

As usual SpaceX gets less money for more effort. And the three companies known for performing badly get the second contract.

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One way to think about it is Starship is designed to be a generic space ship/lander like a 747, and SpaceX HLS contract is an agreement to build some modified 747s off the assembly line for this specific NASA purpose (along with tanker/etc that were already planned). Whereas the Blue Origin's proposal is more of a purpose-built lunar lander + tug vehicle.

So the pricing may actually make sense for all parties involved. It is interesting that BO plans to launch this on New Glenn but aren't going the Starship route of just landing New Glenn's upper stage on the Moon directly (even though with Jarvis it's intended to land on Earth?). But for NASA's purposes hedging on a more traditional lander might be preferable anyway.

But NASA gets a lot more future benefit from Starship tech, whereas the BO solution is completely useless for Mars, or really anything involving a larger crew. So the pricing makes not much sense. Of course this is an incredibly minor problem compared to the vast amounts of money that are wasted on SLS instead of being invested in private rockets.

This is kind of the issue here. NASA doesn't really have a long term strategy. The want to achieve X and then make everybody bid on X. Then Y and so on.

They don't say 'in 30 years we want to be able to do X, what are the steps we need to take'.

SpaceX has that approach luckily they can get some money from NASA to further that program.

SpaceX benefits from Elon Musk's obsession with becoming the first feudal lord on Mars. That helps with long-term focus.

thanks for this insightful comment

Perhaps relevant:

> According to Blue Origin's lunar lander head John Couluris, Blue Origin privately contributed 'well north' of the contract's $3.4 billion payout.

Also relevant and stated publicly by John, Blue Origin expects to cover more than 50% of the total cost.

To put this into perspective the DoD will happily invest north of $1 Trillion for a single fighter pilot development program (F-35) and I doubt Lockheed is willing to front any of that...

The DoD didn't pay Lockheed Martin anywhere near $1 trillion to develop the F-35. The $1 trillion plus figures you see are for total program lifecycle cost including a lot more than just development.

Back in 1996 when the DoD awarded initial JSF prototype development contracts to Boeing and Lockheed they actually prohibited those contractors from putting in their own additional funds. There were major concerns about maintaining a viable industrial base after the end of the Cold War and the DoD couldn't risk having any of their few remaining prime contractors fail.

> There were major concerns about maintaining a viable industrial base.

Maybe from the military industrial complex that was pulling in billions annually. Everyone else hoped that we would scale back after the insane global c*%k measuring contest that was the Cold War.

In retrospect, was the peace dividend a good idea? We got a europe that couldn't protect itself, the US playing bombs in the desert for 20 years and building anti-terrorism focused systems which will have no value against a near peer adversary, a navy that forgot how to build good boats, and a general refusal to learn the always relevant lesson of "build more ammo"

But the US found Boogeymen to continue spending $800B per year to attack. Isn't that the goal of the army?

We did scale back. Military spending was cut back in real (inflation adjusted) terms at the end of the Cold War, and bottomed out as a percentage of GDP in 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_dividend

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/mili...

After 2001, military spending went way up of to fund the Global War on Terror. Most of that was a total waste and failure. Now the GWOT is essentially over and funding priorities have shifted to containing expansionist regimes in China and Russia (and to a lesser degree Iran) as part of Cold War 2. It is certainly an option to adopt an isolationist stance and cut the military-industrial complex down to the minimum size necessary to defend the homeland, but you might not enjoy the results of letting hostile foreign powers dominate the rest of the globe.

The real spending went down a tiny amount despite the largest army of the world was no longer in existence and there was no credible threat what so ever.

I always love how people fall for the false military budgets, the war cost, the veteran health, the nuclear cost and a lot of other associated cost that is conveniently hid outside of the 'military budget' despite it very clearly should be in the same bucket.

> It is certainly an option to adopt an isolationist stance and cut the military-industrial complex down

Ah the old 'anybody that doesn't believe absurd amount of military spending is an isolationist trope'. Never stops getting old that one.

How much should we cut the military budget? Please give a specific number and show your work.

We all understand that there is a huge amount of waste. But in practice it seems to be difficult to cut that waste without losing essential capabilities.

It's redundancy, not waste, in the majority of cases. Look at what's happened to the Russian army to see what happens when there's no redundancy built-in to your logistics and supply chain, redundancy is essential to the capability of US military might.

> There were major concerns about maintaining a viable industrial base

Or everyone took the money and ignored what Present Eisenhower had to say.

This is what happens when multiple influences combine to get the system completely off the rails. It is a worst-case, lowest common denominator perspective that would completely destroy society were it applied everywhere. There’s no reason to use it as a productive reference point.

