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.
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!”
My first job out of law school was at a 176 year old law firm. New lawyers were socialized to identify with the past achievements of the firm, like helping J.P. Morgan build the railroads. There was a good reason for that: it socializes people to adhere to a culture and practices that have proven to be effective.
You’re right that, if overdone, it can lead to complacency. But if you treat every generation as a blank slate, you abandon the valuable capital of experience.
Rail pioneered modern financial scams. I say modern because before that there were similar schemes in other areas like trade expeditions but the historical and written records on those are less complete and recent
America cannot possibly win the space race again, because it has already been won.
This is sort of like saying Leif Erikson and the Icelandic Commonwealth won the "the new world race" in 1000AD. Whatever Columbus et al were up to would surely be of trifling concern to future generations.
The space race was not a scientific endeavor either. It was driven by a political need.
It was to prove that your economic system could muster the correct machinery to get to the moon. Once we got to the moon, nothing significantly changed scientifically, but politically it was a bombshell.
The act of getting the moon now is, once again, not a scientific endeavor. It is once again a holistic test of whether the country still can do it.
And from the looks at it, maybe not. America is not all aligned like we were during the Cold War. Then again, the stakes during the Cold War seems higher.
It’s more about establishing a permanent base or some operational capacity, not allowing China to dominate that aspect.
And yes, it’s probably also about certain aspects of anxiety and probably some panic about the prospect of American decline after so many decades of squandering everything and letting itself both be bled dry and run off a cliff by a subversive element within.
> 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.
In the sense that we don't need to do either, that's true. But if we want to claim we're still competent moon landers, we do need to repeat the task every once in a while to keep that capability. And there are good scientific benefits from continuing to do difficult space launches of many types.
It's not even clear the USA "won" the space race. America was first (and last) to land men on the moon, but arguably the USSR had far more space-related "firsts" than the US.
Landing on the moon only become the end-all-be-all when the US achieved it and the USSR could not (for various reasons).
first satellite? all sputnik could do was beep, and it ran out of batteries in three weeks.
first animal? laika died.
first station? there were two attempts to crew it -- the first failed to dock and everyone on the second mission fucking died. the soyuz 11 crew remain the only human deaths in space.
first *naut? yuri gagarin didn't even have manual controls.
Failing fast is easier when lives are valued cheaply. “If it’s not failing, you’re not pushing hard enough.”
You are selecting goalposts that suit your team, and being disrespectful of the USSR (presumably because you don't want to acknowledge their successes).
But Apple didn't recreate the same mobile handset as Motorola or anybody else. There is very little value or scientific benefit in going back to the moon within the parameters of this mission; it's literally "do the same thing again".
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. Yes, yes, Cold War and all those theories. But it had and can again have this greater effect.
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.
It succeeded in the 60s because we didn't just focus attention, we focused a LOT OF MONEY on it. In comparison, today's NASA has a meager budget which has only been further slashed by the current administration.
I would love to see the kind of investment in NASA we had during the 60s. The scientific advancements were staggering. Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.
This is a common misconception. The total amount spent on the Apollo program over its 13 year time span (1960-1973) was $25.8 billion in 1973 dollars, or around $240 billion inflation adjusted. [1] That's around $18.5 billion per year, distributed on a bell curve. NASA reached it's minimum post-apollo budget in 1978 at $21.3 billion per year! Their current budget is $25.4 billion. [2] So based on current (and historic spending) NASA could have been constantly doing Apollo level programs, on loop, as a 'side gig' and still have plenty of money for other things.
The modern argument is that we spend less as a percent of the federal budget, but it's mostly nonsensical. The government having more money available has nothing to do with the amount of money being spent on NASA or any other program. It's precisely due to this luxury that we've been able to keep NASA's budget so high in spite of them achieving nothing remotely on the scale of the Apollo program in the 50+ years since it was ended.
The big problem is that after Nixon defacto ended the human space program (largely because he feared that an accident might imperil his reelection chances), NASA gradually just got turned into a giant pork project. They have a lot of money but it's mostly wasted on things that people know aren't going anywhere or are otherwise fundamentally flawed, exactly like Artemis and the SLS.
Technological progress should allow us to repeat ancient feats for cheaper.
True excellence in engineering is being able to do amazing things within a limited budget.
(And overall, sending some primates to the moon should come out of our entertainment budgets. Manned space flight has been one giant money sink without much too show for. If you want to do anything scientifically useful in space, go for unmanned.
> Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.
Huh? You remember the cold war? The US spends less of its total income on weapons and warfare than back then. Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.)
> Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.
Note that if you attribute interest for military-related debt to military spending(roughly 40-50% of our interest payments) then it ends up climbing in the ranking. But it’s true that we have other major expenses as well.
Apollo was much better value for money. It inspired generations to study and enter STEM fields, it gave us multitudes of technological advances, and it gave the entire world something to marvel at. It gave us the earthrise image, which fueled the environmental movement. What has "AI" inspired? What marvels will the enshittificatement of googling, or the latest deepfake garbage bestow upon us? If "AI" is our moonshot we're all well and truly fucked.
For what it's worth military research projects also come up with plenty of scientific advancements and the military also is doing things in space, including things they have had up there for years without explaining the purpose of.
Excellent point! I'd add that it also serves to inspire regular people and get them interested in science.
Unfortunately, I think that's the problem with some of the rhetoric like "the green revolution will be the next space race!" For better or worse, solar panels aren't as inspiring to most people as space is.
A lot of money and time were behind the space race propaganda arm that got people excited about advancements in space technology.
If the same resources were put into popularizing advancements in energy, you'd see more excitement. As it is, there are kids growing up excited about environmentalism like there were kids growing up excited about space.
Nah. You can argue that the goal "land on the moon" is artificial, but it being artificial doesn't make it fake or abstract. If you're the first to achieve it then you're the first, and that's it. What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new.
Now, if you're not able to repeat it at all, that does say something. But if it takes you a few years longer, well, so what? It's not a race anymore, because it's already been won, by the US of fifty years ago.
The winner of the race to Mars is still undecided, though.
It feels arbitrary to decide we can’t have a Space Race 2 (Space Harder) but we have Olympics every two years and Super Bowls and World Series and all that every year.
I’ve got to assume I’m misunderstanding the objection because it feels ridiculous to overstir the oxygen over semantics. Do we just need to call it Space Race 2?
A space race isn't a sport, it's a technological and scientific challenge. You can't invent the same technology twice, unless the idea is completely forgotten.
Also unlike sports, space races are massively expensive and it's untenable to forever go from one to the next.
Well, you could try to raise the challenge. Eg do it on a limited budget, or establish a permanent base, etc.
However I agree that manned space flight is a giant money pit with not much to show for. It should come out of our entertainment budget, not eat into our science budget.
The space race was not just about inventing, though. It was about doing.
You can do the same thing twice, and you can also lose the ability to do something.
The ability to do the thing is what is really being maintained and demonstrated.
Every country has the technology to go to the moon - it's well established now. But who can actually make it happen? That's a huge organizational, human, financial, industrial challenge. And people do notice when only one country can do it.
Yeah, I already covered that when I said that if you're not able to do it at all it does say something.
>But who can actually make it happen? That's a huge organizational, human, financial, industrial challenge. And people do notice when only one country can do it.
