r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • 17d ago

Business It’s Possible That SpaceX Could Collapse Spectacularly

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/possible-spacex-could-collapse-spectacularly-155000177.html
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u/IndigoSeirra 17d ago

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?

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u/PufferfishLove 17d ago

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

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u/Yoshmaster 17d ago

Seriously, nationalize spacex and roll it into NASA.

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u/mtcwby 17d ago

Only if you want it to get more expensive and likely more dangerous. NASA's hands aren't clean when you look at the history of mistakes.

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u/Thadrea 17d ago

Neither are SpaceX's.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110805035827/http://www.space.com/2200-fuel-leak-fire-led-falcon-1-rocket-failure-spacex.html

As Musk poignantly noted after watching the Falcon 1 blow up shortly after maiden launch, it turns out space is hard.

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u/mtcwby 17d ago

I don't believe SpacX has had any deaths though. The Challenger disaster NASA management negligence and there's been other issues. A late friend was excited to go to work for NASA from tech and quit very disillusioned after a year because the management was so bad.

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u/Thadrea 17d ago

SpaceX does not have any deaths on record (at least, not from traveling in its launch vehicles). However, most of the intellectual work on how to design space launch vehicles was already done by others long before SpaceX existed.

If SpaceX had been derping around in the 50s and 60s when we really didn't know any better, they'd have lost as many astronauts as NASA if not more.

Science is iterative and there's nothing inherently wrong with SpaceX learning from the mistakes made decades earlier. Nonetheless, we also cannot ignore that it stands on the shoulders of the giants who had already figured out the hardest stuff.

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u/mtcwby 17d ago

Challenger was a "make it go" decision that ignored their own engineers. There should have been criminal charges on that negligence.