What an idiotic thing to say. This is just pure 'I don't like this person so I'm gone shit on everything he does' syndrome.
Rich people buy rich people things, yes, and it matter if its a gas car or an electric. And it matter if the battery industry was transformed by that. And it matters that the image of electric cars was transformed. It matters that the largest fast charging network in the world was financed by this.
SpaceX proved that they could make things the government already does massively cheaper. Literally read any report from NASA or GAO. NASA own evaluation showed that the 300M SpaceX spend on the initial Falcon 9 would have cost 3 billion if done by the government.
Since SpaceX join the race military launches have come down in price by sometimes multiple 100 million $. ULA even outside of the 300M$+ launch prices, received an extra 900M every year.
Literally everything the government is buying from SpaceX could literally not be done cheaper by any other government, foreign or domestic or company foreign or domestic.
When SpaceX got started the commercial launch market was basically 0% US launchers, SpaceX alone changed that to depending on you calculate 50-90% of the commercial market now.
There is seriously not a single argument you can make about SpaceX other then simply arguing the government should be doing spaceflight at all. Everything we know about government internals suggest that both NASA and DoD are beyond happy with SpaceX.
3x more expensive (0.44B vs 1.2B) for NASA to do it. Slide #3 states NASA did not perform a detailed analysis of the estimates, but NASA concluded the number of employees, layers of management, and infrastructure were the key differences. And slide 6 almost sounds like NASA is saying "NASA shouldn't do this." Makes sense. They should use their budget and more comprehensiive oversight for zanier stuff, IMHO. Speaking of oversight, I also doubt SpaceX will be grilled anywhere near as severely as NASA when a death does occur, Elon has been upfront that this is risky stuff.
Rich people buy rich people things, yes, and it matter if its a gas car or an electric. And it matter if the battery industry was transformed by that. And it matters that the image of electric cars was transformed. It matters that the largest fast charging network in the world was financed by this.
SpaceX proved that they could make things the government already does massively cheaper. Literally read any report from NASA or GAO. NASA own evaluation showed that the 300M SpaceX spend on the initial Falcon 9 would have cost 3 billion if done by the government.
Since SpaceX join the race military launches have come down in price by sometimes multiple 100 million $. ULA even outside of the 300M$+ launch prices, received an extra 900M every year.
Literally everything the government is buying from SpaceX could literally not be done cheaper by any other government, foreign or domestic or company foreign or domestic.
When SpaceX got started the commercial launch market was basically 0% US launchers, SpaceX alone changed that to depending on you calculate 50-90% of the commercial market now.
There is seriously not a single argument you can make about SpaceX other then simply arguing the government should be doing spaceflight at all. Everything we know about government internals suggest that both NASA and DoD are beyond happy with SpaceX.