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What It Took For SpaceX To Become a Serious Space Company
An anonymous reader writes: The Atlantic has a nice profile of SpaceX's rise to prominence — how a private startup managed to successfully compete with industry giants like Boeing in just a decade of existence. "Regardless of its inspirations, the company was forced to adopt a prosaic initial goal: Make a rocket at least 10 times cheaper than is possible today. Until it can do that, neither flowers nor people can go to Mars with any economy. With rocket technology, Musk has said, "you're really left with one key parameter against which technology improvements must be judged, and that's cost." SpaceX currently charges $61.2 million per launch. Its cost-per-kilogram of cargo to low-earth orbit, $4,653, is far less than the $14,000 to $39,000 offered by its chief American competitor, the United Launch Alliance. Other providers often charge $250 to $400 million per launch; NASA pays Russia $70 million per astronaut to hitch a ride on its three-person Soyuz spacecraft. SpaceX's costs are still nowhere near low enough to change the economics of space as Musk and his investors envision, but they have a plan to do so (of which more later)."
To compete in price against anyone you only need money. With enough money, you can set a price of $0.
The main question is "will they be able to recover the cost of that competence once they get the contracts?" and it's way too soon to know the answer to that.
It's like judging the acquisition of online "businesses". Nobody can prove the price was or wasn't right until the buyer makes that back as profit or doesn't.
Eh, PayPal was among the first revolutionary online-payment services that enabled the rapid expansion of e-commerce. What you know now as the "evil PayPal" is what happened after Ebay bought it.
I still can't believe it is legal, in so many ways. I mean, I don't think anybody could argue ebay is not a monopoly in the online auction space, and yet they are allowed to only permit their own payment service (so they take a percentage on top of their commission).
Then, they hold your money like a bank account and even extend credit, and yet, unlike banks, they can freeze your money with no explanation.
The PayPal situation boggles the mind, but it is not related to Musk's X.com/PayPal.
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I heard it's the same for Space X, not one rocket has actually been launched.They are always in the design and testing phase! What a joke! It's all a scam and the FTC is going to shut him down soon!
The main problem with space travel so far has been a combination of custom parts and lack of scale. Get a cheap, rugged design made with commodity parts and then run it mass production style and you can really bring the cost down.
Make a rocket at least 10 times cheaper than is possible today.
Hardly "prosaic"; Sounds pretty damn ambitious to me.
OK, they had access to some of the body of knowledge so expensively won by the Germans, USA, Russians et al, but they're still privately funded, developed in-house a working product that's much, much cheaper than the competition and employ nearly 4000 people.
Like Musk or not, he made it work so far.
Yet another Musk fantasy with no hope of becoming reality. Wake me when he DOES something, rather than pie-in-the-sky fantasy.
What have you done that is so spectacular? Go ahead and dazzle us.
Elon Musk has founded several very influential companies, turning those industries upside down in the process. You actually think starting Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX is not impressive? If that doesn't impress you then you plainly don't understand what all that means. You don't have to like the guy but he's certainly earned a measure of respect for his accomplishments.
nah, he's just realized that Paypal's pissed off so many people that he'll have to escape to Mars.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Nonsense. It's all vaporware until they at the very least have a reasonably dense Dyson sphere around the solar system.
At $4,653/kg to LEO it would cost rought 400K to push an average human to LEO
Don't forget your life support and re-entry systems.
Quote from Hans Koenigsmann, early German SpaceX employee, "My German accent helps in presentations. When I say, ‘This will work,’ it is more convincing than other accents for some reason.”
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