SpaceX Is Now Building a Raptor Engine a Day, NASA Says (arstechnica.com) 140
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A senior NASA official said this week that SpaceX has done "very well" in working toward the development of a vehicle to land humans on the surface of the Moon, taking steps to address two of the space agency's biggest concerns. NASA selected SpaceX and Starship for its Human Landing System in April 2021. In some ways, this was the riskiest choice of NASA's options because Starship is a very large and technically advanced vehicle. However, because of the company's self-investment of billions of dollars into the project, SpaceX submitted the lowest bid, and from its previous work with SpaceX, NASA had confidence that the company would ultimately deliver.
Two of NASA's biggest technological development concerns were the new Raptor rocket engine and the transfer and storage of liquid oxygen and methane propellant in orbit, said Mark Kirasich, NASA's deputy associate administrator who oversees the development of Artemis missions to the Moon. During a subcommittee meeting of NASA's Advisory Council on Monday, however, Kirasich said SpaceX has made substantial progress in both areas. The Raptor rocket engine is crucial to Starship's success. Thirty-three of these Raptor 2 engines power the Super Heavy booster that serves as the vehicle's first stage, and six more are used by the Starship upper stage. For a successful lunar mission, these engines will need to re-light successfully on the surface of the Moon to carry astronauts back to orbit inside Starship. If the engines fail, the astronauts will probably die.
"SpaceX has moved very quickly on development," Kirasich said about Raptor. "We've seen them manufacture what was called Raptor 1.0. They have since upgraded to Raptor 2.0 that first of all increases performance and thrust and secondly reduces the amount of parts, reducing the amount of time to manufacture and test. They build these things very fast. Their goal was seven engines a week, and they hit that about a quarter ago. So they are now building seven engines a week."
Two of NASA's biggest technological development concerns were the new Raptor rocket engine and the transfer and storage of liquid oxygen and methane propellant in orbit, said Mark Kirasich, NASA's deputy associate administrator who oversees the development of Artemis missions to the Moon. During a subcommittee meeting of NASA's Advisory Council on Monday, however, Kirasich said SpaceX has made substantial progress in both areas. The Raptor rocket engine is crucial to Starship's success. Thirty-three of these Raptor 2 engines power the Super Heavy booster that serves as the vehicle's first stage, and six more are used by the Starship upper stage. For a successful lunar mission, these engines will need to re-light successfully on the surface of the Moon to carry astronauts back to orbit inside Starship. If the engines fail, the astronauts will probably die.
"SpaceX has moved very quickly on development," Kirasich said about Raptor. "We've seen them manufacture what was called Raptor 1.0. They have since upgraded to Raptor 2.0 that first of all increases performance and thrust and secondly reduces the amount of parts, reducing the amount of time to manufacture and test. They build these things very fast. Their goal was seven engines a week, and they hit that about a quarter ago. So they are now building seven engines a week."
They're doing it all wrong (Score:5, Funny)
They're supposed to take their time and milk that sweet, sweet cost-plus contract for a decade...
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The difference between doing it for the money, and accepting the money to do what you want to do anyway.
Re: They're doing it all wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. SpaceX has just one mission: Put people on Mars. Everything done, even if seemingly unrelated, is for the advancement of that mission.
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Exactly. SpaceX has just one mission: Put people on Mars.
The investors might not agree.
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The investors might not agree.
That's exactly why SpaceX hasn't, and probably will never go public.
Re: They're doing it all wrong (Score:2)
But, why would you think others would not invest into this? In order to get to mars and build a base there, they will need the ability to make money on other systems. After all, mars will be money losing for at least 10 years. As such, they will build a lunar base and will count on starlink, followed by the lunar base, to bring them lots of profits until mars is profitable.
and yes, both will be extremely profitabl
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It is obvious that current investors do agree. After all, they are spending billions on it.
But, why would you think others would not invest into this? In order to get to mars and build a base there, they will need the ability to make money on other systems. After all, mars will be money losing for at least 10 years. As such, they will build a lunar base and will count on starlink, followed by the lunar base, to bring them lots of profits until mars is profitable.
and yes, both will be extremely profitable.
Not only this, but a savvy investor knows 1) musk is mostly insane, but in the endless drive and vision kind of way 2) he generally does succeed, often incredibly and in (positive) disruptive ways 3) because of this he's done the impossible and built a functional and profitable rocket launch company already. Taking all that into account, it's very likely musk will succeed with SS/SH. Forget the moon and forget mars and even forget NASA contracts or sat launch for a moment. He will be the primary gateway
Re: They're doing it all wrong (Score:2)
I certainly do.
