SLS/Orion is not only not a “spaceship to everywhere,” it’s really is a spaceship to nowhere.
I really don’t understand what he’s thinking.
37 thoughts on “No, Mr. Tito”
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SLS/Orion is not only not a “spaceship to everywhere,” it’s really is a spaceship to nowhere.
I really don’t understand what he’s thinking.
Comments are closed.
Really? Ya don’t see that he equates US human spaceflight with NASA and so thinks his only option is to champion whatever they’re doing? It’s a pretty common affliction, I thought you’d be used to it by now.
Elon suffers from it too. “At first I thought that if we can do a small philanthropic mission to Mars – something that would get the public excited, then that would result in a bigger budget for NASA and then we could do exciting things and get the ball rolling again.” It’s the reason why he takes every opportunity to talk about how great NASA has been to SpaceX and why they’ve taken little to no interest in “space tourism”. It’s also the reason why I think people are delusional if they think Elon is ever going to “go it alone” to Mars, but I expect he’ll be sitting in front of Congress begging for money, just like Tito was, and people will still be saying “if he doesn’t get it he’ll go it alone”.
If you’re looking for that guy, you’re looking for is Bob Bigelow. He comes with other “flaws”, like actual business sense.
I think another reason Elon says NASA has been helpfu is that a) it’s true and b) he hasn’t yet nailed down the commercial crew contract.
SpaceX gets the bulk of their revenues from the Government.
DARPA/USAF gave them somewhere between $50-200 Million to build Falcon I.
NASA has given SpaceX $250 Million for COTS, and then a billion for CRS and
will probably give them $2 Billion for the next big supply contract.
SpaceX’s commercial clients have been much smaller dollars.
Show us the numbers, Douchenozzle.
DARPA/USAF “gave” no money for Falcon 1 development. Falcon 1 was developed entirely on private money. DOD purchased the first 2 Falcon 1 flights.
NASA has “given” no money to SpaceX. SpaceX has earned developmental money from NASA by meeting goals NASA set. SpaceX has also earned money from NASA by providing a service, IE delivery of payloads to ISS.
That you have to make your “points” by making misleading statements (IE lying) proves the weakness of your position.
it’s a different model from standard government contracting, that OSC used on
the Pegasus, but, it’s depending heavily on the taxpayers being patient and generous.
That’s just nuts, sir. Conventional cost-plus contracting is what requires the taxpayers to be “patient and generous” as you put it. A paradigmatic example is the F-35 program. It’s years overdue and may even have per-unit costs exceeding those of the already completed F-22 program – which was no bargain either. On the space side, we have the dreadful example of the James Webb Space Telescope. It’s years late and 900% over budget.
Fixed-price, milestone-based contracting is not magically immune to delays either. SpaceX has, Lord knows, been beaten up severely by its non-fans for failing to make schedule targets early in COTS. But, unlike the cost-plus legacy aerospace companies, SpaceX derived no extra revenue from said delays. That’s the difference between paying for effort and paying for results.
It’s obvious you’re no fan of private enterprise. Why are you, then, seemingly so enamored of a corrupt and wasteful legacy system of contracting that is in the process of shaking itself to pieces like the Tacoma Narrows bridge from the un-damped positive feedback loops inherent in said system.
I doubt the marginal per unit costs of the F-35 will be higher than those of the F-22. However the price per unit with R&D accounted for is going to be larger little doubt about that. You can blame having three different airplane versions and rewriting all the software for these costs.
Heck anyone in software development knows that recoding any large codebase from scratch is a bad idea. If they had a large software code base written in Ada it would have been cheaper to train the developers in that language and modify it according to the new requirements than rewrite that entire codebase in C/C++. Ada is not that hard a language to learn in the first place. The mind boggles.
It’s interesting how some people see government paying for goods and services is no different than welfare.
It’s just government contracting….
There is a difference between the government buying goods or services and just giving money away with no exchange of goods or services like what happened with healthcare.gov.
Oh wait, there was a service provided. Obama’s friends got lots of money in exchange for all those campaign contributions. But Democrats want to keep the money out of politics because of corruption and what not. They could just stop being corrupt but that would be a bridge too far.
SpaceX gets the bulk of their revenues from the Government.
