They're still designing it, and learning to build it (building the "machine that builds the machine"). They've already scrapped booster 4 / ship 20 without even a test flight.
Today's rocket was a byproduct of what they're actually working on, so it's hard to pin a price on it. I'd guess a few million dollars in engines, and a few hundred thousand in steel? This is all stuff they would've needed to find a way to dispose of anyway; the next booster in line (B9) already has hundreds of improvements. Among these are improvements to thrust vector control and engine shielding, both of which were involved in the issues with today's flight.
You touch upon an interesting advantage that private space engineering has that, depending on one's attitude on the topic, may or may not be fair.
NASA has to do everything in the public eye and their process reflects this. Private enterprise is allowed to hide information, which implies they are allowed to massage information.
(... this probably says unfortunate things about the nature of governance by public sentiment that it's best not to think about over-much if one is super-fond of democracies as engines of progress...)
True. On the other hand, we do know that SpaceX has taken about $10 billion in funding since its inception.
With that, they developed Falcon 1, Merlin engines, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, first full-flow staged combustion engine in the methalox Raptor engine, Starship, Starship Heavy, Dragon, Crew Dragon, Re-usability, Starlink satellite manufacturing and 4,000 satellites launched to orbit, and quite a bit more.
The SLS has spent 23.8 billion in nominal dollars so far. SpaceX has received about 9.8 Billion total investment, which puts an upper limit on operating losses.
$9.8 billion legally-obligated-disclosable total investment. The disclosure requirements for NASA are stricter than for private industry (and there may also be an apples-to-oranges question on auditing and accounting: if NASA grants a company $500 million to do R&D, and that company turns around and pays its staff and fabrication costs with that money, is that a billion of expenditure on the SLS project or $500 million?).
I agree there are some Apples to oranges comparisons issues. For example, you would want to add pure R&D grants to the SpaceX total.
I don't follow your NASA example though. We know the NASA/government spend amount for the SLS (23.8 billion). We don't need to speculate on if there is double counting of government spend and contractor spend.
The problem is that the public and Congresspeople don't tend to see it that way. They aren't generally of the opinion that spending a couple billion to blow something up on the pad or shortly after launch is an acceptable resource expenditure (especially not at the Congressional level).
Rocket specialists know this is part for the course, but most of the public isn't rocket specialists.
I believe you underestimate the modal American congress-person and rate-payer.
In congress, maybe about 25% of them can't be bothered to remember what state they're from. They don't really matter as they'll pretty much vote however the last person to talk to them wants them to vote. This is why congressional legislative directors try to schedule appointments immediately before their congress-person votes.
About 10% of congress-people are SUPER sharp and will understand this whole "you have to break eggs to make an omelet" concept. 50% more could be educated. The remainder will act randomly depending on what the internal polling says.
SSL and Boeing and the old school guys know a critical part of their job is to lobby congress-persons and staffers. They're not paying them off, they're just making campaign contributions to ensure they get access to pitch their side of the story.
As for the modal American voter? They don't care about space. They care about whether they're getting a raise next year, the mortgage is paid and inflation doesn't price them out of a good meal every now and again. When they get economic security, THEN they start caring about other things like who goes in what bathroom, why they can't buy TANG or light-bulbs at the grocery store anymore or whether they're getting value for money in their national space program.
My gut feeling after doing polling for a few years is the numbers are about the same: 25% of American voters can't tie their shoe-laces, 10% will understand you sometimes fail when you try to do something innovative and the remainder will need some convincing.
The good news is (effectively) no-one in the US looks at national budgets. Heck, most congressional staffers never read the whole thing, just the bits they're interested in. Many (most?) voters (and congress-persons) look to membership organizations for direction. If someone is a member of the Planetary Society, and they happen to be chatting w/ their elected representative, you can be pretty sure they'll mention how important the space program is. If someone is a member of Drunk Middle-Aged Regressive Science Haters of America, you can probably guess what they think about anything with the pong of science about it. Fortunately, this latter class of Americans usually doesn't know who their congress-person is or that they have a congressional representative.
So... to make an already long post short... I don't think you have to convince EVERYBODY, just the people that matter. The message that "it's okay to fail from time to time as long as you're making substantial forward progress" is something at least half of the people who affect US budget priorities can get their brainstems around.
[And as an aside... having worked with US congress-people in the past, I can report they're frequently much smarter than you give them credit for. And you don't get to be a Legislative Director in a congressional staff without being reasonably sharp. But they do worry about how large donors will respond to their votes. We're entering a phase of debt-ceiling debates. The GOP controls congress at the moment and we'll see a lot of wheeling and/or dealing. It's quite telling to see what each party thinks is important. Biden seems to have invested a small portion of personal reputation in the SLS, probably because of it's history over the Obama administration. Despite it's actual benefits, various GOP members may use that to rail against it (SLS) as a proxy for railing against Biden. (I'm trying to avoid being partisan here, some Dems railed against the Constellation program during the Bush years, so I'm not saying it's ONLY something the GOP does. It's just the typical railing against the other party to try and fire up your base so you don't have to explain why you didn't follow-through on your campaign promises.) But I ramble...]