Re: They're doing it all wrong (Score:2)
Thatâ(TM)s why SpaceX isnâ(TM)t a public company - so that they can make sure investors are onboard with it.
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If the engines fail, the astronauts will probably die.
I'd be interested to know under what conditions the astronauts won't die if the engines fail to relight for the lunar landing. The Enterprise appearing at the last minute to beam them to safety?
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Raptors won't be used for lunar landings. Landing is done with special engines near the top of the vehicle in order to prevent large amounts of dust to be blown up. Also a single Raptor probably is too powerful to allow a landing in lunar gravity.
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The relight mentioned in TFS is for takeoff from the moon; if it doesn't light, they just don't go anywhere, and they have the opportunity to try to fix things.
Re: They're doing it all wrong (Score:2)
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Could they actually abort and separate mid-descent? As tight as the mass budget was, I'd be surprised if the ascent module held enough propellant to be able to both stop their descent,*and* climb back into orbit.
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Burning all the way down? Really? That sounds incredibly inefficient, though it would be the safe option, so I could definitely see NASA doing it that way...
Yep, that's what this cool oversized infographic seems to say: https://imgur.com/EDifGGX [imgur.com]
I guess for a single pass around the moon your periapsis can actually be extremely low, since you don't have an atmosphere to deal with. So you could get close enough to make that final landing burn efficient (as a rule, greater thrust = greater efficiency).
They'd
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You're thinking too small.
First, we get man in space, then we do space colonies, and then, in those space colonies, you do contractor job for everything, and milk the hell out of it.
And when the space colony inevitably create space giant robot battles between space nazis and a federation that use the brazil flag for some reason, you sell giant robots to both sides, charging extra to paint em red.
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At what point to sharks with "lasers" take to space in your plot?
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Somewhere between the windmill shaped gundam and the neo mexico space colony that looks like a sombrero
That... (Score:2, Insightful)
...is honestly really impressive. Building a complicated, precision machine like a rocket engine once a day is incredible. Especially since they plane on re-using them.
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Yeah. An engine a day roughly translates to roughly 11 boosters a year, or 60 Starships. And IIRC they are hoping to *start* at dozens of reuses, with the goal being 100s, hopefully thousands of flights per vehicle?
Gotta hand it to Musk - he dreams big.
Now we just need to have people figure out how to make money in space so that there's demand for more than a handful of them. In practice, rather than just in theory.
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Two points. They are not fetting reuse on the first few flights. They will try, but it will take time
Secondly once starship is flying the F9 is retired. Starlink switches to starship
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True, but the first few flights are prototypes, not production vehicles. There's a fair chance they won't even carry real payloads. Saying they won't be reused is rather like saying SLS won't fly at all until they're confident it won't have problems. Just the nature of their respective development processes.
Musk has repeatedly stated that Starship should be heavily reusable as soon as they manage to land them. Unlike Falcon 9 where reusability was the long term goal, Starship and booster were designed f
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Two or three influencer flights from LA and NYC to Australia or some remote part of New Zealand for a day trip
The only "influencer" destination I want to see is the surface of the Sun. Although leaving them on the dark side of the moon would also be acceptable, I guess.
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Point to point transport to any place on Earth in around 30 minutes will do it.
Any place on Earth that doesn't mind the noise of a rocket takeoff or landing, that is. You may recall that the Concorde remained commercially non-viable partially because it wasn't allowed to go supersonic anywhere except over the ocean, due to the sonic booms causing annoyance and property damage over land.
So the likelihood is that you can get from any one spaceport to another within 30 minutes, but you'll spend several hours traveling to/from a spaceport on each end of that suborbital hop.
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No one hears a sonic boom when the plane is at 37,000 feet altitude.
And there is certainly no property damage, lol.
