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Comment by jojobas | Hacker News Reader

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If you think of a way to make that happen, I guess you should do it then.

Apparently a good start is promising to build $25,000 EVs, raising capital and tax subsidies stock value, and then bailing on the promise entirely. You might even be able to afford two or three submarines with that kind of money.

I don't understand this take. Are you saying it's in-principle impossible for them to accomplish these goals?

Not in principle, but it's by no means a small feat.

Raptor 3 is supposed to be way more heat-stressed than the RS-25 and hasn't reached the design pressure yet. Promising rapid reuse at this stage of development is very ambitious.

They haven't reached anywhere near the turnaround with the much less stressed Falcon's Merlin engines.

Rapid reuse of the Starship itself is even more ambitious.

That's what they said about landing a booster

The technology of rocket landing on their tails is decades old.

Turbopumped rocket engines working more than a few cycles of few minutes is radically more ambitious.

They have already flown the same f9 booster more than 20 times

they never disclosed the scope of inter-flight maintenance.

For all we know this booster could have engines swapped out for reconditioning, or outright disposal, every launch.

If you had spacex’s budget you could make all of these things happen

Didn't they already burn through their Starship development budget?

They're a private company funded personally by the richest man in the world. What makes you think there is such a thing as a "starship development budget" and that it's limited?

Musk's interplanetary delirium aside, HLS is the customer for Super Heavy/Starship. They've reported spending all of the NASA's 3 billion and delivered very little of contracted capability so far.

SpaceX filings show $3.8B of funding from various mostly undisclosed investors, Musk's own stake can't exceed that can it?

The richest man wouldn't be so rich if he didn't watch his money.

> They've reported spending all of the NASA's 3 billion and delivered very little of contracted capability so far.

This is not 'reported'. This is just something somebody who doesn't like Musk made up and is successfully spreading it on social media. I have read this claim 100s of time in ever forum, I don't know where this came from.

The facts are literally out-there, but nobody cares. You can literally look up the contract on the official government website.

The payment for HLS has about 40-50 milestones, each gives a part of the money. SpaceX has completed like 25 of them. They have received 2.x billion $ so far. If they finish everything they will get like 3.4 billion $.

And its a fixed price contract, how much money they already spend is completely irrelevant for the government, unless SpaceX might go bankrupt, and they clearly aren't.

SpaceX got exactly as much money as specified in the contract for how far the development has come. This is a far better method for government to pay contractors then what NASA usually does.

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