Musk seems to attract so, so many tinfoil hat type conspiracy theories. He's veering into being almost a Hank Rearden caricature.
EDIT: The tinfoil bit was over the top, but he's such a lightning rod and attracts so much criticism and persecution from the entrenched interests he is trying to disrupt, that it starts to look like there is some shadowy cabal trying to bring him down. I rather like the guy, we need some level of technological optimism to counteract the gloom and doom that is ever present.
Well, if you read the article, it traces back the op-eds to the people submitting them, who work for a PR firm, which has Boeing highlighted as one of their three big case studies on their website.
A tin-foil hat isn't really required, you just need to RTFA: An article critical of SpaceX has been repeatedly submitted to (and published in) 4 newspapers by a PR group called LMG who list Boeing as one of their major customers. Boeing are SpaceX's only competitor in the commercial crew area.
Yet I somehow feel like the whole Commercial Crew contract wouldn't even exist had SpaceX not paved the way.
Other space launch activities, however, have been getting their lunch eaten by SpaceX. This is probably pissing off everyone who was comfortable with the old approach, not just Boeing.
Or it was never a valid criticism on its own, but rather a shorthand to explain a toxic behavior pattern by certain people who would seek out all kinds of unsubtantiated nonsense regardless of merit (Lizard People, Illuminati, Social Marxism, etc). It's unfortunate that some people used it as a thought-terminating phrase against all conspiracies.
Usually the crazy part of conspiracy theories is that they invent a group that's doing something (Reptillians, the Illuminati, whatever), or describe something a real group couldn't possibly pull off (e.g. the CIA runs North Korea, the Bilderberg Group chooses who wins elections).
Which makes it very weird to see people level that accusation against claims that an obviously-real group did an obviously-plausible thing, like "this agency that exists to gather information gathered a lot of information". Or in this case "this PR firm ran several articles to affect PR". Sure, it's a conspiracy in that they aren't admitting to doing it, but why is that surprising?
And yet somehow a company sharing its acronym with the name "Lying Manipulative G's" is merely par for the course in today's world. "if you can't beat em, join em!"
One op-ed article attacking SpaceX's safety practices appears in the newspapers of several space-industry-oriented cities. The article is not written by the person it is attributed to, but rather by two people apparently affiliated with a PR firm in Washington, DC. One of the three main clients of said PR firm is Boeing, SpaceX's direct competitor.
Safety practices for people going into space? Honestly.. Pretty sure people going out of the atmosphere, inches away from an instant, unimaginable death are aware that it's not exactly safe. The company obviously has a huge vested interest in not having people die but it's kind of inevitable when you're in such a high stakes game. NASA has had plenty of deaths
From the space people I talk to, many in the very recent past harbored this notion that SpaceX was irresponsible with their early move-fast methods. However, as predicted, that all slowed down to a similarly glacial pace once they became entrenched in the red tape machine. Parity in that reguard is rapidly approaching.
And a nitpick, NASA was the pioneer, and pushed hard during the cold war to develop ICBM tech, the failure rate then was more in line with the goals. As its just minor economic and exploration roles now, with less polarizing military applications, we see less frantic push. I.e. killing a few people to prevent ww3 > next internet sat/artists on mars/astroid mining. Its not a fair comparison.
> killing a few people to prevent ww3 > next internet sat/artists on mars/astroid mining.
Individuals have very different risk tolerances, often based on their deepest values. But I don't think we should say it's wrong to want to e.g. go to Mars, even if there's an 90% chance of failure. It's a reasonable tradeoff to make.
If you succeed, you'll be hailed as a new civilization's Pilgrims, and will continue in that culture's oral history for as long as it exists. Children will sing songs about your feats, and dress up in crude facsimiles of your space suits on Landing Day. Adults will proudly trace their genealogy to members of your party, and speak admiringly about the values you instilled. Many people would trade their lives for a 10% chance of such a fate. As a society we should let them.
