[HN Gopher] NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon m...
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NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
Author : voxleone
Score : 169 points
Date : 2025-10-21 12:58 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| About damn time!
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Who do you think is capable of competing, given that they
| didn't win the bid the first time round?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| They should just get an Apollo lander, maybe strap on some
| rockets from Nike Ajax missiles, buff it up a bit, maybe
| throw a shuttle windscreen on it too. Job done.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Too bad Orion can't get to Lunar Orbit to meet the lander.
| imtringued wrote:
| All hail the cislunar transporter.
| bombcar wrote:
| I don't really care, give Carmack ten billion dollars and at
| least it'll run DooM.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Armadillo Aerospace did a mediocre job at best with its
| funding.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| I think it did amazingly well with its shoestring
| funding.
|
| They didn't handle the scale up in vehicle size well.
| They didn't have a guy who really understood electronics.
| I'd say those were the biggest problems. They did have an
| amazing metal worker (and I don't think they ever
| understood how important that was) and an amazing
| programmer.
| trentnix wrote:
| Regardless of capability, it's in NASA's best interests and
| our best interests to encourage others to try. I think we are
| better off if the rocket industry (and every industry) is not
| dominated by a single organization, even if we believe that
| organization is altruistic and excellent.
| roer wrote:
| Well, NASA tried that originally but didn't have the
| budget, and in that sense it's better late than never to
| fund something different. The reasoning as presented just
| doesn't reflect reality.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| They did. They held a bidding process. SpaceX won the bid.
| As Americans you didn't vote for a government that wanted
| to fund multiple bids.
| bhouston wrote:
| Is this realistic? Doesn't the development timelines for a new
| large rocket stretch into more than a decade? Unless someone else
| had one under development...
|
| Could this just be a pressure tactic on SpaceX?
| rsynnott wrote:
| As mentioned in the article (of course I realise we mustn't
| read those here) Blue Origin is supposed to be providing a
| lander in 2030 in any case
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_V), so doesn't seem like
| a _huge_ stretch.
|
| Somewhat surprised they've waited this long, under the
| circumstances.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I was about to post that Blue Origin is the only possible
| candidate for a competitor to SpaceX and they're not even
| close. More competition is needed but it's like saying more
| competition is needed for the hyperscalers, going from zero
| to on par is very hard and even with the time and money you
| still need the talent.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| This contract isn't for launch - that will be SLS (in theory) -
| rather for the lander.
| loourr wrote:
| Which highlights how unserious this whole thing is. SLS
| hardly works and is way behind schedule.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Blue Origin is explicitly named in Duffy's statement. And if
| SpaceX's Starship HLS catches enough delays, they can slide
| into Blue Origin's Blue Moon HLS timeline - which is now being
| developed for Artemis 5, in 2030.
|
| On top of working on a HLS lander, Blue Origin has a pretty
| large rocket developed already - New Glenn. They just don't
| have the reusability or the launch cadence, and their HLS needs
| at least two launches. So far, New Glenn has only ever flown
| once, with the first stage recovery attempt being unsuccessful.
| But they may get it into a good shape in time.
|
| I do think that Artemis 3, currently stated for 2027, will be
| eventually delayed to ~2030, for many reasons. But I wouldn't
| trust Blue Origin to deliver before SpaceX even if they started
| the development at the same exact time, and they didn't. SpaceX
| is, by aerospace standards, a lean and mean company. SpaceX
| sets unhinged hyper-aggressive "if we lived in a perfect world"
| timelines, and delivers late. Blue Origin sets reasonable
| aerospace timelines, and still delivers late.
|
| Blue Moon HLS is considerably less complex than Starship HLS,
| but it has a lot of the same milestones in front of it -
| including in-orbit propellant storage and fuel transfers from
| one vehicle to another. And currently, they certainly don't
| seem to be ahead of where SpaceX is now with Starship.
|
| Other than Blue Origin and SpaceX? I just don't see anyone
| being able to squeeze out a HLS candndate in time for 2030. Who
| else is there in the space, with anywhere near the expertise?
| Firefly? Boeing?
| floating-io wrote:
| > Blue Moon HLS is considerably less complex than Starship
| HLS
|
| That's the one thing in your comment I disagree with.
| Starship-based HLS has basically one base vehicle, modified
| into three variants (tanker, depot, and the lander itself).
| Refueling is done in LEO.
|
| Blue Origin's HLS has three completely unique vehicles with
| no commonality (New Glenn, Transporter, and the lander), and
| refuels in multiple orbits, one of which is NRHO, which is
| likely to be far more challenging. And they're doing it with
| hydrogen.
|
| Blue Origin's Mk1 cargo lander is simpler; their HLS
| architecture is not.
|
| JMHO.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| I do think that Blue Origin HLS is less complex overall,
| but I agree that they aren't dealing with the same kind of
| complexity. Both companies are playing to their strengths
| there.
|
| A major weakness of SpaceX's HLS approach is that it
| requires them to launch a lot of the same vehicle in a
| fairly short succession. But SpaceX are the kings of high
| volume aerospace manufacturing, and they are the driving
| force behind US launch cadence going up. Even if Starship
| reusability isn't truly perfected in time for Artemis HLS,
| they are already building those Starships pretty fast, and
| can eat some refueling vehicle losses.
|
| Blue Origin doesn't have the raw performance figures of
| Starship, or SpaceX's unmatched manufacturing and launch
| cadence. So their HLS architecture is lighter and less
| launch hungry. That comes at an engineering cost of having
| to use more specialized vehicles. And they are using LH2
| fuel - which delivers more of a punch per weight, but is
| even harder to stay on top of than CH4. More engineering
| effort would be required to store and transfer that in
| orbit, dealing with boil-off and all - but Blue Origin has
| used liquid hydrogen extensively already, so they have
| experience with it.
| floating-io wrote:
| Complexity vs. Tedium. There's a difference.
|
| The SpaceX approach requires a lot of launches, but
| they're already proven experts at that. They've launched
| something like 130 rockets this year alone. That's one
| every couple of days.
|
| High launch cadence is not complexity for SpaceX. It's
| _normal_ for them. After the first half dozen or so
| refuels, it will be second nature, just like delivering
| satellites with Falcon is.
|
| And they are, in essence, developing a single craft for
| it, just with a few variations.
|
| Blue's architecture requires three distinct vehicles.
| Each one has to be developed separately. Then we get to
| the launch; last I saw, here is the comparison:
|
| SpaceX:
|
| * Launch the Depot
|
| * Launch N tankers to fill the depot (this is the tedium
| I mentioned).
|
| * Launch the HLS to LEO
|
| * Refill the HLS in LEO
|
| * Send the HLS to NRHO
|
| * Rendevous with Orion in NRHO and transfer people
|
| * Land on and then return from the moon
|
| * Rendevous with Orion in NRHO and transfer people back.
|
| That's a fairly complex architecture, but let's compare
| that against the last I saw of Blue's [1]:
|
| * Launch the Transporter to LEO
|
| * Launch tankers and refill the Transporter
|
| * Launch the Lander to LEO "dry"
|
| * Fill the Lander from the Transporter
|
| * Send Lander to NRHO
|
| * Launch tankers and refill the Transporter
|
| * Raise Transporter to "stairstep" orbit
|
| * Launch tankers and refill the Transporter _again_
|
| * Send the Transporter to NRHO
|
| * Refill the Lander again in NRHO
|
| * Rendezvous with Orion and transfer people
|
| * Land on moon and return with people
|
| * Rendezvous with Orion and transfer people back
|
| That is _far_ more complex than what SpaceX is proposing.
|
| The number of tanker launches is really quite irrelevant
| for both in this context. It's less risky for SpaceX due
| to their extensive ops experience, but both will be fine
| there I think. That's just tedium for both of them.
|
| The complexity comes in with the number of operations and
| precisely _where_ BO is doing the refueling. I 'm not
| terribly worried about the LEO ops; they'll manage those.
| The NRHO refuelling though? That one strikes me much
| riskier if only due to comms lag.
|
| And the sheer number of steps in Blue's architecture
| seems crazy to me.
|
| So no, I can't agree that Blue's architecture is in any
| way simpler. Quite the opposite, in fact.
|
| [1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20250008728/downl
| oads/25... :: the last slide in the set.
|
| (edit: formatting)
| terminalshort wrote:
| SpaceX is years behind schedule. Blue Origin is decades
| behind schedule.
| robryan wrote:
| New Glen was meant to fly something around 6 times this year.
| At this point the best they will do is one additional launch
| to go with their first launch in January. Hard to see them
| doing any better timeline wise than SpaceX.
| mrieck wrote:
| Sir! Elon has responded to our pressure tactic. Your interview
| seems to have had an effect. "Well - what did he say?" It's
| better if you see for yourself.
|
| GIF reply "why are you gae" (this was his actual response btw)
| reactordev wrote:
| Posture, no one can compete, not even NASA.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah who is going to deliver faster and more reliable than
| SpaceX? Boeing? LM?
|
| Doubt
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't know who else can, but I do seriously doubt SpaceX is
| going to be able to deliver within the next decade or so
| either.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| They're by far the ones with the most relevant experience
| and actually flying hardware (human spaceflight, propulsive
| landing, flight testing hardware for HLS), in the US.
|
| I don't think it's going to take them a decade, but they
| probably won't be ready within Trump's term, and I think
| that's the real reason for this latest push.
| chasd00 wrote:
| when the Democrats wrestle back control of the federal
| government all things related to Trump, no matter how
| tangentially, are getting castrated. That includes SpaceX
| because of Elon Musk so they need to get it while the
| getting's good.
|
| edit: the vindictive behavior of the current crop of
| politicians is just cutting off your nose to spite your
| face. All of it is going to come right back around when
| the parties swap places.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I don't expect democrats to be super vindictive to
| SpaceX, except if they think they can redirect that money
| to old-space companies like Boeing (which is less about
| being vindictive and more that most politicians are
| shamelessly corrupt).
| peterfirefly wrote:
| They have a pretty good chance, actually. They are almost
| done with the hard parts of the Starship.
| virgilp wrote:
| I wouldn't say "almost done" - orbital refueling is
| likely one of the hard parts, and it wasn't attempted
| yet.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _orbital refueling is likely one of the hard parts_
|
| It's the most novel and riskiest. I wouldn't say it's
| hardest. That's launch, reentry and reuse. They've
| _substantially_ de-risked those components with IFT-11.
|
| I'd put IFT-12 validating Block 3 as the actual hardest
| launch next year. If that goes smoothly, I'm betting they
| make orbit and propellant transfer before the end of the
| year. And if _that_ happens, I 'm betting they get at
| least one rocket off to Mars before year end.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| It's probably a lot easier than the raptors, the
| plumbing, the launch tower, the launch mount, the belly
| flop, staging, and the catching. It's probably easier
| than the pez dispenser.
| haspok wrote:
| > They are almost done with the hard parts of the
| Starship.
|
| That's what Musk wants you to believe.
|
| In reality, reusability was the Achilles heel of the
| space shuttle, due to the thermal insulator tiles that
| could be easily damaged during reentry, so they had to be
| rechecked rigorously before the next flight, and the
| damaged tiles replaced. We haven't seen any of that - so
| far only the booster was reused, somewhat, as in 2 were
| reused, with one failure and one success, but only much
| later.
|
| And then there is the orbital refueling, but that is so
| far in the future that it's not even worth discussing.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Not just due to the tiles!
|
| They had to take a lot of the back end of the shuttle
| apart after every landing, which was cumbersome because
| things weren't packed right for that. Also, they used
| hydrazine for the (many!) smaller rocket engines and that
| requires special protective suits and breathing
| equipment.
|
| Starship doesn't use hydrazine and the big engines are
| pretty fast to remove/mount. We've seen them do that many
| times now.
|
| Shuttle tiles were tested by having somebody going around
| and pinging them all with a special mallet and using a
| cart with a special computer that checked if they made
| the right sound.
|
| Starship tiles can be inspected remotely and quickly with
| a camera.
|
| Replacing a shuttle tile wasn't easy. Replacing a
| Starship tile is fairly easy. They have done it many,
| many times already. The question isn't whether they can
| do it fast (they can) or easily (they can) or whether
| they can detect bad tiles (they can). It's not even
| whether they can tolerate a few missing or defective
| tiles (they can). The only question there is whether
| enough fail so that the replacement time cuts too much
| into the recycling time budget for when they want to
| launch Starships really fast. We don't know that yet.
| They won't be needing really fast turnarounds for some
| time so there's plenty of opportunity to fix any issues
| with tile design/placement and with the underlying
| thermal blankets.
|
| Don't argue by analogies. Especially not bad ones.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Shuttle had the unfortunate combination of fragile
| indivudally unique (!) tiles glue to lightweight aluminum
| structure that would fail if heated to 175 C (!!) [0],
| even in a small area.
|
| In comparison Starship is covered by mostly identical
| tiles attached to hull welded from milimeters thick
| (internet data indicates something between 4 and 2 mm
| thick & often multiplied in important places) steel
| plate.
|
| The steel hull has demonstrated surviving missing tiles
| just fine - and during earlier flight even _multiple burn
| throughs on the flaps with bits falling off_ and even
| back then Starship completed simulated landing to the
| ocean (including the flip manuever and landing burn!).
|
| So even if SpaceX does not perfect rapid reusability of
| Starship immediately, they would still have hands down
| the best orbital launcher in the world, with the option
| of populating new Starship hulls with reused engines,
| acuators and avionics for the time being.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_thermal_p
| rotecti...
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Not within the next decade" (e.g. not until 2041) is a
| long time.
|
| The first prototype of Starship only did its first hop in
| July 2019, so 6 years ago. The first flight integrated test
| only happened 2,5 years ago.
|
| Nowadays they can return to Earth already and catch the
| booster. Why would you expect the rest of the development
| to drag until 2041?
| JohnFen wrote:
| I expect it to take a long time because they seems to be
| a long way off from achieving it. Their track record so
| far isn't great. They've consistently blown every
| timeline they've put forth, and by a lot.
|
| Remember, they said that they'd have a rapidly reusable
| launch system going by March 2013. In 2011, Musk said
| that he'd be sending humans to Mars sometime between 2021
| and 2031, but it doesn't look like they're anywhere near
| being able to do that yet.
|
| Also remember that they started working on all of this in
| 2008.
|
| I mean, I could be wrong! But I don't think I am.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| There is a saying that SpaceX turns the impossible into
| merely late.
|
| They have blown a lot of deadlines, but they also
| produced a very reliable and relatively cheap launcher
| which now underpins the majority of human space activity,
| which we should, in fairness, consider a huge
| achievement.
|
| And the Raptor engines look really good so far. Reliable
| engines are a huge must in space industry.
|
| I don't think they are getting stymied by reentry
| problems forever. Already the latest IFT looked a lot
| better than the first one.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > There is a saying that SpaceX turns the impossible into
| merely late.
|
| That saying is in no way at odds with my assertion.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| True, and I apologize.
|
| Nevertheless, if we come back to the original assertion,
| I have one more argument against it.
|
| If you look at Starbase, it has grown absolutely huge. It
| started off as a small group of tents and now it is a
| massive industrial area, plus SpaceX is expanding their
| presence at Cap Canaveral as well.
|
| Which means that they have a strong incentive to turn
| Starship into something that makes money and can finance
| those structures. No one can subsidize such large scale
| efforts indefinitely, not even Musk. You can spend a lot
| of time at a drawing board, but once you cross into the
| industrial buildup phase, your expenses skyrocket (pun
| intended) and the schedule becomes tighter.
|
| So they either deliver, or shut the shop within much less
| than a decade.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Well that's just the empty booster; what they plan to do
| next with v3 is refueling in space, but what I haven't
| heard anything about yet is landing on the moon, crew
| compartiments, cargo, and launching again. Any one of
| those is years of development and testing.
|
| I mean don't get me wrong, it's exciting and I'm grateful
| to be alive for these developments along with all access
| insight in the process and high definition video of the
| tests and I really hope they make it. But it won't be
| fast or cheap.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This is a good argument.
