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| Science |
| SpaceX has a larger effective budget for Human Space Flight than NASA does! |
| 2018-03-19 |
| [Forum.NASAspaceflight] SpaceX has an income of some 3 billion, counting various NASA contracts, rockets at higher than list price, ... NASA has a budget of some 4 billion for development of HSF, mostly going to Orion and SLS. SpaceX may have a 'profit' of some $1B, right now, or in the very near future(*) that it is investing in future HSF relevant items. (BFR/Mars) It only takes the assumption of SpaceX being three times or so more efficient to put their HSF development program budget over NASAs. This doesn't even require any future profits from Starlink or other customers. * (part of the current budget is going into not-very-relevant going forward architecture such as Dragon, that may be systematically less efficient than a program with reduced oversight). Once StarLink has 800+ satellites it goes commercial, very likely bringing in several $billion more even before peaking with full deployment. Their revenue estimates, printed by WSJ, put StarLink's revenues at about $30 billion by the mid-2020's. Given anchor tenants (local/municipal ISP's, govt agencies, DoD*...) and hosted sensors on their satellites, this could be quite conservative. If SpaceX 'only' has $1B profit available per year, they already have more human space flight money than NASA because they get 10x more out of each development dollar[1]. Look at what they've spent and created over last ten years compared to what NASA has spent and created... And they are just hitting their stride -- BFR isn't their first launch vehicle, Raptor not their first engine, Boca Chica isn't their first pad. |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #6 NASA has to spread out it's expenditures and hiring in such a way as to make congresscritters happy. SpaceX not so much. Any function run by the government will eventually turn into a jobs program. Doing the work well is not good enough; you have to generate votes. |
| Posted by: ed in texas 2018-03-19 08:31 |
| #5 NASA should have had a zero budget since the end of Apollo. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2018-03-19 08:29 |
| #4 Calling D. D. Harriman. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2018-03-19 00:57 |
| #3 |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2018-03-19 00:53 |
| #2 The key word here is 'Effective'. They are a business, not a make work program for aerospace engineers. |
| Posted by: Nguard 2018-03-19 00:22 |
| #1 Yeah, OK. But how's their Department of Muslim Outreach? |
| Posted by: SteveS 2018-03-19 00:21 |