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March 24th, 2011 
Clint NASA will spend more shutting down a failed launch system than Elon Musk spent building a successful one. http://bit.ly/hjr4VC
Seriously, since Obama rightly pulled the plug on the Constellation Program after NASA knew for years that it would be even more expensive than the bloated and crumbling Shuttle program… politicians with their snout in the barrel have wasted over $250 million dollars continuing various dead ended programs and dragging their feet on the shutting down process of others. I wouldn’t be surprised if, once the politicians have had their fill, it came close to $3 billion just to grind the program to a halt.
Not long ago, Elon Musk said that Space X had spent about $250 million to go from an idea to launching rockets.
So, starting years after NASA and spending about 5% of what they did… Space X has launched rockets while NASA has rendered out a bunch of spiffy computer models and managed to cobble together a few “proof of concept” bits and pieces using off the shelf hardware that wasn’t ever going to be part of the finished designs.
There was more to the Constellation program but about half of the budget was expected to go to the Ares and Orion portions which are analogous to the Falcon and Dragon from Space X. These two pieces of the Constellation program were expected to be more than $90 billion over the 20 years of the program… but I don’t know if NASA has come in at less than 150% over budget on any of their big programs in the last 40 years.
I suspect Elon Musk won’t spend a tenth of that on getting Space X far past the goals that NASA was going to miss as badly as they did with the Shuttle Program. It makes a difference when it is your own money that you are spending rather than money you’ve taken from someone else.
Obama made one of his few rational decisions when he cancelled the Constellation Program. If NASA is to continue existing at all, it should be in basic research and exploration- not in building the equivalent of trucks, hotels and gas stations.
NASA could offer to buy those services and maybe work with the X Prize Foundation to create incentives for creating and delivering infrastructure. It would cost tens of billions of dollars less and the money would only be spent if the private world comes through.
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You’re an idiot. Space X works for NASA. By the way, the money for Space X comes from NASA which comes from the tax payers. So it really isn’t Space X’s money. Too bad “reporters” like you are the truly dumbest people on the planet. I do hope we find intelligent life somewhere else, because it sure doesn’t exists here.
Would you be as confrontational and rude if you weren’t hiding your identity? I won’t call you an idiot, but you are ill informed and ignorant about the situation.
Just because a government agency purchases a good or service from a private company doesn’t make that company an arm of the government or beholden to the taxpayer. (crony capitalist bailouts are a different story)
NASA doesn’t design and commission the construction of trucks to deliver groceries to their cafeterias at Kennedy Space Center, they actually hire private companies to do that for them. In your imagination does that make Kenworth Trucks and the shipping company beholden to the taxpayer in some way? How about the taxi service that is hired to get an astronaut to the KSC?
SpaceX is a private company that NASA has contracted to deliver supplies and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station. In the next three years, this is set to save the taxpayer something in the neighbourhood of 20 billion dollars over NASA developing and launching their own rockets. I would expect it is saving them a lot more than that since NASA cost overruns have historically been 100% and increasing.
NASA was directed to procure shipping services rather than waste time and money redevelop their own. SpaceX was already developing the Falcon 9 rocket and NASA simply paid for SpaceX to modify their design to conform with the agency’s requirements. Now that it is proving the capability to deliver to the ISS, they will proceed with the contract for 12 deliveries.
That is the extent of the ties- SpaceX is a private company who’s services NASA is hiring. It is absolutely no different to hire Penske Trucking to deliver the very same supplies to the KSC as SpaceX being hired to deliver them to the ISS.
I can’t see how it is difficult to follow this but you are not alone in your confusion and if there is any way for me to make it clearer I would appreciate your input.