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| SpaceX to launch Dragon at 4:43PM Est | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Apr 8 2016, 04:23 PM (1,229 Views) | |
| Archangel | Apr 10 2016, 08:18 PM Post #21 |
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If Elon Musk did an IPO that would be the end of his successful business model. Greedy investors would demand more money and turn both Tesla and SpaceX into Enron. |
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Wolf Braun had died a fiery death and the Archangel emerged. Hey, guys. | |
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| Archangel | Apr 10 2016, 08:41 PM Post #22 |
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My bad. Tesla stock is already publicly traded yet SpaceX, the one making money, is not.
Edited by Archangel, Apr 10 2016, 08:43 PM.
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Wolf Braun had died a fiery death and the Archangel emerged. Hey, guys. | |
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| estonianman | Apr 10 2016, 08:45 PM Post #23 |
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Do you think that Elon Musk is not courting investors? seriously? |
| MEEK AND MILD | |
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| Demagogue | Apr 10 2016, 08:52 PM Post #24 |
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Let's be fair here. SpaceX is making money because it has a couple government contracts. In addition,, government contracts paid for the development of the Dragon spaceship. Tesla on the other hand has not had the government buying its products or funding nearly all of it's product development. I am a fan so don't take that the wrong way. I just don't think it is fair to compare Tesla to SpaceX because it is an apple and oranges comparison. A more fair comparison would be SpaceX and Orbital Sciences cargo delivery contract. |
| People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would do them harm. | |
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| Archangel | Apr 10 2016, 09:04 PM Post #25 |
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My point was that Elon seems fixated on keeping the most profitable one for himself. Looking around, I saw that while he has had equity sales of SpaceX in the past, the last one was in 2010. SpaceX is successful and profitable. What incentive does he really have to issue an IPO? Personal gain? He threw that incentive out when he released all of Tesla's patents in 2014 for others to improve upon. He has nothing to gain and everything to lose by going the IPO route with SpaceX, most notably control of the company. |
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Wolf Braun had died a fiery death and the Archangel emerged. Hey, guys. | |
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| Robert Stout | Apr 10 2016, 09:22 PM Post #26 |
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Please....Tesla is losing money hand over fist...That is why Musk sold chunks of it to suckers, resulting in his enrichment...Did I tell you that Tesla is building a plant in China to export Tesla 3s to the USA ???...Have you seen videos of crash tests of Chinese cars ???...............
Edited by Robert Stout, Apr 10 2016, 09:23 PM.
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| Jesus can raise the dead, but he can't fix stupid | |
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| Demagogue | Apr 10 2016, 10:15 PM Post #27 |
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Tesla's plant here in the USA can produce more cars than the US market will likely ever demand. The most expensive single part of the car (battery) will be built in Nevada. I do not know what the factory you are talking about is for but it is probably not for the Model 3 any time soon. |
| People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would do them harm. | |
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| Archangel | Apr 10 2016, 10:36 PM Post #28 |
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Tesla actually did build a plant in China to service the Chinese market. But apparently it's not going well, they're downsizing. |
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Wolf Braun had died a fiery death and the Archangel emerged. Hey, guys. | |
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| Drudge X | Apr 11 2016, 12:35 AM Post #29 |
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How is it that Jeff Bezos of Amazon can launch a reusable rocket but not the government?
Edited by Drudge X, Apr 11 2016, 12:35 AM.
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| Kate Steinle was separated from her family permanently but leftists didn't seem to mind. | |
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| Robert Stout | Apr 11 2016, 04:36 AM Post #30 |
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He isn't a defense contractor..........