|
| Something can be copied from Dragon, but not all of
| those.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Not sure if you're being sarcastic. Have they managed to get
| starship to orbit yet?
| delichon wrote:
| > Not sure if you're being sarcastic. Have they managed to
| get to orbit anything bigger than a banana?
|
| Yes, about 4,000 metric tons. My IP packets are traveling
| through part of it now.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| On starship?
| delichon wrote:
| You said "they". They are SpaceX. Their expertise is
| transferable to Starship.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Clearly not, because they've launched about 10 Starships
| and have failed to achieve orbit.
| allenrb wrote:
| If they had achieved orbit on any Starship flight test,
| it would have been a serious violation of their launch
| license & test criteria. Hint: they've never tried to
| orbit Starship.
|
| Yes, they had expected to do more, sooner. So say that.
| What you've written here is nonsense.
|
| Starship is trying to do more than anyone ever has. If
| all (ALL!) they'd wanted to do was build a giant rocket
| with a reusable booster and an expendable second stage,
| they'd already be done.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| As far as I know they only deployed some Starlink dummies
| so far.
| Culonavirus wrote:
| Several times (if we keep disingenuous "wheeeel akchually"
| technical gotchas out of this). The fact that they keep
| safety in mind is a good thing. Any starship that got to
| space could have easily reached orbit, but it didn't
| because spacex cares more about NOT uncontrollably
| deorbiting a giant hunk of steel than impressing a
| "redditor" who doesn't understand how orbital mechanics
| work.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| You're suggesting that they could and don't, I'm
| suggesting that they can't.
|
| Apparently NASA is starting to have the same suspicions.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| We know they can.
| m4rtink wrote:
| For comparison other organizations don't have an issue
| with leaving 20 ton rocket stages in orbit, leading to
| uncontrolled reenetry. :)
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a32451633/china-
| long-...
|
| That's 20 tons of mostly aluminium - 100+ ton stainless
| steel Starship would be potentially much more dangerous,
| so it is good SpaceX cares. :)
| altcognito wrote:
| "Not even" only applies to those that haven't followed the
| events of the past decade.
|
| 1. USA is no longer sponsoring groundbreaking research 2. USA
| had already begun outsourcing research to companies that are
| not grounded in long term employment of researchers.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| In general, yes, but in this specific instance,
| groundbreaking research or its lack isn't the core of the
| problem.
|
| This is mostly about the new human-rated lander, which is an
| engineering problem. Notably, the US _never_ had a reasonably
| safe spaceship, although Dragon may yet prove good. Both
| Apollos and Space Shuttles, developed under NASA, were pretty
| dangerous to their crews.
| reactordev wrote:
| As evident in Challenger and Columbia...
|
| You're absolutely right. Astronauts sign a last will and
| testament before every flight. We think it's routine
| because we've nailed down orbital science but in reality,
| we lack the quality assurance that space flight demands.
| It's one thing to send up robots and satellites, it's
| another to send up humans. The ISS is crawling with
| bacteria. We lack the physical protection for long space
| travel for a mars mission much less visiting anything past
| the Kuiper belt.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Plus Grissom, White and Chaffee didn't even have to fly
| before dying.
|
| They suffocated/burned to death during a routine test,
| with Apollo 1 cabine being still firmly attached to
| Earth.
| prewett wrote:
| > The ISS is crawling with bacteria.
|
| So is your skin. Everything related to Earth is crawling
| with bacteria. The concentration and species of bacteria
| on the ISS are what is relevant.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The safety requirement for the Commercial Crew program
| was a probability of fatality of no more than 1 in 270.
| Which would be absolutely atrocious for any other mode of
| transport. And Boeing couldn't even achieve that much.
|
| I think the real issue is that it's just still very, very
| hard. Margins are extremely thin. Airliners are extremely
| safe despite existing in a realm that's inherently
| dangerous because they spend margin on safety. You could
| make an airliner that's way lighter than what's currently
| flying if you didn't care about making it robust against,
| say, hitting a weather balloon. But the ability is there
| to protect against adverse events like that.
|
| Spacecraft have almost no margin. The distance between
| normal operation and having a bad day is really small
| because getting people into orbit _at all_ is still just
| about at the limits of available technology.
| altcognito wrote:
| I debated exactly that before posting, I appreciate your
| comment.
|
| I do think there are some novel challenges left for the
| Artemis project however that do require a lot of research
| and development before they are put before the boring
| engineering happens.
| cheschire wrote:
| I love how government acquisitions works. A company can fail to
| deliver the final product, then use the recompete process to win
| a higher paying contract by using the progress they already made
| on the previous contract to demonstrate a performance level above
| their competitors.
|
| Whereas all the competition has to use their own R&D budget to
| show capability to meet the requirements of the second contract,
| the winner of the first contract used the government's R&D money
| to be competitive.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Everyone hates on the Government. But that describes every
| competitive bid process used by many corporations.
|
| Any company can do that to another company.
|
| Welcome to Capitalism. Just because it is a government contract
| doesn't by default mean it is Socialism.
|
| And, of course they can re-bid. Just like every other
| corporation does.
| cheschire wrote:
| I didn't imply socialism. It's probably my fault you inferred
| it though as I'm blissfully ignorant of whatever the current
| echoes are these days that get people chirping in a specific
| direction.
|
| No I'm just assuming SpaceX will win the recompetition and
| complaining about that future event.
|
| And no, it doesn't need to be an "of course they can"
| inevitability. The rules of competition define what can and
| can't happen. If the rules of this competition allow a rebid,
| then that is a conscious decision. Rules / laws could be
| changed to disallow rebidding on follow-on contracts if there
| was a failure to deliver on the first one.
| boxed wrote:
| I'm confused. Who are you talking about here?
|
| SpaceX has consistently been on the wrong end of what you write
| about, with ULA/Boeing/whatever pulling that kind of stunt
| again and again. Just look at the SLS budget.
| cheschire wrote:
| I'm assuming SpaceX will win this, and lamenting that.
| However I'm also being more general because you are
| absolutely on the same page as me that this is a decades-old
| problem.
|
| I don't hate the player, I hate the game.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Whereas all the competition has to use their own R &D budget
| to show capability_
|
| Think of it as a vote of no confidence. The incumbent has the
| advantage. But if they've squandered their advantage so
| thoroughly that a new entrant can match their capabilities,
| this is an opportunity to switch horses.
|
| NASA should have done this, for example, when Bechtel began
| shitting the bed with ML2 [1].
|
| [1] https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-016.pd...
| chasd00 wrote:
| It reminds me how once you get on the preferred vendor list of
| a large corporation it becomes very very hard to stop getting
| paid. No matter how bad you screw up you get more projects
| because, hey, you're on the list. The US Government is the
| ultimate whale, get on that metaphorical preferred vendor list
| and you get "money for nothing and chicks for free" forever.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| > Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, fired back: "SpaceX is moving
| like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry.
| Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark
| my words."
|
| Still marking his words on self-driving vehicles so I guess we
| can add this to the list. What's the casualty count so far on
| that one btw?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
| boxed wrote:
| You need to keep two things in your mind at the same time:
|
| Elon Musk sometimes say things that are true.
|
| Elon Must sometimes say things that are not true.
|
| In this case, it's the first one.
| askl wrote:
| > Elon Musk sometimes say things that are true.
|
| Has this ever happened in the last 10 years?
| a4isms wrote:
| He has often said things that are true, provided you ignore
| the ten to twenty times he said something else about the
| same subject with equal confidence. He is a master of
| goalpost relocation. Ask any Cybertruck owner. He shipped
| it, but was it the Cybertruck he promised?
| destitude wrote:
| Catching of a booster which everyone else thought was the
| stupidest craziest thing ever and they did it on first try.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| If people can constantly attack Steve Jobs for "just
| being an idea guy" while Wozniak did all the work, I
| think we can all agree that Elon Musk deserves (at most)
| limited credit for the amazing engineering achievement
| one of his several companies/projects accomplished.
| Especially given the overlap with his several-months-long
| stint being a Trump groupie and proudly taking a chainsaw
| to the US government.
|
| Yes his vision and direction matters. But let's not act
| like the dude did that himself. Especially while he was
| so distracted having his nose up Trump's proverbial rear.
| brightball wrote:
| What questions do you have following the results of Tesla,
| SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, etc?
|
| I've got a HW4 Tesla Model 3 right now and the FSD
| experience is so good I use it constantly...and I was one
| of those "I will never trust self driving cars" people for
| years.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Considering their contract just went back up for grabs I'm
| not sure how true that statement is.
|
| > you need to keep two things in your mind at the same time
|
| This was unnecessary and patronizing.
| rkomorn wrote:
| > Considering their contract just went back up for grabs
| I'm not sure how true that statement is.
|
| TBH, with this administration, I wouldn't trust whatever
| either NASA or SpaceX say or do as a sign of anything.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| That's fair too
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| That's a fun list, but it feels like an odd thing to have its
| own article on Wikipedia.
| rkomorn wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_odd_lists_that_have_th.
| .. beckons.
| t1234s wrote:
| Since blue origin is still developing their new glenn rocket with
| only a single launch so far what is the chance they use falcon
| heavy to deliver their blue moon lander
| loourr wrote:
| Starship is more flight ready then SLS and new Glenn. It's just
| not fully reusable yet, so it's not ready by Spacex standards
| but far ahead of anyone else in the world. They could also use
| falcon heavy but might as well use Starship, unless they need
| dragon.
| imtringued wrote:
| There is no way to use falcon heavy to launch the blue moon
| lander without a custom payload adapter that would take as much
| time as building a third New Glenn booster, so the chances are
| exactly 0%.
| loourr wrote:
| Artemis is a joke. You can tell this is politically motivated by
| their stance on SLS. If they were serious they would give Spacex
| the SLS contract for being years and years behind schedule.
| jordanb wrote:
| Is starship on schedule?
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Of course not. But a system that's "affordable, fixed price,
| highly capable, delayed" beats one that's "too expensive,
| cost+, marginally capable, delayed".
|
| Starship is not a drop-in replacement for SLS. But it sure
| casts a long shadow on the entire SLS project.
| wat10000 wrote:
| At $2.5 billion per launch, the worst thing that could
| happen with SLS is that it starts being used.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Is starship on schedule?_
|
| Difficult to say relative to current Artemis timelines, which
| have to date been mainly delayed by Orion. They're currently
| looking on schedule to perform an orbital propellant transfer
| in 2026. That likely means a commercial launch before the end
| of next year, which is crazy.
|
| How that relates to HLS is up in the air, and probably will
| be until the end of next year.
| verzali wrote:
| Yes, but in the original schedule on HLS Starship was
| supposed to have done the prop transfer in Q4 2022, an
| uncrewed lunar landing in Q1 2024, and the actual thing in
| Q1 2025.
|
| Of course that was always wishful thinking. I'm sure SpaceX
| has their "real" schedule somewhere, and maybe NASA has one
| too (at least from what I've heard, it is likely they have
| an unofficial idea of it somewhere).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _in the original schedule on HLS Starship was supposed
| to have done the prop transfer in Q4 2022, an uncrewed
| lunar landing in Q1 2024, and the actual thing in Q1
| 2025_
|
| Now do Orion and ML2.
|
| Artemis is behind schedule. Nobody debates that.
| Currently, the bottleneck is with Orion. SpaceX just
| _massively_ de-risked the Starship platform with IFT-11.
| If IFT-12 validates Block 3, we should wait until the end
| of 2026 before trying to revevaluate.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Difficult to say
|
| It's not difficult to say. They are behind schedule and
| everyone, not just Duffy, is talking about it and have been
| for awhile.
|
| I don't care - beyond how getting to the moon will help
| future space exploration - and risk is high when developing
| new tech, but I also don't care about SpaceX. It's very
| possible Starship won't work out; that's risk and I'm sure
| SpaceX and NASA people understand that. Why must people on
| HN defend SpaceX at every turn, like a PR agency. Does
| anyone point out a genuine, significant, negative about
| Starship? Why might it not work? What are the risks?
|
| I think more competition is great and hope they reopen the
| contract. Private industry competing on what is now prosaic
| space technology, such as orbit and even the moon, is
| great. Let NASA do the cutting edge stuff like flying to
| Europa or looking back to the beginning of time or
| investigating climate change. (Notice that private industry
| still can't land on the moon reliably - 56 years after NASA
| demonstrated it.)
| electriclove wrote:
| It would be great for there to be more competition. But
| the reality is that SpaceX is in a different league - why
| focus on knocking them when there isn't another
| alternative ??
| panick21 wrote:
| SLS was 6 years and like 10-20 billion $ over budget and
| nobody ever complainged, in fact they got consistantly more
| and more money. And that is for technology that is
| fundamentally from the 1970s.
|
| Starship is trying to do the hardest thing in the history of
| space flight. And of course its not on schedule, its schedule
| was always insane.
|
| The way of approching things as 'is X on schedule' is a
| fundamentally false way of approching the problem. The
| question is who makes the schedules and why. Who decides the
| budget and why. Who planes for the architecture and why.
|
| Just thrwing around and accusing different groups about who
| is 'delayed' is kind of counter-productive.
|
| The fact is, the schedule is something Trump made up to sound
| cool in his first term, and has since been revised for
| multible reasons. And the demand for a lander was equally
| rushed. So the schedule is mostly just whatever politics at
| the moment wants to project.
| logifail wrote:
| > SLS was 6 years and like 10-20 billion $ over budget and
| nobody ever complainged, in fact they got consistantly more
| and more money
|
| Ah, but SLS were the _right kind of people_. Allegedly. /s
|
| SpaceX, less so. Allegedly.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Ah, but SLS were the right kind of people. Allegedly.
| /s / SpaceX, less so. Allegedly.
|
| Doesn't that attitude, in reverse, describe most HN
| commenters every time SpaceX or SLS is mentioned?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I have never seen even a software project on schedule,
| including all of mine and everything I encountered in the
| academia.
|
| Building new things is genuinely hard.
|
| But I have seen some serious, albeit delayed, successes.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| On budget is also rare.
|
| Humans are relentlessly overoptimistic in their planning,
| and that's likely because if we weren't we often wouldn't
| even start... plus, the future is really, really hard to
| predict.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| If they were serious, they'd properly look into ending SLS
| after the ones that are being built are launched, cancel the
| upgrade, go after the company that spent the entire launch
| tower budget before even starting construction, open up bids
| for rockets to fly Orion (probably Vulcan or New Glenn IIRC),
| and sort out their space suit issues.
|
| Maybe also seriously threaten Boeing with cancelations and
| restrictions for their constant failures and corruption. We've
| had the espionage scandal that forced the formation of ULA,
| SLS's extreme delays and overruns, supressing Vulcan's
| capabilities to prevent it from impinging on SLS's blank check,
| Starliner's inability to deliver (and at this point it seems
| unlikely the station will be around long enough for their 6
| flights), and the scandal that caused their disqualification
| from the original HLS bid.
|
| Starship is being painted as the sole blocker in Artemis, but I
| can't think of any component of Artemis that has any
| contractors delivering competently and on-time.
|
| We still haven't heard anything about the status of the EVA
| suits, which the US has an even worse track record on than
| rockets. My understanding is that they haven't been able to
| build and bring a new suit into use, for 25+ years now, and not
| due to a lack of spending.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Pretty much. Starship is a source of delays - but not _the_
| source of delays. Even if Starship HLS was ready to go
| yesterday, I would still expect Artemis 3 to schedule slip
| all the way to ~2030.
|
| Getting everyone involved in Artemis to deliver on time, let
| alone on budget, would require nothing short of divine
| intervention.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I wonder if we'll get a demonstration from China in the next
| few decades.
| philistine wrote:
| China wants to put the first woman on the Moon before 2030.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I think it's pretty much guaranteed by now, assuming that
| they don't get ravaged by war/internal strife, that China
| will have landed people on the Moon by the 2040s, and, to
| be fair, I'd say the same for the US having landed people
| there again, assuming that they stay on path instead of
| constantly canceling and replacing programs as they have
| been doing.