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Musk's rockets could do that of course, but it would still be a lot more expensive than any other form of high speed transport--probably comparable to an orbital Dragon flight. The last time this topic came up, I raised what seems like the obvious question of Bezo's rockets, or Virgin Galactic, or one of the other also-rans doing something other than low-space tourism. The Virgin Galactic thing even takes off from regular airports and well... what I found out was that suborbital flights over those distanc
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Well, probably the most expensive, at least at first. But Musk has consistently said that as soon as they can land Starship it will be cheaper per-launch than Falcon, and they expect the cost to fall rapidly. And it sounds like the marginal cost of a reused Falcon 9 launch is about $15M (https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reused-falcon-9-elon-musk-explains-why-reusability-is-worth-it/)
And even if the cost per launch is comparable to a Falcon launch, with a 1000m^3 cabin you can give 6
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>Point to point transport to any place on Earth in around 30 minutes will do it
Probably not to start with, it'll just be far too expensive to compete with anything else until far more optimization has occurred. We need a demand to help fund that development.
Musk has stated that as soon as they can land Starship it should be cheaper than a Falcon 9 per launch. And he's separately stated that the marginal cost of a re-used Falcon 9 launch is $15M.
At that price, pack 100 people into a Starship, and their
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Summarize.
Don't ask people to waste 40 minutes of their life watching some quite-possibly-actually-an-idiot's video, when you can't be bothered to even condense their arguments so that intelligent people can judge if it's just more ever-popular incompetent Musk-bashing.
I'm not a big fan of the man personally, but 95% of the "Musk disproved" shit is clearly coming from people who don't even have a basic grasp of the physics involved, much less the engineering.
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Seems like you're admitting to idiocy then.
Lots of rants about how the Hyperloop is impossible - all of them are obviously wrong to anyone with a basic understanding of engineering or physics. The business case may be debatable, but the technology is sound.
Also, the concept of a vactrain is over 200 years old, not 100, has had a few successes, and gets revisited from time to time as technology advances. Mostly it gets abandoned again as advances in propulsion and aerodynamics make air resistance less of a
An engine a day .. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's pretty incredible. An engine a day is a pretty insane production rate for a human-rated engine.
Considering NASA ordered 18 additional RS-25 engines - TOTAL - for the Artemis program ... at a cost of $100 million per engine.
SpaceX is cranking out Raptors for less than $1m/each, with a target of around $250k each.
$250k vs $100m.
And one a DAY -- versus a grand total of 18 engines over, what, most of a decade?
I ... don't understand how NASA can justify anything else.
Not Accurate - but still great! (Score:2)
No way are they starting and finishing the same engine in one day of 24 hours.
I'd bet money they are starting and finishing on different days, but finishing 1 motor each day.
How many do they have in production at one time? And what is timeline from start to end for a single motor?
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Well, of course. NASA actually said (per the summary) 7/week. However, a "gate rate" is a valid production metric and while manufacturing time is another valid metric it is not relevant to launch cadence of spaceships.
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I think most people understand that's the *finish* rate, not the *start to finish* rate. That's fundamentally how assembly lines work, after all.
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I'd be interested to know how many engines they're building at one time as well. They presumably work a fashion closer to an automobile or aircraft assembly line rather than traditional space manufacturing. That said, some googling gives me cites of when they were at 1 every other week, then 2 a week, now they're up to 7/week. But an actual "start to finish" time for a single engine? I'm not seeing that.
When you only make 1 of something, you use very different techniques than if you're making a dozen, a
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Just to make sure we're comparing like to like.
The RS-25 is the same engine as used on the Space Shuttle. It's on the order of 2 MN of thrust. .
The SpaceX Raptor is also on the order of 2 MN of thrust
So yeah, that's so many orders of magnitude price difference it's, well, kind of silly.
Somebody mentioned needing to find something that delivers a profit in space in order to justify the launch capability SpaceX is building. I'd argue that dropping launch costs by like 3 orders of magnitude is easily somethi
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Imagine what a pain in the neck North Korea or Iran will be if you can make an ICBM for $1M. Even a poor nation could make them rain down by the dozens on the other side of the planet.
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It's because SpaceX still has not demonstrated that the Raptor engines can work in the super heavy configuration, where the booster needs 33 of them. The Russians tried something similar with their moon programme back in the 60s, but every attempt ended in failure, sometimes catastrophically.
Last I checked SpaceX has put their Super Heavy booster on the pad but not yet launched it.
When NASA was putting out contracts for Artemis, big engines were the only proven technology. Still are. It would have been unwi
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It's not so much the management that is the problem, at least in the Russian's case. It's that one engine fails and takes out the entire rocket.
So far on every test flight that SpaceX has attempted, even the successful one, at least one engine has failed and caused a fire.
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Don't put all your eggs in one basket. It would be nice if the other mfrs were more efficient, but all it takes is one fatal flaw in your sole source supplier and you are up shit's creek without a paddle.
