IN A NUTSHELL 🚀 The International Space Station (ISS) faces rising safety concerns due to structural cracks and air leaks. 💰 Proposed NASA budget cuts by the Trump administration threaten the safe deorbiting of the ISS by 2030. 🛰️ SpaceX is contracted to develop a U.S. Deorbit Vehicle (USDV), but Elon Musk suggests an earlier
That’s true, but it still drove down costs so the original mission goal still worked. Sierra Space has Dream Chaser that will be launching this year which is exciting competition. No crew at first, just cargo. However that’s exactly how SpaceX started so I’m hopefully they will be as successful and we’ll get better competition than Boeing has been offering SpaceX.
It drove down costs relative to a program explicitly designed (by Congress) to maximize costs in the form of graft. Being cheaper than the Senate Launch System is hardly an achievement.
This is a common pattern seen with neoliberal privatization schemes. First, make the government program as bad as possible by cutting its budget and by saddling it with unreasonable mandates, then introduce privatization measures which at first seems to save money but in the long run cost more because profits must always rise and cede control to capitalists.
The Falcon/Dragon system is a legitimately good human launch system, and the first stage reuse is legitimately impressive, but it’s actually less reusable and more expensive to fly per mission than the original version of the Shuttle would have been before the Nixon cuts ruined it.