>>14275785Yes, I'm aware of that. My point still stands. Russia was the biggest aggressor this side of the ocean, half of the US aerospace industry kept buying their engines for putting our own payloads into orbit instead of investing that money at home and making their own engines to curb the dependence, despite knowing full well that there would come a day when this would suddenly stop if Russia ended up behaving in a way that could lead to article 5 invocation.
So here the fuck we are today. While Russia didn't directly do something that provoked Article 5 invoke, they did an equivalent OF that indirectly, and now all Russian engines are DOA for the American market. Everything that depended on it, absent of whatever stock is left, is fucked if they don't have their successor rockets up and running before they run out. If you remove SpaceX from the equation, our access to the ISS just evaporated. Outside of Dragon there's not a single fucking rocket in the entire US aerospace footprint that can put our people up there.
THUS, even if Starship can completely eclipse Neutron for 50% the cost of that Neutron's price, for up to 150T to anywhere in LEO to MEO without refueling requirements, companies will STILL go and pay that extra cost ANYWAY because people have biases or they have grievances or they're simply fucking stupid, should know better, but still choose the counter intuitive choice.
OneWeb could have launched on F9/FH and tweaked their design to take advantage of a rocket flies so frequently, and so consistently, for so cheaply. They didn't. They said "fuck you to cheap easy access" and went and relied on the Russians, and now their entire constellation is COMPLETELY FUCKED. They were 6. SIX SATELLITES AWAY FROM FINISHING THEIR NETWORK and bringing it online to make money on.
Now? Unless they get the UK government to bail them out more, they're in the red. Each satellite costs $1M to make and another $1.5M to launch. The ineptitude is staggering.