None of this is correct. NASA had the most deaths from the Space Shuttle, nothing to do with ICBMs. Nothing they did was to prevent WW3; their current goals are the same as the were four decades ago. SpaceX is still moving at a rapid and successful pace, as is evidenced by reading the news about them.
> NASA was the pioneer, and pushed hard during the cold war to develop ICBM tech
NASA did not develop ICBM technology; the USAF did. NASA used ICBMs in their early days, particularly Atlas missiles. There may well have been some cross-pollination of basic rocket design technology. But NASA was not in the business of making ICBMs and had nothing to do with MAD or the nuclear triad.
When does spacex launch over populated areas? They are either launching into polar orbits on the west coast or florida for non-polar orbits, neither of which overflies populated areas.
Usually happens with a glider or parachutes. In pretty much every case though the vehicle is coming down with next to no fuel on board, and the mass and size of the on-the-pad vehicle has been greatly reduced(due to various stages breaking away).
> The article is not written by the person it is attributed to
To be pedantic, he -did- write the article, but not for a newspaper. It was submitted to multiple large newspapers in space-heavy cities around the country as an Op Ed without his awareness (or at least, "ostensibly on his behalf") by the PR firm.
The article is actually rather vague about whether the op-ed was written by Hagar. It says:
> To try to understand his viewpoint, Ars attempted to reach Hagar by phone and email in September. In the course of this process, we learned that he did not actually submit many of these op-eds.
Since the article claims to be about one op-ed piece submitted to many places, it seems reasonable to assume he wrote it, but that the mentioned PR firm then submitted it far and wide.
It's also not clear from that wording if they actually spoke with Hagar (they "attempted to reach" him), or if this information comes from another source.
In any case, it's still an obvious smear campaign.
I actually got approached myself to write something like this recently.
I blog occasionally about defense issues. I got a call out of the blue from someone who said they liked something I'd written about the F-35 (this: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/08/stovl-the-f-35-and-how-we...), and would I be interested in getting paid to write an op-ed about the current state of the F-35 program?
I'm always interested in getting paid, so I said sure, let's talk. And over the course of ten minutes or so of conversation, it came out that:
- What the caller really wanted was an article about all the cost overruns of the F-35 program;
- That the caller was representing a D.C. "government relations" (aka lobbying) firm.
At that point I politely ended the conversation, because it was obvious what was happening.
The question of what engine to put in the F-35 was the subject of a long and bitter political battle back in the 2000s between the two big producers of aircraft engines in the US, Pratt and Whitney and General Electric. P&W won that battle and got their engine chosen for the F-35, but GE self-funded their own alternative engine and then pushed hard for years to get Congress to approve funding it as an "alternate engine" -- a sort of insurance policy against P&W tanking the too-big-to-fail F-35 project by screwing their engine up. The Air Force didn't want that insurance policy, but GE won the support of a few powerful Senators on the Armed Services and Appropriations committees, and those Senators managed to steer enough money to GE to keep the program alive until 2011, when it was finally axed for cost-cutting reasons. (Here's some background on this story: https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2009/07/experts-contractors-an..., https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2011/0217/F-..., https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/157649-pen...)
So what was going on, I surmised, was that someone with an interest in making Congress regret the decision to cancel GE's alternate engine -- maybe GE themselves, maybe some other company in their orbit, or maybe just someone with a financial interest in seeing UTX (P&W's parent company) go down a few points and GE go up -- had decided that the time was ripe to start building a public record linking the F-35's problems to the decision to go with P&W's engine; and they had money to spend to hire people to make that happen. (It wouldn't even need to be much money. By the standards of defense contracting, writers are dirt cheap.) And so they had engaged this lobbying firm, and the lobbying firm had gone looking for people who could write knowledgeably about the F-35, and Google had led them to me.
I didn't take the gig. But it did provide an interesting case study in the kind of maneuvering that goes on behind the scenes of the manufacturing of opinion.
Curious what the going cost for funding this type of activity is. I assume drastically cheaper than desired result profits, but in comparison to traditional advertising?