On the other side of the coin, it's such a huge expense just for bragging rights, that for any country it's not worth undertaking. It's much more preferable to just give the appearance that you could totally do it if you wanted to, but you just don't feel like it. I'd argue that the US is currently failing at this, but until anyone else flies a manned mission to the moon, it doesn't say anything.
> What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new.
Despite you throwing the word "obviously" at it, that is an extremely untrue claim. Even if we hadn't forgotten a lot of the details, we're solving new engineering challenges with modern material science and manufacturing, and learning a lot of new things about spacecraft design. There is a ton of invention in doing another landing after so long.
What I said was that you didn't have to invent anything new. And yeah, that is obvious. If you've already figured out how to build a Saturn V, to build a second one you just do the same steps you did for the first one. You don't have to use new techniques just because new ones exist.
But even as stated, I don't think your argument holds up. "What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new."
Even if it was technically possible to not invent anything new, that path is not going to be taken. It would be even more expensive and worse in every way. Nobody is going to launch a rocket with just 60s/70s technology ever again. A new moon launch will have lots of invention and learning, and claiming we can still do it does need proof.
Like I said, you didn't have to invent anything new. In this case you put yourself in the awkward situation of having to reinvent the wheel by your own incompetence. So if you actually do do it, what have you proven?
>It would be even more expensive and worse in every way.
Worse and more expensive than what? The only rocket that has flown men to the moon is Saturn V. What exactly are you comparing it to?
Let me make this point very clear with no distractions:
The "you're certainly not learning anything new" argument only works if we do reuse old techniques. "You don't have to invent anything new" is not sufficient to support the argument.
> Worse and more expensive than what?
Trying to reinvent old techniques and rebuild a bunch of machines and factories that used those techniques would be worse than inventing new things. You'd have to deliberately choose to not learn anything and to waste extra money in pursuit of that choice.
> The only rocket that has flown men to the moon is Saturn V. What exactly are you comparing it to?
We don't have a time machine, so the contenders are "2020s rocket with techniques invented before 1970" or "2020s rocket with techniques invented before 2030".
> So if you actually do do it, what have you proven?
If you actually do it, in a reasonable way, then in addition to the inventions and learning and any proof to do with that, you prove you can go to the moon, because saying "oh of course we can, we could use the old method" is not a particularly strong claim as industries change and workers retire over the course of more than half a century.
It’s a new race and a new contender and the simple premise is, what once was the US is now China, the country capable of bringing men to the moon. That position is open at the moment
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.
SpaceX exists because of commercial resupply but that was still a good deal for the government since it was cheaper than the shuttles or buying extra Soyuz cargo launches.
I don't know. I also don't know why that is relevant. Just because a business is selling a good or service to the government doesn't mean it's not competitive, dominant, efficient or really anything.
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.
I mean, falcon 9 reusability is a decent example, if 13 years from work starts to reusability is proven commercially viable counts as a long term business plan.
The private space industry doesn't belong to the US, it belongs to the billionaires.
We might even be better to have no one advancing space travel than to have only the billionaires doing it. At least then they can't find some way to use it to screw us over.
America of Theseus is a great phrase, quite apt for describing "the American Experiment" and the numerous ways America reinvents itself. but I don't see how this usage of it provides any discernable meaning. Ship of Theseus is more a question than an answer, so saying "America of Theseus, therefore 1969 or any connection to it is irrelevant" doesn't follow.
I think it’s apt because the Ship of Theseus as a thought experiment is unanswerable. It’s both. It’s neither.
America does keep reinventing itself. It has few of the same parts as before, but it still resembles some concept of “America” in many ways. In that way it is the same ship.
But is it the same ship? Can it win a space race today that a previous manifestation of America could? Maybe it’s not the same ship and what it could do in the 60s it can no longer do today.
I certainly don’t think it’s a question that demands an answer. Perfectly valid to choose not to show up to the starting line. But having run that race under the same banner generations ago doesn’t tell us much about the America today.
My comment is borderline off topic, but I just can leave it at that. Sorry.
> I think it’s apt because the Ship of Theseus as a thought experiment is unanswerable.
It is answerable, you just need to go meta a little. You can argue that the Ship of Theseus doesn't exist (and didn't existed) because it is just a lot of wood. You can use reductionism further and say that wood doesn't exist, it is a bunch of atoms or quarks or whatever. The ship is just a leaky abstraction people are forced use because of their cognitive limitations. But if it is an abstraction, not a "real" thing, then I see no issues with the ship existing (in a limited sense) even after it changed all the atoms it consists of.
The other approach is to declare that a ship is not a thing, but a process. Like you do when talking about people, who change their atoms all the time, but they still keep they identity in a "magical" way. If you see people as a process, then it doesn't matter how often it replaces its matter with another matter. Like a tornado, which exists while exchanging matter with environment all the time and still being the same tornado. Or like a wave on a water surface, it doesn't have any atoms moving like a wave, but still a wave exists.
> It has few of the same parts as before, but it still resembles some concept of “America” in many ways.
It doesn't matter if there any old parts left, what matters is a continuous history.
> But is it the same ship?
It is the same ship, but its properties are changing over time. Like when people become older, some of them become wiser for example, some become physically weaker.
> But having run that race under the same banner generations ago doesn’t tell us much about the America today.
Yeah, with this I can fully agree. BTW we don't know was the Ship of Theseus becoming better or worse after repairs, but I'd bet that its maximum speed was changing due to repairs.
I agree with what you are saying, but feel that the original usage (above) had a POV, as if that POV was in keeping with the thought experiment. (now, any POV is in keeping from a thought experiment, but it cannot be said except in extremis to follow from the thought experiment
> 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.
>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?
> 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
The whole point of this article, and the NASA admin steps to open up the contract and all of Berger’s recent reporting is that it’s almost a certainty China will beat the US back to the moon.
It is already too bad that the US's plan to get to the moon was so flawed that it has been delayed again and again and money was wasted.
Let's imagine that China puts people on the moon next year in a method similar to the way the US did it in 1969 (but probably better in some ways). They still are mostly doing something that has been done before by the USA.
In that same year, the USA will probably continue to launch 80% of the rockets to space. Maybe we don't do our next trip to the moon for another five years. But there's good chance by then we will be using much more advanced and reusable rockets. Does that really make the US behind?
I want to see us invest more into space exploration. I think its sad that NASA's plan has been dumb. But getting two or three people to the moon is more about showing that China is capable (which is a very reasonable goal for them) then showing they have some long term advantage.
Personally, I think it matters whether its achieved by a private company versus by society. That's especially the case when the private company is so closely tied to someone who hates and alienates so much of society. I don't think that I could view a win for Musk as a win for anything that looks like my chunk of the US.
There's also the fact that part of NASA's mission is to share their knowledge with the public.
>Personally, I think it matters whether its achieved by a private company versus by society.
How exactly are you making the distinction? Space-X wouldn't exist without governemnt funding. CATL sells launches to commercial entities as well as servicing the government.
Official ownership? Because China seems to think a lot of what Space-X is doing can only be accomplished by the commercial sector and is funding startups in China to do the same thing.
> China seems to think a lot of what Space-X is doing can only be accomplished by the commercial sector and is funding startups in China to do the same thing.
That's how China's been running their economy for decades. Every few years, the government sets a direction everyone should row in, and generally lets private firms figure out which one of them will get there fastest.