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| Jesus can raise the dead, but he can't fix stupid | |
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| Demagogue | Apr 11 2016, 08:17 AM Post #31 |
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To be fair, the government built a rocket that does pretty much what New Sheppard does back in the 1990's. New Sheppard flies higher but until it starts taking people on suborbital trips and then returning them it is flying a flight profile very much like the DC-X from McDonnell Douglas. That craft did the ground for vertical landing autonomous rockets and NASA shared that research with both SpaceX and Blue Origins |
| People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would do them harm. | |
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| Opinionated | Apr 11 2016, 08:20 AM Post #32 |
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So it sounds like you're saying that the private sector was able to successfully launch a reusable rocket because the government did a fair amount of the research heavy lifting for them. Sounds about par. |
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| estonianman | Apr 11 2016, 11:04 AM Post #33 |
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Without government research into roads - we would all be walking barefoot on course gravel. Bless the benevolent government, and all that you do for us. |
| MEEK AND MILD | |
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| Demagogue | Apr 11 2016, 12:24 PM Post #34 |
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No, I am saying that New Horizon was essentially doing the same thing NASA did with it's DC-X and DC-XA experimental vehicles just flying to a much higher altitude without going orbital. The craft itself (New Sheppard) is specifically designed as a craft that can fly up and back down while sending a package on a sub orbital flight. While it is an achievement it is not quite as earth shattering for the industry as what SpaceX has done. NASA's goal with the shuttle program was to get the cost to take stuff to orbit down to $25/pound. Well in the end it was really around $25,000/pound. The DC-X started out as a DARPA project and then NASA took it over when DARPA decided to stop funding it. The guys who built it McDonnell Douglas aerospace are now owned by Boeing. NASA eventually decided to stop funding those missions also in the mid 1990's and stuck with the Shuttle until they finally decided to get out of the reusable rocket business entirely with the retirement of the Shuttle. In the end the cost to fly the shuttle to orbit was around $800 million. SpaceX takes a load to orbit for around $100 million for Dragon and $70 million for just a Falcon flight carrying somebody's satellite. If they can reuse the first stage they plan on the reused flights being $43 million initially and less later. What SpaceX has achieved is amazing but it did not happen in a vacuum. Give Musk credit for acknowledging that a great deal of work came before the company even existed. When the first Dragon flew aboard a Falcon 9 he said in the post launch press conference "We would not be here today if were not standing on the shoulders of giants." in reference to all the work done to develop spaceflight back in the 1950's and 1960's as well as to the assistance of NASA in developing the Dragon spacecraft which was built under contract for that agency. Prior to the NASA COTS contract SpaceX was flying small rockets with a single Merlin engine while developing the bigger Falcon 9. The funding from NASA for the COTS project allowed them to develop this larger rocket much quicker than normal economics would have allowed based just on their private launch contracts. It ended up being a public/private partnership that worked just like they are supposed to. Due to it's private nature SpaceX can do things that NASA simply can not due to vastly less red tape. Heck, on the first Dragon flight they found a crack in an engine nozzle and had to abort the initial Dec 7 launch window. Their solution was to fly a guy in from California and have him fix it. They launched 3 days later. If that had been a 100% NASA mission they would have been in meetings trying to find someone to blame for the cracked nozzle for a year and the first flight would not have happened for 18 months. There was a time when NASA could do bold things but those days are gone. With our expanding debt and expanding obligation to entitlements I don't know if NASA will ever the the agent of exploration and discovery that it was founded to be. That will probably now fall to private companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada and others. All of these companies will owe their initial start to government space programs because of what was learned 50 years ago when those folks had real funding, back in the days before LBJ's "Great Society". The bottom line is that all of these private companies have learned from these government programs but they (and especially SpaceX) have gone so far beyond what NASA ever even tried to do in the area of cost reduction and re-usability that at this point (really for the past couple years) they have been in the realm of the totally new and unknown when it comes to their tech. The first time that SpaceX (or anyone else) reuses a first stage to reduce the launch cost of a subsequent load it will alter the entire dynamic of the orbital lift industry and put that company at the forefront of future space technology. Here is a good article on the reusability thing. http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/like-a-boss-falcon-soars-into-space-and-lands-in-the-ocean/ Edited by Demagogue, Apr 11 2016, 12:31 PM.
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| People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would do them harm. | |
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8:26 PM Jul 10