What do they mean by conditional? What are the conditions?
Seems to me that obviously, the conditions were “The price is fixed, unless we f**k up, in which case we’ll need more money.”
I laughed about Boeing’s IP-protection concerns. SpaceX knows the Dragon/Falcon technology will be obsolete before Gateway goes up (NET 2024). So Dragon XL is more likely to be delivered in a Starship cargo bay than atop a Falcon Heavy. When the first Boeing-made Artemis HLS lands on the Moon (when/if), the two NASA astros will get out and have to pose for photos by the waiting tourists.
Makes me wonder how many Dragon XL could fit inside a cargo variant of starship.
Or, as I have said in the past, toss their keys to the SpaceX valet and have the SpaceX bellhop take their bags.
From the first “promoted comment”
Why bother manufacturing a product that you can be held liable for when you can make 3x more money kicking a replaceable can of wishes and ideas down the road for decades? The CH-47 which I flew and system tested in the Army for 8 years has been in action for 50+ years in one variation or another. How many replacement helos do you think Boeing has been “developing” in that time? The majority of airframes for the 47s are the original Alpha model frames built in the 60s! They get ORF’d and turned into B, C, D, E, F, SD’s, and MD’s. In that time technology and materials just haven’t matured allowing a new airframe to replace it, really? I guess it was built THAT good, huh. But let’s not forget the satellite industry of contractors built around maintenance that are subsidiaries of manufacturers.
And we wonder why we have a massive defense budget but still fly rigs from 30/40/50 years ago and the new stuff doesn’t work.
We’re probably looking at losing a big war in a few decades, because the military-industrial complex has gone out of control. Will all these obvious failures spur us to fix this?
Allen Drury wrote about this in “Pentagon” in 1986. Nothing has gotten better since then. (That’s the book where I learned about Fractional Orbital Bombardment.)
More recently, “Ghost Fleet” gives a pretty sobering assessment of a near-future shooting war with China. Turns out that structural issues with our procurement policies can make military tactics irrelevant.
There’s the $64 trillion dollar question.
I am hopeful that the formation of Space Force may have a tonic effect anent getting NewSpace companies involved in defense contracting on a more rational basis than has become the default case for the older services.
Failing that, our only hope is for the Russian and Chinese regimes to both implode before the rot in U.S. defense procurement has time to prove fatal.
Shouldn’t building a vehicle like Dragon XL or Antares be comparatively simple when compared to a capsule that has to survive reentry and/or carry humans?
SpaceX thinks a few steps ahead, so I wonder what plans they have in store for Dragon XL, very exciting to ponder.
Dragon XL makes a great in-space shuttlecraft or tender for Starship.
I think the USPS should have submitted a bid for supply delivery.
This would be the same USPS that won’t deliver packages to my rural address because my driveway is too rough?
When no real competition exists, lobbying is enough. Then Elon showed up.
If Starship works:
Even if it takes 20 tanker launches to get one to the Moon and back, and even if it costs $7 million per launch (rather than Musk’s aspirational goal of $2mln), that puts a large manned expedition on the Moon for under $200 million, at least ten times cheaper than Artemis + HLS+ SLSx2. Maybe 20 times cheaper if pessists are right. Even if Musk underestimated the costs of Starship launches by 10x, its still more bang for the buck.
“Conditional Fixed Price” hoo-boy…
What do they mean by conditional? What are the conditions?
Seems to me that obviously, the conditions were “The price is fixed, unless we f**k up, in which case we’ll need more money.”
I laughed about Boeing’s IP-protection concerns. SpaceX knows the Dragon/Falcon technology will be obsolete before Gateway goes up (NET 2024). So Dragon XL is more likely to be delivered in a Starship cargo bay than atop a Falcon Heavy. When the first Boeing-made Artemis HLS lands on the Moon (when/if), the two NASA astros will get out and have to pose for photos by the waiting tourists.
Makes me wonder how many Dragon XL could fit inside a cargo variant of starship.
Or, as I have said in the past, toss their keys to the SpaceX valet and have the SpaceX bellhop take their bags.
From the first “promoted comment”
We’re probably looking at losing a big war in a few decades, because the military-industrial complex has gone out of control. Will all these obvious failures spur us to fix this?
Allen Drury wrote about this in “Pentagon” in 1986. Nothing has gotten better since then. (That’s the book where I learned about Fractional Orbital Bombardment.)
More recently, “Ghost Fleet” gives a pretty sobering assessment of a near-future shooting war with China. Turns out that structural issues with our procurement policies can make military tactics irrelevant.
There’s the $64 trillion dollar question.
I am hopeful that the formation of Space Force may have a tonic effect anent getting NewSpace companies involved in defense contracting on a more rational basis than has become the default case for the older services.
Failing that, our only hope is for the Russian and Chinese regimes to both implode before the rot in U.S. defense procurement has time to prove fatal.
Shouldn’t building a vehicle like Dragon XL or Antares be comparatively simple when compared to a capsule that has to survive reentry and/or carry humans?
SpaceX thinks a few steps ahead, so I wonder what plans they have in store for Dragon XL, very exciting to ponder.
Dragon XL makes a great in-space shuttlecraft or tender for Starship.
I think the USPS should have submitted a bid for supply delivery.
Cute Disqus graphic posted in Instapundit’s overnight thread
This would be the same USPS that won’t deliver packages to my rural address because my driveway is too rough?
When no real competition exists, lobbying is enough. Then Elon showed up.
If Starship works:
Even if it takes 20 tanker launches to get one to the Moon and back, and even if it costs $7 million per launch (rather than Musk’s aspirational goal of $2mln), that puts a large manned expedition on the Moon for under $200 million, at least ten times cheaper than Artemis + HLS+ SLSx2. Maybe 20 times cheaper if pessists are right. Even if Musk underestimated the costs of Starship launches by 10x, its still more bang for the buck.