People estimate ~100 million, which is still a lot. Of course it's worth noting that they weren't attempting to launch a payload or really recover much of anything, so the only real cost of failure is that they might need to launch more test flights later than they otherwise would have had to.

Apparently estimated total development costs are probably a bit less than half of the Artemis program cost, although the Artemis program has actually developed a fully functional and reliable rocket by now. So it's hard to say if SpaceX's development method will be cheaper in the long run. (Discounting the later manufacturing costs because I don't see any reason why a more ULA, Blue Origin, or NASA-like development process wouldn't still be capable of producing a cheap rocket if that was the focus)

Honestly losing to the US military industrial complex in development cost would be pretty embarrassing. (Congress makes NASA use all the MIC suppliers for their rockets)

Launch services isn't a contract to launch anything, it's just NASA collecting information about every rocket. Rockets that blow up just get listed as Category I High Risk, allowed for Class D payloads that are cheap and replaceable.

Well, they still have the smaller rockets that usually don't blow up.

Yeah. I don't like having this response because I feel like anything that increases our reach and activity in space is a positive step. It's unfortunate that spacex has musk's shitty fingerprints all over it.

aw man, same

thats why he moved to texas, less regulations there.

As a comparison too SpaceX can launch Starship at least 6 more times before reaching the cost of a single Saturn V launch, I an not even talking about development cost.

Starship also did reach orbital velocity on several launches.

The goals are different.

It concerns me from a standpoint that is similar to Oceangate - the engineers are probably aware something is going wrong, but money is getting the final say. Then the people on one of these things end up dying, and it won't be Musk.

I'm also concerned because this lax approach to engineering is becoming more apparent in the private sector. Engineers have a very difficult job -traditionally balancing budget, schedule, and quality. But we also are vital in ensuring regulatory compliance, safety, disposal, process, efficiency etc.

Engineer salaries, however, have stagnated like the rest of American workers. It's true we still get paid better, but compared to how much the salary got you in the 80s-90s, we get much less.

Private sector engineers are largely not PEs as we're shielded by our employers. We are more worried about being laid off than fucking up a project to the point lives get risked.

Part of this is why I chose to no longer work on systems that can cause injuries/ harm to a user. If I'm doing that, I can assume I'm not alone. If those of us consciously avoiding it because of fears of hurting users, it might mean that the ones working on the systems aren't motivated by safety of the user.

And while both of those programs weren't starting from zero, like Apollo learned from Mercury and Gemini, SpaceX should have learned from all of them.

The Saturn V's 9th flight was the third time it took humans to the moon...