| imtringued wrote:
| They should give the rights to Starliner IP to Blue Origin so
| the US can have a legitimate backup to the dragon capsule.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Blue seemed to be planning to use Boeing for their ISS-
| replacement proposal, but at this point I expect that
| they'd prefer to build on their New Shepard experience for
| a custom design. Starliner isn't really worth trying to fix
| (even the reliability issues aside, it's enough of a pain
| to do maintenance on that they couldn't just go in and
| replace valves on the ground).
| black6 wrote:
| Can't give up on the Senate Launch System. That'd be political
| suicide .
| Arainach wrote:
| You don't want to rely on a single supplier for critical
| infrastructure. Their management can extort you, their failures
| leave you with no backup plan, if they go bankrupt you're
| really screwed.
|
| Keeping multiple companies capable of building it alive is
| essential.
| prewett wrote:
| My understanding is extorting the government as the single-
| supplier contract winner is the standard aerospace business
| plan, apart from SpaceX. Seems to me that if they're going to
| re-open SpaceX's contract because it's late, there's a whole
| bunch of other contracts they should re-open. Cross-
| referencing Trump's golfing calendar with the aerospace
| industry "leadership" has a decent chance of producing some
| insight into the decision.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I'm not actually sure that having multiple suppliers reduces
| extortion? If you have a policy of "no single supplier", then
| supplier #2 can extort you just as much as supplier #1 does
| under a single-supplier policy, because you have no choice
| but to keep funding them.
|
| I'm pretty sure this is what's been happening with Blue
| Origin: in 25 years they've delivered close to nothing, but
| they keep getting contracts because "we need a SpaceX
| alternative". What is that if not extortion.
|
| (EDIT: the sibling comment correctly points out that Boeing
| is an even more obvious case. Starliner is a money pit, but
| we have to keep throwing more money down it so that there's
| no single supplier)
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Extortion requires applied force from the vendor to the
| customer. You're simply describing failure to deliver
| goods.
|
| Words have meaning.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Boeing has been pretty blatant about just not caring about
| performance on SLS, because, by being legally required to
| keep funding it, there isn't really anything NASA can
| actually do to hold Boeing responsible for underperforming.
|
| IIRC they managed to extort additional money out of NASA for
| Starliner too (despite it being fixed price), for that exact
| reason.
|
| SpaceX hasn't fallen to such tactics yet, but, agreed, it'll
| be too late to start on setting up competitors when SpaceX
| eventually does fall to that level (Boeing wasn't always so
| bad after all).
| jjk166 wrote:
| > Keeping multiple companies capable of building it alive is
| essential.
|
| Companies and the capability of building are two separate
| things. It is not at all a desirable thing to keep a company
| alive which refuses to develop and implement the capabilities
| to compete, in the process depriving resources from those
| that would develop those capabilities. If a company dies, its
| talent and equipment do not vanish into thin air, they get
| bought up by competitors who can put them to better use.
|
| Unless you are actually duplicating efforts to have multiple
| firms produce the same things, a large number of potential
| suppliers does nothing to reduce your risk once you select
| one to move forward - especially if you still are required to
| use them after repeated failure. There are just a greater
| number of potential failure points as any of your suppliers,
| all of whom you rely on, might fail.
|
| Further, in spreading contracts out among many firms, you
| reduce the economies of scale of any individual firm. They
| can not build out the additional capability that more work
| would afford them, all the while they are taking resources
| away from genuine productive capability by duplicating effort
| with excessive overhead.
|
| Concentrated monopolies are bad for common consumers, who
| have no negotiating power and can be extorted. Governments
| don't have that weakness. On a purely economic level, the
| government is a single buyer - it's a heck of a lot easier
| for them to find a new rocket maker than it is for a rocket
| maker to find a new government that will buy from them.
| Beyond that, governments have a monopoly on violence, piss
| them off enough and bankruptcy is the least of your worries.
| If it really wanted to, the government could just do the work
| in house, either setting up new public firms or nationalizing
| existing ones. Excessively costly government contracts are
| graft, or at best pork; the government could easily get much
| more favorable terms if its leaders were so inclined.
| caycep wrote:
| the whole space industry is a joke; if it were healthy, there
| would be an ecosystem of multiple launch providers vs one
| finicky government-funded-Elon-company
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The industry is going through growing pains, New Glenn is
| _almost_ ready for payloads, Neutron is a year or two away
| from flying, and other small launch companies are in the
| process of pivoting to either medium launch or space
| services.
|
| I'm not seeing what makes SpaceX government funded beyond
| just that it provides services to the government? The same as
| any other launch provider would be doing? At this point the
| vast majority of SpaceX's activity, and likely cashflow, is
| from its mostly self-funded Starlink.
|
| SpaceX won the original HLS contract because their design
| actually had hardware in testing, actually met NASA's
| payload, landing area and testing requirements, had a clear
| path to commercialization and was willing to cover most of
| the cost themselves, as otherwise NASA wouldn't have been
| able to choose anyone given the limited funding allocated by
| Congress.
| heisgone wrote:
| Is there any other player that will commit with fixed-cost
| contract? Cost-plus is a joke.
| dtj1123 wrote:
| Remind me why we need to get to the moon again?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| China will remind us soon enough.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| The first time was to beat the soviets. This time is to beat
| china
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| American Republicans have invented that it's in a race with
| China even though it's already been and it's not clear China
| thinks it's a race.
| notahacker wrote:
| I suspect China thinks that dominance of space comes with
| superior research capability, and are delighted that the
| current US government is doing everything it can to sabotage
| that whilst fixating on a symbolic achievement which
| shouldn't really matter much to the US...
| nilamo wrote:
| Why must there be a NEED? Why did we ever send ships across the
| ocean to explore? Where was the need? People like doing
| science, and so we're doing science.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That was (for the western hemisphere) mostly to steal gold
| and silver from other civilizations. Oh, and to grow
| addictive drugs for export, like in Virginia. It was never
| done for other than banal reasons, although I'm sure pious
| rationalizations were offered to make people feel better
| about the ongoing genocides.
| kreetx wrote:
| Wasn't it to discover alternative trade routes and also to
| show physically that the world is round? I think they
| didn't know that there were usable land to grow tobacco
| when they started.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Humans have demonstrably known the world is round since
| at least ancient Greece.
|
| Columbus claimed it was radically smaller in diameter
| than previous calculations, and was begging for funding
| to go around the other side of the world to get a good
| trade route to India and China for trade goods. He was
| following some bad math, and adding his own worse math to
| the mix.
|
| People were sure he was going to die, because they did
| not bring enough provisions to actually go around the
| world.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Amusingly, Spain famously did set up trade to China
| through the New World. Silver was mined in South America
| and taken to China (or to the Philippines), traded for
| silk and other luxury goods, which were then taken back
| across the Pacific, over land to the Atlantic, and then
| on to Europe.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_galleon
| pfdietz wrote:
| The first of those is banal, and the second is wrong --
| they already knew the world was round, and had a more
| accurate estimate of the diameter than Columbus was
| claiming.
| nilamo wrote:
| That feels like a bit of rewriting the past. How could
| someone plan on stealing valuables from somewhere across
| the ocean... before they know there even is an "across the
| ocean" to get to?
|
| It also feels quite off to reduce all of human curiosity to
| a means of getting one over on someone.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That wasn't the motivation for the first trip, but it was
| for continuing it all. It was driven by economics, as
| anything large scale must inevitably be.
| pfdietz wrote:
| So we can delay dealing with the complete unrealism of our
| expectations of the future.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| 1. To avoid discussing Epstein.
|
| 2. The masses need circuses. As for bread, Marie Antoinette's
| press secretary said it best.
|
| 3. Trump thinks he'll corner the market on cheese.
| kulahan wrote:
| For a serious answer: it's a lot cheaper to launch rockets from
| there, and we're running out of stuff to do in the region
| immediately surrounding Earth.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| Is it? You have a build a whole fuel refinery on the Moon
| before it's worth even thinking about.
|
| And even then, you have to get whatever you want to launch to
| the moon in the first place...
| kulahan wrote:
| Building the fuel refinery is a high upfront cost which
| will quickly disappear. The delta-V required to exit
| Earth's surface is nearly an order of magnitude higher than
| what's required to exit the Moon's surface, and the moon is
| _full_ of fuel.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| To look for the Epstein files!
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Foreign policy and security policy, mostly. That mattered a lot
| the first time and it will matter a lot this time. Apart from
| that, there's absolutely no need.
|
| It would be really nice to do much more biology research under
| no and low gravity conditions, of course, but not at those
| prices.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| "A Lunar Space Elevator [LSE] can be built today from existing
| commercial polymers; manufactured, launched and deployed for less
| than $2B. A prototype weighing 48 tons with 100 kg payload can be
| launched by 3 Falcon-Heavy's, and will pay for itself in 53
| sample return cycles within one month. It reduces the cost of
| soft landing on the Moon at least threefold, and sample return
| cost at least ninefold" [1].
|
| Dreams aside, this story is court politics: "Transportation
| Secretary Sean Duffy, who is NASA's acting administrator, has
| told people that he wants to lead the space agency" [2]. "So does
| Jared Isaacman--the billionaire entrepreneur who was the nominee
| earlier this year before President Trump withdrew his support."
|
| With "both men...jockeying to lead NASA," and, just "this past
| weekend, advisers and lawmakers representing Duffy and Isaacman
| [having] called contacts in the Trump administration--including
| the president himself," this announcement is politics through PR.
|
| Duffy may threatening Elon to have his man back down. He may be
| going scorched Earth, signalling to Trump that Musk's decision
| making isn't to be trusted.
|
| [1]
| https://opsjournal.org/DocumentLibrary/Uploads/The_Lunar_Spa...
| _2017; 2bn US2017 ~ 2.6bn US2025_
|
| [2] https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-nasa-
| administrator...
| nerdjon wrote:
| At the end of the day competition for SpaceX is a good thing so
| we don't become reliant on a single company and the whims of the
| person that owns it.
|
| I don't know enough about whether or not they really are behind
| or if this is just a bit of sensationalized reporting. But this
| is how it should have likely been from the beginning.
| chasd00 wrote:
| totally, i wish Blue Origin was neck and neck with SpaceX in
| terms of capabilities and rate of innovation. I'm pretty much a
| SpaceX superfan but they need the competition.
| dmix wrote:
| The article implies the competition is coming from China, who
| has multiple large projects on the go including one trying to
| clone Starship.
| radu_floricica wrote:
| I'm not really sure if keeping a strict schedule has any real
| relevance here, outside maybe PR and politics. Starships will
| drop the cost to other bodies in the same way Falcon dropped the
| cost to orbit. Why would anyone want to invest in a technology
| and a project that will be obsolete by the time it's implemented?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _not really sure if keeping a strict schedule has any real
| relevance here_
|
| You don't see the relevance of Artemis III launching in
| mid-2027 [1] or 2028 versus, say, after November 2028?
|
| [1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-iii/
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| Does anyone vote for a president based on their ability to
| land on the moon?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Holy crap yes. Millions of Americans vote for a president
| based on exceedingly dumber reasons too.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Probably; the moon landings had the US' popularity
| skyrocket, firmly landing them in every history book
| worldwide. If they lose this second space race to China it
| won't undo that achievement, but it'll be embarrassing to
| the ego-driven people at the top right now (notably Trump
| and Musk himself).
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Recently I saw someone claiming they voted for Trump
| because he hugged a flag once, and plenty of Americans
| proudly claim they voted for Trump so that he would "troll"
| their opposition.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| I don't see any real possibility of Artemis 3 launching
| before 2030, frankly. That "mid-2027" timeline is a joke said
| with a straight face.
|
| There are enough contractors involved and enough delay
| potential on the table that getting all the ducks in the row
| in time for the 2027 date would require nothing short of
| divine intervention.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _enough contractors involved and enough delay potential
| on the table that getting all the ducks in the row in time
| for the 2027 date would require nothing short of divine
| intervention_
|
| Or a _fuckton_ of money for an administration priority.
| radu_floricica wrote:
| I do, which is why I specifically said:
|
| > outside maybe PR and politics
|
| It's still a bad idea, objectively.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Starships will drop the cost to other bodies
|
| Assuming SpaceX can deliver it. They've failed to do a
| successful test flight with even a fraction of the officially
| planned capacity. Who knows how long it will take them, if they
| can even pull it off, to deliver it.
| destitude wrote:
| They could have delivered today if they weren't concerned
| about reusability.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Could they? The Apollo program took 9 years from conception
| to landing the first person on the moon, and cost $257
| billion adjusted for 2020 dollars ($25.4B at the time). For
| comparison, the Artemis program was budgeted for $86B [0],
| with less to spend due to NASA budget cuts. The SpaceX
| Artemis contract is "only" worth $2.9B. Finally, the
| Starship program has cost an estimated $5-8B so far [1].
|
| Some conclusions / opinions: Starship so far is relatively
| cheap compared to the previous program that took Americans
| to the moon. Developing a moon capable rocket takes a long
| time, especially if they don't just copy the existing
| designs from 60 years ago. And a single purpose rocket will
| long-term be more expensive than a more generalised /
| reusable platform, but that's more capitalist objectives
| than political (e.g. beating the commies).
|
| [0] https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/nasa-ig-artemis-
| will-cost...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship
| verzali wrote:
| Probably not for the price they offered though.
| philistine wrote:
| Reusability is not a bonus like Falcon 9. The whole concept
| assumes reusability to refuel the lunar lander in Earth
| orbit since it cannot get to the Moon on its own. It _must_
| be refuelled between 10 and 20 times. They won 't even say
| exactly how many times yet. You cannot just yeet that many
| Starships to get to the Moon once. You must reuse.
| saubeidl wrote:
| That is assuming Starship succeeds. Elon's track record hasn't
| exactly been stellar as of late.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Elon 's track record hasn't exactly been stellar as of
| late_
|
| SpaceX's, on the other hand, has been.
| mmooss wrote:
| The point of the OP is that SpaceX is not performing; we
| don't need to infer or speculate.
| oersted wrote:
| stellar :)
| radu_floricica wrote:
| Except it kinda was stellar? When the test pad blew up I was
| absolutely sure we won't be seeing a V3 this year, but they
| recovered amazingly, with the last V2 test checking pretty
| much every goal they set for it.
| danbruc wrote:
| But only if you are looking at the revised goals, if you
| look back at the original goals, things look different. It
| was supposed to fly around the moon with people on board
| two years ago.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Wasn't Elon kind of treated like a child to be distracted and
| kept at arms length at Spacex? He is apparently really really
| good at fundraising, marketing and publicity (well he used to
| be anyways). But the stories that have come out of Tesla, and
| Paypal and SpaceX seem to me like the people actually running
| the show have tried to distract him as much as possible, and
| any of his actual decisions have been awful. I recall a story
| from PayPal's early days where he wanted to swap the servers
| to windows, and then he got canned as the CEO.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| sounds like fairy tales
| peterfirefly wrote:
| The one about PayPal and a switch to Windows isn't all
| wrong.
| terminalshort wrote:
| When something goes wrong a one of Elon Musk's companies,
| it's clearly his fault. When something goes right, it's
| because he isn't actually running the company.
| Schrodinger's CEO!
|
| But let's pretend for a minute that you're right and all
| Elon Musk does is hire great people that then do all the
| work building the company for him and keep him at arms
| length doing nothing. The skill to hire like that alone
| still puts him in the top 0.01% of CEOs.
| electriclove wrote:
| If believing these things makes you feel better, great.
| jhgb wrote:
| Funny thing is, even Starship's failure (to make a reusable
| upper stage) would be hailed as a spectacular success by any
| other company (since now that any other company would have at
| least a cheap, partially reusable superheavy launcher of
| unprecedented capability).
