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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

> It funny, usually people on HN diss NASA et all hard for being those big, inept governkent agencies, with SpaceX being so so mich better because

Many of NASA’s problems aren’t the fault of NASA, they are the fault of Congress. NASA didn’t come up with SLS+Orion all by themselves, the high-level design was dictated to them by Congress and NASA was left with the job of fleshing out the details and making it all work somehow. SpaceX needs NASA as a customer and a source of valuable expertise, it just wants it freed from being forced by Congress to spend billions on super-inefficient projects such as SLS+Orion, when SpaceX has a solution which can do more for less (Starship+SuperHeavy) and is likely to be available soon (bureaucratic delays due to the FAA and environmental agencies such as the FWS being under-resourced being the current biggest obstacle to that)

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So SpaceX wants NASA to be able to spend all those billions with them instead of a competitor? Shroud business move, that says nothing about capabilities.

Just one question, what will be avaiable first, FalconHeavy and a fully certified Starship (which has to launch without blowing up for that), Tesla FSD or Tesla's humanoid robot?

Regarding SLS, they launched successfully last year and aim for a manned launch in 2024. SpaceX has to beat that timeline, assuming this whole thing being a race, which it isn't.

Falcon Heavy has been launching commercial, government, and military payloads successfully for years now. [1] I'd strongly encourage checking out their first successful test launch of it, from 5 years ago. [2] Skip to about 29 minutes in for the money shot. Still gives me goose bumps!

So let's compare the two! Falcon Heavy was developed with completely private funding, at a cost of ~$500 million. The prices of the launches are listed in Wiki. They start at $117 million, as NASA paid in 2023 to launch their Psyche craft. The SLS has been in development for more than a decade now, fully paid by the taxpayer, at a cost just about to break the $30 billion mark. The nominal cost per launch is still unknown but will almost certainly top a billion dollars. The last NASA administration gave an estimate of $800-$900 million per launch in 2019 dollars. And SLS cost estimates only go one way.

And what do you get for $30 billion, and then another billion per launch? Ideally up to almost twice the capacity of a Falcon Heavy. The reason people are so cool on the SLS is that it's already a very poor value against existing technologies. And will be completely obsolete by the time Starship comes to pass which should not only be able to launch for a fraction of the cost of Falcon Heavy (which is already a fraction of the cost of SLS), but also launch well over the ideal launch capacity of SLS.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Launches_and_payl...

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c

We do not have any reliable financials from SpaceX, just advertized launch costs and PR releases. SLS on the other hand has, as does e.g. Ariane-6, public budgets and a lot more bureaucracy.

For Starship to make things like SLS obsolete, it has to be available first. Until then, it is just pure speculation. Is SLS more expensive than Starship development wise? Yes. But it is not the goal of a government to be profitable, nor is it to hand technologocal monopolies to eratic billionaires. Supporting alternatives is always good, and it maintains know-how and technology at different companies, which is also a good thing.

> We do not have any reliable financials from SpaceX, just advertized launch costs and PR releases. SLS on the other hand has, as does e.g. Ariane-6, public budgets and a lot more bureaucracy.

We know how much SLS and Ariane 6 have spent, but that's not any kind of reliable indicator of how much they're going to cost.

> For Starship to make things like SLS obsolete, it has to be available first. Until then, it is just pure speculation.

Only if SLS is ever going to be available. If Starship is further along in development, that's pretty suggestive.

Starship's a red herring. The SLS is already so far behind the game (before even being finished) that it lacks any rational argument even against the Falcon Heavy, which has been in service for years. And nobody's being handed monopolies. Government space contracts have a competitive bidding process. If Boeing/Lockheed, Blue Origin, or any of the other less known aerospace startups can come up with something that can reasonably compete against half a decade old SpaceX tech then I'd love to see it as much as anybody else. But for now that's simply not happening, and just corruptly tossing tens of billions of dollars towards Boeing/Lockheed isn't bringing us any closer to that happening.

Assuming Starship succeeds, hopefully at that point other players will adopt the basic design, iterate and improve, then forcefully compete. I'm still surprised that, all these years after Falcon 9 obviously works, there isn't a "clone" on the market. (I am aware there are couple of small "new space" companies working on something similar.)

Agreed. I think you can even take it further than other new small space companies. Boeing and China would both absolutely love to replicate SpaceX's tech, and both have (relative to SpaceX) practically unlimited resources to do so, yet both are still nowhere near them yet, and not for lack of trying.

From an outsider's perspective it's quite difficult to understand what the big barrier is.

> But it is not the goal of a government to be profitable, nor is it to hand technologocal monopolies to eratic billionaires.

So instead it should award contracts - without any competition even - to big established aerospace firms such as Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and Aerojet? SpaceX, by contrast, won its most important NASA contracts (ISS cargo and crew, HLS) by open competition.

> Supporting alternatives is always good, and it maintains know-how and technology at different companies, which is also a good thing.

If NASA wanted to do that, they would have spread the SLS/Orion money around newer and more innovative players (not just SpaceX-Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Axiom, Relativity, etc), rather than giving billions to Boeing/Lockheed/Aerojet/etc to keep alive technologies from the 1970s. Of course, Congress wouldn’t let NASA do that

Shrewd business move?

> Just one question, what will be avaiable first, FalconHeavy and a fully certified Starship (which has to launch without blowing up for that), Tesla FSD or Tesla's humanoid robot?

In order: Falcon Heavy (because it's been around for years already), then I recon Starship, the robot, then FSD.

But this is on the pair of assumptions:

(1) that the robot will initially launch with a very limited role and set of environments it can work safely in — a lightweight mobile pick-and-place robot is much much easier than a fully general humanoid that you can drop into any role a real human would do and expect it to not accidentally dismember or decapitate itself or others.

(2) it only counts as "FSD" when they can ship the cars without including a steering wheel. If the current marketing of a nice-but-limited cruise control, lane changer, and occasional automatic break counts as "FSD", then it too is already out. (I would not count this myself).

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