I didn't get far enough in this particular conversation to suss out what they're willing to pay. Generally speaking, freelance writers are paid on the order of pennies per word. Writer's Market has some guidelines for freelancers on pricing their work here: http://www.writersmarket.com/assets/pdf/how_much_should_i_ch...
Is is immoral to write something that you might not feel is exactly a lie but pushes an opinion that you don't agree with very strongly? I think this is immoral, but if someone needed the money I wouldn't quibble as much. I know some people will just say that is PR but you can give the press a helpful to your side view of the world without lying and creating a false perception that someone supports something they really don't. But I'm kind of an idealist :-)
Seems like run-o-the-mill big corporation FUD to me, and not even particularly well executed distribution of said FUD. Doesn't strike me as overly newsworthy. Am I missing something here?
I'm curious as to whether Eric Berger (the reporter who wrote this piece) saw the op-ed on the Houston Chronicle first (he worked for them before Ars) and smelled something fishy.
The fact that the Chron used a screencap of Musk smoking that blunt to go along with the anti-SpaceX op-ed is unbelievable. Letting a PR firm throw mud at a client's competitor via a thinly-veiled op-ed is one thing, but helping them by taking part in the propaganda machine to that extent is something else entirely.
If you just assume that about 100% of what you read on the internet, see on the tv news, or read in a newspaper is bought and paid for by someone with a economic interest in the topic, you'll probably be right about 90%+ of the time.
The underlying message is that Boeing isn't confident they'll beat Crew Dragon to orbit. They've already stacked the deck with more funding due to their "legacy overhead" but apparently even that isn't enough.
Is Boeing having trouble competing on all of features, price, and schedule?
I think the story is more complicated as always - If you watch Scott Manley's channel, I think there's a few mission profiles that ULA can do better than SpaceX. One launcher can't do everything well.
I think right now Boeing is ahead schedule-wise, but it's a bit of a coin flip for who will launch first. I wouldn't be surprised if they're within 3 months of each other, both for the initial test and the first crewed test.
I dug into SpaceX a little bit deeper the last couple of days, mainly to get an answer to the question whether reusabel launchers are financially feasible or not. I did not find an answer to that question, instead I found some other intriguing data.
The development sure is cheaper at SpaceX compared to Arianespace, so I assume the same is true for Boeing. On the launch costs, taken everything into account, including the WSJ article using SpaceX internal data up to 2015, there is not much of a difference between SpaceX and Arianespace on average. It seems that SpaceX is undercutting the commercial competition with government contracts. Also, Google most likely saved SpaceX from bancruptcy in 2016. That ULA, as a historical DoD monoplist, plays in different league all together is a different story. I am not yet finished, so yes I might be mistaken with my conclusion so far.
Well, there was the internal data zhe wall Street journal reported on in 2017. And the SpaceX comments made in the follow up. And the funding history is available as well, how reliable crunchbase is for that I don't know.
So there is no complete vacuum. Also, you have advertised costs on SpaceX website. It is at least enough to get a first idea of things. I don't have the numbers in front of me rigjt now, but I am more than happy to share them. Because my whole thought process and thus analysis was wrong it would really help to know that.
EDIT: The rumors I read have been the reason I tried to chase down as much numbers and information I could by myself.
I'm glad you convinced yourself, but this situation has been argued over for years by a lot of people on Reddit, and I really doubt you can bring any hard facts to the argument that aren't well-known.
See, I am not convinced at all. It is reasonable to assume that SpaceX has lower development cost (it would be hard to be more expensive than Ariane and ULA so). Which means SpaceX reaches the program break-even point earlier. Launch costs on the other hand are driven by production cost mainly. And there I don't see any systematic advantage that would explain the lower prices SpaceX is advertising.
I know that there is no such thing as a "standard" launch, but all numbers that are available point at higher prices than the $ 62M a Falcon 9 is advertised for.
Reusable launchers are different story. And SpaceX is giving 30% discounts for them (source: SpaceX, Gwynn Shotwell).
So yeah, if you can point out wrong assumptions or errors, I'm more than happy because I am not convinced of my analysis so far myself.
