Is SpaceX going to return the billions for the Artemis contract from missing their milestones? This is generally what happens with corporate welfare - the people getting the handout win contracts by over-promising the most and then under-deliver.
Starship has been progressing relatively well because delays in these things are the norm, not the exception. A big issue is that the previous administration was weaponizing regulatory agencies against SpaceX to intentional delay launches.
It led to some amusing stories like this one. [1] SpaceX were required to prove that Starship wouldn't hit a shark when coming down in the ocean. So they asked if they could have the data on sharks, but the answer to that was no - apparently it was pseudo-classified for fear that shark fin hunters might get their hands on it. It all comes off as a comedy sketch, but it's real!
Artemis will never go anywhere, but it won't be because of SpaceX. SLS/Boeing play a key role, and the astronauts they barely managed to send up to the ISS like 9 months ago are still stranded there. By the time they're ready to fly SpaceX will certainly be fully capable of single-handedly delivering people to the Moon completely obsoleting the point of the big convoluted multi-company mission.
“ 3.3.4.1
Impact by Fallen Objects
Direct strikes by debris from Starship are extremely unlikely for all species of concern, fish, sea turtles, and marine mammals. This is due to the small size of the components as compared to the vast open ocean.
If debris from the vehicle struck an animal near the water's surface, the animal would be injured or killed.
As stated in the 2022 PEA, given the low frequency of the Starship/Super Heavy ocean descent and landing operations, and the fact that marine wildlife, marine mammals, and special status species spend the majority of their time submerged as opposed to on the surface, it is extremely unlikely they would be impacted. The relative occurrence of these animals at the ocean surface, spatially and temporally, combined with the low frequency of the Proposed Action, reduce the likelihood of impacts to extremely low. Additionally, there are no known interactions with any of these species after decades of similar rocket launches and reentries. Further, the projected landing areas for both Super Heavy and Starship are well offshore where density of marine species decreases compared to coastal environments and upwelling areas (FAA 2017).”
Pretty much every subsection of the report regarding risk to biological life ends on a similar note.
A quick search finds the environmental impact report that is the basis of this story: https://www.faa.gov/media/76836. To land a spacecraft in the ocean required a certification by the FAA. That certification required an environmental impact assessment.
Perhaps you prefer a world in which corporations can dump (even more) waste in the ocean?
It has nothing to do with waste. It's about species impact. And it's done completely maliciously. You're splashing down in a relatively random area that's tens of trillions (for the Indian Ocean alone) of square meters large. Advanced life density near the surface is going to be very close to zero.
That is immediately obvious to just about anybody with a decent head on their shoulders. But now actually proving that takes what almost certainly amounted to thousands (if not tens of thousands) of manhours followed by months of review, and adversarial engagement. It was the outright weaponization of government.
This, btw, is what leads to extremist viewpoints on regulation. Regulations, done in good faith, are a very good thing. But they can easily be weaponized both by the government against enemies of the state, and by other companies, in the case of regulatory capture, to prevent competition. And there is no entirely clear way to prevent these sort of abuses.
I'm unaware of ways to prevent abuse of the environment by corporations other than regulation. Do you have some evidence or documentation that these standards are applied differently to Space-X than other similar companies? Can you show some paper trail that the submission wasn't processed in good faith?
The reason toxic dumping is illegal is not because of the EPA or whatever but because there are laws against it. Laws are how you prevent specific abuses, without regulations. Of course in some cases you want a regulatory agency because actions or violations may need to change quickly and/or respond to emerging situations in a dynamic fashion, but there's at least a solution.
As for SpaceX, you're asking me to prove a negative which is impossible. But feel free to find a single-counter example to what I'm saying, as that would completely disprove it. The FAA suddenly decided to impose a 2 month delay to Starship on its 5th launch which was in no way fundamentally different than the priors besides a new splashdown location, and add a bunch of new 'concerns.' In another case the EPA came after SpaceX for "unpermitted discharges" of... oxygen.
And all of these new issues coincided exactly with the timing of the previous political administration defacto naming him an enemy of the state. There was nothing of a comparable scale in the past. Heck they even had a return-to-flight after a major mishap and mishap investigation that took less time than it took for the previous administration's FAA to determine if a shark might get hit by a rocket landing in the ocean...
Boeing right now is in a terrible place. They have cost+ contracts for Orion and SLS - key components of the Artemis program. Cost+ means the government pays all of their costs and then gives them a fat chunk of profit on top. The problem for them is that when/if they ever deliver on those contracts, that's pretty much the end of them. They simply lack the technical capability to compete with SpaceX.
This means that so long as they keep working on the SLS and Orion, the money keeps rolling in. But if they ever succeed then their Golden Goose, of taxpayer money, dies. There was a recentish WSJ report suggesting that they are looking into spinning off/selling their space division, and it's probably related to this. Great legacy, but they seriously need a complete reboot in the present.
SpaceX by contrast is, more or less, in their prime. They're going to complete the project, not because of Artemis, but because they want to get people to the Moon as well as to Mars. It's just a part of their operational goals which they have been directly and working towards, with steady progress, for many years now.
Turns out you don’t actually have to hit milestones on grants. The unfortunate reality is grants are typically unrealistic in the same way VC backed startups vastly overestimate their growth curve. In order to win the grant, you’re competing against other ideas. It’s easy to win grants with ideas that aren’t feasible because they sound better than ideas that are actually feasible. It enables incredible amounts of grift once you understand how to exploit the dynamics. Look up SBIR mills
I had the displeasure of submitting a few honest SBIRs at one point in time. Needless to say, they were rejected for not being ambitious enough. It is actually so bad that there is an inverse relationship between your ability to get an SBIR and your ability to produce a commercial product - startups who try and fail are statistically more likely to succeed in the market than startups who get an SBIR (even with the benefit of the money).
I’ve had the displeasure of working for companies that did get SBIRs and firmly believe you are correct that there is an inverse relationship on producing products. The machine knows how to get grants, and it does not care about delivering anything.
Do you have any references on this topic I can look into further? I find it difficult to articulate that particular behavior to management