> Personally, I think it matters whether its achieved by a private company versus by society.
People appreciate German cars just fine, and no one seems to be particularly bothered that they are produced by workers in private sector companies instead of 'by society'. Whatever that even means.
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.
To me, a significant part of the value presented by space exploration is the way that it inspires society. I think that whatever else we would do instead would need to be equally inspiring. Honestly, I can't really think of something comparable.
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.
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.
The goal could be simply to learn how to do it again, since almost everyone who actually has done it--on any level, be it engineering, management, manufacturing, flight crew, ground crew, etc--is dead. That's a totally worthwhile exercise if it's actually a serious goal to explore further.
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).
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.
I’ll give you an example: the technology in the Instrument Unit on the Saturn V, which was the computer that controlled the Saturn V during launch, was largely derived from System/360. By technology here I mean things like the Unit Logic Devices (ULDs) out of which the logic boards in the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) were made. No surprise, I suppose, given that it was contracted to IBM’s Federal Systems Division.
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.
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.
Artemis II is not on the pad. It's in the VAB, and it isn't stacked yet (source: my sister's an engineer with NASA Exploration Ground Support and is one of the people in charge of assembling it).
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]
If Luna is a textbook then we’ve read the section headings for chapter 15 of 43 and stolen half a page by ripping it out and taking it home. Oh and that’s just Volume I. There’s a whole Volume II (The Far Side) for which we’ve barely even read the sleeve notes.
In terms of field geology alone, we deserve permanent human presence on The Moon. Apollo was an impressive first shot but it is completely unrealistic to act like we know anything more than one percent of one percent about Moon’s geology. They nailed the flat bits on the marine side, but you’d laugh at someone who claimed they knew Earth’s geology after a few weeks in Buenos Aires, Houston, and Miami:
Who will be woken up by the first moonquake? Who will visit the first mooncaves? Who will find the first water-based anomaly — some kind of periodic waterfall maybe, in a heat trap that warms up one day a year? Who will see the first solar eclipse?
IIUC there are few "prime" locations on the moon. NASA publicly named 13 specific candidate regions.
The nations will will likely use "safety zones" to exclude others from their base of operations. We'll see the radius of these zones but expect 200m - 2km for a start.
There is a reason to think that there is a race. Without very advanced automation all of this is pointless, but I am willing to wager that many think that advanced automation will occur within a short timeframe.
That’s an upper-stage issue — I was talking about the booster (1st stage). A conventional stage could be placed on top, complete with a traditional abort system and/or something like what Dragon uses.
> 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.
National pride has long been tightly coupled to seafaring capabilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship) "Richly decorated as a symbol of the king's ambitions for Sweden and himself, upon completion she was one of the most powerfully armed vessels in the worl"
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.
I'm not sure which company you're referring to here but I do here this claim a lot about SpaceX and while i'm anti-rent-seeking I don't see SpaceX as a rent-seeking company. Yes it has gotten some grants to develop particular programs and promises from the US government to buy services but all up we're talking about (IIRC) $10-20 billion.
We just gave $40 billion to Argentina for pretty much no reason whatsoever.
Now the US government has spent a whole lot more on SpaceX but they're buying services.
SpaceX is an incredible bargain compared to the alternatives like ULA.
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).
See the grandparent's comment about global supply chains. Everyone requires everyone else in those industries, no one does it all on their own.
I posit that software has no such supply chain dependency, literally anyone can do it, and thinking the US is unique in their ability to produce software isn't accurate.
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.
You'll need to launch more mass to get there but the technology isn't really any more complicated. It's also a more hospitable environment (reasonable gravity, day/night cycle, some atmosphere, water, etc.)
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 ?.
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.
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.
There was an attempt made to get to the moon which ended in the late 60s as people realized it would be impossible, and the decision was made to fake it to save face. Instead, the missions were filmed with extremely sophisticated simulators built for training for the real mission. The radiation environment halfway between the Earth and the Moon is highly hazardous. The constant background radiation from galactic cosmic rays is 2-4 times higher than what astronauts experience on the ISS and hundreds of times higher than on Earth. This poses a significant health risk. Finally, it is obvious that the lunar lander is a complete joke if you look closely. The longer you look the worse it gets. The builders of the second lunar lander scrapped large amounts of documentation and the lander itself because they "needed warehouse space." One of the most important tools used in one of the most important achievements in human history was scrapped "to make room in a warehouse." Please. I am hopeful that one day SpaceX will land the first man on the moon. It will be very painful because they can't claim to be the actual first people on the moon without tremendous reputational damage to the United States.
It would have made them a laughing stock and the prospect of future cooperation would have been slammed shut. It would have made the USSR seem like sore losers. They were already public enemy number one thanks to the media PR machine. The Russians have been cooperating with the USA and ESA for many years on LEO missions, culminating in the successful ISS project.
Lots of people complaining that we have already won the "moon race" and that this makes no sense. This is a completely wrong reading of the situation.
Let's say we forgot how to do heart transplants. Once we did them a few times perfectly, got all surgical techniques right, but patients died shortly after the surgery due to rejection. We quit the whole transplants stuff for years, the techniques and the equipments were lost over time. But then, some 40 years later, we now knew a lot more about immunology, have incredibly advanced drugs, and an aging population. So, because of that, we decided to develop the surgical procedure techniques, long-lost, again.
This is a good analogy for the situation. The moon is an important milestone for further commercial and scientific exploration of the space. We lost the ability we once had to reach it. And anyway, we were not as ready as we are today to follow the next logical steps. If we manage to harvest water from moon ice now, we will be establishing the basis for a kind of serious exploration and development that we weren't nearly ready to achieve in the past.
So, no, we are not doing it just to prove "we haven't lost our mojo", for bragging rights. We are doing it because we are in a development stage where it makes sense to finally return to the moon.
Your example does not support your argument. Unlike heart surgery, there hasn't been a major shift in what we could do if we went back, and more exploration probably won't change the commercial or military prospects of the moon.
You know what else has real world economic consequences? Dead astronauts.
I'm all for reinvigorating the global economy with a resurgence in scientific investment, but it only works if we do it patiently. China understands that, the CCP is quite capable of national planning that transcends administrations. You can't force a moon landing like it's a political OKR, if you do then you better have a pretty solid Plan B considering the amount of risk it represents.
This dismissal is quite shallow. Yes, it matters politically - but that has enormous downstream repercussions. China beating us to the Moon helps reinforce the narrative that the American century of global dominance is over, and China is the new superpower that is unseating it. The implications of that would go well beyond politics.
~$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.
I don't know how you can claim a deadline that was achieved was not realistic.
Full stack testing was not cutting corners. After ground testing it was deemed that incremental testing would not be beneficial. Doing tasks in parallel instead of in series can introduce project risks, but that's not the same thing as cutting corners, which is where something necessary is not done at all.
I am not a supermodel, I don't have the looks for it. But for everyone who has become a supermodel, it was most certainly realistic that they could become supermodels. If you have what it takes to accomplish a task, accomplishing the task is realistic. That's what the term realistic means.
