Why The US Can Beat China: The Facts About SpaceX Costs

Re:Why The US Can Beat China: The Facts About SpaceX Costs by dbarlett on Wednesday April 18, 2012 @03:11PM (#3859697)

Yes. According to a NASA study [1], Falcon 9 development would cost $1.3B as Cost Plus Fee ("traditional NASA") or $443M Firm Fixed Price ("more commercial approach"). Compare to SpaceX actual of "about $300M".

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/586023main_8-3-11_NAFCOM.pdf

Edit: NASA originally came up with the $4B/$1.7B estimates that InclinedPlane mentioned. They visited SpaceX, saw how they actually operated, and revised the estimated downward.

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Re:Why The US Can Beat China: The Facts About SpaceX Costs by bane on Wednesday April 18, 2012 @05:00PM (#3860185)

They visited SpaceX, saw how they actually operated, and revised the estimated downward.

I'm not sure that's really fair for NASA to do. The question they were supposed to be answering was "how much would this cost NASA to do?". They can't just see a more efficient operation and then cheat their numbers down because without Space-X, NASA would never have had a reference to work off of. NASA doing it the NASA way would have been the larger figure, not NASA doing it the Space-X way.

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Re:Why The US Can Beat China: The Facts About SpaceX Costs by john-n on Wednesday April 18, 2012 @09:02PM (#3860952)

"without Space-X, NASA would never have had a reference to work off", this works both ways.

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Re:Why The US Can Beat China: The Facts About SpaceX Costs by cma on Thursday April 19, 2012 @12:18PM (#3863724)

>without Space-X, NASA would never have had a reference to work off of.

And where would Space-X be without the Saturn V...

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