So far. Until last December one could have argued that essentially all of SpaceX’s revenues came from government: mostly the U.S> gov’t. but also the Malaysian gov’t. for launching RAZAKSAT on a Falcon 1 back in 2009, and whatever portion of the CASSIOPE mission of Sept. 2013 was provided by the Canadian gov’t. Starting in December 2013, SpaceX launched two entirely private-sector-paid comsat payloads to GTO. Depending upon how much of SpaceX’s planned launch manifest for 2014 actually gets off the pads by 12/31, SpaceX’s purely private-sector-paid revenues may increase to somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of total revenues. Breaking the 50% mark is at least an outside possibility for 2014 and pretty much a cinch bet for 2015. The idea that SpaceX has been, is now, and always shall be a creature dependent upon gov’t. contracting is simply nonsense.
DARPA/USAF gave them somewhere between $50-200 Million to build Falcon I.
Absurd fantasy. As noted by another commenter, DARPA merely purchased the first two Falcon 1 launches. At that time, nearly a decade ago, Falcon 1 launches were list priced in the $5 – $7 million range. Even supposing DARPA paid more, to cover extra gov’t. paperwork requirements or whatever, it seems highly improbable that DARPA paid more than $20 million for the two launches and I suspect the tab was, in fact, appreciably below this figure. Falcon 1, in any event, was already a real rocket, previously developed and component tested entirely with private capital by the time the DARPA deal was made.
By the way, as also noted previously by another commenter, not a dime of the DARPA money was “given” to SpaceX, as you state. SpaceX entered into a contract to supply services and DARPA paid for said services, including the two Falcon 1’s necessary to accomplish said services.
NASA has given SpaceX $250 Million for COTS, and then a billion for CRS and
will probably give them $2 Billion for the next big supply contract.
Again, NASA has never “given” a dime to SpaceX. It has paid for development work and launch services, respectively, in, first, the developmental COTS program, then the operational CRS program. The payments under COTS were actually more like $400 million than $250 million. SpaceX spent approximately $450 million in privately-supplied capital in pursuit of its COTS efforts along with the NASA-supplied milestone funds. Substantial privately-raised “skin in the game” was, in fact, a contractual requirement for participation in the COTS program. One early contractor (Rocketplane/Kistler) was dropped from the program for failure to perform in this regard.
SpaceX’s CRS contract is for 12 missions for $1.6 billion. It has already accomplished two of these and has a third ready to go whenever the Eastern Test Range gets its recent tracking radar issues sorted out. At least two more such missions , and possibly a third, are scheduled for launch in calendar 2014.
How much NASA pays (not “gives”) SpaceX for any follow-on CRS contract will depend upon how many missions NASA decides to purchase in a single contract and also what SpaceX’s CRS competitor Orbital Sciences is able to bid. Follow-on contracts that are competitively bid tend to trend down in price. Orbital’s current contract is for 8 missions for $1.9 billion, so they would have to come down quite a bit just to match SpaceX’s current contract price and probably more.
Whether Orbital can do this is problematical. The Russian-sourced engine they use for their Antares first stage is a surplus item, long out of production. They have enough in-hand to cover their current CRS contract, but covering a future contract using this engine looks very unlikely. Restarting production didn’t look feasible even before the whole Crimean invasion thing. If Russia elects to try the same trick with the remainder of Ukraine, Orbital may also lose access to Antares’s 1st-stage structure and tankage, as these are produced in Ukraine. Then there’s the separate problem of what Thales-Alenia in Italy might charge for another run of Cygnus modules, given that they are already making noises about shutting down production if they don’t get another order tout suite.
In contrast, SpaceX’s future supply chain seems assured as it is largely autarkic – barring a Russian invasion of Hawthorne, CA of course. Overall, SpaceX appears to have more room to maneuver on price for future NASA CRS RFQ’s than does Orbital. NASA, though, is unlikely to shut either company out of future contracts entirely. Having achieved a competitive CRS market, NASA will do what it can, within reason, to maintain it.
SpaceX’s commercial clients have been much smaller dollars.
This, of course, assumes that all of SpaceX’s previous, current and projected business with sovereign states is somehow not “commercial” in some way. I do not so concede your implicit categorization, but I’ll humor you on this for purposes of discussion. As noted above, the trend line of SpaceX’s revenue sources is decidedly in the purely private direction.
Over the next five years, I expect SpaceX to have roughly the same affect on the launch businesses of ILS and Arianespace that the Visigoths had on the “business” of Rome. Proton rockets will still launch Russian gov’t. payloads for the foreseeable future. Arianespace will do likewise for the ESA and European governments, but may collapse when the loss of their current purely private-sector portfolio of business goes to SpaceX. Even with the largest single current percentage share of such business, Arianespace is not even a break-even concern, requiring a large annual subsidy from the EU. Absent this segment of their current business, Arianespace will become an unsupportable white elephant which I don’t expect the EU to carry forever.