Full stack testing was testing the entire rocket at the same time instead of using dummy stages to test parts of the rocket separately. There was opposition to it because if the rocket failed it might be difficult to diagnose why exactly it failed, which would slow the project down in the long run. Based on the ground testing and advances in instrumentation, the risk of a project delay from a failure was considered acceptable. It still took multiple launches to man rate the rockets. There's a reason the first manned launch of the Saturn V was Apollo 8.
Would you have gone up on that first manned Saturn launch? Not me. Recall how the space shuttle was safe, until it blew up. And then it was safe again, and broke up on reentry.
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?
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?
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!
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.
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.
Deadlines, 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.
Charles Lindbergh knew his chances of dying crossing the Atlantic were pretty high. After all, previous attempts resulted in many deaths.
Armstrong's personal estimate of his odds getting back alive were about 50%.
Apollo 13 came within a hair of killing its crew.
I fly across the North Atlantic at 30,000 feet, death in seconds if the hull is breached, in a comfortable chair, watching a movie and sipping a drink. Isn't that incredible? I still find it amazing.
But I know that was achieved through the loss of many, many lives.
Crucially, American's typically don't die from commercial flight every day.
It's also entirely reasonable as an American to discount Polio / Ebola and a lot of other stuff that' aren't an issue for them. It doesn't mean that worldwide they aren't a problem. But historically, we've had systems to ensure these things aren't problems so when they become problems its newsworthy.
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.
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?
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.
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.
My theory is they are shooting for an unmanned mission that allows immersive 3D 8K VR telepresence. Then they'll auction time slots to anyone who wants to golf on the moon.
Yes, but the program was started under his predecessor Eisenhower (a Republican) and "the end of the decade" was beyond the end of a hypothetical second term. The timeline was arbitrary and political - probably set primarily to beat the Soviets - but not self-serving.
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."
Deaths are always terrible. But unless we have a reason to only care about astronauts specifically, once we zoom out to the entire massive endeavor and how much everyone sacrifices for any big project, three particular deaths aren't a big factor and don't do much to say if we went too fast or too slow.
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.
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?
It is not even "if" they should be funding these activities.... it is whether the public would "support" funding these activities, if there was a trail of deaths.
JFK did the same thing. Most people believe that succeeded. Obtuse, out-of-touch leadership can lead to some very interesting results when it doesn’t fail.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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).
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?
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.
And they abandoned it to try to eliminate the need for a heat shield. This plan did not pan out.
The whole point of a reusable launch system is the cost of the vehicle is amortized over many launches, so you can use expensive, high performance materials.
> [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?
Well in the drawing analogy, they picked stainless steel while they were still trying to draw a sparrow.
Stainless steel was specifically chosen so that starship wouldn't need a heat shield and would survive re-entry with transpiration cooling. This would save substantial weight and make rapid reusability easy. The problem is that after designing starship around the stainless steel construction, they found that the transpiration cooling system wasn't workable, so now they have a stainless steel hull and a heat shield.
Further, I do not believe the drawbacks of stainless steel were fully appreciated at the time. Stainless steel on paper looks like it has better strength to weight ratio than aluminum, especially at the cryogenic temperatures of starship's fuel tanks. However a steel tank wall with the same strength as an aluminum wall is much thinner and so you wind up with different failure modes, namely buckling. In practice, a rocket made from steel is heavier than a rocket made from aluminum. This was why the Atlas rockets used stainless steel but subsequent rockets switched to aluminum in the first place.
Additionally, at the time much hooplah was made about stainless steel being cheaper and more formable which would reduce production costs. This is just nonsense. Stainless steel is expensive and tough to work with, which is why we don't use it for creating large structures despite its desirable material properties. It may be favorable compared to titanium, which was likely the only other option when transpiration cooling was the game plan, but for the current design aluminum would be far cheaper in addition to being lighter.
Now I'm sure SpaceX did some analysis after the transpiration cooling didn't work out and asked whether it made sense to start the design over and retool everything instead of continuing on with the stainless steel, and they decided at the time no. Since then they have had several further setbacks. The increased weight required them to reduce safety features, which may have contributed to some of its earlier losses. Starship has had to grow considerably and increase thrust to accommodate for these shortcomings. Would SpaceX have made the same decision to continue with the stainless with the benefit of hindsight? I can't say. But with the exception of a few chinese startups trying to carbon copy starship, other rocket manufacturers have not adopted stainless steel, likely with good reason.
Your comment mixes a few kernels of truth with incorrect premises, false information and wild speculation.
>> Stainless steel was specifically chosen so that starship wouldn't need a heat shield and would survive re-entry with transpiration cooling.
Not really, no. When SpaceX switched to stainless steel in 2019, Musk simultaneously described using ceramic hex tiles on the windward side. They showed hex-tile testing publicly in March 2019. Tiles were not an afterthought added later because transpiration "failed". Musk did initially discuss transpiration/regenerative cooling concepts for hot spots (stuff like a double wall, or fluid-cooled steel skin) but this was framed as in addition to tiles, not as a full replacement.
>> Additionally, at the time much hooplah was made about stainless steel being cheaper and more formable which would reduce production costs. This is just nonsense.
It is not. In 2019, carbon fiber was $135/kg with 35% scrap (so effective cost was $200/kg) vs. $3/kg for stainless steel. That's a two orders of magnitude difference in raw materials.
300-series stainless (301/304L) is widely used precisely because it is formable (301 work-hardens to high strength) and readily weldable (304L). That doesn't make it effortless but it's still much easier to work with than aerospace aluminum-lithium, which requires specialized friction-stir welding and tight process control.
>> The increased weight required them to reduce safety features
This is just conjecture. There's no evidence that Starship has reduced safety features to compensate for stainless steel + heat shield weight.
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.
>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.
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.
Not sure if any of my anecdata when I was a contractor are relevant anymore given current circumstances,
but among all the NASA facilities I worked with, JPL really seemed to be doing its own thing, mostly for better. They were a bit quirky to work with though, because they did seem to do so much more in-house than elsewhere.
So I don't know if it's that independence or their zip code that has made them such a target, but I wonder if it has been that they have less political capital from moneyed interests keeping them off the chopping block.
But any gutting of JPL is probably irreplaceable damage.
Yes, this. And the reason why congressional appropriations plummeted was that no one saw any need to maintain such high expenditures. There hasn’t been an actually coherent vision of what NASA is supposed to be working towards since the Apollo Program. Everything after that is lurching from one project to another, justifying it based on short-term possibility rather than committing to a longer-term goal the agency is supposed to be achieving. Just look at Shuttle. It accomplished some nice things, but it was always a dead end. Everybody in NASA knew it. ISS: accomplished some nice things, dead end. Sure, you can talk about how these were steps along the way to learning about long-term human habitation in space, but we’ve never had a coherent vision for that that everyone is aligned with. What they really were: make-work projects that were at least short-term justifiable, executed in order to preserve NASA’s capacity to do anything at all.
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?
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).
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.
Well for starters, this was the 70s - the space shuttle's development started in 1968 and its maiden flight was in 1981. The last spy satellite program to use film ran from 1971 to 1986. Further, the issue wasn't a lack of knowledge of TV signals - the first wireless video transmission had been made in 1923. The issue was producing digital video cameras of sufficient quality for the task in an appropriate size, and then transmitting such large files to the ground. Nobody in 1968 foresaw the massive improvements in digital electronics miniaturization that would unfold over the coming decades.
