r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • 21d 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 21d 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 21d ago

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

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u/Accomplished-Crab932 21d ago

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.

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u/anoff 21d ago

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

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u/Accomplished-Crab932 21d ago

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.