Sorry, ambiguous phrasing, I meant private not in terms of "public issue," but as opposed to quasi-governmental corporations... which I imagine in China and perhaps elsewhere (state oil companies in petrostates?) may have a greater value. Though it depends on how you compute value when there aren't shares as well!
Depends. The original Falcon 1 funding mostly came from Musk and a few friends.
Then for the Falcon 9, they got the COTS contract for resupply of the station. Or rather they got a contract that would pay money if they were successful in executing. This funding was mostly for the Dragon Space craft, but it also funded Falcon 9. But that was a much smaller number then Ariane 6.
Then SpaceX got Commercial Crew, for 2.6 billion $. That mostly funded Crew Dragon space craft. But it also required human rating of Falcon 9. So those 2.6 billion $ were not assigned X amount for Dragon, Y for Falcon 9. SpaceX was just required to launch people to ISS and bring them back with NASA overview. During this time SpaceX finished the Block 5 version, and that was human rated.
Beyond that SpaceX did most of the development on the re-usability of Falcon 9 on their own money. They used costumer missions to do a lot of the testing. But importantly, SpaceX never got any money from NASA to develop re-usability.
Same goes for Falcon Heavy. SpaceX sold Falcon Heavy to DoD but they didn't get any development contract for the rocket itself. Falcon Heavy was fully developed by SpaceX on their own money.
SpaceX did miss out on a major DoD development funding when they bid Starship and DoD did want it. Other companies like BlueOrigin and ULA got a huge amount of money.
Both Raptor and Starship were mostly on SpaceX as well. A very early version of Raptor, when it was very different from what is now, once got a DoD research contract. Only when there was a competition for Human Moon Lander System, and Starship got selected, was government spending any money on Starship. And HLS is milestone based, so that will help SpaceX a little to pay for Starship. But a lot of that money will go into the customized version of Starship for use as a moon lander.
Starlink is basically fully funded by SpaceX. There never was any development money.
So in totality, SpaceX doesn't really get much development money for rockets or engine. They get money for spacecraft (Dragon 1, Crew Dragon, Cargo Dragon), and they just have to make sure they have a rocket that they can launch on. They could also just buy somebody else rocket, but of course that's not what SpaceX wants to do.
For all this stuff, Starship, Starlink and so on, they did raise like 10 billion $. That the majority of their major developments.
They've had multiple private VC rounds. They also have had several milestone based development contracts from the government to develop capabilities (iss cargo and crew mainly) while charging the government less to do that dev work then their competitors bid.
Ariane 6 was funded by European taxpayers to the tune of €2.815 billion.
>and uses facilities built by the military and NASA.
Ariane is launched from the Guiana Space Centre which is owned and operated by the ESA. Since you haven't familiarised yourself with the topic, ESA is the European Space Agency and is owned by 22 European governments.
In addition, the member states of the ESA will subsidize the rocket for up to €340 million annually in return for an 11% discount on launches.
I think it's unreasonable to treat people's volunteer efforts lightly. Nobody gives massive amount of personal time to something they don't really care about.
But that also leads to myoptic views of projects in super-volunteers, where the intent of the project to users gets lost in performance of the rules.
I'm not sure this is a solveable problem for volunteer-based projects though. There are only so many people willing to donate time, and you have to keep them happy.
>Many of them are recruited from other sports based on strength, speed, and agility.
This is not true at all. F1 pit crews are mechanics who have worked with cars in other motorsport racing series/feeder series and worked their way up to an F1 team.
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