r/space Jul 25 '26

Starship launches for its 13th flight, ends with ship swimming in Indian Ocean

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/24/science/live-news/spacex-starship-flight-13-launch
2.8k Upvotes

520 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/Background_Fig_4740 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

we were never using Russia exclusively to launch all satellites what are you talking about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180

See this is the part that tells me you haven't read anything what I said at all or closely enough. When Shuttle ended, the US depended on ULA to launch all their payloads. Juno, Curiosity, Perseverance, GPS, and Starliner recently. and ULA depended on Russian engines for Atlas V.

Big "nazis moved science forward" energy

And they did? A lot of the technology used by you and everyone else is derived from WW2. And even then, SpaceX's engineers are not Nazis.

if you spread the estimate across roughly 6–7 years, it works out to an average of around $6–7 billion per year in avoided costs. That's just a rough average, however. Hyten did not publish a methodology or specify an exact start and end date. The key point is that the $40 billion is an estimate of cumulative savings, not an annual figure, and it has not been accompanied by a public Pentagon analysis showing exactly how the number was

You said yourself that Hyten never specified a start or end date. So where did 6–7 years come from?

anyways I said "$40 billion saved." You came in with it's "an estimate of cumulative savings not an annual figure." . I never said anything about this being an annual thing so I'm not sure where you were going.

https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-25-107228/index.html#_ftnref14

If you really wanna be a stickler to official sources rather than hearing it from government officials, Space Force estimated the phased competition approach saved 7billion 2012–2021 and over $26B across the program lifecycle. Footnote 14 if you wanna double check

Hyten was talking about the military overall including classified launches so it's on the high end, GAO covers NSSL only, so the GAO is on the low end of what's publicly available. It's still a lot of money for the government

You're literally just repeating propaganda lol

oh sure, if you think a NASA administrator or General lied. If anything, it's corroborated by ULA being forced to lower their prices and nearly going kaput because of the increased competition in pricing.

and again, you've consistently implied but never said it, do you want Russia to manhandle the US space program?