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Study Finds SpaceX Investment Saved NASA Hundreds of Millions (popularmechanics.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Popular Mechanics: When a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft connected with the International Space Station on May 25, 2012, it made history as the first privately-built spacecraft to reach the ISS. The Dragon was the result of a decision 6 years prior -- in 2006, NASA made an "unprecedented" investment in SpaceX technology. A new financial analysis shows that the investment has paid off, and the government found one of the true bargains of the 21st century when it invested in SpaceX. A new research paper by Edgar Zapata, who works at Kennedy Space Center, looks closely at the finances of SpaceX and NASA. "There were indications that commercial space transportation would be a viable option from as far back as the 1980s," Zapata writes. "When the first components of the ISS were sent into orbit 1998, NASA was focused on "ambitious, large single stage-to-orbit launchers with large price tags to match." For future commercial crew missions sending astronauts into space, Zapata estimates that it will cost $405 million for a SpaceX Dragon crew deployment of 4 and $654 million for a Boeing Starliner, which is scheduled for its first flight in 2019. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but Zapata estimates that its only 37 to 39 percent of what it would have cost the government.
What is the current state of the art for removing that greyed out screen when you visit TFA with an ad blocker?
Beelions
Seriously, when you're being compared to notoriously expensive "cost-plus" contracts with (largely) military contractors, it's not hard to emerge as the cheaper option.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
From TFS:
A new research paper by Edgar Zapata, who works at Kennedy Space Center, looks closely at the finances of SpaceX and NASA. ...
Imagine that! A "look how great we are!" result.
In other words, NASA shot itself in the foot and could have had a much bigger budget. That's the problem with saving money in a bureaucracy: it will be used against you as an argument to cut your budget next year. Better not to do it in the first place.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Zapata estimates that [ the cost of a SpaceX crew deployment ] its only 37 to 39 percent of what it would have cost the government.
Sounds like it's time to sell-off NASA's space operations (or maybe just the non-exploration parts) to SpaceX.
They seem to be doing a much better job of it. More innovative, cheaper, faster turnarounds. Is there really any reason for NASA to do anything in LEO any more?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Spacex cheaper because the bulk of the research already done by NASA and that cost was added in NASA launches but effectively Spacex got it for free. NASA likely could do a lot of mission cheaper now and in it had gone into fabrication and not contracting it out, even cheaper, with lobbyists ensuring massive hidden profit margins for contractors (set profit margin, no problem inflate costs, simply pay higher wages to executives who do nothing, active pointless nepotism and ramp up the bill and more profit and ramp up costs they do at every single opportunity and use lobbyist to buy corrupt politicians to sign off on it all).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Miss you, buddy.
The US federal government cannot run out of dollars, a currency it created out of thin air. Just as if you created your own currency, except you have no power to make people use it, unlike the federal government (via taxes, fees, fines).
The federal government can never not afford to pay for something because everytime it pays a bill new dollars are created.
Federal taxes reduce the money supply, federal spending increases the money supply. Learn how money actually works or you will continue to look like ignorant fools.
"A few weeks after killing the U.S.A.â(TM)s world-famous moon-mission program, President Obama has ordered the space agency that operates it to focus on reaching out to Muslim countries."
Yep, Obama got lucky that somebody else picked up the baton for NASA.
I'm waiting to hear that the study of the costs was so expensive, all of the savings have been lost...
Really? What I took away was, "Look how much more efficient and effective private enterprise is!"
Private enterprise is NOT always more efficient or cheaper. Private enterprise generally does a terrible job on anything that is a public good. Roads, policing, primary education, basic research, and many other necessary things that do not have a direct and relatively short term profit motive are difficult for private enterprise to do effectively or efficiently. The notion that private enterprise is always better is idiotic, false and counterproductive. Use private enterprise for what it is good at and government for what it is good at and have them work together when appropriate.
There is absolutely no way the Apollo program could have happened with private enterprise footing the bill. Private enterprise was useful to contract for specific tasks but it never would have happened if we'd let the Invisible Hand of the market do its thing. The Hubble Telescope would never have happened as a privately owned and operated device.
Tesla Motors, despite all the hype and love showered here, shows no signs of ever showing a profit.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Kind of a shot over the bow of the crowd suggesting the government shouldn't pick winners. Sometimes government is the only entity with a big enough footprint to get a new technology over the startup finish line. DARPA does it routinely for military tech and we have a universe of modern tech that started as a DARPA project. There's a long list of winners but what's the one 40% of America focuses on? The solar panel place. Not all of them pan out.
We shouldn't be limited to military tech for the government to pick winners.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I'm not a zealot that demands we privatize everything, but it's practically certain that the private sector can and will do almost anything cheaper than a government agency.
-Styopa
Not trying to start a flame war or anything, but heard they pushed some bills, only companies with US can bid for stuff. (chose ISRO because of cheap and efficient reputation...)
Let's not forget that NASA created the ecosystem in which SpaceX evolved.
SpaceX -ONLY- succeeded because there was a market.
NASA created that market.
Actually, yes, I found the actual details in the numbers to be quite surprising.
Working through the details, most of the cost of using the shuttle to resupply the station turned out to be due to the fact that one flight per year was enough to deliver the cargo to station, but that's not enough to cover the fixed cost. The main reason that the shuttle was too expensive as a resupply vehicle was that its cargo was too high (all of the cargo that sixteen flights of both Dragon and Cygnus carried to ISS, from 2012 to present, equals the cargo capacity of 2.5 shuttle launches).
