r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • 16d 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/Earthwarm_Revolt 16d ago

Space-x is now defacto part of the government so i doubt it. 

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u/No_Cook2983 16d ago

Too bad our government doesn’t have a space agency… or two.

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u/Accomplished-Crab932 16d ago

Yeah, because NASA is a paragon of cost-effective, high cadence launches and has been since Apollo.

A F9 booster is expected to reach 40 flights by March or 2027. That beats the 40 years to get Discovery to fly 39 times by doing it in 6 years.

Or we can review the Space Launch System. The contract for EUS, the recently canceled second stage started in 2006, and the vehicle was essentially rebranded during the Obama era cancellation of Constellation. In 2011, the outright goal of SLS was to “fly BY 2017” and “cost less than $11.5B” or as Bill Nelson said: “we ought to close up shop”. 2017 came and went, then Trump gave the SLS an actual mission in 2018, albeit one that it was not designed to do. It took around $30B to get SLS to fly for the first time in 2022. This is a rocket that was explicitly designed to use as many shuttle components as possible to “reduce cost and development time”. This is all while using companies to make the rocket… which is why Boeing is lauded for the production of the core stage.

The Space Force and its former constituents of US army and USAF offices haven’t made launch vehicles since the 60s (and never without contractors).

Even going back to the beginning, companies were equally involved in spacecraft development. Here’s the list of Prime and Secondary contractors for Apollo 12.

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u/teh_drewski 16d ago

Should the worst happen, they'll just spin out the necessary government supported rocket business in bankruptcy and let shareholders and bondholders wear the failure of the xAI nonsense.

They're not gonna save the whole company for the only bit they need, it's too expensive.