Rather than "very late to use tv" they were "very early to use CCDs". Even so that only happened in the 1980s. Before that film had to be used, same as we all had to use film for our holiday snaps until 2000.
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.
I'd say material science since the only non-ablative material we can use is too brittle compared to a normal fuselage. I really hope they succeed but it's a pretty fundamental problem to have unanswered this deep into the program development (and gating Artemis no less). Also hard to judge their progress without the data their heat shield team is getting, see https://x.com/mcrs987/status/1978183753114505496 for example. It's great that they can tolerate loss of vehicle & have better margins due to the steel fuselage but for Artemis and Mars they need to solve it or they'll be burning up hardware fast, literally.
SpaceX uses flight proven boosters. The rockets aren't quite as gigantic nor as single-shot as the Saturn V. Also, they launch satellites into LEO for commercial reasons. It's quite a different beast from lobbing LEMs at the moon where the money is essentially lit on fire.
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.
> NASA regresses so far that they are now unable to do anything by themselves
they handed lots of space exploration stages to private industries, companies like spaceX got decades worth of knowledge exchange and access to nasa facilities.
Somehow people with no skin in the game shout the most stupid things these days.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2030 is just a little over 4 years away. They have a lot of hardware to develop and test. It takes time to develop good hardware, as the US is also realizing (again). It was about 7 years between the first flight test of any Apollo related vehicle and Apollo 11.
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).
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.
> 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.
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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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 ??
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).
> 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 revëvaluate.
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.
I'm not sure what are talking about. I don't like giving contracts to SpaceX because they are the right kind of people, I like it because they tend to deliver faster and at less cost with something more modern and more future looking.
While on the contrary Boieng and friends try to use old tech they have in their archive to slap togetehr a minimal viable product to meet the requirment.
But the contract structure changes is not about giving contract to SpaceX only. Its about developing a space industry. And this has worked extremely well. Commercial cargo resulted in Falcon 9, Antares rockets. Antares team is now working with the Firefly startup for a next generation rocket. Clearly not as successful as Falcon, but without Falcon on the market it might have delivered differently.
It also produce Cargo Dragon and Cygnus. Both have seen a lot of further development since then and have all kinds of uses.
You can also look at CLIPS for moon landers, where some companies at small budgets have managed to build landers. And even those that weren't successful, training a lot of people on deep space probes.
If you comapre the explosion of the space industry since Commercial Cargo to the stgantion in the Shuttle/Constellation area you will see why many space fans are so in favor of the new model. And the amazing thing is, that a tiny fraction of the money was spent on the non-Shuttle/Constellation/SLS part.
In fact, I did the math and the total spend on just development of Constellation/SLS/Orion is going toward 200 billion $ over the last 25 years. And that is without actually delivering anything meaningful.
In comparison the complete development budget of Commercial Cargo was a few billion $ at most, and it has revolutionized the US space industry. The complete spend on all Commerical Cargo, Commercial Crew and Lunar development more like 20 billion $. And the impact is just hilariously larger.
Seems fairly obious what the way forward is, its just politically not feasable. As long as 50% of NASA discretionary budget is spent on ISS and Shuttle-derived stuff that will never be forward looking, you are playing the game with a hand tied behind your back and cement shoes.
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.
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
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.
> * I'm not seeing what makes SpaceX government funded beyond just that it provides services to the government*
Take away all of SpaceX‘s government contracts. You imagine SpaceX would still be in business?
As you said, every launch provider is basically dependent on government contracts to stay in business because the government is the only entity that has a legitimate need for launch capability such that it’s willing to pay for its development. There are no sufficiently profitable private contracts out there to sustain a launch provider.
Duffy and Isaacman are fighting to be head of NASA. This is that fight spilling from Washington over the weekend onto Twitter today because of course it has with this administration.
Duffy, as acting head of NASA, is trying to lob a threat at Musk, Isaacman’s patron. He’s done so poorly, and so here we are.
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.
This is Destin of SmarterEveryDay. This is a very good speech, very courageous and has implications for all of society.
American society seems to be more and more controlled by people in positions where they cannot fail. The example that originally put this idea in my head was the Mozilla CEO who, oversaw a year during which Firefox usership fell, and Mozilla workers were fired, and then the CEO received a pay raise. A job where it's not possible to fail. You get paid no matter what, probably get a raise.
In the video Destin keeps asking "we're going right?", throughout the whole video, and the truth is everyone in the room is hesitant to say yes.
Destin keeps narrating and apologizing for his own speech (because he doesn't want to burn every bridge he has with NASA), but history will make Destin look like a prophet I think. I think this speech is worthy of the history books.
Really? It’s eye opening. But Destin seems to miss the point.
We’re not trying to go back to the Moon, one and done. That was Apollo. We’re trying to build a system that reduces the repeat cost of Moon access, with medium-term plans for permanent settlement. (Like in Antarctica. Not The Expanse.)
His criticism of Artemis is on point. But his anchoring to Apollo is bewilderingly blind. If we’re just redoing Apollo, the programme should be defunded. (If a NASA administrator set that as a goal, I’d argue the NASA manned spaceflight programme might need to be overhauled.)
> everyone in the room is hesitant to say yes
This is like Trump complaining his generals won’t laugh at his jokes.
These are senior NASA scientists. They’re listening to a talk, not a rally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's like bolting new wings on a 777 after every flight. It's going to cost a LOT and you won't be able to just load up fuel/passengers and take off again.
I'm sure SpaceX will eventually fix the problem. They are well funded, the materials exist, and they have amazing engineers. They just haven't reached that point yet.
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.
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.
Starship (the upper stage) can launch from Mars and bring humans back to Earth. The problem is that they need a lot of propellant to do this, and they can't bring that much from Earth. Their current plan is to generate it on Mars, which requires complex infrastructure built by unmanned missions. A simpler approach could be developing a smaller ascent vehicle:
If there is water ice there, as suspected, it is the most realistic path to a self sustaining space economy. If you can earn money in space, there is a reason for people to work in space, and you can extend the economy into space.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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...
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
I think the main problem for Starship is that they need to do a large number of tanker launches (about 20 I believe) in a timeframe in which the propellant in the LEO depot doesn't boil off. I assume they need to develop some good sun shielding for that. 20 launches could take quite a long time (multiple months? a year?) since it will probably take quite a few years till Starship, especially the upper stage, is rapidly reusable. They can't wait that long with Artemis 3, with Sean Duffy adding pressure.
On launches, it's conceivable that they can do the launches in 20 days if they do one a day. I ignore reusability, because I don't see it as required to meet the need.
They're known for moving fast, and they're building multiple pads. They're also building enormous mass manufacturing facilities in the background of all this (Gigabay and whatever). Not sure how many ships they'll be able to produce per month once the design is nailed down, but I'll bet it will surprise everyone.
SH Boosters are already effectively reusable for the purposes of this discussion; a couple of them have already re-flown. That's half the battle right there.
Boiloff prevention is presumably one of the main modifications needed for the depot. I think it's supposed to be easier with methalox than with hydrolox (which BO is using), but I have no idea the particulars of what they'll have to do there to achieve effectiveness. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if they try to cut that corner at least once; should be interesting.
The big risk that I see is neither launch nor boiloff, but rather simple fuel availability. Can they get that much methane and LOX shipped around the country that fast? I have no idea, but it seems concerning to me. Logistics...
