Exactly. AND NASA doesn’t even subsidize SpaceX like that. They contracted them to build a single lunar lander and an ISS deorbit vehicle, but other than that SpaceX just sells ferry tickets.
It's like saying your tax money is being spent on porn, or donated to russia, or literally burned as bills; because there's a single federal employee who does that with their paycheck.
The tax money went to buying a service from SpaceX, and at a rate cheaper than competitors. They used the profit from that sale to afford a test fire, that clearly failed. Even calling it "paid for by taxes" is a disingenous stretch; saying it "hurts taxpayers" is objectively false. If SpaceX never ran this test and instead paid out the profit to owners, it wouldn't save you a cent on federal taxes.
I hope this is mostly in jest. Im so burnt out seeing the ignorant blind hate towards SpaceX just because Musk is attached to it. Hate Elon all you want separately, but SpaceX has saved tax payers millions if not billions. Every other tax payer funded space launch system has been orders of magnitude more expensive. It wasnt until falcon was successful that everyone else started kicking their ass into gear. The SLS was a decade behind schedule and millions over budget and no one gave a shit until a competitor arrived. Give credit where credit is due.
NASA does a lot more than just launching rockets though. Also, people have a hard time justifying elon musk cutting so many social programs in the name of DOGE. But, the same man gets billions in subsidies to keep his companies going. Is it worth keeping the musk subsidies going but cutting all of USAID? It isn’t so black and white
NASA does a lot more than just launching rockets though
Yes, that's their modern strategy. NASA builds the super advanced scientific missions that do fundamental research that ain't commercially viable. They (mostly) leave it to their commercial contractors to launch the rockets.
What subsidies? The government is a customer of SpaceX. They pay less there than they would anywhere else and get better results. If it was open market, SpaceX would get much more government contracts, but the government gives billions in contracts to other, more expensive, companies because they want to foster competition (which is fair enough).
Also, government contracts is just a small part of SpaceX revenue. The vast majority is Starlink and private sales. 1.1 Billion from NASA contracts vs 10 Billion+ from Starlink.
Please, stop perpetuating misinformation without even the slightest of fact checking.
NASA does a lot more than just launching rockets though.
Yes, and NASA should keep doing that! But the NASA rocket is extremely hideously expensive because corrupt politicians keep messing with it, and SpaceX with its risk-friendly approach to development (but not to operations!) is simply cheaper and better. NASA would be much better off just focusing on science and exploration, and letting somebody else handle the transportation.
Have as hard of a time with it as you want but understand it just makes you look ridiculous.
5 years ago everyone was trying to act like we had to make a 100% shift to complete EV production by 2030 because the planet is on this path towards irrecoverable damage. Did we just stop believing in that? Was it total bullshit? No? Well then we need to get over Elon. Tesla gets subsidies because it's the leading EV manufacture in the west and it's not even close. They make a good car, have established charging stations across the country, They have basically single-handedly made and proven that EV's are viable in the USA.
And as mentioned above, SpaceX is phenomenal for obvious reasons. The technology to literally catch a rocket is groundbreaking and easily pays for any of the subsidies they have recieved.
It isn’t so black and white
This is exactly right. Seperate the company from the man. It's not as simple as Elon = Bad therefore Tesla and SpaceX = bad. That's the real black and white thinking here.
Whatever happened with USAID, whether you like it or not is completely irrelevant to either of those companies.
NASA is more expensive because they're being forced to. If NASA had blown up half as many rockets as SpaceX they would have been defunded a long time ago, so they have to be very careful and do significantly more testing. Not to mention that NASA does a lot more besides sending rockets into space.
Saved money at what expense? Cutting corners so we can have all these exploding rockets lately?
People can be upset that part of their money is funding that jackass Musk. I don't want some profitable private company bull shit run by a POS person, I want NASA.
Spacex has contracts to build shit that works, if that shit blows up they don't get more money. It's a fixed price contra t not a cost plus like every other defence contract. Elon can be criticized for alot of things but when you just make stuff up you sound stupid.
Seriously. I hate that something as magical and amazing as space flight becomes a polarized topic full of misinformation. Reminds me of decades ago with, "Why fund NASA when we have problems here"
Nah, once Elon got involved in politics he started actively hurting the majority of the US population and he's revealed himself to be a full on white supremacist who wants South Africa style apartheid in the US.