EDIT: Typos... man, typing on the phone really is suboptimal for sentences with more than three words...
> Which means SpaceX reaches the program break-even point earlier
I mostly agree, but it's entirely possible that they just spread the cost out more, which would reduce the cost of individual launches.
As far as production goes - my recollection is that SpaceX does a lot of in-house stuff, so they've got vertical integration going for them. Perhaps more importantly, they build their own engines, and lots of them (10 per rocket, as I believe MVac is similar enough to the first stage engines to use essentially the same production). That's a pretty big advantage over buying RD-180s like ULA.
Also, doesn't SpaceX use essentially 'off-the-shelf' electrical components, and just use more if needed for redundancy? 'Space-grade' hardware isn't cheap, so if they really are avoiding that entirely, that could be a big win.
Whatever the case, unfortunately for us, they're a private company - so this is all semi-educated guesswork. They definitely seem to be doing well, so clearly something somewhere is keeping those costs down.
An Mvac takes two weeks to build, vs about a day for a sea-level Merlin. It's not just a different bell. If a sea-level Merlin fails (and this has happened, I think on CRS-5) the remaining eight engines gimbal a bit and burn a bit longer. If the Mvac fails the second stage and payload are lost. So the vacuum engine is built to far higher standards than the sea-level engine.
The Falcon 1 even went so far as to strip the most failure-prone part of the engine that could be eliminated, the turbopump, and simply pressure feed the vacuum engine. They called it Kestrel, but the combustion chamber and most of the rest of the motor (sans bell) was identical to the Merlin on the first stage.
There's a NASA study that says that SpaceX has lower development cost. SpaceX has a volume advantage for manufacturing. SpaceX makes a lot of usually-contracted-out stuff in-house and at high volume, for example they are the #1 maker of composite rocket fairings. Horizontal assembly and payload integration is much cheaper than the way ULA/Arianespace assemble and launch rockets. The most recent announced number for F9 cost was $50mm for a reused+landed GTO launch -- see the FH press conference. And so on. There are a lot of details flying around, some more solid than others, and you're probably not going to learn much in a discussion about them here.
As just one example, you say Google most likely saved SpaceX from bankruptcy in 2016. As far as I know, neither Google nor anyone else did any investment into SpaceX in 2016. Where are you getting your information?
Also, have you not even considered the official reasons given for why SpaceX is cheaper? Namely vertical integration, extreme cost consciousness, use of off the shelve hardware, designs made to take advantage of economies of scale (several smaller engines per rocket instead of a few), the advantages of clean slate designs, and details like friction welding?
Alphabet and some other fund (fidelity?) invested $ 1bn in, I think 2016. Could have been 2015 as well. I don't have the numbers ready right now. But I'm rather sure it was the year after a Falcon 9 exploded and they didn't launch for a couple of months.
Well, it was in January of 2015, half a year before the CRS-7 anomaly. Google and Fidelity jointly invested $1 billion on a $10 billion valuation. You can't have been researching this very carefully.
See, that's the reason I put it up there. And yes, citing stuff from the top of ones head usually doesn't help accuracy.
HN is a great place to have that kind of discussion.
So let me rephrase my statement: Alphabet and Fidelity invested $ 1 bn in January 2015, this helped to keep SpaceX afloat when in June 2015 a launch mishap resulted in a launch hiatus and subsequent loss of $ 260m in fiscal year 2015. Now even the timeline is correct.
It was a significant moment to see two of the most powerful women in aerospace alongside one another—two fierce competitors coming together for the good of the country.
Can someone explain me this line? What "good for the country" do they mean?
Crew boards while the rocket is empty, which makes it safe. After that, there is launch escape system ready to take the crew to safety in case anything goes wrong during the fueling or launch.
This is not considered less safe than fueling after the crew has boarded, and NASA agrees.
The technical reason from what I understand is that the closer you fuel to launch, the more cryo fuel you can pump into the rocket, as it won't have time to expand its volume before being used.