“The idea that SpaceX has been, is now, and always shall be a creature dependent upon gov’t. contracting is simply nonsense.”
Let’s see. Certainly, SpaceX is trying to belly up to the trough for EELV Launch Capability
dollars from USAF. That was the whole point of that spat between Mike Gass at ULA and
Elon Musk at the Senate. Elon wants a chunk of the ELC dollars.
It would be great if SpaceX starts snapping up launch business, but, they may end up with 33% from USAF, 33% from NASA and 33% from commercial launch.
At which point, SpaceX will suffer the same cost bloat that the Majors have.
SpaceX will suffer the same cost bloat that the Majors have.
That would certainly be a problem for SpaceX since it enters into Fixed Price contracts.
Do you have any more libel to share?
Of course Elon wants to launch more gov’t. payloads. He can do it a lot more cheaply than the incumbent monopoly supplier so it’s a win-win. Simple as that.
As for the percentages, I recommend a look at the SpaceX launch manifest. Their backlog is already dominated by private-sector customers. This is only likely to increase, percentage-wise. Remote sensing/imaging and even – though more speculatively – those vast constellations of LEO comsats that are 20 years or more overdue are beginning to expand the launch services business well beyond the established GEO comsat market, which SpaceX is already in the early stages of rolling up.
The USAF-DoD-NRO market looks good to Elon not because it is huge but because it will go on indefinitely. The future of NASA business is more problematical. But Elon, I believe, sees correctly that, while CRS and Commercial Crew. per se, are limited by the remaining lifespan of the ISS, they are means to the end of developing crew-to-LEO services that will have future purchasers in addition to NASA as they enable private LEO and cis-lunar facilties to be built in the post-ISS era.
The majors have cost bloat because they grew up in an era of cost-plus contracting that encouraged it. Current fiscal realities mean that this contracting model has a decidedly limited future life, even for defense systems. As Glenn Reynolds likes to quote the late Herb Stein, “When something can’t go on, it won’t.” The remaining majors will have to adapt or die. SpaceX has no bloat to shed and no real incentives to acquire any. Fixed-price, milestone-based development has been a model that has served SpaceX well. Their competitive incentives are all on the side of working to make it the new default mode of gov’t. contracting for space-related services because they know how to make a good living at it and the legacy majors don’t.
leland,
you apparently know neither the law nor the facts, so i will refer you to
this http://spacenews.com/article/launch-report/40006spacex-says-requirements-not-markup-make-government-missions-more-costly
” Space Exploration Technologies Corp. President Gwynne Shotwell said the company’s Falcon 9 launch prices have nudged up to an average of about $60 million for standard commercial launches but that NASA and U.S. Air Force missions will add between $10 million and $30 million per launch.”
and thats just the opening bid.
Bigelow also sought government money. Even Bezos did, though only a small amount.
I don’t think Bezos cared about the money. He just wanted to legitimize Blue for potential NASA business down the road.
I get it, Trent; you’re a radical Libertarian. I was too at your age. Then I grew up a bit.
Look, just because Elon Musk is not a black flag-waving anarchist is no reason to paint him as some sort of abject, boot-licking toady for all things statist and especially NASA. I hesistate to speculate too minutely about Elon’s detailed motivations, original or evolved, in starting SpaceX, but I’m inclined to take him at his publicly stated word that he only started a rocket company because he needed rockets to do what he really wanted to do and no one already in the business could quote him a non-absurd price. Sounds quite reasonable to me.
Nor has Elon run SpaceX in a manner consistent with the hypothesis that all he really wanted to do from the get-go was find a nice comfortable place to curl up and suckle forever after at various government teats. He’d already been in business several years and had the Falcon 1 fully built before the U.S. government first came calling. Elon has stated publicly many times – most recently on last Sunday’s 60 Minutes – that NASA saved SpaceX when they offered the firm a place in the COTS program, but I think Elon may be overstating the case a bit. SpaceX was, for sure, hard up against it when they finally succeeded with the fourth Falcon 1 mission, but they did succeed. NASA wasn’t engaged in some perverse act of charity when it invited SpaceX to participate in COTS; SpaceX brought a lot to the party including a working version of the Merlin engine and demonstrated skills in avionics development. SpaceX might well have succeeded without COTS, but it would likely have been a significantly slower evolution. COTS was there, it was within SpaceX’s core competencies and it promised a way to build the company more quickly by going to work on the F9 much sooner than would have otherwise been feasible. Not a hard decision, really.
