by panick21 | 2026-02-28 14:17:30+00:00
I think you are just talking out of your ass. Please provide some sources.

The milestones and options are all defined in the original contract and each milestone is assigned some monetary value. There were a set of extension option that add milestones for a second lander that NASA choice to pick up. All this was specified in the original contract.

Starship won one small additional contract that I know of, that was about liquid transfer in Orbit, but that just one of 20+ minor contract about space operations.

> no matter what happens to the mission (it'll probably fail), Elon and his buddies will still get to scrape a couple hundred million for themselves

If it fails SpaceX will not get the money covered in the milestones. So if it fails it will 100% be SpaceX that pays. Why are you making stuff up?

Also, SpaceX has been the most successful NASA contractor in the last 20 years and its not even remotely close, so your confident that it fails is just bias.

NASA own estimation is that the SpaceX lunar program will cost more then double what they are paying SpaceX. SpaceX is giving the government an absolutely insanely good ideal and building a lunar lander for like 1/10 of the cost the lunar lander estimates were during constellation. SpaceX will be LOSING MONEY ON THIS DEAL.

Same goes for BlueOrigin, they can only bid because its Bezos hobby project, they will not make money from the lunar lander anytime soon.

All the contracts are public, if there are contracts that SpaceX got for Starship beyond the original lander contract and the minor demonstrator contract I mention above, please link them.

> Funnily enough, the person who decided to grant SpaceX this contract, Kathy Lueders, did so and then immediately decided to quit NASA and work for SpaceX. Nothing to see there.

Kathy Lueders has fantastic reputation with everybody in the know and has worker for NASA for 20 years. Its also wrong to say that it was just her, there is a whole team doing the evaluation with lots of experts involved.And after her the report had to be approved by a whole bunch more people.

If you have any actual evidence of wrong-doing, please come forward.

Funny enough Boeing did actually get caught cheating, a NASA executive was actually fired because he was giving Boeing details about the contract and giving them chances to re-submit the bid.

In terms of the technical evaluation see:

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/option-a-sou...

And the GAO about why the protests were rejected:

https://www.gao.gov/assets/b-419783.pdf

BlueOrigin's 'National Team' and SpaceX received the same technical evaluation level while SpaceX was only like 50% of the price.

There is really no question that it was the only sensible selection. Anybody would have done the same selection. In fact had Kathy Lueders not selected SpaceX she might have been fired for bias and wrong doing.

It was then followed up by lobbying on the side of BlueOrigin where they got their senator from Washington involved and forced an increase in budget so they could also participate, but they were forced to lower the price by a huge amount as well.

So the result is NASA gets two lander program for about 1/4 or cheaper then was expected 20 years ago during Constellation.

If that's not an amazing deal I don't know what is.

> How could SLS, a rocket that literally worked the first time, be worse than Starship, a rocket that does not work?

Its so crystal clear that you don't know anything about rockets and you're only goal is to perpetuate anti-SpaceX hate.

SLS 'first' flight is literally 95% things that already existed, doing something very conventional. It is literally using engines that were built in the 1970s. And its using solid state boosters form the same factory as those of Shuttle. Its literally just a bunch of old parts in slightly different configuration.

And its already cost 50 billion $ in development without even having to design anything new. The launch cost are absurdly high, so high that NASA can barley fund a SLS any anything else at the time. Notice how during Constellation they never even started to build a Lander, they never had the budget for it.

Starship on the other hand is a completely new architecture, with brand new engine, brand new infrastructure, brand new manufacturing sites and so on. And its trying to do much more then SLS. Its trying to be reusable and support distributed launch, and be a lander.

If all NASA wants is a simply rocket that can launch stuff, then SLS shouldn't be compared with Starship at all. SLS is more like Falcon Heavy or New Glenn, just 10-50x more expensive. Notice how Falcon Heavy also worked the first time it flew, because it was just parts of existing rockets in a new configuration. Its almost like its easier if you build with components that have flight heritage. Crazy how that works.

If NASA wanted just a simple big rocket they could have gotten there much cheaper then SLS. So the whole SLS vs Starship comparison doesn't even make any fucking sense in the first place. The goal of Starship was never to be SLS. Falcon Heavy is already 90% of SLS and if NASA had wanted to, they could have paid SpaceX to boost its performance a bit (something that had been studied 15 years ago already). And now between Vulcan, Falcon, New Glenn there are plenty of options if all you want is launch.

Honestly what kind of idiotic engineering evaluation is it to say 'X worked first time' so its forever better then anything else that didn't work the first time. That's not how we evaluate engineering projects ever even if you were comparing the right things in the first place. This argument just proves that you are not seriously trying to engage with the issues of Artemis program.