Re: An engine a day .. (Score:2)
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The private loons do it because they are stupid and or crazy.
The public loons do it to make money off the other loons.
Trump knows it's all lies, but does it to win votes.
But why does Musk do it ?
He is certainly too clever to believe that stuff, but his tweets make it sound very much like he does.
I want Musk to succeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Get him a personal Fact Checker, FFS!
Re:I want Musk to succeed (Score:5, Informative)
That Pelosi's husband was pursuing some sexual kink when he was getting beaten up with that hammer.
Musk RT'd that absolute BS.
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Err, I'm looking and I'm not seeing any evidence to suggest they knew each other, or where friends, let alone what is being suggested.
The closest is that Paul may have been drunk (which seams like the norm for him...)
All evidence and information released is pretty convincing, including the guys facebook page.
We know (Score:2)
Elon told Jay Leno last month.
Redundancy is an understatement. (Score:5, Interesting)
"If the engines fail, the astronauts will probably die."
Why? This isn't the LM, a stripped down mylar foil can. Starship is the size of a small building with insane amounts of redundancy. There are two scenarios of note, an in flight failure and a failure to function on the surface. For the first scenario there are 6 main and dozens of smaller engines on the craft, if one fails there are plenty of others to pick up the slack. And regarding collateral effects if an engine "explodes", SpaceX has already had this happen on at least one Falcon 9 flight with little effect. There is no reason to think that they won't use the same heat/debris blankets/bulkheads on the final versions of starship/booster as they use on Falcon 9 to keep such failures in check. Regarding a failure to function on the surface, even if the failure is unrepairable, they have ample margins to stock months worth of supplies to wait for a rescue mission. The only limiting factor I see would be power during lunar night which could be easily solved by one of the kilowatt nuclear generators they're designing for Mars anyways or simply adding on a generator (fuel cell or even piston driven) that would convert the methane/oxygen in the fuel tanks into power/heat.
Meanwhile... (Score:2)
what? (Score:2)
"In some ways, this was the riskiest choice of NASA's options because Starship is a very large and technically advanced vehicle. "
Pardon me, but what the fuck does that statement mean?
It shouldn't be large? Saturn V wasn't large? It shouldn't be advanced? We should be relying on 1960s tech instead?
I know NASA has become almost cripplingly paralyzed and sclerotic when it comes to manned space missions but the author of the article shows a sort of weird endorsement.
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It just means that it's harder to make than a small, simple vehicle.
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They are saying that it was overkill for the specific mission requirements that were put out for bid. Other proposals were less risky from a technical point of view while still accomplishing the job. That is a non-controversial assessment of the proposals, and something that needs to be taken into consideration when awarding a contract. But it isn't the only thing that needs to be considered, and NASA decided that SpaceX's superior track record of meeting technical challenges balanced that risk.
Re: what? (Score:2)
The actual SpaceX engineers get no credit (Score:2)
The actual SpaceX engineers designing these engines get no credit. No mentions. Zero.
SpaceX is a collection of some really smart people and their identities are suppressed to an almost comic degree. All credit is attributed to the company or to Musk. Never to the individuals actually doing all this cool shit.
That's the biggest problem here, and that's what Musk needs to be held accountable for. His ego won't let anyone else take any credit.
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Let Me Google That For You [letmegooglethat.com] - Oh look! A couple of really great answers! Tom Mueller and Max Vozoff both come up!
Is Elon the focus? Sure, he's the man in charge. Same as how Gates was the focus for everything Microsoft, or Jobs was at Apple. But like in those cases, it's not difficult for an enthusiast to find the other contributors.
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How about the guys (of any sex) who did the SST?
New York's subways?
the original GI Joe?
Re: The actual SpaceX engineers get no credit (Score:3)
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There wasn't a single sentence in that article mentioning Musk, let alone giving him credit for this. It was all attributed to SpaceX in general, as it should be.
Building a Raptor a day isn't an individual effort. Back when SpaceX was a small startup building Falcon 1 it was not hard to find articles crediting individual engineers for the work they did, like Tom Mueller, who designed the Merlin engine used on Falcon 1, and lead all the improvements made to for the Falcon 9. But when people try to give him c
Re: The actual SpaceX engineers get no credit (Score:2)
Re: The actual SpaceX engineers get no credit (Score:2)
Jeez, what a buzz-kill (Score:2)
"If the engines fail, the astronauts will probably die." Way to kill off enthusiasm for the project. What the hell is it with people these days? It's like most people are experiencing either a low-grade depression or they just can't handle other people's success so they have to tear them down.