The rocket runs on extremely cold fuel. It's impossible to perfectly maintain that temperature in the tank, so the fuel is constantly expanding and venting out of the tank so it doesn't explode. You can keep adding more chilled fuel to the tank though, so the goal is to top off the tank as close to launch as possible.
This is somewhat tangential to the topic, but having worked in PR/marketing agency environments and heard stories from friends, I've found them to be the most amoral places to work at.
The agency where I worked (social media marketing) would make outrageous claims and give a lot of "smoke and mirror" presentations to both land clients and give them the impression they were getting more for their money than they were. They'd engage in astroturf, fake views, and generally do whatever it took to deliver on the number they promised. It made me uncomfortable, but I was young in my career and thought that's just how the world worked. Thankfully I didn't have to stay there long enough for it to really rub off on me. I've heard enough stories from others over the years to know this wasn't an isolated experience.
Most agencies only have a few big customers paying everyone's paychecks, and it's far easier to retain a client than land a new one. As a result, they're highly incentivized to do whatever it takes to keep them. It's probably the biggest dark side of a directly incentivized culture.
Hearing that an agency for Boeing did this doesn't surprise me. What might be worse is it's quite possible Boeing is finding out through this reporting.
> What might be worse is it's quite possible Boeing is finding out through this reporting.
_If_ Boeing really is behind all this, they may well be unaware of the specific details, sure. But so what? This doesn't make them any less responsible. So I don't understand what makes this "worse".
I would personally find it distasteful if someone did something shady trying to further my interests and find out about it in the news, which is why I find it worse.
Call me cynical, but in my opinion, any company using the service of such agencies, have to know the possibility of abuses and unethical practices that might happen. They may even count on it, but with the great benefit that they now have plausable deniability.
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[ 929 ms ] story [ 1894 ms ] threadEDIT: The tinfoil bit was over the top, but he's such a lightning rod and attracts so much criticism and persecution from the entrenched interests he is trying to disrupt, that it starts to look like there is some shadowy cabal trying to bring him down. I rather like the guy, we need some level of technological optimism to counteract the gloom and doom that is ever present.
Other space launch activities, however, have been getting their lunch eaten by SpaceX. This is probably pissing off everyone who was comfortable with the old approach, not just Boeing.
Which makes it very weird to see people level that accusation against claims that an obviously-real group did an obviously-plausible thing, like "this agency that exists to gather information gathered a lot of information". Or in this case "this PR firm ran several articles to affect PR". Sure, it's a conspiracy in that they aren't admitting to doing it, but why is that surprising?
One op-ed article attacking SpaceX's safety practices appears in the newspapers of several space-industry-oriented cities. The article is not written by the person it is attributed to, but rather by two people apparently affiliated with a PR firm in Washington, DC. One of the three main clients of said PR firm is Boeing, SpaceX's direct competitor.
And a nitpick, NASA was the pioneer, and pushed hard during the cold war to develop ICBM tech, the failure rate then was more in line with the goals. As its just minor economic and exploration roles now, with less polarizing military applications, we see less frantic push. I.e. killing a few people to prevent ww3 > next internet sat/artists on mars/astroid mining. Its not a fair comparison.
Individuals have very different risk tolerances, often based on their deepest values. But I don't think we should say it's wrong to want to e.g. go to Mars, even if there's an 90% chance of failure. It's a reasonable tradeoff to make.
If you succeed, you'll be hailed as a new civilization's Pilgrims, and will continue in that culture's oral history for as long as it exists. Children will sing songs about your feats, and dress up in crude facsimiles of your space suits on Landing Day. Adults will proudly trace their genealogy to members of your party, and speak admiringly about the values you instilled. Many people would trade their lives for a 10% chance of such a fate. As a society we should let them.
NASA did not develop ICBM technology; the USAF did. NASA used ICBMs in their early days, particularly Atlas missiles. There may well have been some cross-pollination of basic rocket design technology. But NASA was not in the business of making ICBMs and had nothing to do with MAD or the nuclear triad.
