At time of writing, it's the opposite: Falcon is launching humans into space on a regular basis, something SLS has entirely failed to do to date.

Of course the Falcon can be compared to the SLS. Both are vehicles designed to take things into space for crying out loud!

The figures are easy to compare as well. Just include these factors in your comparison! Even if we don't know exactly what those factors are, we can make a ballpark estimate the total difference and add that as a percentage to spaceX's final figure.

The idea that things can't be compared because they are different is nonsense. When things are different is the only time comparisons are meaningful to make!

> Every report on Falcon 9 costs has made this mistake forever. SpaceX does not release their full costs.

Not really relevant.

The correct metric to make the comparison on is the fully amortized cost to the government per launch. The government doesn't pay for SpaceX's facilities or development - all of those costs are rolled into the launch price. But that's not true of SLS.

The article isn't based on information SpaceX released. The WSJ got their hands on internal financial documents.

61 launches is quite a lot. The SLS can do about 100 tons to LEO, a standard F9 can do 22 tons albeit with a much smaller fairing.

So in total if you split your vehicle up and assemble it in orbit you can launch one that's almost 5x the size for the same price. Maybe more like 3x + extra engineering overhead costs for the orbital assembly, but still much more bang for the buck. The lunar gateway is planned to be a station anyway so those costs will have to be paid regardless.

>Falcon cannot do what SLS does.

Thus far, SLS has only done once what Falcon does on the regular: Launch a payload into orbit

You can easily compare what SpaceX charges for a launch. Wikipedia says Falcon Heavy expendible is 63 tons to LEO and $155M. SLS is supposedly 95 tons to LEO and 2 Billion.

I overheard some high-temperature semiconductor guys ("how do you build chips that work on venus / in engine blades / etc") at a NASA facility talking about budgets in a way that suggested a substantial part of their funding came from the launch vehicle budget.

I don't have good intuition for how much of the bloat comes from a top-heavy organization, from grifting contractors, and from good old fashion boondoggles -- but I'd like to add to this pile of possibilities the possibility the categories are poorly drawn and that "things which NASA should be doing but shouldn't be classified under launch vehicles" are nevertheless classified under launch vehicles.

Brief, if almost 4-year-old article:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/nasa-does-not-deny-t...

The ~$5B figure is in the final para. And that still sounds like it excludes ground systems and Orion development costs. (Plus ~4 more years of ever-growing bloat, obviously.)

And NASA will probably be very happy to use such a cheap system once they are convinced it meets their reliability standards. The point of SLS IMO is to keep a backup option if SpaceX has some horrific, unpredicted setback or design problem.

Surely people understand redundancy in aerospace right?

A rational return to the moon program that had to choose between Falcon and SLS would choose Falcon.

No, it's the other way around.

SpaceX's yearly spending would include the 61 flights, but also literally thousands of satellites, presumably a huge number of commercial dishes, their human flight overheads, their Starship development program including ground support and production and testing of about a hundred Raptor engines, their sales and outreach, their specific contract work like HLS, and their mug business by the side.

If you were to amortize SLS's total dev costs (incl. Orion and SLS-specific ground support but excluding Constellation) over its reasonably expected lifetime flights, you'll be lucky as heck to get <$10B/flight, though of course we don't know how that adds up and so report the much smaller marginal numbers instead.

Your right that figure isn’t accounting for the $23.8 billion cost of the program so far. That $5billion per launch figure is based on an optimistic number of SLS launches which haven’t happened yet.

SLS and Orion are dead ends. I wish them well and I am huge space geek but that program is just a gigantic waste. I wish we could take that budget and use it for unmanned missions or public/private space station partnerships with some of the new space companies.

$1b loss in the space industry is probably the smallest loss for any business in said industry in history. Every launch of the space shuttle was a few billion used up. There has been no completion here, because before SpaceX everyone else was launching 100M-1B+ of rocket that was never reused and other than the payload was a write off. It is always financed by government because there is typically a much larger generalized payoff for the nation state involved regarding capabilities.

I think many governments with state industry routinely run massive deficits in those state industries, and as an extension, state funded industries. Space is such an industry.

Yep. Nicknamed the "Senate Launch System" for very good reason.

Distance is almost completely irrelevant for comparing launch vehicles.

Also, Falcon 9 has delivered multiple payloads to lunar orbit. Examples are ispace's Hakuto-R Mission 1, SpaceIL's Beresheet, and South Korea's Danuri. In interplanetary space, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test was launched on a Falcon 9.

It takes 9400 km/s of delta-v to get to LEO, but only 3260 km/s of delta-v to get from LEO to Lunar Intercept Orbit.

I mean, not all the credit.

She might be brilliant, but she's worked other space jobs before. So clearly whatever company Musk has created, has allowed her to actually showcase her brilliance.

CEO sets the vision. Without vision, even perfect execution is pointless.

There are also launches moveing forward or show up out of knowwhere.

If it doubles Starlink customers and gets more high-value customers, perhaps it does.

Yeah.. it's a strange guilty pleasure to see all the changes i view as stupid, to perform as badly in the real world.

I think we should nickname it (e)x-Twitter.

thanks

I suspect that SpaceX is booking Starlink launches as revenue. My basis for this is that their launch revenue is growing much faster than their non-starlink launch schedule.

We can't prove or disprove this though, since their financials are secret.

I'm just asking to know.