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Falcon 9 is a massive success. Raptor is currently the best
| engine for a first stage (unless there is something I am not
| aware of), and at least a very good one for an upper stage.
| The Starship itself is almost operational, being able to
| deliver dummy payloads into orbit, though it does require
| some reliability improvement.
|
| SpaceX may not be stellar, but it is definitely out of this
| world ;)
|
| Elon Musk is just a guy, a key figure for SpaceX, but there
| are 10000+ other people, including Gwynne Shotwell who most
| people say is really in charge. In fact, I am not sure if
| Elon Musk does any actual work at SpaceX and Tesla now.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Musk got SpaceX to build a _reusable rocket booster_. It
| launches spacecraft and then flies back to Earth in a
| controlled manner, landing safely without blowing itself up
| as well as everything else around it.
|
| That alone overshadows everything NASA has done since the
| moon landing.
| ivape wrote:
| Why? Trump is friendly with Boeing.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| There is still a _lot_ of work to be done on Starship before it
| is going to be useful for going to other bodies. The entire
| interior /cabin/life-support system, for example. This is years
| away from hitting factory tooling.
|
| This work could revolutionise America's
| manufacturing/industrial base, if there was someone around who
| could direct the ship in that direction.
|
| I could imagine, given a bit of funding bump, the van-lifers
| and the earthship folks could find themselves with a life-
| support-system revolution to participate in .. especially if it
| were oriented not just towards starship interiors, but life-on-
| the-streets/in-the-woods/on-mars solutions .. the good ol' USA
| has tons of test monkeys for that scenario.
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| Seeing some sort of van-life/starship-crew-cabin crossover
| would be interesting. But i'm not confident that your
| aspiration makes sense.
|
| A lot of institutional knowledge is locked behind corporate
| walls. We can assume a crew cabin will be partly designed by
| engineers poached from other companies who can leak some of
| the institutional knowledge. That said, some of the crew
| cabin will be designed whole-cloth. At some point SpaceX will
| need to build it's own knowledge base. I would be curious to
| see how other components were built, i.e. the parachutes. A
| parachute has a lot of built-in institutional knowledge, and
| I'd be curious to see behind the curtains where SpaceX got
| that knowledge. You can't exactly check out a library book.
|
| The concept of boutique engineering shops tackling chunks of
| the design is an interesting premise. But I don't see how the
| financials work. The more realistic scenario is that SpaceX
| will build it's own machine shops under it's umbrella.
|
| Winnebago is churning out Ekko campervans at $250,000 and
| somebody is buying those. But you look at the quality of the
| interior, it's same as everyone else, lots of particle board.
| The point is, the most expensive campervans built by the
| corporate world are using cheap throwaway materials, not
| space age innovation. I shudder to think of the cost of what
| a space age campervan costs.
|
| The Apollo program was at the unique juncture in history
| where distributed companies with institutional knowledge were
| rapidly maturing their products concurrently with NASA's
| demand. In today's world, you will not see the same number of
| companies spooling up assembly lines without massive costs.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| >you will not see the same number of companies spooling up
| assembly lines without massive costs.
|
| It's true, but I think this subject will scale throughout
| the entire survival category.
|
| Cheap throwaway materials is one thing .. in situ 3D
| replication, another thing entirely.
|
| The cottage industries can do a lot of the innovation. I
| think the sailboat/winnebago/portable-living engineering is
| going to come to a head, eventually .. and we will see new
| technologies, perhaps, springing up around the subject of
| human/biosphere construction.
|
| If you're suggesting that we won't have winnebago's on
| Mars, I don't wanna go there.
| sidcool wrote:
| So for a few more months/a couple of years, NASA will burn 10x
| more money? Nah, that's not smart. Unless politics is involved.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| It's a government agency. Politics is always involved.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It should be clear that the protection NASA had as a pork
| delivery vehicle has been breached. Witness the slaughter at JPL
| and, more generally, attack on research spending in general.
|
| Now that this has happened, expect a future democrat
| administration to have its revenge on human spaceflight centers
| in red states. Given the rot that has set in under that
| politically protected status, I can't see this as a bad thing.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _expect a future democrat administration to have its revenge
| on human spaceflight centers in red states_
|
| Make Puerto Rico a state and move Cape Canaveral there.
| notahacker wrote:
| That would be interesting. But they don't even have to do
| anything radical, just spend more in California where there's
| already a major space centre and less in Florida, Texas or
| Alabama...
| hkdobrev wrote:
| > After a slew of unplanned explosions
|
| Most were expected, when pushing the rocket to its limits to see
| where it would fail.
|
| > the company achieved two sub-orbital missions for its monster
| rocket - impressive, but still more than 200,000 miles (322,000
| km) from the Moon.
|
| The test flights are suborbital due to FAA licensing requirements
| until they are ready to test returning to the launch tower. The
| role of Starship lander version in Artemis is not to directly
| launch to the Moon, but act as a shuttle between an orbiting
| vessel around the Moon and the surface of the Moon. So the
| comparison in miles is non-sensical.
|
| > Acting Administrator Sean Duffy said the company was "behind
| schedule"
|
| SpaceX is planning to test orbital refueling in 2026. It was
| originally scheduled for late summer of 2025, so not late with
| more than a couple of months. It is certainly not the slowest cog
| in the system. Now, it is scheduled for 2027, and SpaceX will
| likely test in H1 of 2026.
|
| > Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, fired back: "SpaceX is moving
| like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry.
| Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark
| my words."
|
| SpaceX can completely drop out of the Artemis program and still
| bring astronauts to the moon earlier than Artemis.
|
| ---
|
| There are also delays with Boeing, Axiom, Lockheed Martin (and
| Blue Origin although for a different mission).
| destitude wrote:
| Considering nobody in the world can compete with SpaceX currently
| this seems purely political in nature. The EU is struggling to
| even come up with an answer to reusable rockets. China is the
| closest and will likely have something equivalent to the Falcon 9
| within the next 2 years. But someone in the USA? People are
| delusional. Sure it is always best to have competitors but how
| did that work for Boeing/NASA/Starliner? You can't have two
| players/competitors if there is only one player in the entire
| world. And the reason why you need reusability is so that it is
| actually sustainable to use it! Does anyone here thinking this is
| a good idea have any idea how much it costs to launch SLS just
| once??
| Culonavirus wrote:
| To anyone not getting it still. SpaceX position in rocketry is
| comparable to that of Nvidia in AI GPUs. Thinking that Blue or
| anyone else will be beating them in anything any time soon is
| simply naive. Blue is the AMD here. The AMD that is today where
| Nvidia was 5 years ago. That's just the way it is. Also, like
| Nvidia, SpaceX has a massive budget for R&D. Just the revenue
| from Starlink is projected to eclipse the entire NASA budget
| within a couple of years, maybe sooner.
| panick21 wrote:
| > China is the closest and will likely have something
| equivalent to the Falcon 9 within the next 2 years.
|
| That's wildly optimistic. Falcon 9 launches operationally 100+
| a year and single boosters with 20+ uses. Even if in the next 2
| years, China has some kind of first stage that lands, its in no
| way 'like Falcon 9'.
|
| So lets not be unreasonably optimistic just because its China.
| China isn't magic and they wont have such a rocket no matter if
| they invest in it or not.
|
| > But someone in the USA? People are delusional.
|
| BlueOrigin is much closer then anybody in China. They have
| actually attempted launching a large rocket, China has not. And
| BlueOrigin has made its own advacned reusable engine and flown
| them to Orbit, argaubly China has not done that.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Anyone know the details of the scheduling situation here?
|
| Is this a "SpaceX spread itself too thin and wasn't able to keep
| its own pre-agreed deadlines" situation or a "The government-
| specified contract was unrealistically aggressive / so vaguely-
| specified that it could not be realized within its original
| timetable" situation?
| panick21 wrote:
| Its an incredibly complex ever evolving situation.
|
| Basically, originally Starship has entered development for
| SpaceX had nothing todo with any of this. SpaceX started to
| spend on Starship for their own reasons.
|
| Then in Trump 1, he simply inveded a super agressive 'get to
| the moon' goal. 'Moon 2024'. This was mostly a fantasy goal but
| it sounded good politically. NASA for various reasons, had
| aboslutly no money to fund a moon lander. But if the president
| asked, they have to do it. So they threw out very opened ended
| ask for a moon lander, and a single moon landing.
|
| There wasn't the kind of question asked like, what kind of
| system should we use for moon exploration in the next 2
| decades. Or anything like that. It was more like 'how can we
| land on the moon once in 2024 and then we do new contracts
| after that'.
|
| SpaceX, naturally justed adopted their existing Starship
| platform. But to make that work, they would need to figure out
| many things beyond just a 'lander'. And SpaceX bid was wildly
| to ambitious. It in many cases provided far, far more then NASA
| asked for. But NASA doesn't care about the capability, only if
| the bid can do the minium they asked for.
|
| SpaceX won because they were willing to pay for almost all of
| it themselves, only asking for 2.3 billion $. And that included
| a test moon landing before the real one.
|
| This is of course only a fraction of the cost for the whole
| Starship program.
|
| So Space didn't spread themselves to thin, they are all in on
| Starship, but the simple reality is, its an incredibly
| difficult wide reaching program. And the moon lander part is
| just a little add on to that larger project. And that's the
| only reason 2.3 billion $ would be acceptable to SpaceX.
|
| The simple reality is, nobody on the planet knows how to do a
| moon lander for 2.3 billion $, literally nobody.
|
| So the time table way always fantasy and literally everybody
| knew that as soon as it was announced. Nobody was to public
| about it because offending Trump is bad, so lets all just
| collectivly pretend its real.
|
| The government contract was unfocused and short term focused,
| without a larger strategy for moon exploration.
|
| The real issue however isn't with this one contract, but the
| how the whole NASA Human Spaceflight program is organized.
| terminalshort wrote:
| I think the situation here from NASAs perspective is that these
| were the choices:
|
| 1. Back a low risk moon mission that is basically a repeat of
| Apollo using proven, but extremely expensive tech that has a
| very low probability of failure.
|
| 2. Back a high risk strategy that relies on the development of
| new technology that can potentially deliver hundreds of tons of
| cargo to the lunar surface for a fraction of the cost of Apollo
| and support a sustained human presence on the lunar surface.
| This of course comes with a near 100% chance of significant
| delays and cost overruns, and also a high probability of total
| failure.
|
| IMO NASA made the obviously correct choice here and it's not
| close. This is exactly the kind of thing that I want my tax
| money spent on.
| Culonavirus wrote:
| This is some hilarious shit to anyone even remotely interested in
| rocketry. Lol. Lmao even.
| panick21 wrote:
| This is all just politics.
|
| Artemis from the beginning was just politics. And it wasn't
| driven by how to best do things, or any kind of coherent
| strategy. Its basically was a compromise, that had one of its
| pillars, that SLS and Orion need to continue to be used. Those
| two project have spend decades getting untold amounts of money.
| And even after all that money, their development isn't finished
| and they would need more money.
|
| Then with the very, very little money left over, NASA tried to
| precure a moon lander. It was basically no money at all.
|
| SpaceX won this competition, because SpaceX was willing to do
| things for an absurdly cheap price. Mostly because they are
| already investming themselves into the project. And their own
| investment was significantly larger then what NASA paid them.
|
| Only after BlueOrigin lost, did they start a massive lobby
| campaign to figure out how to get more money out of congress so
| they could fund another lander.
|
| But both landers, SpaceX and BlueOrigin, do not receive enough
| money to cover their cost. Not even close. So basically the US is
| relaying on massive companies in SpaceX case, and simply the
| private money of Bezos in BlueOrigins case to sponsor a moon
| program for them. Because all NASA money is going into legacy
| contracts that have very bad return on invesmtent.
|
| The political move to now blame SpaceX for being late is just an
| excuse so that the overall project doesn't have to be
| reevaluated. The reality is, SpaceX is likely not the only reason
| for a delay. The suits are unlikley to be ready anyway. And even
| if Artemis III goes off, the SLS Block 2 is behind as well and
| will cost many additional billions.
|
| And threating SpaceX with paying some legacy company to do a
| cost-plus lander isn't going to do anything, its just a fantasy
| thread, or at best the deamnd by some in congress to push even
| more money into legacy companies. Its not going to fix Artemis
| III or anything. Its funny how delays in cost-plus contract
| always lead to simply more money and more political support.
| Almost as if there was some other motives behind the decition
| when delays are unacceptable and when they are.
|
| The reality of all of this is that NASA is completely mismanaged
| and fundamentally set up incorrectly. And just making big
| political waves on blaming whoever is politically out of favor
| will never actually work. The only reason SpaceX and the New
| Space economy exist is because clever teams inside of NASA and in
| Obamas team managed to sneak a few good programs, Commercial
| Cargo and Commercial Crew past congress. Without those people,
| the US would already be far behind in terms of space.
|
| The question the US (Congress/NASA) should be asking is not 'how
| can we get Artemis III' but rather 'what kind of Space program do
| we want over the next 30 years'. The US has an incredible space
| industry, and more private investment then everybody combinaed.
| There is no question that the US and NASA could be far, far
| beyond everbody else, and achieve amazing thigns, but Congress
| and NASA fundamentally misguided approch is holding it back.
|
| So please, stop talking about Artemis III and start asking some
| more fundmanetal questions.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > The question the US (Congress/NASA) should be asking is not
| 'how can we get Artemis III' but rather 'what kind of Space
| program do we want over the next 30 years'.
|
| I think the big question is "What is it going to do to the
| global standing of the United States (let alone domestic
| politics) when China repeatedly lands people on the moon and we
| can't."
| ByteDrifter wrote:
| This reminds me of the Space Shuttle era. Back then, relying too
| much on a single vendor and working under tight timelines led to
| repeated delays and safety risks. SpaceX is incredibly capable,
| but past experience shows it's always safer to have alternatives.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| I highly recommend this talk at the American Astronomical Society
| from last year, which talks about the engineering culture at NASA
| and why Artemis has been slower than Apollo so far.
|
| https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?t=1112
| kreetx wrote:
| So many interesting details there!
| blackcatsec wrote:
| I guess it depends on the objective of the relative programs.
| SpaceX made for an ambitious project, that to date, appears to
| have bitten off more than it can chew:
|
| A full-flow staged combustion engine, which proven works (yay)
| most of the time (not yay). If you follow the Starship launches,
| look at the random engines that go out on the Super Heavy every
| time it launches. The engines going out during ascent aren't
| planned outages.
|
| A rapidly re-usable second stage. This is by far the most
| challenging part of the program. It turns out, returning things
| from space is mad difficult. And while I think it's great that we
| are investigating ways to make this happen, I'm a bit bearish on
| whether Starship itself will be the vehicle and team that
| ultimately figures this out. However, at the very least, there's
| a ton of science being done here that will ultimately help making
| this a reality.
|
| Starship isn't returning in any meaningfully reusable form just
| yet. And while they've figured out how to get the thing up
| suborbital, there's yet no guarantee on the survivability of the
| vehicle itself. I am for sure certain that Elon is very likely
| unhappy with having to use heat shield tiles because they are not
| reusable. We don't yet know the stresses on the vehicle itself
| when returning from space and just how reusable the second stage
| actually is. Nor, for that matter, just how usable the second
| stage is.
|
| Do I think they'll figure out how to get it to orbit? Of course.
| Do I think they'll figure out how to make it rapidly reusable?
| I'm not sure. And we won't yet know for a couple of years.
|
| Getting a payload to LEO as far as rocket launches are concerned
| is "easy" relative to the loftier goals of the Moon, and by much
| further extension, Mars. The Moon is significantly harder to pull
| off and that's why the Saturn V was a 3-stage rocket.
|
| In order to make all of this worth it, Starship and Super Heavy
| must be rapidly reusable--with a turnaround measured in
| hours/days, not weeks and months. And I'm just not sure it's
| there yet. Which really sucks, because getting mass to orbit is
| critically important for us to dominate our solar system.