Now, All They Need Is Warheads : | (Score:2)
I, for one... (Score:2)
Re:It's not a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
What in the bloody hell are you talking about?
NASA's prime contractors - i.e. Grumman, Boeing, ULA, Rocketdyne, etc - have ALWAYS been privatized. NASA hasn't built any engines. Ever.
The difference is that now you have a contractor that's not soaking them as a make-work Congressional pork project, but rather trying to actually build something for their own use as well as NASA's.
But hey, don't let reality get in the way of your spin.
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What in the bloody hell are you talking about?
rsilvergun plays this game where he has to turn everything, regardless of the topic at hand, into a political rant. He's like that uncle at your Thanksgiving dinner who just can't sit quietly and chow down when it's an election year.
Re: It's not a surprise (Score:2)
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Slowly infusing technology into society so that he can safely return back to Mars from whence he was exhiled.
If we let NASA condone any more of these rockets, we're headed for was with Mars in a few years at 91 rockets per quarter!
That, or some geeky kid hit it big with PayPal. Really loved electric cars and rockets. Started a couple companies that while not revolutionary, provided revolutionary production scaling for new
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I ran the numbers and if you are building power satellites, the energy (mostly rocket fuel) put into one of them is paid back in less than 66 days.
On the other hand, Musk has a low opinion of power satellites.
More of a worry is the ozone damage from high flight rates. NOAA did a study on this some years ago, but it was for the hydrogen-burning Skylon not methane rockets.
Re: It's not a surprise (Score:2)
If the methane can be sourced from somewhere which would be producing it as a by product anyway, then burning it would be a *negative* greenhouse gas contribution.
Re: It's not a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not talking about who built the ever loving rockets I'm talking about who invented the tech and trained the engineers.
Which tech? Nearly everything SpaceX creates is original work. Nobody else can even do even half of what SpaceX does. Including any government you can name. Not Russia, not EU, not China...none.
Building the damn things to spec is into the expensive part it's developing the technology and doing the billions and billions of dollars of basic research that takes decades and decades to pay off that's the expensive part.
SpaceX is actually very unique in that the government didn't commission any of its designs. Everything it built, it did so for its own purposes. Nobody asked us to build reusable rockets. Basically NASA says "hey, we need this launched, here's it's dimensions and weight, and here's where we need to put it, how much will you charge us?" Reusable rockets came because because SpaceX wanted to lower its own costs. Now that it has, none of its competitors can offer anywhere near the same value.
But now that you mention it no, we shouldn't have private companies building what is in effect public transportation.
Sooo...You're saying private companies should be banned from building rockets at all? If that was the case, NASA wouldn't even be able to put astronauts in space at all right now.
I don't particularly see any good reason to let them profiteer from my tax dollars in any way shape and form.
Dude, you don't even pay any taxes. Every dime of every dollar withheld from your welfare checks gets paid back to you in your tax returns.
At the very fucking least we should get stock in their companies instead of just handing them huge fat sacks of cash in exchange for a handful of middle class jobs that would have existed anyway.
Ahhh...No.
Reality isn't in my way, billionaires are.
No they're not, they're actually subsidizing your broke ass.
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Nobody asked us to build reusable rockets.
Interesting slip there. I assume you work for SpaceX? If so, congrats, it sounds fun and exciting; however, there are deranged people out there. You probably should not have let that slip.
Re: It's not a surprise (Score:2)
SpaceX employees are easy to spot, they're always wearing swag.
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And I'm broke because of corporate profiteering and the financial damage done by our fucked up healthcare system. One guys like Musk lobbied to maintain because he doesn't want to pay the taxes for a single payer healthcare system like the rest of the world has.
What keeps our healthcare system that way is that commercial competition is disallowed by lobbyist-controlled law. Bust open the ,medical monopoly and let in SpaceX-like open competition, and we would all enjoy better tech at lower prices.
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Furthermore without antitrust law enforcement you don't get competition you get mergers and acquisitions.
Fina
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An example is the high price Americans pay for pharma products and medical devices. For each of these commodities there is an international market, with competitive prices. Nations like Canada and Mexico buy in bulk in these markets, passing on the savings to their patients. No price controls that any country may have internally applies to international trade. Suppose that Walmart and Amazon, both of which are already registered as pharmacies, could shop in these markets? With their large customer bases, be
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Oh for fuck sakes the reason those prices are competitive is because the government heavily regulates the prices in those countries forcing them to be lower.