I think your point is fair, but the point I'm making is that we should applaud when private industry is willing to shoulder a large proportion of the risk (vs. the traditional externalize risk, internalized profit).

Not a bad way for NASA to generate revenue. License its brand to space manufacturers, who privately fund say, microgravity single-crystal silicon wafer fabs ;)

SpaceX did the same thing with Starship. I think this is why Dynetics didn’t win, tho. They couldn’t self-fund.

Starship development is projected to cost 2 billion this year alone, and they have a lot left to do (developing the HLS upper stage variant, orbital refueling) so it seems likely that SpaceX will lose money on this.

Yes, but keep in mind that Starship is mostly going to be used for launching Starship satellites in the early years, and that is super valuable to SpaceX. Falcon 9 is super cheap and has a low marginal cost to SpaceX, but to launch the full sized Gen2 Starlink system would cost ~$100 billion extra if done on Falcon 9 vs Starship (and that’s just initial launch… the constellation would need refreshing on a 5-10 year basis), so Starship is worth about $100 billion to the Starlink program alone. Refueling will also be helpful for launching commercial satellites to geosynchronous orbit, for crewed missions like Dear Moon, etc.

This is why SpaceX doesn’t mind co-investing on Starship.

The Lunar contract was never meant to pay the whole development. Starship is not a dedicated lunar architecture for NASA. NASA does not finance most of Starship development, but rather a variant of the upper stage for lunar landing.

So yes, SpaceX will 'lose' money but they will have a very versatile rocket that can use for everything.

Obviously the second choice is going to be a worse deal, otherwise it would have been the first choice instead. I agree it does seem kinda backwards that SpaceX gets paid less for a better proposal, but it's kind of a natural consequence of how the bidding and selection process works.

You could maybe run a Vickrey auction style auction.

Wait why is that necessary?

Obviously the second-lowest bidder will have a higher price than the lowest bidder. Arguably a second-price policy would be fair in this case but it may not be legal for NASA to award any more money than necessary.

Its not that obvious.

It all depends on how you do the selection and how you value the selection.

SpaceX will have a huge payload capability that NASA didn't bid for. And therefore SpaceX gets no money for it.

This is just how NASA choose to do this. They could have instead award contracts sized based on the capability both long and short term a projects add to NASA plans.

They made a second bidding round where SpaceX wasn't allowed to bid because they already have contracts for earlier Artemis missions.

SpaceX didn't compete for this contract

Correct, but its part of a larger 'program' that NASA is conducting. And how and when how much of that money gets award to whom is very much to be questioned.

What are the differences between the HLS and SLD contracts?

Correct. SpaceX already has a contract for a lunar lander.

If I was in charge of NASA/goverment spend, I would have done the same.

Support successful companies at a lower level. Encourage competitors. Cannot have just one option - especially with an owner as fickle as Musk.

Musk is so fickel, he has been the CEO of a company for 20 years with a laser focus on a single goal. So fickel.

Also, you can't support companies on 'a lower level' if you want to do thing like land on the moon.

The question is how could NASA budget most effectively used to turn humanity into an advanced space flight spices.

The way NASA evaluated and financed these contracts is very questionable if those are the goals they had. But unfortunately their contracting is and was very restricted on a set of very particular minimum requirements. No extra money for over-achieving, even if over-achieving would have been incredibly useful.

P.S: And btw, with SpaceX they are trusting a real proven space company that has man costumers, lots of revenue and so on. BlueOrigin is just a Bezos hobby project that literally depends on multiple billions a year on Bezos private money, they have basically no revenue and want have for years.

Fickle.

The man has been flirting with antisemitism and that was just last week (I'm not Jewish btw, so this isn't personal). I cite that as an example and not one of many reasons I have to despise the current incarnation of the man.

Just because NASA is his cash cow, doesn't mean they should trust him as far as they could throw him. Alternatives are required.

The man has done incredible things, supported by an incredible team, but looking on from the outside ... he's just one blood sugar spike from screwing the whole thing up.

Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are all but fickle.

Edit: And their Dragon capsule. SpaceX has been a very reliable partner for NASA. Don't believe the anti Musk sentiments spread by far-left journalists.

Far left journalists? What?

Really? The man has been flirting with antisemitism and that was just last week (I'm not Jewish btw, so this isn't personal). I cite that as an example and not one of many reasons I have to despise the current incarnation of the man.

Just because NASA is his cash cow, doesn't mean they should trust him as far as they could throw him.

The man has done incredible things, supported by an incredible team, but looking on from the outside ... he's just one blood sugar spike from screwing the whole thing up.

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