Should we disregard safety on their account, too?
At first glance, these op-eds (which are linked to) appear similar rather than identical.
Also, they confirmed "at least 4 out of 6".
To be pedantic, he -did- write the article, but not for a newspaper. It was submitted to multiple large newspapers in space-heavy cities around the country as an Op Ed without his awareness (or at least, "ostensibly on his behalf") by the PR firm.
> To try to understand his viewpoint, Ars attempted to reach Hagar by phone and email in September. In the course of this process, we learned that he did not actually submit many of these op-eds.
Since the article claims to be about one op-ed piece submitted to many places, it seems reasonable to assume he wrote it, but that the mentioned PR firm then submitted it far and wide.
It's also not clear from that wording if they actually spoke with Hagar (they "attempted to reach" him), or if this information comes from another source.
In any case, it's still an obvious smear campaign.
The most common version of it says good things about your own company.
I blog occasionally about defense issues. I got a call out of the blue from someone who said they liked something I'd written about the F-35 (this: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/08/stovl-the-f-35-and-how-we...), and would I be interested in getting paid to write an op-ed about the current state of the F-35 program?
I'm always interested in getting paid, so I said sure, let's talk. And over the course of ten minutes or so of conversation, it came out that:
- What the caller really wanted was an article about all the cost overruns of the F-35 program;
- Specifically, an article that attributed those cost overruns to the rocky development of the F-35's engine, Pratt and Whitney's F135 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_F135); and
- That the caller was representing a D.C. "government relations" (aka lobbying) firm.
At that point I politely ended the conversation, because it was obvious what was happening.
The question of what engine to put in the F-35 was the subject of a long and bitter political battle back in the 2000s between the two big producers of aircraft engines in the US, Pratt and Whitney and General Electric. P&W won that battle and got their engine chosen for the F-35, but GE self-funded their own alternative engine and then pushed hard for years to get Congress to approve funding it as an "alternate engine" -- a sort of insurance policy against P&W tanking the too-big-to-fail F-35 project by screwing their engine up. The Air Force didn't want that insurance policy, but GE won the support of a few powerful Senators on the Armed Services and Appropriations committees, and those Senators managed to steer enough money to GE to keep the program alive until 2011, when it was finally axed for cost-cutting reasons. (Here's some background on this story: https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2009/07/experts-contractors-an..., https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2011/0217/F-..., https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/157649-pen...)
So what was going on, I surmised, was that someone with an interest in making Congress regret the decision to cancel GE's alternate engine -- maybe GE themselves, maybe some other company in their orbit, or maybe just someone with a financial interest in seeing UTX (P&W's parent company) go down a few points and GE go up -- had decided that the time was ripe to start building a public record linking the F-35's problems to the decision to go with P&W's engine; and they had money to spend to hire people to make that happen. (It wouldn't even need to be much money. By the standards of defense contracting, writers are dirt cheap.) And so they had engaged this lobbying firm, and the lobbying firm had gone looking for people who could write knowledgeably about the F-35, and Google had led them to me.
I didn't take the gig. But it did provide an interesting case study in the kind of maneuvering that goes on behind the scenes of the manufacturing of opinion.
Curious what the going cost for funding this type of activity is. I assume drastically cheaper than desired result profits, but in comparison to traditional advertising?
There's a nearly inevitable lack of conscience within deeply established institutions where people, in committee, are paid to seek an outcome.
The fact that the Chron used a screencap of Musk smoking that blunt to go along with the anti-SpaceX op-ed is unbelievable. Letting a PR firm throw mud at a client's competitor via a thinly-veiled op-ed is one thing, but helping them by taking part in the propaganda machine to that extent is something else entirely.
I think the story is more complicated as always - If you watch Scott Manley's channel, I think there's a few mission profiles that ULA can do better than SpaceX. One launcher can't do everything well.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/launch-dates-to-be-updated-more...