As for COTS being some kind of cushy once-you’re-in-you’re-in-for-good kind of deal, well, you might want to ask the creditors and former management of Rocketplane/Kistler, which did seem to entertain such notions, about that.
As for Elon’s alleged intent to go cap-in-hand to NASA like Tito at some point to beg financing for his Martian ambitions, I doubt it. Based on COTS, and now, CCiCAP/CCtCAP, Elon has certainly gained a far more bone-seep appreciation than any of us are ever likely to acquire that NASA is, at best, an inconstant ally, perpetually obliged to tack into the political winds blowing from Capitol Hill.
I think Elon still fully intends to go to Mars and do so completely without reference to whatever NASA may have in mind about manned Martian missions – which, at the moment, is nothing much. In the process of getting ready to do this, I don’t expect that he will ever make any public statements critical of NASA. If, as I believe to be the case, Elon already sees himself surpassing NASA in this arena, it would hardly profit him to do otherwise. Unlike the often intemperate Mr. Waddington, Elon recognizes that no upside can possibly accrue from gratuitously derogatory remarks.
As for future NASA fundng for Mars, I think Elon knows better than most that NASA won’t have any to offer until after ISS is gone and SLS/Orion is cancelled. There’s a good chance it won’t have any even then. By that time, at least six years hence, he should be well along with his own plans and may even have a first unmanned mission underway. His strategy of keeping SpaceX private to preserve nimbleness and decisiveness is a good one. The success of Tesla demonstrates that he can certainly expect a huge payday whenever he takes SpaceX public. But, in the meantime, he can finance the raising of the “seed corn” for his Martian effort by simply gobbling up the business of other launch services providers and proceeding along the track he is already following with CRS and Commercial Crew.
In the fullness of time, Elon will do what Elon will do. NASA will figure less and less in his calculations, I believe, but you’ll never hear him say a thing about that.
Dick, I’m just paying attention to what the guy actually says instead of projecting my own fantasies upon his motivations.
I get it, Trent; you’re a radical Libertarian. I was too at your age. Then I grew up a bit.
How old do you think I am? Idiot.
Trent,
I hope you’re wrong.
I’m not worried by SpaceX’s behavior so far (they basically have the government as one of their customers), but I’m also aware that its run my the same guy who runs Tesla, which absolutely is exploiting the taxpayer trough (via the absurd credits for purchase, carbon credits from California, etc). The same applies to Solar City.
I don’t like that Tesla and Solar City do this, but I don’t blame them; they’re simply using the system as it exists (and as their competitors are). I am however adamantly opposed to the system itself, and think all such subsidies for electric cars should be terminated.
Uh huh. Elon has made it abundantly clear that he thinks there should be more government subsidies for “sustainable energy”, in both production and consumption.
It seems logical that you should tax things that are most likely to be bad rather than – like, that’s why we tax cigarettes and alcohol, because those are probably bad for you. Certainly cigarettes are. So, you want to err on the side of taxing things that are probably bad and not tax things that are good. So I think, given that there is a need to gather tax to pay for the federal government, we should shift the tax burden to bad things and then adjust that tax on the bad things according to whatever is going to result in the behavior that we think is beneficial for the future.
– Elon Musk
I don’t know how anyone could possibly read a statement like that and imagine that he’s a good guy working inside a system that he doesn’t support. He not only supports the system of taxing bad things and subsidizing good things, he thinks the government doesn’t do enough of it.
Well, that puts me one up on you again. I pay attention to what the guy actually says, too, but also to what he doesn’t say and, even more importantly, to what actions he takes or doesn’t take.
How old do I think you are? You write like a petulant kid, so that’s what I take you to be. If you’re not, then I suppose you’re just another of those people who become obsessed with some shiny, but fundamentally flawed, political philosophy when they’re in college and never have another original thought in the lives they spend angrily railing against whatever fails to measure up, in their eyes, to their always-receding utopian mirage. Usually, it’s some flavor of radical leftism that infects such people like some intellectual strain of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, but it can also be Objectivism or some other fever-swamp flavor of Libertarianism. Either way, it’s wearisome to be lectured snarkily by some arrogant git whose just knows he’s got all the answers. You don’t.
But you keep right on telling Elon what he’s doing wrong. Just don’t be too surprised if he can’t quite descry your voice from that far away when he’s standing on the surface of Mars.
I suppose you’re just another of those people who become obsessed with some shiny, but fundamentally flawed, political philosophy when they’re in college
Is that where you learnt to be a condescending asshole?
I think it’s much more likely that you don’t pay any attention to what Elon Musk actually says, or does. You’ve decided what he is and you’re against anyone who presents actual evidence that challenges your preconceived notions. Don’t be surprised when he doesn’t part the red sea for you.