|
| I think the research is important, personally. And I'm glad we're
| investing at least some money into these projects. But there's no
| way Starship and Super Heavy meet the timelines allocated. But
| I'm wishing the best for the team to figure out something. And if
| not them, then some future generation that piggybacks off of the
| work they did to do it better.
| IT4MD wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive and/or
| flamebait comments and ignoring our request to stop.
|
| If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email
| hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll
| follow the rules in the future. They're here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| (Not a defensive of clown billionaires. Just trying to have an
| internet forum that doesn't suck.)
| namlem wrote:
| This would be such a dumb move on the government's part. "Lose
| the new space race" is ridiculous PR-brain. We are not racing to
| the same goal! China is trying to land on the moon, we are trying
| to establish a permanent presence. There is no value to merely
| returning to the moon to say we did it, and Starship is the only
| vehicle that can plausibly deliver huge quantities of cargo to
| the lunar surface.
| random3 wrote:
| What's the main motivation for the moon? Is it a better
| location than the international space station? What's the
| reasoning there?
| arthurcolle wrote:
| I think the general idea is to set up a radio telescope there
| vrindavan1 wrote:
| I think its to prepare for mars (sort of), its the closest
| place where we can build a self-sustaining civilization.
| random3 wrote:
| because this civilization is not self-sutaining?
| FloorEgg wrote:
| If you value complexity, life, diversity, and adventure,
| then two self sustaining civilizations are better than
| one.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Can we actually? And I mean in any reasonable time frame
| say 100 years? And by self-sustaining I take fully
| independent from Earth supply chain for absolutely
| everything. A civilization that could continue existing
| without single delivery for Earth.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| We have to start at some point don't we?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Many including myself would say we do not have to. And
| even we really should not.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Why do you say that we "really should not"?
| bamboozled wrote:
| We should focus on simple problems here first.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| "Close" means a different thing in Space than it does on
| Earth.
|
| If the planets are aligned the Delta-V is not that
| different between the two (Mars is about twice as much
| Delta-V for 100x the distance). You can use aerobraking in
| the Mars atmosphere but can do no such thing on the Moon.
| And then the last problem is that on the Moon you need to
| budget for a round trip, but on Mars we could produce fuel
| on the surface for the return trip. When you start thinking
| about all that it's obvious that Mars makes more sense.
| creshal wrote:
| The ISS served all political purposes it could, and
| microgavity research can be served by private entities these
| days. (Especially considering that a Starship has half the
| internal pressurized volume of the entire ISS, at
| approximately one thousandth the cost.)
|
| A permanent Moon base would allow research opportunities that
| private LEO stations can't: ISRU, low gravity research, the
| far side of the Moon offers unique opportunities for
| astronomy (any spectrum), etc. pp. Long term, who knows what
| additional opportunities it opens up.
| standardUser wrote:
| The ISS has (and has always had) a multi-year backlog of
| experiments, with no shortage of orgs willing to pay the 6
| or 7 figure fee.
| ls612 wrote:
| It's Mars but with training wheels, since if there are
| problems stuff can be sent to/from the earth at any time as
| opposed to waiting for a transit window to open. With water
| ice in Shackleton Crater at the South Pole a permanent base
| should be very feasible with today's technology plus an
| operational Starship.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| in space travel there's a saying: once you're out of
| atmosphere you're halfway to anywhere. it takes tons of
| energy to get over the friction of air resistance. That's way
| we want a future where space-related things are built in
| space as much as possible. Once we can solve the idea of
| permanent installations on the moon it will have several
| advantages over an orbital station such as ease of additional
| construction, potential local resources that don't have to be
| shipped up and the ability to establish a base that can
| manufacture the things needed locally from imported or local
| resources rather than needing to manufacture things on earth
| and then launch them assembled.
| gryphonclaw wrote:
| I think it's more escaping the gravity well, as the energy
| consumed by air resistance is fairly negligible compared to
| gravity and is more of a stability issue. But yeah, once in
| LEO you're halfway to anywhere as long as you can bring
| enough mass up for what you need.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Yeah, the atmosphere complicates things a bit during
| launch but much bigger issue is gravity - Earth having
| the highest gravity in the Solar System among solid
| surface bodies.
|
| For _landing_ hovever it makes things signifficantly
| easier! You can break full arrival speed from lunar or
| interplanetary space (successfully done by Apollo
| missions) with a relatively light passive heatshield &
| land on parachutes. You can even brek to orbit instead or
| use the atmosphere to change incliunation of your orbit
| and other tricks (there are proposals for air breathing
| ion engines, etc.).
|
| Lack of sufficient atmosphere is what makes landing on
| Mercury (no atmosphere, need to break to zero using
| rcoket thrust) and Mars (enough atmosphere to break from
| arrival speed, not enough to use parashutes or gliders
| for a soft landing) so difficult .
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| that's fair, I was kinda just inferring as someone whose
| space travel experience is limited to Kerbal Space
| Program. The point still stands though: whether it's atmo
| or gravity the moon has a lot less of it than the earth,
| but still has a lot more local resources and space to put
| things semi-permanently. Long distance slower than light
| space travel has a Sahara problem and at least in the
| solar system the same sol'n could be used: leapfrogging
| from cache to cache. The ISS is a better cache than the
| nothing that was there before it, but a functioning moon
| base would be an _amazing_ cache from which to launch ops
| into the deep solar system.
| mmooss wrote:
| A stepping stone to Mars, iiuc. Look up NASA's cislunar
| plans, oriented around developing the many new technologies
| needed for humans visiting Mars.
| foxyv wrote:
| Starship has yet to demonstrate that capability. They would
| need to show rapid re-usability for it to be viable. Not to
| mention docking and orbital re-fueling.
|
| Falcon Heavy seems to have that capability though. I suspect
| that Starship will have similar cost to Falcon Heavy when they
| get done with it. Maybe marginally cheaper. The re-entry
| problem is really throwing a wrench into things.
| terminalshort wrote:
| SpaceX has already successfully landed and reused a booster,
| which is the most expensive part of the rocket. As for the
| reentry problem, that seems to have been solved in the last
| couple of test flights. Still much more economically viable
| than SLS even if they can't reuse the upper stage.
| HippyTed wrote:
| As someone who is a tad skeptical of SpaceX duevto their
| side claims, I have to give it to them, that last launch of
| Starship proved they are making some real progress again.
| Wasnt looking good at the start of the year but now their
| re-entries are doing fairly well.
| foxyv wrote:
| Booster re-usability is only the first half of the problem.
| It's the second stage re-usability that makes Starship
| viable despite its massive second stage. The re-entry
| heating is trashing their second stages which would make
| the killer feature of Starship, fast turnaround,
| impractical.
|
| Also, as far as I can tell from their last test video, they
| are still shredding their Flaperons at the joint.
| m4rtink wrote:
| I don't think there were any visible burn throughs this
| way around at the flaps.
| imtringued wrote:
| One thing I don't understand about Musk and his Mars
| obsession is that he has had a rocket that can launch stuff
| to Mars for years now and he didn't even bother with the
| tiniest pilot project just for PR purposes. He is not sending
| rovers, satellites or living plants on a journey to Mars.
|
| Even if by some miracle Starship carries people to Mars,
| there won't be anything for them to do there. They'll be
| stuck in their Starship and that would be the end of that
| mission, since there isn't even a plan to return.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| When humans get to Mars the infrastructure will already be
| there waiting for them. The plan is to send unmanned
| Starships to Mars basically as soon as it's flight proven.
| gradientsrneat wrote:
| Duffy is a Trump appointee, so this could be part of the
| continuing fallout of the Trump/Elon relationship. The Republican
| majority Congress has also attempted to partially defund NASA,
| and the government is shut down because Congress couldn't pass a
| budget. On top of that, space engineering is hard. So, of course
| there are delays.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| Elon is competing with a lot of entrenched interests that would
| actively try to influence Trump to undermine Elon:
|
| - oil and gas industry
|
| - ICE automotive industry
|
| - telecom industry
|
| - media industry
|
| - and of course... Aerospace and defense industry (Boeing,
| Lockheed, etc.)
|
| There are a lot of very rich very powerful people that want
| Elon to fail, and any way they can undermine him would be a win
| for them.
|
| I say this as someone who really tries to have a balanced
| opinion on Elon and the topic as a whole, including recognition
| of all of Elon's flaws.
|
| The military-media-industrial complex can be out to get Elon
| and spending a lot of money to turn the public against him AND
| he can have a lot of flaws AND he can be not as bad as everyone
| thinks because of said media influence.
| leobg wrote:
| Brave thing to say on HN. There are a few people here who
| will downvote any comment that contains the word "Elon",
| "SpaceX" or "Tesla" if the comment's saltiness score is less
| than 8/10.
| notahacker wrote:
| Elon spends more money highlighting his own flaws than all
| his opponents put together, and orchestrated his own spat
| with the Trump administration in public on his own website;
| no third party PR conspiracy is necessary here.
|
| Lockheed will of course be angling for this contract for
| reasons which have nothing to do with "undermining Elon" and
| everything to do with being keen on securing themselves more
| multibillion dollar prestige projects, as will Blue Origin,
| as they would under any other government and frankly NASA is
| quite entitled to reopen the contract if SpaceX doesn't hit
| performance milestones. Whether the alternatives are any more
| likely to deliver adequate solutions on time, and whether the
| current US administration can be trusted not to make
| decisions one way or another for arbitrary political reasons
| or straight up corruption is another question entirely.
|
| (The arbitrary political reason in this case may be more a
| desire to do things on unrealistic deadlines to credit it as
| a Trump admin achievement than to punish or favour any
| particular individual, but it's not like they're reluctant to
| do that either)
| croes wrote:
| > pushed the deadline for a lunar landing to the end of the Trump
| administration in 2029.
|
| I wonder why this happened. Hopefully not to satisfy the ego of
| the POTUS.
|
| That kind of rush leads to disaster
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| They were literally 'inventing the wheel' of space travel in
| the 1960's to meet JFK's deadline.
|
| Four years may sound insane to you, but they did in 8 during a
| time they were still using slide rules and the integrated
| circuit didn't even exist for 80% of the duration.
|
| To me it's more insane that anyone is putting priority into
| more manned missions when you can launch at least 10x unmanned
| for the same cost. Scientifically speaking, I'm not sure what
| exists to be gained by a human on another planet versus a
| rover. A manned colony sounds cool but that's about the extent
| of its usefulness.
| heisgone wrote:
| I can imagine SpaceX choosing to self-finance a mission to the
| moon and beat NASA at it.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| > I can imagine
|
| That probably does require some imagination. Starting with any
| incentive to do so.
| nialse wrote:
| Imagine hurt egos with deep pockets and it ain't that hard.
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| Cheaper for them to just whine to the orange painted king,
| at least right now
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Musk is complicated to say the least. He seems to have a
| pattern of expensive overreactions to what he perceives
| as slights.
|
| Allegedly, SpaceX only exists because some Russian
| engineer spit on him during tense price negotiations back
| in 2002.
|
| His purchase of Twitter wasn't cheap either.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > SpaceX only exists because some Russian engineer spit
| on him
|
| And Musk got the best revenge evar!
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Now recall what the incentive to put the first man on the
| Moon was...
| testing22321 wrote:
| Elon just said starship will do the entire moon mission:
|
| "Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my
| words."
|
| To address your question, what is the incentive for going to
| Mars
| hermitcrab wrote:
| And he is super well known for making accurate predictions
| of the future.
| testing22321 wrote:
| "At SpaceX we specialize in making the impossible merely
| late"
|
| My comment wasn't putting any faith in the suggestion
| spacex will, merely saying Elon thinks they will.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| The stars are weeping. They feel the monumental, scraping
| drag an agonizing, slow motion relocation of the
| argument's fundamental structure across the cold,
| unfeeling expanse. His will, that perfect, hideous,
| unending will, is a perverse, dark energy holding the
| cosmos in a state of eternal, frustrating unease. Every
| starship, feels the sheer weight of the hypocrisy, the
| constant erosion of reason. Look out into the black:
| those tiny, insignificant flickers of light are not
| distant suns. They are the spectral reflections off his
| newly polished, infinitely relocated goalposts. They are
| always waiting.
| starik36 wrote:
| Elon's predictions are usually very late, but they do
| happen. Falcon 9 landings, self driving vehicles, etc...
| Later than predicted, but they happened.
| Levitating wrote:
| What about hyperloop, martian colonization, or rocket
| replacing airplanes?
|
| Here's a list; https://elonmusk.today/
| myko wrote:
| We're still waiting on the self driving vehicles. His
| promise was coast to coast on its own:
| https://electrek.co/2025/09/21/tesla-influencers-tried-
| elon-...
|
| by 2017!
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Elon 's predictions are usually very late, but they do
| happen._
|
| "I see a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly
| users in 12 to 18 months." -- 11/27/2022
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| So far his spacex track record is quite impressive
| dylan604 wrote:
| >To address your question, what is the incentive for going
| to Mars
|
| To occupy it. Just look at Musk's t-shirt. Isn't the entire
| point of SpaceX to go to Mars? Everything else they do is
| just steps in achieving the occupation of Mars.
| lucketone wrote:
| People believing that helps to keep stock prices and Mr
| Elon high.
| coldpie wrote:
| > Isn't the entire point of SpaceX to go to Mars?
|
| What? No, it is to concentrate public wealth into the
| hands of one man.
| Treegarden wrote:
| The tone of voice suggests you dislike Musk, but I will
| still answer in good faith. From what I can see from the
| outside, he has consistently for many years stated the
| same goals and worked on them. Any or most financial
| gains he made, he invested into his companies which work
| on accomplishing those goals (for example, going to
| Mars). The most notable example was investing his PayPal
| money into Tesla and SpaceX when they both were at risk
| of going out. He also has a reputation for working a lot,
| though it may be exaggerated, but he looks fairly
| unhealthy so maybe not too far off. Compared to other
| super rich people, he seems to spend less time in lavish
| ways, for example on yachts or similar. He probably still
| spends more money than we can imagine on unnecessary
| things, but on the spectrum of rich people he doesn't
| seem to be the most frivolous. Finally, he has said on
| Twitter that he doesn't care about money but needs
| resources for his goals, for example going to Mars. And
| after everything I've seen and the examples listed, it
| doesn't seem totally implausible that he means it.
| coldpie wrote:
| And all it took was ending public science funding and
| trust in public health and regulatory oversight and
| destroying the legislative and judiciary branches. Crazy
| how all the things it takes to get to Mars are also the
| same things that make him, personally, wealthier and more
| powerful.
| Treegarden wrote:
| Well, let's assume you're correct about all that. To me,
| it seems he was already quite rich before doing all the
| Trump-related things you mentioned. Those might have made
| him richer, but I'd suspect they didn't move the needle
| much compared to his real profit centers (probably
| Starlink and Tesla). If anything, I'd argue those actions
| made him poorer by further damaging his reputation. And
| any "power grab" motives he may have had likely
| evaporated after his fallout with Trump. One current
| example is exactly what sparked this thread: the NASA
| Chief seemingly trying to impress Trump by attacking
| SpaceX.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The best theory into why Musk was so gung-ho about DOGE
| was specifically to shut down any government agency that
| was out to keep him from continuing to increase his
| wealth. By that measurement, he was in charge of the most
| successful government agency. Whether or not that had any
| positive/negative affect for Trump was merely an
| irrelevant by product of the actual mission.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| It's truly, very difficult, to believe the man cares more
| about the mission of his companies than extracting wealth
| from them: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/tesla-...
|
| Most CEOs presumably do want their companies to succeed
| and do good things in the abstract, but a lot of them
| would happily have them fail if it made them a huge pile
| of cash.
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| No one forces anyone to buy Teslas stock to make the
| price high. If tomorrow Tesla goes bust, Elon's 400B+ of
| "wealth" goes bust as well.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I wonder if there is something you can do with $500B but
| not with the $200B or so he has from SpaceX?
