And what were they awarded in the 2000s and early 2010s during development and prototyping?
Next to nothing. Meanwhile almost 100% of Ares/SDHLV/SLS Dev costs were born by the taxpayer and it was 30 years late. Just like the F-35 and LCS and other Garbage.
Good thing non-Defense and non-Space development is far less dependent on Government paying endlessly for Development.
SpaceX had to sue the USAF/NASA/ ULA-Boeing-Lockheedmartin Entitlement complex multiple times to get contracts.
ULA and the rest of the Tax Funded "Companies" don't care about developing space, just milking endless tax money for endless delays.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is deploying Starlink YET ANOTHER Elon Musk Entrepreneurial Development that is killing off the hyper expensive Hughes Satellite Internet. And of course they are begging for a bailout because apparently competition is unfair.
Sorry you don't understand the history of real Private (not "Public Losses-Private Profits") space development.
Oh pooh.
Less than a decade for a complete series of reusable rockets. Amazing.
And Tesla.
And Paypal.
Vastly Superior to LockheedMartin and United Lobbyist ("Launch") Alliance which is 95% dependent on lobbying Congress for tax money.
In the Time it took to develop the F35, we went from the Super Sabre to the F15
Dublin is a major Tax Haven and Globalhomo Hub
Sorry,the $54k/kg to just over $2k/kg was a massive innovation.
Entrepreneurs don't always make something new. They just know how to get shit done. Ms. Fields cookies, Ms. Fields was just a dumb trophy wife, but Mr. Fields (who married her bat girl ass and come from a big family of rich investors) started the first digital logistics for shipping cookies, and that's how he made bank that she took credit for as the figurehead.
Gionet is a useful idiot, he's getting 60 days for Parading in a Government Building or some crap, he'll do it in the best facility possible, cover to maintain his utility.
Just like they made Oswald work in a Coffee Warehouse after he worked at a Defense Contractor that analyzed sat photos for several times what he made stacking sacks of Java.
As for blow ups, failure is how you learn.
As long as Elon flies a Starship to orbit in less than 15 years, he'll have beaten SLS/Ares/SDHLV in dev time, since that's been in the works for 20+ years, Zubrin worked on it as a young guy and thought it couldn't possibly be more than 3-4 years for a suborbital of slapping some engines on the Big Orange Tank.
SpaceX now has as many or more launches than any country in the world, and is not only stealing every last private launch dollar from ESA, but is now matching CHYna in launches.
Entrepreneurship beats tax-subsidized legacy aerospace.
Only the glider was reusable, two of them blew up in flight, The whole program had a lousy ~130 flights with 6 vehicles in 30 years with 14 fatalities.
And that only with massive, much much much longer than anticipated ceramic tile repairs and testing.
Neither the twin solid rocket boosters nor the big orange tank landed back on their own power. Neither could be reflown within weeks without months or years of a near total refurb. A car isn't reusable if it can only be driven on one trip and then it has to be fished out of a lake and mechanics had to rebuilt it nearly completely.
136 Big Orange Tanks were built, so very few Big Orange Tanks were refurbished. But it created a lot of jobs in Congressional Districts across the country.
The cost to orbit per kg to oribt was obscene at $54k, far more than totally disposable rockets, and a MIC boondoggle. The whole program was so expensive it sucked up every last dollar for everything else.
Meanwhile Falcon's record is (at least) 10 times for a booster in less than a decade, 196 successes, only 1 failure, 1 partial failure, and no fatalities. And the kg per orbit is just over $2k, a massive savings over the Space Waste Shuttle. The turnaround for the whole rocket is now 8-10 weeks, compared to shuttles systems whose complete turn around times were measured in years.
The Shuttle never came within a hair of it's advertised utility, frequency, and cos and was massively underwhelming.
LockonTax-MoneyFarten and Beijing Boring needed the competition, and the story of how Elon fought the USAF, NASA, and now the FAA against shoveling money on more expensive, less reliable shit is a great one.
Right, the world's first reusable rocket I heard the other night took off and landed with fairy farts and vaporware.
Biden's Chinese Funded Think Tank.
"Left Wing Madrasas" > Stealing This.
Very few Churches of Size stood up on COVID, too.
The Western/Eastern Catholic/Orthodox Churches certain posters are always pumping up caved like a Spelunker and shut down and actively worked to push the Vax from every Church and College they run.
There were three Churches in North America that I recall that publically resisted: A small one in Idaho, the Polish Pastor in Canada, and Grace To You in California run by John MacArthur. I'm sure there were more but they were in the minority.
Yeah, we're the Rebels. America as we know it is already gone.
We need another term besides "Conservative". Counter Revolutionary?
Check out @sciam, Scientific American, which has gone full woke, on Twitter.
4.1M follows and they're lucky if a tweet with an article link gets 100 likes.
Lots of bots still out there. Apparently Twitter is a Rube Goldberg Machine of patches and roundabout code, that Tesla/SpaceX coders are having a helluva time making sense of it.
Just like Steve Jobs.
He also claimed he didn't need to shower because of his pure diet. Those within arm's length strongly disagreed.
I can see why Orange and Seminole were lost based on the incumbents. It's Big Business Republicrats that are pro-Immigration and pro-DIE, so long as they get a tax cut and some contracts.
Now I'm in Brevard and a little late to the show, but looking forward to jumping on board. Moms for Liberty won bigly in this county.
There's a shitload of entryists with their special good kind of socialism agenda, demoralizers, instigators, etc
They brigade and upvote each other and downvote MAGA.
They are eventually found out by the mods but they return with new alts.
Those Ice People, always with the facts. Drives the Sun People crazy.
This is in reference to Hakeem's Uncle, CUNY professor Leonard Jefferies.
Hopefully people are realizing that voting "R" isn't enough.
Primaries are more important than elections now, I feel.
I agree. Gaetz might have been hoping for a Jordan or somebody with more influence to run against McCarthy, but it didn't happen. In the end, we got a shitload of concessions on House rules in play - and not Biden, not the Senate can stop it. GOP RINO treason is another story, but that's par for the course.
Yep, it took a literal handful, a few single digit percent of the Congress, to get this. That's all it took! Imagine 10%, 20%, 30% of a fully reinvigorated conservative party dedicated to MAGA.
Doomers want to focus that everything wasn't fixed instantly.
50 years+ of subversion won't be fixed in a month, a year, or four years. It'll be a decade.
The Tea Party was the first snowball of what is becoming an avalanche. We're not there yet. Keep attacking.
Sure thing, first name buncha numbers.
Mike Rogers, big time "Security" RINO.
Where Security is defined as the Western part of the Eurasian Steppe, and never the borders of CONUS.
Surviving in dire cold conditions breeds... the ability to delay gratification and plan far ahead
It's been normal and usual in the House since before 2009.
He said he wouldn't be allowed to make Blazing Saddles or History of the World Part I.
This is his mocking sending off of cancel culture.
Mel was a WW2 Combat Veteran, combat engineer, sniped and mortared clearing mines and bridge crossing.