The development sure is cheaper at SpaceX compared to Arianespace, so I assume the same is true for Boeing. On the launch costs, taken everything into account, including the WSJ article using SpaceX internal data up to 2015, there is not much of a difference between SpaceX and Arianespace on average. It seems that SpaceX is undercutting the commercial competition with government contracts. Also, Google most likely saved SpaceX from bancruptcy in 2016. That ULA, as a historical DoD monoplist, plays in different league all together is a different story. I am not yet finished, so yes I might be mistaken with my conclusion so far.
So there is no complete vacuum. Also, you have advertised costs on SpaceX website. It is at least enough to get a first idea of things. I don't have the numbers in front of me rigjt now, but I am more than happy to share them. Because my whole thought process and thus analysis was wrong it would really help to know that.
EDIT: The rumors I read have been the reason I tried to chase down as much numbers and information I could by myself.
I know that there is no such thing as a "standard" launch, but all numbers that are available point at higher prices than the $ 62M a Falcon 9 is advertised for.
Reusable launchers are different story. And SpaceX is giving 30% discounts for them (source: SpaceX, Gwynn Shotwell).
So yeah, if you can point out wrong assumptions or errors, I'm more than happy because I am not convinced of my analysis so far myself.
EDIT: Typos... man, typing on the phone really is suboptimal for sentences with more than three words...
I mostly agree, but it's entirely possible that they just spread the cost out more, which would reduce the cost of individual launches.
As far as production goes - my recollection is that SpaceX does a lot of in-house stuff, so they've got vertical integration going for them. Perhaps more importantly, they build their own engines, and lots of them (10 per rocket, as I believe MVac is similar enough to the first stage engines to use essentially the same production). That's a pretty big advantage over buying RD-180s like ULA.
Also, doesn't SpaceX use essentially 'off-the-shelf' electrical components, and just use more if needed for redundancy? 'Space-grade' hardware isn't cheap, so if they really are avoiding that entirely, that could be a big win.
Whatever the case, unfortunately for us, they're a private company - so this is all semi-educated guesswork. They definitely seem to be doing well, so clearly something somewhere is keeping those costs down.
And it is impressive what they achieved.
The Falcon 1 even went so far as to strip the most failure-prone part of the engine that could be eliminated, the turbopump, and simply pressure feed the vacuum engine. They called it Kestrel, but the combustion chamber and most of the rest of the motor (sans bell) was identical to the Merlin on the first stage.
Also, have you not even considered the official reasons given for why SpaceX is cheaper? Namely vertical integration, extreme cost consciousness, use of off the shelve hardware, designs made to take advantage of economies of scale (several smaller engines per rocket instead of a few), the advantages of clean slate designs, and details like friction welding?
HN is a great place to have that kind of discussion.
So let me rephrase my statement: Alphabet and Fidelity invested $ 1 bn in January 2015, this helped to keep SpaceX afloat when in June 2015 a launch mishap resulted in a launch hiatus and subsequent loss of $ 260m in fiscal year 2015. Now even the timeline is correct.
Can someone explain me this line? What "good for the country" do they mean?
This is not considered less safe than fueling after the crew has boarded, and NASA agrees.
The agency where I worked (social media marketing) would make outrageous claims and give a lot of "smoke and mirror" presentations to both land clients and give them the impression they were getting more for their money than they were. They'd engage in astroturf, fake views, and generally do whatever it took to deliver on the number they promised. It made me uncomfortable, but I was young in my career and thought that's just how the world worked. Thankfully I didn't have to stay there long enough for it to really rub off on me. I've heard enough stories from others over the years to know this wasn't an isolated experience.
Most agencies only have a few big customers paying everyone's paychecks, and it's far easier to retain a client than land a new one. As a result, they're highly incentivized to do whatever it takes to keep them. It's probably the biggest dark side of a directly incentivized culture.
Hearing that an agency for Boeing did this doesn't surprise me. What might be worse is it's quite possible Boeing is finding out through this reporting.
_If_ Boeing really is behind all this, they may well be unaware of the specific details, sure. But so what? This doesn't make them any less responsible. So I don't understand what makes this "worse".