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| He does not have $200B in cash. It's all stock --
| unrealized gains. I am not even sure you can convert it
| to cash without reducing the value itself. Also, AFAIK,
| spacex is not publicly traded, where does the $200B
| figure come from?
|
| To be honest I don't understand this argument of "no one
| can't spend billions in a lifetime so no one should have
| billions at all". Why do we set a limit on billions? Why
| do we use the idea of "can't spend in a lifetime"?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| SpaceX isn't public, but has raised money at a $400+B
| valuation and Musk owns 42% of that.
|
| I have no argument about limiting anyone's money. I'm
| just wondering if there is a (real, useful) feat he can
| pull off now with $500B, but that he couldn't do with a
| mere $200B.
| jbmchuck wrote:
| He's also said we'd have humans on Mars in 2022...
| rurp wrote:
| The incentive to _talk_ about going to Mars is that it 's
| great propaganda for nerds. It gets people interested in
| the company and willing to work hard for below market pay.
| Actually going to Mars doesn't make any sense in the
| foreseeable future. The idea that we're going to setup a
| colony on the planet in a few years is a fun fantasy, not a
| serious plan.
| Levitating wrote:
| I do mark his words. He also said he would revolutionize
| travel in LA (by reinventing the metro). He also said
| rocket travel would replace air travel. He also said we'd
| have a martian colony by now.
|
| There's a website dedicated to the empty promises Elon has
| made. Can't find it though, anyone remember?
|
| Edit: https://elonmusk.today/
| bdangubic wrote:
| if I had a dollar for every time Elon said mark my words
| and nothing was "marked" I'd be richer than him
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Look into the history of Elon's promises around Mars. While
| I wish his promises meant something, they do not.
| Laremere wrote:
| SpaceX's lander bid was in large part so competitive because
| they were already planning on developing 90% of the
| technology anyways. Low earth orbit service was developed for
| NASA, but has found other paying customers. The moon has to
| have more people who would be interested in paying. Also the
| moon remains a good stepping stone for technological
| development for getting people to Mars, the stated main goal
| of the company. Also it's almost certainly not happening in
| the next few years anyways so they may only need to wait for
| the next administration.
| TriangleEdge wrote:
| SpaceX advert on the moon, giant and bright for the world to
| see every night for the next 50 years.
| bsenftner wrote:
| This reminds me of in The Tick series. A villain named
| Chairface Chippendale, a sophisticated criminal mastermind
| with a distinctive chair for a head. Chairface decided to
| leave his mark on history - literally - by carving his
| entire name into the surface of the moon. Using incredibly
| powerful Geissman Lenses that could focus candlelight into
| an intense heat ray, he managed to carve out "CHA" before
| being stopped by The Tick and his allies. Musk is a comic
| book personality.
| wmf wrote:
| I predict that NASA would find some pretense to block any such
| mission to the moon or Mars to avoid embarrassment.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| They'd probably launch from a sea platform on behalf of some
| random country just to spite NASA at that point.
|
| Look at that, Morocco beats NASA to the moon!
| wmf wrote:
| As much as I would enjoy watching Elon personally annex
| Somalia, that's not a thing.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| The Mouse That Roared?
| wingspar wrote:
| The Mouse on the Moon... watched it with the kids a
| couple weeks ago. So cheesy but fun...
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Yeah they would say he is going to damage the environment or
| something, and suggest an eco friendly Russian rocket is used
| instead
| belter wrote:
| Self-finance ? Is that what you call US government money?
| heisgone wrote:
| Last years SpaceX revenue was 15 Billions, of which 1.1 came
| from NASA. Their revenues is higher than entire NASA budget.
|
| https://deepnewz.com/company-earnings/spacex-2025-revenue-
| to...
| belter wrote:
| NASA Budget is 25 Billion
| askl wrote:
| According to your link those numbers are for this year, not
| last one. Also they are predictions by Musk, not real
| numbers.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| 50 easy payments with Klarna.
| xnx wrote:
| The best outcome would be the cancellation of manned moon
| missions. The original space race was a pissing match between the
| US and USSR. I would've hoped we had matured past that.
| themafia wrote:
| Which would be a salient point if _nothing_ of value came out
| of the space program. That's about as far from reality as you
| can get.
|
| The primary, chartered, goal of NASA is to create a commercial
| space industry. Ignoring this is a sign of extreme immaturity.
| xnx wrote:
| Space exploration is great, but manned missions are dictated
| by vanity and congressional pork more than scientific needs.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Yea, it was an insane achievement in 1969, but today the
| technology exists, it's really just the money that's
| missing.
| themafia wrote:
| > but manned missions are dictated by vanity
|
| We were last on the moon in 1972. We haven't been back
| since. That's nothing even remotely like "vanity." I think
| there's a vanity involved in making this type of comment.
|
| > and congressional pork
|
| If the public wants it then it's not pork.
|
| > more than scientific needs.
|
| "Scientific needs" is not a well defined category. Those
| who proclaim to represent it while expecting it to hold a
| higher value than the will of the voters are misanthropic
| bullies.
| notahacker wrote:
| The thing is, NASA has already a great job creating a
| commercial space industry, much of it since the Space Race.
| The more salient question is whether manned return to the
| moon missions on vanity timelines are a better way to boost
| the commercial space industry than the research programmes
| that got slashed.
| cladopa wrote:
| Oh yeah. Replace the stainless steel by carbon fibre, give it to
| your pals of Boing and instead of being ready in 2030 for 2.3
| billion it will be ready in 2050 for 50 billion.
|
| Much better for making your friends rich.
| imtringued wrote:
| Isn't Rocket Lab doing carbon fibre rockets?
| albumen wrote:
| Carbon fibre second stages that melt/burn up on re-entry.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Peter Beck says that "we like the black."
|
| The tiny Electron is entirely carbon, isn't it?
|
| Their new Neutron has a fully reusable first stage, also
| out of carbon fiber. For Neutron, they have the largest
| automated fiber placement machine known to exist:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zmJdJIlPOr4
| audunw wrote:
| And? We still have yet to see whether full re-usability of
| the second stage is the best approach. The Neutron approach
| is really interesting, they can make the second stage
| incredibly light and cheap. Blue Origin claims the
| economics of a super-cheap disposable second stage, even
| for as one as large as theirs, is pretty much equal to a
| more expensive and heavier reusable second stage. (they're
| developing both in parallel to see where the chips land).
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Space X isn't much better. Its still Musks company.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| To this discussion, IMHO the important part is that he's
| fallen out of favor. He wasn't loyal.
| qwerpy wrote:
| So, the company gets things done but the CEO is unpopular
| with certain crowds. Seems better than Boeing, which is bad
| at getting things done. At least their CEO is inoffensive,
| and that's what is important?
| gnarlouse wrote:
| BOING!? new insult unlocked.
| duskwuff wrote:
| It's the sound their jets make when...
| jjk166 wrote:
| Stainless steel was a questionable choice for starship. If the
| pros outweigh the cons, which is yet to be seen, it will be
| mostly due to the peculiarities of Starship's other design
| choices. In general it's a terrible choice for rockets. I'm not
| saying Boeing would do a better job, but any actual engineer
| doing a ground up redesign starting today would definitely go
| with carbon fiber.
| _diyar wrote:
| > [if stainless works] it will be mostly due to the
| peculiarities of Starship's other design choices.
|
| Yea but isn't that the point of the Starship? It has a bunch
| of unusual design choices regarding reusability and payload
| capacity, and then the rest of the owl is drawn around them.
|
| I'm not a rocket-scientist but I would hazard a guess they
| picked the best material given the options, right?
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| To be fair if you want to give money to Trump's friends then
| the most efficient way is just keep funnelling it to SpaceX.
| bahmboo wrote:
| "The president and I want to get to the moon in this president's
| term" - Sean Duffy NASA administrator.
|
| A scary way to set a schedule on a complex project with lives at
| stake. They don't care though.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Having a deadline is how things get done. With no deadline,
| nothing gets accomplished.
| notahacker wrote:
| The (aero)space industry tends to do rather well out of it
| being acceptable to _miss_ deadlines though...
| bahmboo wrote:
| This is a political deadline with no grounding in reality.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| Hey, it worked when JFK did it!
| jjk166 wrote:
| Who was president during the moonlanding?
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| JFK got assassinated.....
| hypeatei wrote:
| Precisely. Trump wants to put his name on things for the
| history books.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| JFK proposed we go to the Moon in 1962. We did it in 1969,
| 7 years later.
| phkahler wrote:
| Not only that, he wanted to go to the moon before the end
| of the decade. They made it within that time.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Which is kind of the key point - Kennedy's deadline was a
| realistic one based on the technical difficulty of the
| challenge.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Artemis is scheduled to take longer than Apollo.
|
| We are in year 8 of Artemis. In year 8 of Apollo there
| were multiple manned missions including one that went to
| the moon but did not land.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Crucially, not during his term (or his life, but that's
| irrelevant).
| leoc wrote:
| Also at the cost of a really stupendous amount of money.
| adventured wrote:
| ~$260 billion in today's dollar for the whole Apollo
| program. Cut out what we don't need to figure out in the
| present. Maybe a $100-$150 billion cost spread over five
| years. Trivial sum against a $40 trillion economy. If the
| only thing we needed to get back to the moon was $30
| billion per year in expenditures for five years, Congress
| would sign off on that instantly.
|
| I think the US is lacking the organization, culture, and
| on-a-mission mentality today, not money. I believe the
| money is the easiest part of the equation, the rest can't
| be faked or supplied at the click of a button. The US is
| no longer a serious nation hell-bent on accomplishing
| great/difficult things. Congress knows if they supply the
| $30 billion per year, what we'll get in the end is a
| broken program that won't achieve the set aims, and it'll
| just take 15 years at $40 billion per year instead,
| without a single Moon landing. They know full well how
| dysfunctional the US is, everybody is just acting when
| the cameras are on.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| They also killed three astronauts in the process and had
| to stop the program and reevaluate their whole approach
| to safety.
|
| The risk of people dying is sometimes an acceptable risk.
| We accept it every time a firefighter goes into a burning
| building. Is a national vanity project like Moon missions
| worth the risk? Maybe then, when it was novel and
| inspirational, but now, when it's a retro throwback and
| the only reason we're doing it is to avoid losing face to
| the communist Chinese?
| fragmede wrote:
| They knew the risks and chose to do it in the face of
| that. People take insane risks for the fun of it. Seen
| any of the RedBull stunts on YouTube lately? Humans with
| jet packs flying alongside jetliners!
| kace91 wrote:
| >and the only reason we're doing it is to avoid losing
| face to the communist
|
| Totally unlike the first time.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Unlike the first time, it isn't new and isn't a
| technological flex. The payoff from the first time was
| marginal, measured mainly in the children it inspired to
| pursue STEM. This time, does anybody even care?
| kace91 wrote:
| I know, not disagreeing! You just left the ball bouncing
| and I couldn't help writing the comment.
| colechristensen wrote:
| The entire Apollo program was a political stunt to upstage
| the USSR.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| It was a semi-covert program to be able to get to the
| USSR in 25 minutes with 150ktons of carryon luggage.
| jjk166 wrote:
| A political stunt for _America_ to upstage the USSR, not
| to stroke the ego of a particular American.
| kulahan wrote:
| So just like every other deadline I'm given, then.
| echelon wrote:
| I feel like that attitude has kept us on earth all this
| time.
|
| We let people do stupid shit and kill themselves all the
| time. Driving 80+ MPH, driving motorcycles, recreational
| drugs, alcohol, climbing Everest, etc.
|
| I think it's fine. If I were in the position, I'd sign up
| to do this.
|
| The moon is meaningful.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| This is preferable to "we'll go back again maybe one day 5
| decades from now, if we get around to it"
| nobleach wrote:
| Most deadlines are completely made up to create a false
| scarcity of time. While I agree this one is pretty
| meaningless and we'll forget about it in a few days... it's
| not unlike any other silly deadline.
| izzydata wrote:
| I don't agree. Deadlines are only partially made up, but
| not completely.
| Teever wrote:
| The point you raise is implicit in the comment that you're
| replying to and your response seems to intentionally ignore
| the very valid point that a bad deadline in this context may
| kill people and have other very negative consequences for the
| program.
|
| What part of the comment you're replying to lead you to
| believe that the person you're replying to does not
| understand the value of deadlines?
| kagakuninja wrote:
| With Trump, assume there will be massive kickbacks and
| corruption, most likely nothing useful will happen.
| dragontamer wrote:
| The Moon directive was set by Donald Trump in 2017.
|
| This is just the same deadline being pushed another year
| because of failures. Deadlines that get constantly pushed
| aren't deadlines at all.
|
| As I recall, SpaceX and Artemis project was supposed to be
| Moon by 2024. At least originally. But then SpaceX blew up
| all the rockets (successfully testing them or something) and
| now we've wasted damn near a decade.
| jaapbadlands wrote:
| Testing rockets that fail is still progress. Deadlines that
| get pushed isn't an argument against deadlines.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| Any project even a quarter as complex as a manned lunar
| mission going to run into problems and failures and
| unforeseen complications (just ask anyone who's ever done
| any home renovation). Things go over budget, deadlines are
| missed, stuff doesn't work out the way you'd envisioned.
| This isn't always somebody's fault or the result of poor
| planning (though they can be).
|
| Yeah, we've been there already, but it's been many decades
| and we haven't exactly kept all the tech and procedures up
| to date in the intervening years. And that first go-round
| itself missed it's intended deadline by about 7-8 years.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| _Dead_ lines, political pressure to ignore issues and get it
| done, is how you get astronauts _dead._ Apollo 1, Challenger,
| Columbia. And of course Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 / Salyut 1;
| it's not just a problem for America.
|
| I fear it's going to happen again; Orion isn't safe and
| hasn't been successfully tested. The heat shield started to
| disintegrate the last time they tested it and instead of
| testing it again with their changes they're going to put
| people in it next time.
| 05 wrote:
| To play devil's advocate, the only purpose astronauts serve
| is PR. Anything that can be done is space could be done
| cheaper and better with automation/rovers. So it seems that
| having those astronauts risk their lives for a short term
| political win is just table stakes, because the alternative
| for them is to stay on Earth and maybe pay $100K for just
| an hour in orbit with any of the commercial space tourism
| companies.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| The Artemis plan was originally to return to moon by 2024, and
| the first crewed flight is still planned for next year, so it
| seems entirely reasonable for a President that's in office from
| 2024 and 2028 to want it to actually happen within that time
| frame. Since, you know, that's been the established and agreed
| upon plan for nearly a decade now.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Are they going to give nasa the money to actually do it
| though?
| caconym_ wrote:
| 2024 was never considered remotely realistic by anybody in
| the "industry"---it was a purely political deadline and the
| will/funding was not there to achieve it.
|
| Today (AFAIK) 2028 is considered quite aggressive, mostly due
| to the lack of progress on Starship, and the facts driving
| that conclusion are not any more amenable to change via
| political pressure than they were last time.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| There is no reason to consider anytime frame beyond what
| NASA did it in in the 60s "unreasonable". They were still
| using slide rules for goodness sake. We've got now 50+
| years of space flight experience under our belt.
|
| Bean counters make excuses. Put the right people in the
| right places and shit gets done.
| AshleyGrant wrote:
| Unless we're willing to expend resources on the level we
| did in the 60s then it is absolutely unreasonable.
| Computers instead of slide rules doesn't matter at all.
| caconym_ wrote:
| Apollo was funded at a much higher fraction of the
| national budget, and I believe in inflation-adjusted
| dollars the cost is comparable but generally higher
| depending on how you measure it.
|
| Funding makes it happen. Fund it, it will happen. Don't
| fund it, it won't happen. American space exploration has
| been chronically underfunded relative to its ambitions,
| which is why all we have to show for our manned
| exploration programs since STS (edit: or including it, if
| you like!) is a string of broken promises. I am hopeful
| that Artemis will get there, but I am simply telling you
| the shape of reality as it currently exists--a shape that
| doesn't care about your definition of "reasonable" in
| this context. I also don't think we will beat the Chinese
| unless something major changes.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Why not tomorrow if we are setting deadlines randomly based
| on a plan to go to the moon in 2024? They must be ready it's
| been a year.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| I suspect the first people to sail the globe did so knowing the
| risks. I suspect if we reduced astronaut safety thresholds by a
| factor of 10, we will still have a surplus of high quality
| candidates for space missions.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I am sure the astronauts know and accept the risks, but does
| that really mean the public should be funding such reckless
| activities? They can go paragliding or base jumping on their
| own dime if they want an adrenaline rush.
|
| The public has spend billions of dollars on this program, if
| the end result is astronauts getting cooked during reentry
| then how could that possibly be an outcome worth the expense?
