Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, go for it. I alluded earlier that SpaceX has been heavily revenue-funded and lots of that by NASA. There's a great publication. The great thing about NASA is it's a government agency, so everything's public. There's this audit. It's called the Audit of Commercial Resupply Services to the International Space Station. This was published in 2018. This has a great diagram of money that flowed to different companies, SpaceX, Boeing, Orbital, Sierra Nevada, others, and what flowed for. All the different programs, be it commercial crew or shipping people up. SpaceX has received $7.7 billion in contracts from NASA for launches, which is astounding compared to a company that would be trying to do as much as SpaceX has done without actually having a customer at the end of every rocket. It'd be impossibly hard. It would take so much more capital, it would change your priorities, and what SpaceX really has done here, I don't think I realized this. Every time I'm watching one of these SpaceX launches and getting all excited about a new piece of technology on that rocket, which by the way, there's a new piece of technology on every rocket. Every single mission they fly is different hardware than the previous one because they're constantly iterating. Every time they do that, save for 10 or so, there's a customer that's paying them money to send that thing up. NASA has been responsible for $7.7 billion of that. The other thing that NASA has put in money for, which has been really interesting, is when you mentioned the spaceship, David, which would ultimately be called the Dragon capsule. Developing the sum total, the Falcon 9, which we're about to go into the story of, and the Dragon, that cost about $400 million of NASA's money and about $450 million of SpaceX's money to go and develop that. At some point, NASA did an internal audit to basically say, how much would that have cost us if we didn't bid this out to SpaceX to go and do this? If we had built this the way that we built the space shuttle, how much would that have cost us? Basically, what they find is the number is about $4 billion. Wow. So, it is 1/10 of the cost.…

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