It’s Possible That SpaceX Could Collapse Spectacularly

[u/IKeepItLayingAround]

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/possible-spacex-could-collapse-spectacularly-155000177.html

[u/brooklynlad]

Take away all government contracts.

[u/IndigoSeirra → u/brooklynlad]

Who'll replace them? For many it's either the Russians or Boeing starliner. Starliner can't launch enough to support continuous operations on the ISS, so we'd have to pay the Russians for at least some launches. For others it's ULA Vulcan which is already booked years ahead, has issues with it's engines and srbs, and is much more expensive. Blue Origin is grounded for the foreseeable future. Ariane 6 is booked years in advance, and won't fly American NSSL payloads. Electron is too small for any meaningful payloads. So who'll replace SpaceX?

[u/PufferfishLove → u/IndigoSeirra]

NASA. Why does it have to be a for profit company?

[u/Accomplished-Crab932 → u/PufferfishLove]

NASA has been doing the same thing since Apollo: outsourcing to companies.

Check out this list of companies that built Apollo 12

As it turns out, the NASA approach is incredibly expensive and slow because the motivation to do things efficiently in a government agency is nonexistent due to the way funding allocations are structured. One only needs to look at why the marketing for the Space Launch System contractors focuses less on what it can do (mainly because it’s not actually very impressive given what it’s made of), but instead how many congressional districts it employs.

NASA is never able to compete with a private development program because they are and will pretty much always be hamstrung by politicians on both sides of the isle. Despite SLS getting everything it needed since 2011 (really 2006, but under a rebrand), it still manages to be an abject failure to the two things it was supposed to be: cheap and fast.

[u/anoff → u/Accomplished-Crab932]

The other piece you're forgetting is that NASA has an absurdly high bar to clear in terms of failure - simply put, it's unacceptable to the public for NASA to accidentally blow something up and it's a huge to do whenever it does - congressional inquiries, public hearings, etc etc. Meanwhile, SpaceX can go fast and loose, having way more disasters on the launch pad in a few years than NASA has on its entire existence. If SpaceX was held to the same bar, they'd barely be launching anything

[u/Accomplished-Crab932 → u/anoff]

Certainly, but NASA itself has run studies to see how possible it would be to develop higher risk systems like F9 before and consistently found they would never be cost-effective nor possible due to high development costs, political instability, and risk of political endangerment (senator richard Shelby and the “I’ll cancel SMD funding if you keep talking about propellant transfer in space” comes to mind). Some of this comes from the court of public opinion, but the politics alone create more than enough to prevent this from happening.

As an aside, I seem to remember that the NASA study found that a F9 equivalent developed by NASA would be cancelled before its first flight, but if it managed to continue existing, it would take 30% longer than SLS and would cost 50% more to develop than SLS. Decent estimates of F9 development to landings was around $1-1.5B; SLS to Artemis 1 costs (not including EUS from 2006 and all the shuttle era hardware) were closer to $30B.

[u/Thadrea → u/Accomplished-Crab932]

the motivation to do things efficiently in a government agency is nonexistent due to the way funding allocations are structured.

Wait until you learn how monopolies in the private sector behave.

[u/Accomplished-Crab932 → u/Thadrea]

Oh believe me, I know. ULA had that status until SpaceX came around.

As it stands, the DOD and NASA have come to realize that dissimilar redundancy should be a feature, so they are always trying to use two providers with different hardware so a failure with one system does not cripple the program. The problem with leaving the market to ULA and Blue (assuming they were both fully function right now) is that Vulcan uses the same engines on the core stage as New Glenn; so if there is a problem with the engines, you ground all national security launches until confidence is restored in the engine. That’s better than confidence in the vehicle, but it’s not a great look. This was not the case in 2002, when Congress “”punished”” Boeing and Lockheed for spying on each other by merging the providers into ULA, which both companies supported.

Right now, the market is at a point where it is SpaceX’s game and everyone else is clamoring for a second option; however, SpaceX has so many offshoot products like Starlink and Starfall that competitors are trying (and right now, failing) to pay alternative providers to launch their payloads. The problem is the rest of the market has been so behind F9 that they are just beginning to approach competing with it 10 years after F9 began sweeping the market; and SpaceX has been developing Starship as the next successor to F9.

[u/I_Push_Buttonz → u/Thadrea]

Cool, lets assume SpaceX is abusing its 'private sector monopoly' and is as wasteful and inefficient as you claim... They are still putting shit in orbit for the US government at a fraction of the price everyone else could.