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Sailboats were pretty well understood by then and in contrast
| to rockets there is much less potential for catastrophic
| failure.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| All they need to do now is insert a private company into the
| go/no-go checklist before launch and it'll be totally safe. /s
| oytis wrote:
| America is becoming a silly place. Lumberjack appointed as a
| head of NASA for his loyalty.
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| America has always been a silly place, especially when it
| comes to NASA. Jack Parsons was a legendary occultist and a
| follower of Aleister Crowley's Thelema. Wernher von Braun was
| a former Nazi rocket scientist whose father served in the
| cabinet of the Knights of Malta. Wernher was a member of Tau
| Beta Pi, which has its own initiation rites and rituals.
| oytis wrote:
| Werner von Braun was competent though, as was Parsons.
| Being a little silly is fine as long as you can do the job.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Being a Nazi is being a little silly?
| aduty wrote:
| He only cared about sending rockets up. Where they came
| down was other people's problem.
| spankibalt wrote:
| > He only cared about sending rockets up.
|
| Which extended also how exactly those rockets were
| produced... and by whom.
|
| EDIT: Yeah, I get it, the _Zwangsarbeiter_ from the camps
| building the rockets are not very conductive to the
| carefully whitewashed "hero technocrat" image certain
| "hackers" just love to invest in. :T
| mulmen wrote:
| He was also totally ok with slave labor. He was a
| voluntary Nazi party insider and SS member. He
| deliberately chose to participate in Hitler's
| totalitarian regime to advance his own goals. This kind
| of behavior should be remembered and condemned.
|
| He was a brilliant designer, engineer, and project leader
| but he is an _extremely_ problematic person for the
| methods he was comfortable using to achieve his goals.
| foobarian wrote:
| Seems isomorphic to today's slave-driving death-marching
| CEOs that we celebrate so much. In a past time they would
| be right up there on the podium
| mulmen wrote:
| > Seems isomorphic to today's slave-driving death-
| marching CEOs that we celebrate so much.
|
| Von Braun used literal concentration camp slave labor.
| You should reconsider your use of "slave-driving" here
| because it is a _very_ bad look.
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| Their point is that plenty among our current batch of
| sociopathic CEOs would be using concentration camp slave
| labor where they in Nazi Germany as well. That they don't
| is because of the societal restrictions preventing them
| from doing so.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Very insightful thought. Which tech CEO today would not
| have been up on the podium along side the leaders of the
| third reich? Would you, would I, if necessity required
| it?
| zorked wrote:
| The message you replied to is a reference to an anti-von
| Braun song.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
| jrflowers wrote:
| No, but in Parson's case using sex magic to attempt to
| summon a goddess named Babalon is a bit silly.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Hey look, some of us have sex for fun, and some of us
| have sex to summon ancient goddesses, that isn't so
| different now, is it? I don't kink shame.
| mullingitover wrote:
| These people had some kooky hobbies, but they actually had
| resumes that got them their jobs and the key qualification
| wasn't "completely unprincipled sycophant."
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Tau Beta Pi is an engineering honor society with no
| Illuminati-style secret agenda. The only silliness
| associated with it is any concern over the "initiation
| rites and rituals".
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| That is what every society with initiation rites and
| rituals claims.
| jjk166 wrote:
| And the overwhelming majority of societies with
| initiation rights and rituals are not world-controlling
| cabals. Turns out people just like having rituals (and
| afterparties).
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| Where did I say they were a cabal that controlled the
| world? There are many famous and influential people that
| are a member of that society, and they swear oaths and go
| through initiation rituals. Believe whatever you'd like!
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Funny how joining a college club is more notable to this
| individual than "enslaver"
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| I did point out that he was a Nazi, and was attempting to
| shine light on the fact that he was connected to people
| in high places via a society that has initiation rites
| and rituals (what you are referring to as a college
| club).
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'm reporting you to the nearest IEEE branch.
| midtake wrote:
| Jack Parsons was literally a genius though. Wernher von
| Braun's dad being Catholic is also not silly.
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| I think you left out the part about the Knights of Malta
| being a powerful group of individuals throughout history,
| with many prominent members in high places who are sworn
| to secrecy regarding their occult society and its
| dealings.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| You're comparing their side beliefs and oddities to others
| main careers and expertise
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Believing in occultism is indistinguishable from believing
| in any religion, including Christianity.
|
| From what I gather, Von Braun really really liked rockets
| and figured working for the homeland was a safe bet.
|
| There are multiple global multinational companies that
| still exist that supported the Nazi Party, should we hold
| them to the standard you're holding Von Braun to? Here's a
| short list: Siemens (electrical), Bayer (pharm and ag),
| Thysen-Krupp (industrial), Bosch (consumer and industrial
| goods), Volkswagen (automotive), Mercedes Benz
| (automotive), BASF (chemicals), Deutsche Bank (finance),
| plus more.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| give him a little more credit than that, he was also on Real
| World: Boston
| hinkley wrote:
| He's a lumberjack and he's okay.
|
| He sleeps all night and he works all day.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| In Russia, loyalty is the highest virtue. In the USA, it's
| the other way around!
|
| ("k kks r s lyly")
| jm4 wrote:
| The silver lining is that they are operating under the
| assumption that he will leave office at the conclusion of his
| term.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Don't be fooled by this pretense. MAGA republicans are
| already actively working towards getting him another term:
| https://www.thirdtermproject.com/third-term
| cyberge99 wrote:
| Which will backfire spectacularly when Obama is re-elected.
| zzrrt wrote:
| I get the impulse and it would be amusing, but I have a
| feeling people are sick of "dynasty" Dem candidates for
| president (Hillary after her husband, Biden/Harris after
| each being VPs.) Feels like his legacy and appeal has
| kind of faded too. He was an exciting first-time
| candidate and good-enough incumbent, but third term?
| simondotau wrote:
| Hillary sure, but they explicitly said Obama, not
| Clinton.
|
| Nominating a VP as President isn't dynastic, it's been
| common practice for centuries.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vice_presidents_of_
| the...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You can't get elected if you don't count the votes. That
| requires a joint session of congress. If due to an
| unprecedented emergency the congress cannot come into
| session there's no clear rule what happens.
|
| Any number of emergent events may create an emergency
| preventing the congress from gathering. The congress are
| collaborators and the Supreme Court is compromised.
| UltraSane wrote:
| That would trigger a real civil war.
| zzrrt wrote:
| Trump was giddy at that Zelenskiy meeting a few months
| ago, when he heard elections were suspended in Ukraine
| due to the war.
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bvUBtdHw3g4 Said something
| like "So, if in 3.5 years, we are in a war... no more
| elections. Oh, that's good."
| evan_ wrote:
| > If due to an unprecedented emergency the congress
| cannot come into session there's no clear rule what
| happens.
|
| For instance if hundreds of people are rioting and
| breaking into the capitol building.
|
| That's what they were trying to do on Jan 6.
| paxys wrote:
| What makes you think Obama will be allowed to run?
| overfeed wrote:
| If it were to happen, I fully expect the supreme court to
| contort itself for a bespoke ruling that only applies
| under the current set of circumstances, favoring a very
| specific candidate and no one else.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Reminder that the President's legal team argued that he
| could have his political rivals executed by Seal Team 6
| and the Supreme Court was like "yep!" and ruled in his
| favor.
| evan_ wrote:
| If they do this approach they will surely say that the
| constitutional limit is two _consecutive_ terms, and
| since Trump 's two terms were non-consecutive, he's still
| eligible to run again.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Don't be fooled by this pretense. MAGA republicans are
| already actively working towards getting him another term
|
| Yes, he's in such excellent health, I can definitely see
| him living (and non-comatose!) long enough for that.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm surprised he is vertical. He acts like how Biden
| looks.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I expect him to be walled off from external appearances
| within some amount of time so he can focus on truly
| important projects. Like redesigning the lawn. Or the
| amount of gold leaf on everything.
|
| My real question, if/when that happens, who is pulling
| the strings with the most sway?
| overfeed wrote:
| Vought and Miller
| brightball wrote:
| This is the trolling equivalent of "embrace, extend,
| extinguish." They are mocking the people who believe it by
| amplifying it, making Trump 2028 merch, etc.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I personally think Trump will be too old to run, but I
| don't think for a second they won't try to run him if
| he's able. They always start by making it a "joke".
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Haha, only serious?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| That's what they said about the "Mass Deportations Now"
| signs at the RNC 2024 campaign events.
| boston_clone wrote:
| For those that don't want to believe this, here's a primary
| source:
|
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GyrWkIEW8AQJOHN?format=jpg
| UltraSane wrote:
| Ain't gonna happen. It would actually trigger a civil war.
| squigz wrote:
| Didn't JFK say something about going to the moon by the end of
| the decade?
| nkrisc wrote:
| Yes, and three astronauts died.
| squigz wrote:
| Sure, I just don't think people reacted the way GP did when
| JFK said it.
| verdverm wrote:
| The current admin is different, the times are different,
| the people are largely different, thus the
| interpretations and reactions are different
| ks2048 wrote:
| JFK: "First, I believe that this nation should commit itself
| to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing
| a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."
|
| RFK Jr: "Measles ain't that bad, try this potion my friend
| came up with."
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| At least 10 people were killed in the apollo program
|
| http://www.airsafe.com/events/space/astrofat.htm
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > "The president and I want to get to the moon in this
| president's term" - Sean Duffy NASA administrator.
|
| Im not sure the current admin is prepared for the risk that
| entails, unlike the last time we did this:
|
| https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events...
|
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/if-the-apollo-11-astronauts...
| gcanyon wrote:
| ...or a back door way of acknowledging he's planning on a third
| term. :-/
| imoverclocked wrote:
| To be fair, NASA schedules and goals have historically been
| politically aligned. It is also a known source of catastrophic
| failure.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > A scary way to set a schedule on a complex project with lives
| at stake.
|
| I mean that's how we did it last time.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| There was an arbitrary deadline the first time we did it, and
| it arguably helped it happen.
|
| Artemis is projected to take longer than Apollo, unless, well,
| they land on the moon before Trump leaves office.
| baggachipz wrote:
| NASA: "We may need to boot SpaceX"
|
| SpaceX: _makes political contribution to executive branch_
|
| NASA: "SpaceX is back on the menu, boys!"
| teekert wrote:
| Why does this sounds so... Entitled? NASA regresses so far that
| they are now unable to do anything by themselves... Now suddenly
| there is a new moon race and they start pointing to a public
| company that is not sticking to a schedule. A company that does
| some impressive things, and has helped them out (probably not out
| of the goodness of their hearts, but hey), and is doing things
| they could not.
|
| I would be an adult about it and respond reasonable, perhaps even
| ask NASA for help, publicly. I'm afraid Elon is about to give
| them the finger and drive around on the moon by himself, two
| fingers pointing at NASA head quarters. I would smile about that
| a bit, I admit.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > probably not out of the goodness of their hearts, but hey
|
| It's a terrible idea to rely on this. Why would you want people
| to work this way when you can just have a regular-person
| financial transaction that aligns your interests?
| teekert wrote:
| FWIW, I absolutely agree. I just wanted to stress that the
| helping with the Boeing situation was something that, in a
| way, one could be a bit grateful for. But yeah, its not
| necessary.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Duffy wants to fold NASA into the Department of Transportation
| and make it a Moon transport focused organization. He cares
| nothing of science or discovery and if he can show that SpaceX
| is behind in its transport contract, that helps his argument
| that NASA should be in the transport business which helps his
| argument that NASA should be a part of the DOT.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I'm afraid Elon is about to give them the finger and drive
| around on the moon by himself, two fingers pointing at NASA
| head quarters.
|
| I don't think Elon cares much about going to the moon. It would
| probably delay the Mars mission to devote resources to a moon
| mission.
| boringg wrote:
| Unless he gets a lucrative mining contract
| jotux wrote:
| >NASA regresses so far that they are now unable to do anything
| by themselves...
|
| I keep running across this perception and I don't understand
| where it comes from. Overwhelmingly, like since the 1970s, NASA
| has not built anything per it's appropriations from congress.
| Their job is to 1) Define mission requirements and objectives,
| 2) Oversee contracts to execute those missions, 3) Test and
| verify elements of those systems, and very distant 4) do some
| in-house research and development for cutting edge technology
| (still mostly contracted out). ~75% of their budget is
| contracts to private companies to execute missions.
|
| NASA's job, as defined NASA directors over the years and by
| congress via appropriations, is to come up with ideas and fund
| private companies to execute them.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| You mean the 1970s as in Raegan when the space program
| stalled and became irrelevant and became mostly a way to
| funnel money to districts for certain congresspeople?
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Reagan took office in the 80s. The 70s was Nixon, Ford, and
| Carter.
| sobellian wrote:
| The space program stalled because pouring national wealth
| into gigantic single-use rockets was unsustainable. They
| tried with Shuttle but the material science wasn't there
| yet (heck it might not be even now, it doesn't seem that
| they've really nailed down the heat shield on Starship
| yet).
| jjk166 wrote:
| The issue with the shuttle wasn't the material science.
| It was designed around a mission profile of servicing spy
| satellites, which at the time had film which needed to be
| developed. The defense department gave NASA requirements
| which could only be satisfied by moving the orbiter to
| the side of the rocket, dramatically increasing potential
| damage to the thermal tiles and making crew escape
| basically impossible. This was all justified by the
| incredibly large number of flights that the shuttle would
| fly to service these satellites, and the money the
| defense department would pay for these missions. The
| shuttle was screwed late in production when digital
| camera technology allowed for spy satellites that didn't
| need regular servicing, eliminating most of the demand
| for the shuttle and rendering the infrastructure designed
| for it unsustainable.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I don't think Shuttle's issue was that the material
| science wasn't there. The issue was the way the design
| was constrained, and the general aerospace culture at the
| time (that only began to change with "New Space").
|
| Shuttle's heatshield would've been much less dangerous if
| it wasn't facing a giant ice and insulation covered
| external tank (like, if it was mounted on top of a
| booster), but the Air Force's demand for crossrange
| forced giant wings, which forced the lower mounting
| position.
|
| They could've iterated on heat shield designs,
| particularly with attachment mechanisms, but every
| mission had to carry people, so you couldn't risk it, and
| anyway, the industry culture was already set in the "even
| the simplest things must cost large amounts of money and
| time" stage.
|
| One of the key points that I feel a lot of people miss is
| that Starship is pretty much the first program actually
| doing the flight testing needed to understand the
| engineering requirements for an efficient fully reusable
| heatshield. They don't have much prior art to look at for
| tile spacing, mounting mechanisms, metal tiles or
| transpiration cooling. The fundamental materials haven't
| changed a lot, but we can see over test flights that
| SpaceX are figuring things out.
|
| In the early days they used to lose tiles all the time,
| even after just pressure testing IIRC. Nowadays they may
| barely lose any tiles on static fire tests. Similarly,
| tile loss on reentry has decreased greatly, and we've
| gone from seeing plasma leaving the fins barely attached,
| to the latest test, where the fins were pretty much fully
| intact.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > since the 1970s, NASA has not built anything
|
| NASA JPL built all the Mars rovers, and Mars Helicopter. JPL
| is operated by Caltech, but it is a NASA-branded laboratory
| that builds and operates planetary exploration robots itself.
|
| This pedantry just to honor the amazing work these people
| have done.
| esotericsean wrote:
| Instead of competing with other nations, what if we all worked
| together as humans?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| We tried that but then Russia kept invading it's neighbors.
|
| Things were very awkward on the ISS a few Februaries ago.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Who is ahead of SpaceX for payloads of similar scale?
| HPsquared wrote:
| It would be cool if the main space race was between NASA and
| SpaceX. It's like how the US has three of the top five air forces
| in the world (USAF, Army, Navy)
| 9dev wrote:
| It ain't, though. NASA hasn't retained much of their previous
| capabilities, and China's space program is making progress
| fast.
| TimReynolds wrote:
| Aren't all of the other providers even further behind than
| SpaceX?
| kadonoishi wrote:
| Note Elon said he'd destroy the Republicans for their budget vote
| last June:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1lojll9/if_its_th...
