Giorgio wrote:
Not a bad news after all, it might push SpaceX to speed up its development plans.
How would it achieve that? Less funding means delayed development. Elon Musk stated as much.
It seems to me that the republican senators are aiming to delay commercial crew until it becomes pointless. Then they will cancel it. Meanwhile they are happily throwing big government money after the SLS contractors. But then they are all large defense corporations. So it is natural that republicans would throw money after them.
Just being jaded. Citizens United was about other nonprofits besides unions and leftists being able to do political speech, cap like this has been going on long before that changed.
Not a bad news after all, it might push SpaceX to speed up its development plans.
I'm confused. Why will not getting paid push SpaceX to speed up its development plans? I would assume they are already going as fast as they can with the funds they have, how they would then go faster with less is beyond me...
Skipjack wrote:
Giorgio wrote:
Not a bad news after all, it might push SpaceX to speed up its development plans.
How would it achieve that? Less funding means delayed development. Elon Musk stated as much.
Edited to make it shorter:
Russia is already placing limitations to the use of his rocket engines for US military satellites.
When ULA will not be able to respect his launch obligations they can only to go to SpaceX
True, SpaceX will lose development founds of about 300M to 500M USD, but those founds was coming with strict obligations and lot of hidden costs to certify components suppliers.
I believe is better if they get those same amount of money (without red tape or limitations) from launches done in lieu of ULA
Not a bad news after all, it might push SpaceX to speed up its development plans.
I'm confused. Why will not getting paid push SpaceX to speed up its development plans? I would assume they are already going as fast as they can with the funds they have, how they would then go faster with less is beyond me...
I believe his point was that the Russians will be charging more for the launch services they provide now which will cause the US to look elsewhere for those services, perhaps to SpaceX.
This just drives home the very obvious point that "humans in space" is not yet economically viable without massive public spending. If you build up a launch service based on the whims of the political class doling out yearly funds, then you have to take this kind of setback into account. I'd bet Musk is well enough prepared to deal with these issues.
I agree with some of the other posts that indicate that the dynamics with the Russians will drive changes in this whole approach as we go along.
JoeP wrote:This just drives home the very obvious point that "humans in space" is not yet economically viable without massive public spending.
Elon Musk said that they would pursue their goals even without the funding through the commercial crew contracts from NASA, but it would take them longer without it.
So it is viable, but not at a fast pace.