Thing about the deadline, though, is who's going to do it faster? Blue has worse issues with their current crewed lander proposal. Nobody else has even started on one AFAIK.
My prediction is that nobody can build and fully qualify a safe moon lander with a more or less clean-sheet design in three years.
On the other hand, I can easily see Starship succeeding in a moon landing in three or four years if things go well with V3 and the refuelling research. It's a stretch -- things aren't likely to go completely smoothly -- but it's conceivable.
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.
Yes! I'm disappointed I had to scroll down so far to see this. The CNN headline isn't even accurate. The actual NASA statement is:
> "I’m going to open up the contract. I’m going to let other space companies compete with SpaceX."
SpaceX is behind schedule, but still years ahead of its competitors. No one is even in the same ballpark on the main metric that ultimately matters: dollars per kilogram to orbit. The main effect of this NASA statement, or of NASA sending a few dollars to SpaceX's competitors, is to give SpaceX a kick in the pants.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Elon's predictions are usually very late, but they do happen. Falcon 9 landings, self driving vehicles, etc... Later than predicted, but they happened.
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.
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?
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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, reëntry and reüse. 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
(explodes before it can reach)SpaceX is just as rushed as Boeing is.
I wouldn't trust Sean Duffy to successfully watch paint dry, let alone anything space related.
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.
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
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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).
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps. I am doing my best to stay emotionally detached from this topic and maintain a balanced view, and very open to reasoned arguments and being wrong.
Hacker News is one of the last places I feel comfortable engaging in this way, and not always (sometimes I step on a land mine and get surprised), but if it's not here, I don't know where else to go, and that feels like a shame.
I don't care much about the points, so long as I can keep engaging. So I do my best to follow the guidelines and have faith in the moderation to keep me and others in check, even if sometimes I slip up or encounter what seems like an unfair reaction.
To censor myself from being inquisitive or rationally explore a sensitive topic in a place like this just feels too dystopian for me to accept.
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)
A conspiracy assumes secret cooperation, and I am not making any claim like that. I am merely pointing out that Elon has position himself as a rival against a lot of rich and powerful people. Rather than speculate on the specific arbitrary political reason, it might be mostly because of the underlying pressure or general anti-Elon baseline effect (and to attribute it to something more specific is a form of baseline or base rate neglect).
And to your point about him spending more money then the rest combined, maybe, he did spend a lot on twitter, but I don't think any of us can actually know how much all those people are spending. It might be closer than you think. Also the anti-Elon media brigade started long before he bought twitter, it just wasn't focused on the general public, it was focused on amateur investors.
it's really just a massive sign of disrespect, clearly there's no one capable of competing with spacex, who is already known for beating deadlines, but they insist on insulting them like this
why?
"it's 10 years from now and they're behind schedule", what kind of schedule is this?
Musk ... decided to respond by posting a meme of a reporter saying, “Why are you gay?” ... He called Duffy “Sean Dummy” ... Musk posted a reality TV clip calling him an “a*s rocket”
"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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
Tangent but while the joint strike fighter program's decision to "save costs" by developing one platform for three branches may arguably have been a bad idea, by all respects except for perhaps long term maintenance costs the f35 is the most effective fighter in the skies.
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> 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?
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?
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.
His rapidly deteriorating market share in Europe and basically anything cybertruck related
>SpaceX
The contract they had that just reopened for bidding
>neuralink
Haven’t they stopped human trials because they were running into serious issues? I feel like I read something about that but I can’t recall the exact nature of the issue.
>starlink
Pretty sure the Canadian government abandoned their big contract with starlink. A cursory Google search shows that “several governments and organizations have paused or canceled their contracts.” AI summary so should probably be investigated more in depth but I imagine it’s largely accurate.
I see that his hyperloop company didn’t make the list, which went belly up just a year or two ago.
Robotaxi was shut down in Phoenix after all sorts of safety issues arose.
Several major projects have stalled or been shut down over the last few years.
Starlink is changing the world, airlines, cruises, rural areas and defeated Russian interference in Ukraine. They lost contracts in Canada due to short sited political motivations who were willing to waste 3 times as much tax payer funds because of it. Starlink is doing great.
Glad to see neuralink is working. Truly. Of all the projects he’s involved in that one and SpaceX are two I am actively rooting for and hope succeed.
Stock prices =/= their sales aren’t plummeting in Europe. You asked what questions we had, my question is “what is he going to do about their reputation in countries that care about his unhinged behavior as it’s clearly effecting their sales?” Also, we’re both on HN. We both know that stock price does not directly correlate with the health of a business.
Starlink was withheld from Ukraine early in the war at an incredibly critical time in case you forgot - he literally dictated where they could and couldn’t use the service (denied access in Crimea for drone operations). Should musk be unilaterally deciding the fate of Ukraine’s military operations, without warning at that? I hope we both agree the answer is “no.” And whether it’s short sighted or not the contracts Starlink lost were to the tune of 9 figures. You blame “short sighted” political motivations, I blame a ketamine-addled fickle billionaire who can’t keep his impulses in check. He consistently acts like a petulant, drunk child. We’ve seen it over and over again.
You ignored half the companies/projects I mentioned.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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??
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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].
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
My first job out of law school was at a 176 year old law firm. New lawyers were socialized to identify with the past achievements of the firm, like helping J.P. Morgan build the railroads. There was a good reason for that: it socializes people to adhere to a culture and practices that have proven to be effective.
You’re right that, if overdone, it can lead to complacency. But if you treat every generation as a blank slate, you abandon the valuable capital of experience.
Relevant Mitchell and Webb sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AeCo3AD1cM
Ah, yeah definitely! Tradition can be powerful in that way. “We’ve always done the hard things because they’re hard.”
Established on 176 years of lying cheating and graft. That’s definitely a legacy. Rail was AI and dot com of the 1800s.
I expected that comment for J.P. Morgan, not rail… so upvote for you.
Rail pioneered modern financial scams. I say modern because before that there were similar schemes in other areas like trade expeditions but the historical and written records on those are less complete and recent
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.
> 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.
We need to land on the moon once a generation just to prove that we are still capable of landing on the moon.
America cannot possibly win the space race again, because it has already been won.
This is sort of like saying Leif Erikson and the Icelandic Commonwealth won the "the new world race" in 1000AD. Whatever Columbus et al were up to would surely be of trifling concern to future generations.
It also ignores the fact that empires can decline.
(Although I think the moon landing is ridiculous there is no scientific reason for it).
The space race was not a scientific endeavor either. It was driven by a political need.
It was to prove that your economic system could muster the correct machinery to get to the moon. Once we got to the moon, nothing significantly changed scientifically, but politically it was a bombshell.
The act of getting the moon now is, once again, not a scientific endeavor. It is once again a holistic test of whether the country still can do it.
And from the looks at it, maybe not. America is not all aligned like we were during the Cold War. Then again, the stakes during the Cold War seems higher.
What do you mean "there is no scientific reason for it"?
It’s more about establishing a permanent base or some operational capacity, not allowing China to dominate that aspect.
And yes, it’s probably also about certain aspects of anxiety and probably some panic about the prospect of American decline after so many decades of squandering everything and letting itself both be bled dry and run off a cliff by a subversive element within.