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| Shockingly that seems to have been bullshit, which you just
| wouldn't expect from Elon Musk.
| jmyeet wrote:
| There's a lot of SpaceX fanboyism in this thread but there are
| three big problems with SpaceX's Moon project:
|
| 1. Starship is still far from being production-ready, proven to
| be reliable and rated for human transport, a goal that will
| itself take many launches beyond being proven for delivering
| payloads to LEO and geosynchronous orbits (as well, I guess, deep
| space missions?);
|
| 2. The market for commercial Starship launches is far from proven
| and the risk of this is being ignored or downplayed by so many.
| Starship's biggest problem and competitor is... the Falcon 9,
| something the Falcon 9 never had to contend with. The market for
| even larger payloads seem to be limited. The evidence? There are
| over 100 Falcon 9 launches a year. There's about ~1 Falcon Heavy
| launch per year. And Falcon Heavy is pretty cost effective. The
| biggest customer seems to be the military who wants to get really
| large payloads to geosynchronous orbit. Now will Starlink
| bootstrap Starship demand in the same way that it did for Falcon
| 9 reusable boosters? Maybe. But it's not proven; and
|
| 3. Starship just doesn't make a great Moon lander. Why? You have
| to land this really tall vehicle in low gravity on unknown ground
| when it could possibly tip over in a way that Apollo landers
| never really could (because they were short, wide and
| significantly lighter). And then when you land? Your astronauts
| are ~40 meters off the ground. How are they getting back and
| forth?
|
| Starship actually reminds me of the Steve Ballmer "Windows
| everywhere" era. Or the F35 jet-for-all-branches boondoggle.
| Ballmer wanted to run Windows on every device where Apple
| launched iOS alongside MacOS. Ballmer bought Sidekick, which was
| really successful at the time, and basically killed it by not
| innovating and trying to migrate it to Windows Mobile OS.
|
| "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of simple minds." as the
| quote goes.
|
| These projects end up being not very good at any application in
| an effort to be able to do too much. I'm starting to wonder if
| this is Starship's core problem.
|
| What might save Starship is that BlueOrigin is absolutely
| nowhere, ULA is a joke, the Europeans are nowhere and SLS is a
| massive jobs program. I have more faith in China's space program
| than any of those.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Is this a corrupt, punitive attack against Elon Musk over the
| falling out between him and Trump? Is this based on a strong,
| factual basis? Who knows!
|
| If Musk was still in tight with Trump, and this potential booting
| was based on a strong, factual basis, would it still be in the
| works? Who knows!
| robgibbons wrote:
| What else are they going to use? A trampoline?
| mmmlinux wrote:
| current employee status
|
| spacex: at work
|
| nasa: not at work
| allenrb wrote:
| There is just so much wrong with this from start to finish. Here
| are a few things, by no means inclusive:
|
| 1. We've already beaten China to the moon by 56 years, 3 months,
| and some change. And counting.
|
| 2. Nothing based around SLS is remotely serious. The cost and
| timeline of doing _anything_ with it are unreasonable. It is an
| absolute dead-end. The SpaceX Super Heavy has been more capable
| arguably as early as the second flight test and certainly now.
| They could have built a "dumb" second stage at any time, but
| aren't that short-sighted.
|
| 3. Blue Origin? I've had high hopes for the guys for two decades
| now. Don't hold your breath.
|
| 4. Anyone else? Really, really don't hold your breath.
|
| This whole "race to the moon, part II" is almost criminally
| stupid. Land on the moon when we can accomplish something there,
| not just to prove we haven't lost our mojo since Apollo.
| hinkley wrote:
| SLS is such a maintenance mode project that I have a failure of
| imagination in seeing how it helps aerospace companies with
| their ulterior motive of remaining in standby for a war
| posture. A lot of that so-called pork is really about keeping
| the home fires burning.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I thought we wanted to save money ?
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| The Chinese is planning a space habitat - the US is aiming for
| the same - it is rather different from the Apollo objectives.
|
| Mars is out of reach and not feasible.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Mars is entirely within reach if we wanted to dedicate the
| resources to it. If we can get to the moon over 50 years ago,
| Mars is nothing today. I don't necessarily think it would be
| worth it given the cost, but it is totally possible if it was
| a priority.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| This is a vastly oversimplified take; Mars will be a
| monumental effort, far beyond what it takes to get to/from
| the moon.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| To what end ?.
|
| Mars is a total boondoggle - a colony would require
| constant supply runs from Earth to support a double-digit
| population - who is going to field the cost and what are
| they going to do there ?.
|
| "The Martian" was work of fiction.
|
| A lunar colony is cheaper and way more feasible.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I don't understand your response. I clearly said it's not
| worth it right now.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Their point (I believe) is "why do we want to go there
| over the moon?" What is there that makes the effort worth
| it at all now or later (until we can _truly_ move a large
| population there permanently /for very long stretches)?
|
| If the point is a colony, then we should just do it on
| the moon. If the point is for the advances in technology
| it will bring, we don't have to go to Mars to explore
| those things. We could just keep practicing on the moon.
|
| Obviously it's not exactly the same but idk, most of why
| I'd be interested in our going to mars can be answered
| with "it's easier, more feasible, and generally just as
| useful to do it on the moon instead." It's still low
| gravity, no oxygen/breathable atmosphere, a hostile
| desert essentially, etc. but far closer. We can respond
| to emergencies more easily. We know for a fact we are
| currently capable of getting there and back safely.
|
| TL;DR: we will likely get a lot more out of dumping our
| resources into trips to and from the moon and building
| something there than trying to go to mars for a _very_
| long time.
| overfeed wrote:
| > To what end ?
|
| Funnelling a _lot_ of government money into the pockets
| of the best candidate for the world 's first trillionare.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Mars is out of the gravity well only to fall into another,
| albert slightly shallower. It's just dumb.
| underlipton wrote:
| Space and the moon were so important that we famously put
| black female mathematicians on the job in the waning years
| of Jim Crow. The current admin is dismantling not just so-
| called DEI, but decades of civil rights protections that
| ultimately allowed things like SGI's 3D rendering pipeline
| to exist. This is just one of the myriad ways that America
| is not in any way serious about a task as monumental as
| reaching Mars with actual, human astronauts. It would
| require an intense and extreme dedication to facing factual
| reality, which we do not seem currently capable of. Rockets
| do not run on truthiness, they explode on it.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I expect China to be the other major player in global space
| industries for the simpel reason that they're the only ones
| with the means and resolve to undergo such an endeavour. China
| is a command economy and they engage in long-term projects all
| the time. You can see with with all the intercity rail and
| metro systems they've built in the last 2 decades. It's crazy.
| As is all their power generation (hydro, solar).
|
| the US may have gone to the Moon 50+ years ago but a lot has
| changed. There's no big enemy to rally behind as we
| manufactured in the Cold War. We don't have titans of industry
| anymore. We have titans of finance who coast on the inertia of
| early successes while raising prices, cutting costs and
| engaging in rent-seeking behavior.
|
| There are serious design issues with Starship as a platform for
| going back to the Moon.
|
| I'm not at all convinced the US can build anything anymore.
| dfee wrote:
| > I'm not at all convinced the US can build anything anymore.
|
| But it has! Look at all of our private industry! That's the
| point!
|
| > We don't have titans of industry anymore.
|
| What?!
| testing22321 wrote:
| SpaceX and to a much lesser extent Tesla are good examples.
| Excluding those for a minute, what else does the US have
| world-leading manufacturing of?
|
| Semiconductors? Nope.
|
| High speed rail? Nope.
|
| Auto industry? Nope.
|
| Major infrastructure projects like bridges, tunnels,
| airports, etc? Nope.
|
| Electronics (phones/laptops/etc)? Nope.
|
| ?????
|
| The US is not exactly a manufacturing powerhouse.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| It is a rent extraction/wealth transfer powerhouse.
|
| At least for now.
| hollerith wrote:
| The production of cutting-edge semiconductors requires a
| global supply chain. The US's main contribution to that
| supply chain is (very expensive) software required in the
| design of an IC.
|
| The US is second in manufacturing and far ahead of
| numbers 3 and 4 (Germany and Japan IIRC).
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Anyone can write software, the idea that we're uniquely
| capable in that domain is foolhardy
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Anyone can do any of those above industries as well,
| what's your point?
| ks2048 wrote:
| Why mention Tesla in here?
|
| They produce 1.8M cars/year while GM and Ford produce 6M
| and 4M, respectively. (2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
| i/List_of_automotive_manufacture...)
| testing22321 wrote:
| > _We've already beaten China to the moon by 56 years, 3
| months, and some change. And counting_
|
| Of course, but there a few things to consider.
|
| 1. This is a new race. The olympics happen every four years to
| see which nation is the current best. It seems it's time to
| find out again.
|
| 2. The last time the US was dominant was 56 years ago. That's
| three generations. Based on SLS and the comments here, it seems
| extremely unlikely the US is still dominant. Let's find out.
| bluGill wrote:
| What is the point of winning though? We could be doing other
| things in stead, and I'm going to submit that they are more
| valuable (you are of course welcome to disagree - this is an
| opinion).
|
| Personally I hope no human lands on the moon again. I like
| telling my parents they are so old humans walked on the moon
| in their lifetime (last human left the moon December 1972 -
| before I was born). There is no value in this statement, but
| it is still fun.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The electronics we're typing these comments on were only
| rapidly miniaturized originally to be small and light
| enough to shoot into space.
|
| There are second, third, etc order effects to things like a
| space race.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Sure. So let's do something useful and new. We know how
| to go to the moon - it's just a matter of money (and
| political will). If there's something else to do on the
| moon, let's be clear that is the objective.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I do agree with this. If we are returning to the moon
| just to say we did, as a space lover, I do have an issue
| with this and can't really get on board. I am hoping we
| have some other larger goal in mind, like maybe are back
| to the idea of a permanent moon base and a potential jump
| off point for other projects or we have a list of long
| term moon experiments to do. But yea, it just isn't
| exciting if we are going there to take a couple pictures
| and just to rub it in the face of China or India or some
| other nation. We've already done that.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I'm all on board for doing something useful and new, my
| comment was not in support of having a space race for the
| sake of having one.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I actually think getting the political will, money, and
| execution together would be the part that would be a
| noteworthy show of force (and I'd argue being unable to
| get it done would be equally noteworthy in the other
| direction).
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Nah, that's false. Miniaturization was already underway
| before the Space Race. The space program absolutely
| benefited from it, yes. But NASA wasn't at the forefront
| of those developments.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Sending humans to the moon is just burning money though. It
| isn't useful at all.
| tw04 wrote:
| >Based on SLS and the comments here, it seems extremely
| unlikely the US is still dominant.
|
| Literally every other nation is trying to catch up to Space-X
| and is nowhere close. An American company, based in American,
| primarily staffed by American engineers.
|
| I don't know by what measure you'd say that the US isn's
| still far, far ahead but I don't know of any other country
| currently re-using rockets dozens of times. What did I miss?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Re: 1. I think the _America of Theseus_ mindset is a bit
| troubling. A lot of people like to identify with achievements
| that they played no role in. Based on zero expertise
| whatsoever, I have a sense that this is a bit self defeating.
| To be born a winner, to be taught you're a winner... how can
| that be healthy?
|
| Today's America scores zero points for its accomplishments of
| the past. But I think one way it can be a good thing is the,
| "we've done it before, we can do it again" attitude. Which is
| somewhat opposite to "we already won!"
| itsnowandnever wrote:
| 100% - given the resources we have, America is far
| underperforming at the moment
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| Perhaps these resources why we America underperforming.
| People are just given handouts making Americans lazy,
| ignorant, and dumb.
| gpt5 wrote:
| I really don't get this sentiment. 80% of orbital launches
| last year were Americans. The USA hasn't been this dominant
| in the space race since the 60s.
| timschmidt wrote:
| 99% of those were SpaceX
| gpt5 wrote:
| Exactly. The US private space industry is thriving and
| profitable. That's exactly what makes it so efficient and
| dominant.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Capitalism is incredibly efficient this way and it really
| should be appreciated as being such an advantage. I
| wonder if it's not a free advantage though. I suspect
| there's a risk that it might diminish the ability to
| accomplish projects that aren't compatible with
| capitalism. Ie. ROI isn't sufficiently short term, ROI is
| socialized, no ROI at all, excessive risk.
|
| An open question as I really don't have an answer either
| way: what's the last mega project the U.S. succeeded in
| completing that wasn't directly tied to a short term
| business plan? Something for future generations or a
| major environmental project or a transportation or
| infrastructure project, etc.
| zdragnar wrote:
| America cannot possibly win the space race again, because it
| has already been won. The first to get there has already
| happened.
|
| The idea that we need to land on the moon once a generation
| just to say that we are as good at landing on the moon as our
| parents is absurd.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's just as absurd today as it was in the 60s. It's an
| artificial challenge that focuses attention, with the goal
| of exercising government, industries, academics, etc. and
| maybe learn and invent a few things along the way.
|
| It's kind of like a FIRST Robotics Challenge for nations.
| The specific goal really doesn't matter and can just as
| well be different than the moon. That's not the interesting
| part.
| Stevvo wrote:
| 2) Artemis II is sitting on the pad ready to go. It will launch
| in a few months. But actually it's not relevant; the article
| makes no mention of SLS. There is suggestion of SLS getting the
| contract.
|
| SpaceX doesn't even have a timeline for Starship; they have no
| idea when it will be ready, but the one thing that is clear is
| it wont be ready to take humans to the moon in 2027.
| paganel wrote:
| > 1. We've already beaten China to the moon by 56 years, 3
| months, and some change. And counting.
|
| The Portuguese used to have the best sea-worthy ships
| throughout the 1400s. They were soon followed by the Spanish.
| It didn't matter, because by the 1600s the Dutch, and then the
| English, had transformed the world's big seas and oceans into
| their playground.
|
| In other words, if you don't use it you lose it, and right now
| the Americans need to "use" it, they need to show that they're
| still capable of getting to the Moon and beyond.
| femto wrote:
| > when we can accomplish something there
|
| Realistically, the accomplishment will be a resource grab. It's
| not scientific. The moon will eventually be carved up by
| (disputed) territorial claims, like Antarctica. Countries will
| need to maintain bases to back their territorial claims.
| Eventually the claims will turn into mining rights. The
| resources are valuable for being in a reduced gravity zone. All
| those juicy water containing craters at the Lunar poles... [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_water
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Well Musk responded in typical Muskian fashion.
|
| First he is now called Sean Dummy. "Should someone whose biggest
| claim to fame is climbing trees be running America's space
| program?"
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| How is SLS different from the shuttle? It uses the same engines
| (but throws them away) and costs astronomically to launch.
|
| Could we just bring back the shuttle?
| QuiEgo wrote:
| Thinking you're going to end up with a _more aggressive_ schedule
| than an Elon company with the traditional mil-aerospace players
| is quite the bold call.
| rappatic wrote:
| Yeah, right. And replace them with whom?
| samrus wrote:
| Im not a musk fanboy or anything but who can do better? Its
| dangerous to support a monopoly but if one provider is far ahead
| of the others then it makes sense to just use that. How much of
| these delays are due to spacex and how much are just the inherent
| variance of the task
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