SpaceX just locked in another $950 million from NASA for three more taxi rides to the International Space Station. The extension brings the total contract value to numbers that would make your average retail trader weep into their Robinhood account if they'd bought puts on government spending.
Three flights. $950 million. That's $316 million per flight, which seems expensive until you remember NASA used to pay Russia $90 million per seat on the Soyuz and everyone acted like that was a bargain. Progress is just paying Americans more to do what Russians used to do for less, but with better marketing.
The crewed Dragon program keeps getting extensions because it works, which in the aerospace industry is the equivalent of a unicorn sighting. Boeing's Starliner was supposed to provide competition but instead provided comedy. Nothing says healthy market dynamics like one company that can actually deliver humans to orbit and another that delivers excuses.
NASA awarded this contract modification like it had a choice. What were they gonna do, ask Boeing? Call up Blue Origin and see if they've figured out how to leave low Earth orbit? The negotiation probably lasted four minutes. SpaceX named a price. NASA asked if they take purchase orders. Done.
Elon Musk will take this money and fund approximately eight minutes of Starship development while retail investors analyze the NASA press release for hidden signals about Tesla's delivery numbers. They won't find any, but that's never stopped them before.
The International Space Station gets three more years of reliable crew rotation, America maintains its only functional path to orbit, and SpaceX gets close to a billion dollars for doing something it already knows how to do. The free market didn't create this outcome. Decades of government contracts and a competitor too incompetent to fly created this outcome.
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