> 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.
In the sense that we don't need to do either, that's true. But if we want to claim we're still competent moon landers, we do need to repeat the task every once in a while to keep that capability. And there are good scientific benefits from continuing to do difficult space launches of many types.
It's not even clear the USA "won" the space race. America was first (and last) to land men on the moon, but arguably the USSR had far more space-related "firsts" than the US.
Landing on the moon only become the end-all-be-all when the US achieved it and the USSR could not (for various reasons).
the reds did space much, much worse.
first satellite? all sputnik could do was beep, and it ran out of batteries in three weeks.
first animal? laika died.
first station? there were two attempts to crew it -- the first failed to dock and everyone on the second mission fucking died. the soyuz 11 crew remain the only human deaths in space.
first *naut? yuri gagarin didn't even have manual controls.
the n1 was catastrophic. need i go on?
Failing fast is easier when lives are valued cheaply. “If it’s not failing, you’re not pushing hard enough.”
You are selecting goalposts that suit your team, and being disrespectful of the USSR (presumably because you don't want to acknowledge their successes).
> The first to get there has already happened.
Motorola was the first to create a handheld mobile phone, Apple just did not get that memo... :)
But Apple didn't recreate the same mobile handset as Motorola or anybody else. There is very little value or scientific benefit in going back to the moon within the parameters of this mission; it's literally "do the same thing again".
What do you mean "the same thing"? Different rocket, different suits, and different budget.
If we want to put people on Mars, we must prove we can put people on Moon, again.
I say let's do it once a week
The point is to avoid "China can do this feat but US is no longer capable"
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. Yes, yes, Cold War and all those theories. But it had and can again have this greater effect.
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.
It succeeded in the 60s because we didn't just focus attention, we focused a LOT OF MONEY on it. In comparison, today's NASA has a meager budget which has only been further slashed by the current administration.
I would love to see the kind of investment in NASA we had during the 60s. The scientific advancements were staggering. Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.
This is a common misconception. The total amount spent on the Apollo program over its 13 year time span (1960-1973) was $25.8 billion in 1973 dollars, or around $240 billion inflation adjusted. [1] That's around $18.5 billion per year, distributed on a bell curve. NASA reached it's minimum post-apollo budget in 1978 at $21.3 billion per year! Their current budget is $25.4 billion. [2] So based on current (and historic spending) NASA could have been constantly doing Apollo level programs, on loop, as a 'side gig' and still have plenty of money for other things.
The modern argument is that we spend less as a percent of the federal budget, but it's mostly nonsensical. The government having more money available has nothing to do with the amount of money being spent on NASA or any other program. It's precisely due to this luxury that we've been able to keep NASA's budget so high in spite of them achieving nothing remotely on the scale of the Apollo program in the 50+ years since it was ended.
The big problem is that after Nixon defacto ended the human space program (largely because he feared that an accident might imperil his reelection chances), NASA gradually just got turned into a giant pork project. They have a lot of money but it's mostly wasted on things that people know aren't going anywhere or are otherwise fundamentally flawed, exactly like Artemis and the SLS.
[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026596462...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
Technological progress should allow us to repeat ancient feats for cheaper.
True excellence in engineering is being able to do amazing things within a limited budget.
(And overall, sending some primates to the moon should come out of our entertainment budgets. Manned space flight has been one giant money sink without much too show for. If you want to do anything scientifically useful in space, go for unmanned.
> Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.
Huh? You remember the cold war? The US spends less of its total income on weapons and warfare than back then. Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.)
> Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.
Note that if you attribute interest for military-related debt to military spending(roughly 40-50% of our interest payments) then it ends up climbing in the ranking. But it’s true that we have other major expenses as well.
Money is fungible. How do you decide what debt is military related?
(And yes, the government can give labels to the debt, but that's more of a political exercise than fiscal reality.)
> we focused a LOT OF MONEY on it
Apollo at its height commanded 0.8% of the entire US economy.
AI is today's equivalent race. I wouldn't be surprised if it's now over 1% of the US economy.
And IMHO this AI race will do something Apollo never did, at least not with people aboard… crash and burn.
Apollo was much better value for money. It inspired generations to study and enter STEM fields, it gave us multitudes of technological advances, and it gave the entire world something to marvel at. It gave us the earthrise image, which fueled the environmental movement. What has "AI" inspired? What marvels will the enshittificatement of googling, or the latest deepfake garbage bestow upon us? If "AI" is our moonshot we're all well and truly fucked.
For what it's worth military research projects also come up with plenty of scientific advancements and the military also is doing things in space, including things they have had up there for years without explaining the purpose of.
Excellent point! I'd add that it also serves to inspire regular people and get them interested in science.
Unfortunately, I think that's the problem with some of the rhetoric like "the green revolution will be the next space race!" For better or worse, solar panels aren't as inspiring to most people as space is.
A lot of money and time were behind the space race propaganda arm that got people excited about advancements in space technology.
If the same resources were put into popularizing advancements in energy, you'd see more excitement. As it is, there are kids growing up excited about environmentalism like there were kids growing up excited about space.
>It’s just as absurd today as it was in the 60s.
Nah. You can argue that the goal "land on the moon" is artificial, but it being artificial doesn't make it fake or abstract. If you're the first to achieve it then you're the first, and that's it. What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new.
Now, if you're not able to repeat it at all, that does say something. But if it takes you a few years longer, well, so what? It's not a race anymore, because it's already been won, by the US of fifty years ago.
The winner of the race to Mars is still undecided, though.
It feels arbitrary to decide we can’t have a Space Race 2 (Space Harder) but we have Olympics every two years and Super Bowls and World Series and all that every year.
I’ve got to assume I’m misunderstanding the objection because it feels ridiculous to overstir the oxygen over semantics. Do we just need to call it Space Race 2?
A space race isn't a sport, it's a technological and scientific challenge. You can't invent the same technology twice, unless the idea is completely forgotten.
Also unlike sports, space races are massively expensive and it's untenable to forever go from one to the next.
Well, you could try to raise the challenge. Eg do it on a limited budget, or establish a permanent base, etc.
However I agree that manned space flight is a giant money pit with not much to show for. It should come out of our entertainment budget, not eat into our science budget.
If you want to do science in space, go unmanned.
You have to invent the same thing twice because the original tools and materials aren’t used anymore.
And most of the people who actually did it aren't alive anymore. A corollary from some other recent tech news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45649178
The space race was not just about inventing, though. It was about doing.
You can do the same thing twice, and you can also lose the ability to do something.
The ability to do the thing is what is really being maintained and demonstrated.
Every country has the technology to go to the moon - it's well established now. But who can actually make it happen? That's a huge organizational, human, financial, industrial challenge. And people do notice when only one country can do it.
Yeah, I already covered that when I said that if you're not able to do it at all it does say something.
>But who can actually make it happen? That's a huge organizational, human, financial, industrial challenge. And people do notice when only one country can do it.
On the other side of the coin, it's such a huge expense just for bragging rights, that for any country it's not worth undertaking. It's much more preferable to just give the appearance that you could totally do it if you wanted to, but you just don't feel like it. I'd argue that the US is currently failing at this, but until anyone else flies a manned mission to the moon, it doesn't say anything.
> What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new.
