SpaceX Falcon 9 Relatively Cheap Compared To NASA's New Pad

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Motherboard.tv: "As debate over the future of spaceflight rages on — and as the axe all but falls on NASA's mission back to the moon and beyond — the successful launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 two weeks ago proved at least one of the virtues of the private option: it's a heckuva lot cheaper than government-funded rides to space. In fact, the whole system was built for less than the cost of the service tower that was to be used for NASA's proposed future spaceflight vehicle (yup, the service tower is finished, but the rocket isn't, and the whole program may well be canceled anyway)." CEO Elon Musk spoke recently about some of the ways SpaceX finds to cut costs in the construction of their rockets.

Comments

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[AnonymousClown]

Will these cheaper options be more efficient, or just cheaper?

More efficient.

Between government salaries, the way they get contracts, how NASA's budget is dependent on pork barrel spending, NASA having to put some projects in certain states to get votes from Congressmen for a budget, price gouging by contractors, etc...

Just eliminating Congress from the loop is going to save billions. Add in businessmen/engineers and you have a much more efficient space program.

Safety? We'll see if it's reduced. But I have a feeling there won't be change in safety record.

If it's only about the cost, give the money

[melted]

If it's only about the cost, give the money to Russians. If you pay a little more, they'll even let you have the blueprints for stuff. They've been launching stuff into space on the cheap for decades now.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[dragisha]

NASA sure did great things, but "track record"? As compared to? Which other venture is your baseline?

Re:About to get more expensive!

[ae1294]

The Falcon-9 is about to get 50% more expensive.
Musk has just proposed to NASA that Space-X will fly only two demonstration flights of Falcon-9, instead of three... but he still wants to be paid for all three.

I read TFA you linked and you make it sound all evil. If they can prove everything in two flights (three if you count the first launch) then good for them, they should get paid for not fucking up. I guess you'd rather just waste everyones time having an extra flight instead of moving forward and getting shit done. I'd rather move forward and start suppling the station instead of flying by it a few times and waving...

Musk may be the Henry Ford of space travel.

[maillemaker]

What Elon Musk is doing is similar to the assembly line process Henry Ford brought to the automotive industry.

Instead of each item being lovingly hand-crafted by thousands of pork-fueled constituents, SpaceX is making a rocket factory. It's fantastic.

Large organizations are the problem

[DragonHawk]

"No one tries 'efficient' because no one is motivated and it would actually interefere with their personal fiefdom building."

In fairness, that happens all the time in private companies, too. It's just less public because they're, ya know, private.

I'm not saying this to defend government so much as to also criticize private companies. They both suck.

If there's any conclusion I can reach, it's that large organizations of any type are the problem. When you scale up, you inevitably get longer lines of communications, a higher tolerance for mediocrity (you need more people than the cream of the crop can provide), the need for more formal procedures (to compensate for the first two), deeper pocket to fund fief building, and more places to hide it all.

I think Space-X wins because they're small, nimble, and fresh. And more power to them for it.