No government has the power to regulate prices in the international pharma market. All they can do is save by buying in bulk on it and by choosing not to buy if the deem prices to be too high. They might also choose to subsidize low domestic prices for their own citizens, which would be a state budget expenditure. My point is that Americans don't have the option of buying internationally, but are required to live in a high-priced bubble of the pharma industry's own devising.
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NASA's portion of those taxes is about $1500. NASA's budget is about $21B, and I think we recently saw that SpaceX is their number one contractor at around $2B. Now, SpaceX actually provides launches for that $2B. Dozens of launches. As opposed to the other contractors who might provide a handful of launches for the same amount.
Keep complaining about SpaceX getting $150 of your dollars, while Boeing and other contractors continue to fleece the system (in NASA and DoD) taking much more, and delivering much l
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You'll find that they have little or none. They haven't invented anything.
When you speak of a subject that you know nothing about, then every word that comes out of your mouth IS A LIE.
I know much more about this than you do, that's for sure.
I pay around $30,000 a year in taxes. That is a lot of money to me.
That's a lot to just about anybody. I pay $20,000 in taxes to California alone, and in return I get a broken infrastructure and politicians that have no fucking idea what they're doing. I pay about three times that amount to the federal government.
I've never been able to obtain any property because every time I start getting ahead the entire economy is crashed by the super rich and I'm starting over from scratch.
Then you're doing something incredibly wrong. Last year, my taxes (state + federal) were about $
Re:It's not a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Who invented the tech? Do you think it was some government employees? Are you crazy? The engines in these rockets were designed by private companies.
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OK, what "spec" is the raptor engine being built to? Show me the college that the methane reusable engine was designed at. Or the document, produced by a government employee, specifying what the design of the Raptor engine should be.
Masten Aerospace a private company for example showed mid air engine relight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Show me that done at a "public university." The other flaw in your argument is that you think some politician can come up with great ideas and run a company. Look at wh
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I'm talking about who invented the tech and trained the engineers.
"The tech" was invented by Russians (starting with Isayev in the 1940s) and the engineers were trained by universities, just like all other engineers. So...what the hell are you talking about?
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I'm not talking about who built the ever loving rockets I'm talking about who invented the tech and trained the engineers.
Germany.
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LOL. You obviously have no personal experience nor any clue how govt. funded projects typically work.
What a retard.
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A lot of actual US government civil service employees do in fact invent stuff, especially in the aerospace industry. They even get patents (in the government's name but they are still listed as the inventor).
There's even an entire class of government contracts meant to be a research collaboration (CRADAs, cooperative research and development agreements) rather than purely paying for R&D or contracting out a requirement like "put this satellite in this orbit" and letting the respondants decide what meth
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>Guys like you are all about saving taxpayer money until guys like me point out how to actually do it.
I have read all your posts up to this point in the thread. Nowhere do you talk about how to save taxpayer money. Your idea of just not spending money won't work because we want to go to space.
The government has *always* had private contractors build their space stuff. It *used* to be hella expensive because they could basically charge what they wanted, and it was all pork barrel politics.
After SpaceX,
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They're taking a whole bunch of tech that was invented for them by taxpayers along with a whole bunch of engineers that were trained for them also by taxpayers and then a whole bunch of money paid for by taxpayers to do what used to be done at cost by the federal government and is now done at cost Plus whatever profit gets tacked on for the owners.
And yet, they're doing it for a tenth the cost... go figure.
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Re: It's not a surprise (Score:3)
You don't know the first thing about SpaceX. Yes, government contracts are part how SpaceX drives revenue. However, that isn't only the US government; other governments use SpaceX, even in favor of their own domestic space agencies. In addition, and this might shock you, a fair number of engineers are actually self-taught. If you apply for a job at SpaceX, the hiring managers aren't all that concerned about where or how you developed your skills, they're primarily interested in whether you're very good at w
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If everything was politician-owned, how can anyone pay taxes? You realize that even if you were right (which you aren't) you're saying private industry made this possible.
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Re: (Score:2)
For whatever project you wish to accomplish, commercial profit margin in a competitive line of business costs less than cost-plus socialism.
Re: It's not a surprise (Score:2)
Oh? When did a taxpayer funded full flow staged combustion engine get built and flown then?