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Musk already got a 2b contract out of NASA, and all it cost him was to give the lady who signed it a cushy job.
That and owning the company that makes the only reusable rockets on Earth, I guess.
Musk is a twat but you can't deny that NASA is getting their money's worth out of their contracts with SpaceX.
2 billion doesn't even pay for a single launch of SLS. And I wouldn't be surprised to see Starship land on the moon (or at least impact the moon, lol) before the next launch of SLS.
I would be VERY surprised. And I NASA didn't award blue origin a second moon lander contract because they have utmost faith in Starship/HLS.
I will be first in line to say Falcon is an amazing piece of engineering, and Starlink is a great way to fund Falcon. It'll never turn a profit, but it's an amazing way to turn venture capital into cheap rockets for everyone.
But SpaceX has missed every single HLS deadline by a mile. They've got 2 more weeks to do their first unmanned moon landing, according to the original schedule. It'll take 12 (or 20?) successful launches to do 1 lunar landing and return, so I'll take this bet.
The 2 billion contract was for HLS. It was originally higher, but Kathy Lueders gave SpaceX a call to lower their bid to just under the (previously undisclosed) limit, making them the only valid bid. That's what the Blue Origin lawsuit was about, but the judge said it was legal for NASA to "enter in negotiations" with single parties, so this was allowed. You might recognise the name Kathy Leuders, because right after she handed SpaceX the contract, she quit NASA and got a job at SpaceX.
I think I'm validated in finding the whole HLS situation extremely concerning.
I agree with you on HLS, the whole thing seems foolish. I meant more like SpaceX will chuck something around the moon for sport than that they would actually get HLS working. After all, SpaceX can already get to the moon, a lot of the recent payloads to the moon have flown on Falcon 9.
The hardest part of getting to the moon is getting mass to orbit, and Starship just proved it could get mass to orbit, even if the reusable components didn't work out. Now they just need to put Blue Origin's lander inside the payload bay with a kick stage to send it off to the moon 😉 Doing a ton of refueling just to send an entire, oversized Starship as a lander makes no sense.