> NASA has to do everything in the public eye and their process reflects this. Private enterprise is allowed to hide information, which implies they are allowed to massage information.
That would be a good point if we were talking about NASA vs Blue Origin. But SpaceX is arguably building more in the open than NASA.
> How would you argue that? I mean, please step me though this argument.
The person I replied to was making the case that NASA can't take risks because they develop in the open whereas private companies can develop in hiding, so they can take more risks.
But a quick glance on reddit, nasaspaceflight, and youtube tells me that SpaceX is very much developing in the open, and to a greater extent than NASA.
Which means that there is some other reason why SpaceX feels more free to take risks than NASA.
In contrast, Blue Origin is famous for not disclosing almost any information to the public. For a long time Tory Bruno, the CEO of ULA, was the one providing the most public information on Blue Origin's BE-4 engines.
If you cared to, you could download the entire US federal budget, NASA's budget, NASA's contracts with SSL, Boeing, SpaceX, etc. and all the ancillary data regarding milestones and results. You could, if you wanted, download more information that you might ever want about Blue Origin's contracts w/ the federal government. And SpaceX's contracts with the federal government.
Not everything is there, but enough to get a very decent picture of what's going on. Sometimes relevant information takes YEARS to be published.
But it's not easy to find. I've had to directly email people sometimes. Sometimes stuff is classified for no good reason other than someone thought at one point that a particular program was dual-use (commercial/military). Sometimes you DO have to file FOIA agreements.
I'm completely not coming down on anyone for not spending their time doing this. It takes a fair amount of time to piece things together from spreadsheets and contract addenda.
But it is possible.
What SpaceX does is they make it easy to see what they're doing. They upload videos to YouTube and Shotwell speaks at events and conferences from time to time. But you are getting their side of the story. Every now and again Casey Dreier over at the Planetary Society will dig up some previously difficult to find nugget of information about how various programs are being funded and exactly what they're being funded for. But Dreier's job is to focus more on planetary exploration missions rather than aerospace development, so I don't think he's focusing on SpaceX, SLS and Blue Origin.
You can only massage information so far though. The costs do actually matter and you can't turn a profit if all of your launches are horrendously expensive (above what you're charging for them), and you just keep it a secret.
What's the value add on your comment? Of course costs matter for IBM and Amazon! They're publicly traded companies, and they need to make a profit or else!
Well... the US tax-payer spent $2.9B for a starship or two. Or to be more accurate, there's a contract between NASA and SpaceX to deliver a Lunar Lander Starship variant (NextSTEP-2, Appendix H, Option A.) Last year it was upgraded to Option B which (I think) calls for a beefed-up Starship that can perform multiple lunar missions.
I'm sure they're not just dumping 2.9B in Elon's bank account (I mean... if they did he would just buy back all the Tesla stock) but there are a series of milestones that need to be met for the government to release the next chunk of funds. I don't know if NASA published the exact milestones, but maybe "not exploding on the launch-pad" was enough to release the next block of funds.
By comparison, Falcon Heavy costs about $62M per launch, but Gwynne Shotwell predicted they can shave 40% off that price tag when they start re-using heavies.
But Elon has supposedly said the TDC (total development cost) of the Starship is projected to be 2-10 billion. [I found this at the Daily Mail website, so take it with as large a grain of salt as you wish.]
If it costs $10B to build one and $10M per launch and you get 10 launches per vehicle, that's $1.1B per launch if you amortize the development costs. But if it takes $2B to build one and $2M per launch and you get 10 launches, then it's only $220M per launch. But if you build five operational starships that each have 10 launches each, things start to get downright affordable.
So if the question is how much has SpaceX spent on the Starship to date? I don't know that's public info. If the question is how much will they spend on development, the answer is $2B-$10B (though that's from the Daily Mail.) If the question is how much will each launch cost (including amortizing development costs)? It could be as cheap as $42M. Or depending on how much of the $2.9B from NASA they're able to apply to previous development costs... who knows!? They could make $1.6M per launch as long as the GSA doesn't audit them too closely.
There's a myth in US government purchasing that competition drives costs down, and that's probably true for commodities. But Starship class super-heavy-launch vehicles aren't commodities. There's a TREMENDOUS amount of cost (both opportunity cost and dollars) associated with fiscal oversight of large projects. The hope has always been that when Blue Origin built something to compete, it would bring total costs down. I am skeptical.
They literally have another booster/starship ready to go. The project cost may be 2-10B but the individual launch vehicles will cost less than 200M$ each.
