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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 13 2020, @04:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the cheaper-by-the-dozen dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The head of Russia's space agency on Saturday accused Elon Musk's SpaceX of predatory pricing for space launches, which is pushing Russia to cut its own prices. "Instead of honest competition on the market for space launches, they are lobbying for sanctions against us and use price dumping with impunity," Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin wrote on Twitter.

Rogozin, who is often outspoken on Twitter and previously engaged in online banter with Elon Musk, on Friday raised the issue during a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.

He said the Roscosmos space agency "is working to lower prices by more than 30 percent on launch services to increase our share on the international markets." "This is our answer to dumping by American companies financed by the US budget," he said. The market price of a SpaceX launch is $60 million, but NASA pays up to four times that amount, he said.

Musk responded to the criticism Saturday by saying on Twitter: "SpaceX rockets are 80% reusable, theirs are 0%. This is the actual problem."


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2020, @05:51PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2020, @05:51PM (#982105)

    You're just wrong.

    SpaceX has indeed had a decent amount of government contact work. Detractors point to the first commercial resupply contract awarded early on, which pushed them to quickly advance to Falcon 9 and when they didn't have a very good track record. You didn't even bother to reference that, instead posting a crappy Google redirect to a different story.

    The thing is, NASA wanted commercial resupply. Moving to commercial means you need to have redundancies because of the type of stuff we're seeing now with Starliner. Except Boeing couldn't get the program going fast enough, while at the same time the cost for launching a Soyuz magically went sky high thanks to the Russians knowing we didn't have any man rated launch capability.

    So SpaceX put forth a bid to send up cargo. Their bid was fantastical from the traditional spaceflight standpoint, in terms of speed, cost, and the fact that basically none of the necessary hardware existed. But they said they could do it when nobody else could, and NASA said okay we'll be willing to basically treat this like venture capital because the whole development budget SpaceX demanded wasn't really all that expensive compared to continued use of Soyuz. ULA and entrenched players laughed at it.

    SpaceX delivered. That's what you do with government grants or contracts. This wasn't in any way illegal.

    Now all the entrenched players are crying because SpaceX also figured out how to land and reuse their vehicles, which lets them completely outcompete the field until they do the same. And that same vehicle is rapidly building one of the longest and best service records in the history of spaceflight, so competitors can't really claim they have the edge on quality to justify their added expenses.

    Again, not at all illegal. SpaceX experiments and pushed the envelope in ways the rest couldn't be bothered.

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday April 13 2020, @07:28PM (4 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 13 2020, @07:28PM (#982170) Journal

    And, of course, it's a bit hypocritical for a government that calls itself communist to complain about government subsidy. (I'm not sure Russia still calls itself communist though. That feeling may just a a hangover from back in the day.)

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by legont on Monday April 13 2020, @10:49PM (3 children)

      by legont (4179) on Monday April 13 2020, @10:49PM (#982277)

      Russia today is way more capitalist than the US.

      --
      "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 14 2020, @04:22AM (2 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 14 2020, @04:22AM (#982412) Journal

        Russia today is way more capitalist than the US.

        Like state-owned Roscosmos versus purely private, SpaceX?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @09:01AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @09:01AM (#982475)

          Like state-owned Roscosmos versus purely private, SpaceX?

          Are you serious? Comparing Roscosmos to SpaceX is like comparing NASA to SpaceX. And as far as I know, NASA is not exactly private and it probably should not be private.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 14 2020, @12:08PM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 14 2020, @12:08PM (#982536) Journal
            Of course, I'm serious. The comparison is valid because Roscosmos is a competitor to SpaceX in a way that NASA is not. They manage directly the organizations that manufacture the Soyuz [wikipedia.org] and Angara [wikipedia.org] rocket families.

            And as far as I know, NASA is not exactly private and it probably should not be private.

            But neither should it be competing with private business for the commercial launch market. And frankly, the same goes for Roscosmos. They should have spun off their control a couple decades ago.