Is that where you learnt to be a condescending asshole?
More like where I learned to spot one. It was a target-rich environment.
As for Elon, I’m not too concerned about his putative political philosophy. His public statements make him out too be an unremarkable member of the species Liberalis Americanus. complete with the usual AGW baggage. Ho hum. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and most of the crowd that built the Internet were likewise. Yet their business pursuits resulted in major advances for individual liberty, not net advances for statism. I see Elon as the Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Marc Andreesen or Sergei Brin of space exploration. SpaceX, right now, is, analogously, about where Microsoft was in 1980. Cheap, reliable, frequent access to space will matter consequentially for the future of individual liberty. Elon’s opinions on taxation won’t.
The same is even true of his earthly pursuits, like Tesla. I don’t happen to share Elon’s environmentalist beliefs, but I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with a genuinely practical electric car or a nationwide infrastructure of charging stations for same either. Elon isn’t quite there yet, but he seems a lot closer than I would have thought he’d get this quickly. And, as with space, he seems committed to this project for the long haul.
One aspect of his Tesla project I do unalloyedly approve is his taking on the legal and regulatory infrastructure that exists in virtually every state that requires cars to be sold through local dealerships instead of, as Elon would much prefer, directly from the maker via the Internet. I’m a federalist, generally, but I don’t approve of state-level restraints of trade any more than I like them at a national level.
Consider the contrast between Elon’s business activities, which materially advance human liberty in most respects – despite his conventionally statist politics – and the business activities of the Koch brothers, which don’t. Not that the Koch’s business is detrimental to liberty, its just not much of a factor either way. The Kochs are long-time libertarians and yet their decades of purposeful attempts to defend and enhance individual liberty in the United States, while modestly successful, will probably amount to far less, in the long term, than what Elon – who does not share their politics – is doing now and will do in the future.
Trent and Dick, you’re both on the side of the good guys. Everybodies weaknesses are more apparent to others than to themselves. You both provide insights that others fail to. But don’t let me stop a good flame war… we all enjoy those.
The flip side is even if you have every intention of doing it your own way, you do not kick the big dog in the groin.
Which is just another reason why NASA should be cut lose. Even -nearly- joined at the hip is better than being a direct governmental industry.
The point of my quote was to show that even before Elon had a financial interest in saying NASA was the best thing since sliced bread, he was acting as if it were the case. There’s plenty of other examples of Elon acting like the government is swell and there should be more of it. Heck, he’s one of the few well respected people on the planet who think a carbon tax would be a great idea.
Any suggestion that he would rather be without NASA is just counter-factual. It’s wishful thinking at best.
Deal with it.
You may be right. I hope you’re wrong.
If you look at it, Elon has 2 companies tied to Green tech and green economies.
Tesla and Solar City. A carbon tax would be very beneficial to both companies.
What? He’s not a saint? I’m shocked! You really like throwing rotten tomatoes, doncha?
I know I cringe at some of the things Elon says.
For all his innovation, Elon is a very traditional businessman. He just wants to sell tickets. He expects NASA to purchase many of those tickets. The thing that will shake everything up is when other business people realize there are real ROI possibilities using the capabilities Musk and others are providing.
Tito is blind, pure and simple. Otherwise he’d realize that 3 years is more than enough time for Inspiration Mars without NASA. The FH will be ready as will it’s launch site and the Dragon is ready now (adding an inflated porch is not a big deal) even if they don’t have time to fully test the abort system. They don’t need no stinkin’ superdracos for this mission. The cost for the entire mission would have been within his own pockets. Tito is a big disappointment. It would have been better if he had never announced the idea.
What else Elon is up to.
“The reason I don’t spend the money that you [Congress] would like to have me spend on SLS is because I don’t need a 130-metric-ton vehicle right now, I do need a commercial vehicle that I can send my astronauts to low-Earth orbit.” – Charles Bolden to U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Space.
What I don’t get is that when NASA creates an imaginary program, that with all the alpha nerds at NASA they don’t put forward an imaginary plan that could actually work. Is it because they are afraid they would actually have to do it? Or is it because if they detailed the changes that need to be made that would allow the mission to be possible on technical grounds, that congress would get upset? And if congress wants Tito to do a flyby of Mars, why wouldn’t they want NASA to produce a plan and the hardware to realize it?
I am happy to blame congress but NASA’s hands are not clean in this either.
NASA’s hands *cannot* be clean when their paymasters in the committee chairs demand to smell the manure between their fingers before those committee chairs will write a check.