The cost per flight of the shuttle drops remarkably with number of flights per year. From table 6, on page 30, the cost is $365 million per flight at a rate of one flight per year, and drops to $96 million per year at a rate of five flights per year*.
So, the surprising thing is that at five flights per year, the shuttle cargo launch cost would have been about equal to the Falcon 9/Dragon cost.
I didn't know that.
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*note that this is NOT counting the development cost of shuttle-- that is money already spent, so you don't get it back when the shuttle stopped flying. So the second lesson is that it would not be a good bargain to build a new vehicle with the same development costs as the shuttle.
I wonder how many other things "The Government" does that could be privatized.
Not everything of course, but seriously, this is a template for real change and sustainability.
NASA was never Roscosmos. The work always went to private cos be they Boeing, Orbital ATK or now SpaceX. Nothing has actually changed. NASA hasn't been a primary contractor itself on a rocket since the Space Shuttle and even then all the actual manufacturing went to private sector subs. SpaceX still uses NASA infrastructure at Canaveral. What's changed between now and what we had in 1995? Its the same model on one new entrant -- SpaceX. In terms of cost there is no clear evidence that Falcon 9 us actually cheaper than Soyuz for launch because the contract terms for both are opaque and you cant trust the empty press releases which cite one overly simplistic dollar figure. The reason SpaxeX has stolen market share from Roscosmos/Soyuz is legislation mandating companies launches in the US if they want US government business. If you launch in Russia the US government wont use your satellite and guess who the single largest customer for imagery and satellite communications on the planet earth is. It's protectionism generating SpaceX's market share. Customers cant launch in China, cant launch in India and now they cant launch in Russia or even Kourou if they want to do business with the US. That drives all the business to SpaceX.
What's happening in space is really disgusting frankly. Cooperation outside of the dog and pony show that is the ISS between nations is dead. No one is chasing actual efficiencies. Everyone launches pretty much only their own payloads and cooperation on payloads is going away too. Try selling US comms payloads in Asia. Good luck with that. Every major market is either closed due to sanctions or because they are all running active import substitution programs or both. Globalization exists in low skill low wage manufactures. In aerospace its protectionism all the way and more now than 20 years ago.
Seriously, when you're being compared to notoriously expensive "cost-plus" contracts with (largely) military contractors, it's not hard to emerge as the cheaper option.
Cost plus contracts only make sense when the costs are difficult to ascertain at the time of quotation. When you are talking about something like the Apollo program, nobody really had any clear idea how much the whole thing would cost in advance because so much of it had never been done before. No sane private company would entertain such a deal unless the government was willing to absorb essentially all the risk. But at this point rockets aren't new technology so it should be reasonably straight forward to make a reasonable estimation of expected costs. (I'm a certified cost accountant in addition to being an engineer so I should know) Cost plus contracts for orbital lift services simply don't make sense anymore and the company that makes the rocket should have to experience some amount of risk.
So, the dollars per kilogram drops by a factor of 4 as the launches per year increases from 1 to 5, but the actual cost remains at 1.3 billion per launch even at a flight rate of five per year. But because the cargo capacity is so high, the cost per kilogram is about the same as the Falcon 9/Dragon, and somewhat lower than the Antares/Cygnus.
Looking more carefully, the recurring cost does include a budget of $1 billion per year for shuttle upgrades. So, if you did not do upgrades (essentially freezing the shuttle technology at what it is), cost would drop slightly (only by 15%, though, not a very large drop).
What you missed is that there's no comparison on the engineering rigor. ULA is,contractually bound to a full space rating for all launches, and manned flight rating for designing everything that MIT touch space launch. SpaceX, on the other hand, got their space rating pencil whipped by the Air Force at congresses direction. The level of engineering rigor is just not comparable. Sure, SpaceX is winning, but the game is rigged.
I get so sick of all of the Elon haters here, where are you now?
"will SpaceX ever show a profit?" Elon Musk says he's going to do a lot. Some of that he's already done, some of that he hasn't...yet.
I was referring to the numbers in the article being discussed here, which were not the generic "$/kg to LEO" but were the specific $paid-per-launch-for-delivery-to-ISS divided by payload-delivered-to-ISS.
The first re-usable rocket to launch to orbit was, of course, the space shuttle. So, NASA started doing reusable rocket launches back when Elon Musk was 11 years old.
Total pork-barrel.
Pork barrel or not, it was nevertheless the first re-usable orbital launch vehicle.
...And, so far, the only reusable orbital launch vehicle ever flown. (Falcon 9 recovers and re-uses the first stage: the easy one.)
ISRO is pretty expensive per KG. Sure the rocket may only cost about $25 Million, but it can only loft about 1/5 the payload of a Falcon 9 FT. So in comparison to SpaceX it's effective cost is over $100M (SpaceX quotes $65M). With or without legislative horseplay I think SpaceX is currently by far the cheapest per kg provider on the planet, though the only thing I can recall them doing on the legislative front was when they were trying to get into the national security launch market they were railing about ULA relying on Russian engines to launch US national security payloads.
NASA patting itself on the back.
Paying out giant bonuses, buying Russian rockets to actually do anything useful and occasionally smashing stuff into the ground or the ocean is not a formula for cost savings.
Face it, wholesale outsourcing of space would have never gotten the US to the moon.
"There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough." - Elon Musk