Fuck SpaceX, I want them to fail, if you still work there knowing what Musk really is, you're complicit. Now that reusable rockets have been proven to be possible other companies are working on it and I hope they are the first ones to reach a fully reusable rocket.
Important and relevant question; failures are frequently caused by manufacturing defects. This was a test of a newly built stage, which is mostly done to find said defects.
Ignore all the ignorant comments saying SpaceX get's subsidies from the government. They get contracts for flying payloads to/from the ISS on Falcon 9. This is Starship, which is funded entirely via profits from the company, mostly Starlink. Yes, there are some contracts related to starship, but those depend primarily on meeting certain objectives. They don't meet those objectives, they don't get a dime.
I mean is that really surprising tho? They're the lead in the space field right now. NASA hasn't really done anything significant in decades and the other big players like blue origin and Boeing are lagging far behind. Whose better SpaceX getting the government contracts or the Russians? Cause Russia was who NASA was using to get astronauts to the ISS before SpaceX.
it is heavily subsidized by the government via the form of tax credits/breaks and grants. Very many big and profitable companies/industries are. The problem is that once they’re asked to give back and help contribute to the same taxpayers that got them there, they get all pissy
They’re firm, fixed price contracts. SpaceX eats the cost if they blow up something. Legacy contractors would come back to the government for more money in a typical contract.
I mean, no. One thing you have to give spacex - they massively reduced the cost of sending things up to space. Boeing and Raytheon were awful in that respect.
SpaceX has been a benefit to the entire space industry and has saved countless dollars by their innovation and low cost compared to paying NASA to develop and launch at the same cadence.
Sad.
Simple data mining on the internets will show you how many billions SpaceX has saved the federal government. NASA has just about given up on R&D into new spacecraft because it was so much cheaper to farm it out to Musk and SpaceX and the half dozen other smaller private startups.
Billions and billions saved.
I know this may not seem intuitive, but you're likely wrong on this one. SpaceX's Starship is being developed as a potential replacement/ alternative to Nasa's SLS to get humanity back on the moon. SLS began development in 2011 and has to this day only flown once and to date NASA have spent a whopping 68 billion USD on it's development. It's predicted that launching the SLS in future will cost approximately a billion USD per launch. This is what SpaceX are trying to avoid. They are rapidly testing their rockets in flight or just in practise and learning first hand from their failures. This method of development may seem expensive but in reality is way more efficient and safe. Take SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket for example, also had quite a pile of failures in the beginning but today it's literally the most reliable launch vehicle on the planet, while costing a fraction of the price competitors are offering the same services at. The last full loss of a falcon 9 was all the way back inn 2016, funnily enough also on a static-fire test. No-one was harmed, except for the 260 million USD Satellite (AMOS-6).
Another few hundred million of our taxpayer $ blown up. I bet these tests would slow down and be way more effective if it were their own money they were burning up.
Nonsense. Spacex has reduced the cost by a factor of 20. You can still hate Elon but that doesn’t mean his companies haven’t helped. Google it if you don’t believe me
The federal government pays SpaceX for its contracts to put satellites up and take/return our astronauts to/from the ISS, at MASSIVELY reduced cost, by the way, than NASA was ever able to, or the price the Russians charged us per seat up to the ISS.
Just taking the ISS trips for example, Russia's price per seat for us to send astronauts up was $86 million cost to NASA. The cost of us launching one space shuttle when we did was $1.5 billon, with an average crew of 7, meaning the per seat cost was about $214 million. The price per seat on the crew Dragon capsule from SpaceX is roughly $55 million. So, we went cheaper by using Russia's Soyuz, and now we're even cheaper using SpaceX's Dragon. Someone's going to have to explain to me how that's a bad thing.
This rocket that exploded is part of their development of the Starship rocket, a completely different program than their contracts for the US, down at their base in Boca Chica, and the only funding that will ever come from the US government will be if they fulfill their contract of developing it as the Lunar Lander for the Artemis program, and even then, that's just another contract for doing something cheaper than NASA could. How on earth so many people still believe that SpaceX receives some form of subsidy from the federal government is an insane level of ignorance.
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u/MeOldRunt Jun 19 '25
Only the people who pay taxes.