"I expect that the government will follow all the rules and be fair and follow all the laws."
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A key SpaceX competitor says he has “not been impacted” by Musk’s ties to Trump
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"I expect that the government will follow all the rules and be fair and follow all the laws, and so we're behaving that way."
So when is the board going to give this man his pack and push him out of the plane? Think this qualifies as dereliction of fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders.
So when is the board going to give this man his pack and push him out of the plane? Think this qualifies as dereliction of fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders.
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"I expect that the government will follow all the rules and be fair and follow all the laws, and so we're behaving that way."
Said the guy building gas chambers in 1940....
Edit; I know it's harsh, but anyone lying to make money, whilst facilitating this regime is legitimising it and therefore part of it.
Said the guy building gas chambers in 1940....
Edit; I know it's harsh, but anyone lying to make money, whilst facilitating this regime is legitimising it and therefore part of it.
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Trump doesn't do friends. Elon is getting preferential treatment because this government is pay to play and Elon tossed the most money around.Here are the reasons: "Because Elon is Trump's friend".
List done.
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The Elon bros have their hands hovering over their keyboards ready to pass out instant downvotes in defense of their fascist hero.
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That's true of any of Trump's "friends". I should have double quoted it to make that clear.
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As much as it sucks, SpaceX has been delivering on launch cadence and price. Now if every single launch had been given to them I'd be much more worried about corruption. But the split seems reasonable for the moment.
A few years from now? That could totally change. Right now? It seems reasonable even if annoying.
A few years from now? That could totally change. Right now? It seems reasonable even if annoying.
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The break down of the awarded launches really does seem reasonable. SpaceX is the cheaper option and has the proven capacity to do the launches. The last block going 60% to ULA felt like a "We want to make sure you get enough launches to actually stick around". Now they've got a big backlog with Kuiper launches but without the proven capacity to handle that quantity of launches on a rocket that was way behind schedule and had an anomaly on the second qualification launch.
The comments about the high energy orbits are a little odd. Sure, Vulcan may be a little better optimized but SpaceX can still do the missions. While SpaceX might be expending a FH center core on those missions a Vulcan launch is going to be loaded up with SRBs which aren't exactly cheap and might actually cost more than the FH core that is being expended. Even if the FH core costs more than the SRBs the mission price is still lower. I think the Space Force might just be a little more comfortable with the tried and true ULA for those launches.
The comments about the high energy orbits are a little odd. Sure, Vulcan may be a little better optimized but SpaceX can still do the missions. While SpaceX might be expending a FH center core on those missions a Vulcan launch is going to be loaded up with SRBs which aren't exactly cheap and might actually cost more than the FH core that is being expended. Even if the FH core costs more than the SRBs the mission price is still lower. I think the Space Force might just be a little more comfortable with the tried and true ULA for those launches.
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Stephen, that's a great writeup. It's one thing to look at just the numbers and wonder, it's another to get insight into the requirements driving the allocation. Thanks.
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It is a good write up and good on Mr. Clark for taking one for the team so that Mr. Berger can avoid the arrows about this. SpaceX is run by a oligarch who has become the epitome of everything wrong with the US right now and not just space exploration, or the US, but the world would be better off without him. But SpaceX is currently everything that was written in this article and we do live in a capitalist (late stage, rotting, run by a kakistocracy of evil lunatics) economy so it makes sense that it is getting most of the contracts for US space deployments.
Let us not just hope, but work towards a better day and look on the bright side. We have no where to go but up. Pun intended.
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Some people are impervious to facts. These awards would have been exactly the same with a President Harris in the White House, because SpaceX had the competitive advantage for this round of contracts.
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Specifically, the facts driving this decision are the space launch needs of the US military and the current relevant capabilities of the available US launch providers. One need not appeal to any other considerations to justify the reasonableness of these awards.
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Is SpaceX building capacity to fly FH from Vandenberg?
or are we going to see a variation of the "geography" argument going the other direction as well: that ULA will get certain missions because they can fly a heavy-weight Vulcan from Vandenberg while SpaceX can't fly an FH from there for heavy weight throws to Polar orbits?
or are we going to see a variation of the "geography" argument going the other direction as well: that ULA will get certain missions because they can fly a heavy-weight Vulcan from Vandenberg while SpaceX can't fly an FH from there for heavy weight throws to Polar orbits?
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SpaceX has been working on launching polar missions from Cape Canaveral. Those do require a dogleg, which imposes a payload penalty, but I don't know if it's enough to prevent Falcon Heavy from completing Space Force missions.
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Yeah, at this stage, the chaos and potential lever-pulling of improper favors probably hasn't reached this deep into military procurement. The justifications and technological positions seem accurate to the market, plus the motivations of the agencies being served. We will have to see how the technology selection and political influence change to understand where improper impacts could lie.
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The comment section here at what is now rapidly becoming Ars Communista is clearly lacking any knowledge of the history of the rocket industry and just how colossally stupid Boeing and Lockheed were in their milking this for decades until someone else did what they should have done decades ago.
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What Boeing and LM did. They successfully lobbied their way to an effective duopoly. Not stupid. Just standard corruption. Falcon's success is not in dispute even amongst the *groan "ars communista". Musk's financial(and ideological) influence of the current administration is also indisputable. So, tech and corruption. Same as it ever was.
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The mass to LEO of FH and F9 isn't that far apart. F9 improvements ate a lot of the use case for FH. The use case for FH in these contracts (unless I have misread something) are high-energy launches to GEO. Those aren't polar launches.
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Or, there are those among us who detest Trump and Trumpism, but don't think that's somehow a license to just blatantly lie. It's not about "leaving out the politics", it's about basic honesty. Yes, the Trump administration (and the whole Republican Party) is hideously corrupt and shockingly inept, with frightening anti-democratic and authoritarian tendencies. Also, Elon Musk has gone full MAGA, which is genuinely deplorable. But none of that means that SpaceX must have somehow cheated to get the majority of Department of Defense contracts. The reality is, if Kamala Harris had won (which she totally should have!) SpaceX would still have gotten the majority of Department of Defense contracts.
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SpaceX is working on SLC-6 at VSFB to launch Falcon Heavy.
They can also hit polar orbits out of 39A, although they haven't done that with FH yet.
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That's orthogonal to the fact that you simply cannot have the same person on both ends of the bid process. People will rightly call foul on this until either Musk is completely divested from SpaceX or he's completely out of the government, with the latter being essentially impossible to fulfill at this point because nobody would reasonably believe he's not pulling the levers on this behind the scenes.
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How we got ULA was... much more complicated than that. And the administration doesn't get to pick who wins DoD procurements.
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Musk has no direct or indirect control over bid selection. He has the ear of POTUS on some issues, but POTUS doesn't get to pick procurement winners. The bid would be invalidated if the competitors could show that either directed the selection.
If you have any actual evidence related to this bid, produce it. Insinuation isn't evidence.
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