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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @08:51AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @08:51AM (#982470)

    The US government can buy thing from private sector, but in general it can not prefer American over the foreign within WTO agreement.

    Yes, they can. And yes, they do, all the time.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/us/politics/coronavirus-defense-production-act.html [nytimes.com]

    WASHINGTON — Chemicals used to construct military missiles. Materials needed to build drones. Body armor for agents patrolling the southwest border. Equipment for natural disaster response.

    A Korean War-era law called the Defense Production Act has been used to place hundreds of thousands of orders by President Trump and his administration to ensure the procurement of vital equipment, according to reports submitted to Congress and interviews with former government officials.

    Yet as governors and members of Congress plead with the president to use the law to force the production of ventilators and other medical equipment to combat the coronavirus pandemic, he has for weeks treated it like a “break the glass” last resort, to be invoked only when all else fails.

    ....

    Invoking the Defense Production Act is hardly a rare occurrence. As recently as last summer, the Department of Defense used it to obtain rare earth metals needed to build lasers, jet engines and armored vehicles.

    The Defense Department estimates that it has used the law’s powers 300,000 times a year. The Department of Homeland Security — including its subsidiary, FEMA — placed more than 1,000 so-called rated orders in 2018, often for hurricane and other disaster response and recovery efforts, according to a report submitted to Congress in 2019 by a committee of federal agencies formed to plan for the effective use of the law.

    The law, which was used frequently by previous administrations as well, does not permit the federal government to assert complete control over a company. The federal government can, however, use it to jump ahead of other clients or issue loans so a company can buy all of the supplies it needs to complete the government’s order by a specific date.

    Unless you are completely ignorant, US has favoured their own suppliers vast majority of the time. What you say about WTO, is completely bullshit. But ignorance is high these days and I fear we will be killing ourselves over something that we could have just bought few months ago. All thanks to nationalistic bullshit and *ignorant populations*. Happened before and so it probably will happen again.