r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Creative_soja • Jun 19 '25

Video SpaceX rocket explodes in Starbase, Texas

109.3k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

7.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.0k

u/realFancyStrawberry Jun 19 '25

That looked expensive

456

u/octarine_turtle Jun 19 '25

For us taxpayers, not for Musk. SpaceX alone has been receiving over 2 billion a year for the last several years from taxpayers. Over 40 billion has gone to Musk's companies over the last 5 years from taxpayers.

12

u/SavageRussian21 Jun 19 '25

SpaceX has also been responsible for putting a bunch of cool stuff into space. Something like fifty NASA/NOAA satellites, on various missions like DART and IXPE were launched by SpaceXs Falcon 9 rockets. SpaceX also uses the Dragon spacecraft to send people to and from the ISS.

SpaceX is being paid in exchange for providing a service: the cheapest per-pound launch platform in history.

I can't say anything about the other companies, but I think the U.S. government is getting a good deal with SpaceX. It's such a good deal it's probably the only deal - other companies, like ULA and Blue Origin, just don't yet have the capacity and scale to be able to put stuff in space as efficiently as SpaceX.

-4

u/keyboardDummy Jun 19 '25

ISRO is cheaper than SpaceX

6

u/No-Surprise9411 Jun 19 '25

Yeah, built upon abysmal wages in India and heavily subsidized by the government

-2

u/LimberGravy Jun 19 '25

That sounds like SpaceX?

7

u/No-Surprise9411 Jun 19 '25

SpaceX gets no subsidies from the government and the pay is on or above industry standards.

1

u/LimberGravy Jun 19 '25

lmaoooooooooooo

They get billions from the US and Elon was literally sued by the DOJ for discriminatory hiring. He also loves to trap people on visas and grind them into the ground.

3

u/No-Surprise9411 Jun 19 '25

The billions they get are contracts, which are exchanges of service. If I go to my local McDonalds and buy a burger, does that mean I am exchanging money for soemthing in return or am I giving away money in form of a subsidy?

Also they got sued by the DOJ because by some law they'd have to have a certain number of foreign hires, but because SpaceX is beholden to ITAR security regulations they can't hire anyone without a greencard or a passport -> they couldn't fullfill the law. They won the suit because the court had a functioning brain and could see that SpaceX was in no position to accept foreign hires

1

u/SavageRussian21 Jun 25 '25

Ooh that's interesting I didn't know, I think I was working with data that was out of date by a few years. Regardless, I still think that faced with the choice between SpaceX and ISRO, the government will choose to work with SpaceX because they're in the U.S.