Despite you throwing the word "obviously" at it, that is an extremely untrue claim. Even if we hadn't forgotten a lot of the details, we're solving new engineering challenges with modern material science and manufacturing, and learning a lot of new things about spacecraft design. There is a ton of invention in doing another landing after so long.
What I said was that you didn't have to invent anything new. And yeah, that is obvious. If you've already figured out how to build a Saturn V, to build a second one you just do the same steps you did for the first one. You don't have to use new techniques just because new ones exist.
We have lost a bunch of old techniques.
But even as stated, I don't think your argument holds up. "What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new."
Even if it was technically possible to not invent anything new, that path is not going to be taken. It would be even more expensive and worse in every way. Nobody is going to launch a rocket with just 60s/70s technology ever again. A new moon launch will have lots of invention and learning, and claiming we can still do it does need proof.
>We have lost a bunch of old techniques.
Like I said, you didn't have to invent anything new. In this case you put yourself in the awkward situation of having to reinvent the wheel by your own incompetence. So if you actually do do it, what have you proven?
>It would be even more expensive and worse in every way.
Worse and more expensive than what? The only rocket that has flown men to the moon is Saturn V. What exactly are you comparing it to?
Let me make this point very clear with no distractions:
The "you're certainly not learning anything new" argument only works if we do reuse old techniques. "You don't have to invent anything new" is not sufficient to support the argument.
> Worse and more expensive than what?
Trying to reinvent old techniques and rebuild a bunch of machines and factories that used those techniques would be worse than inventing new things. You'd have to deliberately choose to not learn anything and to waste extra money in pursuit of that choice.
> The only rocket that has flown men to the moon is Saturn V. What exactly are you comparing it to?
We don't have a time machine, so the contenders are "2020s rocket with techniques invented before 1970" or "2020s rocket with techniques invented before 2030".
> So if you actually do do it, what have you proven?
If you actually do it, in a reasonable way, then in addition to the inventions and learning and any proof to do with that, you prove you can go to the moon, because saying "oh of course we can, we could use the old method" is not a particularly strong claim as industries change and workers retire over the course of more than half a century.
> You didn't have to invent anything new
Yes, you do.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-th...
It doesn't make it new just because you've forgotten how to make it.
It’s a new race and a new contender and the simple premise is, what once was the US is now China, the country capable of bringing men to the moon. That position is open at the moment
I mean it may not be a good reason but it would boost morale. I'd be happy about it
Buying everyone a puppy would presumably also raise morale.
who's going to take care of this puppy?
100% - given the resources we have, America is far underperforming at the moment
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.
99% of those were SpaceX
Exactly. The US private space industry is thriving and profitable. That's exactly what makes it so efficient and dominant.
Genuine question, is it profitable because of government contracts?
SpaceX exists because of commercial resupply but that was still a good deal for the government since it was cheaper than the shuttles or buying extra Soyuz cargo launches.
I don't know. I also don't know why that is relevant. Just because a business is selling a good or service to the government doesn't mean it's not competitive, dominant, efficient or really anything.
nah Starlink is the money printer
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.
I mean, falcon 9 reusability is a decent example, if 13 years from work starts to reusability is proven commercially viable counts as a long term business plan.
The private space industry doesn't belong to the US, it belongs to the billionaires.
We might even be better to have no one advancing space travel than to have only the billionaires doing it. At least then they can't find some way to use it to screw us over.
SpaceX isn't a billionaire.
US dominates with SpaceX internet project. For moon landing it's far behind at this point.
Far behind who? China still doesn’t have a Falcon 9 competitor, let alone Starship.
_America of Theseus_ is a great shorthand for what you're describing. Did you just come up with it then?
America of Theseus is a great phrase, quite apt for describing "the American Experiment" and the numerous ways America reinvents itself. but I don't see how this usage of it provides any discernable meaning. Ship of Theseus is more a question than an answer, so saying "America of Theseus, therefore 1969 or any connection to it is irrelevant" doesn't follow.
I think it’s apt because the Ship of Theseus as a thought experiment is unanswerable. It’s both. It’s neither.
America does keep reinventing itself. It has few of the same parts as before, but it still resembles some concept of “America” in many ways. In that way it is the same ship.
But is it the same ship? Can it win a space race today that a previous manifestation of America could? Maybe it’s not the same ship and what it could do in the 60s it can no longer do today.
I certainly don’t think it’s a question that demands an answer. Perfectly valid to choose not to show up to the starting line. But having run that race under the same banner generations ago doesn’t tell us much about the America today.
My comment is borderline off topic, but I just can leave it at that. Sorry.
> I think it’s apt because the Ship of Theseus as a thought experiment is unanswerable.
It is answerable, you just need to go meta a little. You can argue that the Ship of Theseus doesn't exist (and didn't existed) because it is just a lot of wood. You can use reductionism further and say that wood doesn't exist, it is a bunch of atoms or quarks or whatever. The ship is just a leaky abstraction people are forced use because of their cognitive limitations. But if it is an abstraction, not a "real" thing, then I see no issues with the ship existing (in a limited sense) even after it changed all the atoms it consists of.
The other approach is to declare that a ship is not a thing, but a process. Like you do when talking about people, who change their atoms all the time, but they still keep they identity in a "magical" way. If you see people as a process, then it doesn't matter how often it replaces its matter with another matter. Like a tornado, which exists while exchanging matter with environment all the time and still being the same tornado. Or like a wave on a water surface, it doesn't have any atoms moving like a wave, but still a wave exists.
> It has few of the same parts as before, but it still resembles some concept of “America” in many ways.
It doesn't matter if there any old parts left, what matters is a continuous history.
> But is it the same ship?
It is the same ship, but its properties are changing over time. Like when people become older, some of them become wiser for example, some become physically weaker.
> But having run that race under the same banner generations ago doesn’t tell us much about the America today.
Yeah, with this I can fully agree. BTW we don't know was the Ship of Theseus becoming better or worse after repairs, but I'd bet that its maximum speed was changing due to repairs.
I agree with what you are saying, but feel that the original usage (above) had a POV, as if that POV was in keeping with the thought experiment. (now, any POV is in keeping from a thought experiment, but it cannot be said except in extremis to follow from the thought experiment
That's every country though. Just read the regional or national newspapers of other nations.
> A lot of people like to identify with achievements that they played no role in.
They arguably footed the bill.
Are you suggesting people eg born after 1980 footed the bill for the Apollo programme?
To the extent that the government runs on debt, that's something of a given.
> 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.
>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?
> 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
The whole point of this article, and the NASA admin steps to open up the contract and all of Berger’s recent reporting is that it’s almost a certainty China will beat the US back to the moon.
It is already too bad that the US's plan to get to the moon was so flawed that it has been delayed again and again and money was wasted.
Let's imagine that China puts people on the moon next year in a method similar to the way the US did it in 1969 (but probably better in some ways). They still are mostly doing something that has been done before by the USA.
In that same year, the USA will probably continue to launch 80% of the rockets to space. Maybe we don't do our next trip to the moon for another five years. But there's good chance by then we will be using much more advanced and reusable rockets. Does that really make the US behind?
I want to see us invest more into space exploration. I think its sad that NASA's plan has been dumb. But getting two or three people to the moon is more about showing that China is capable (which is a very reasonable goal for them) then showing they have some long term advantage.
China’s plan looks nothing like what was done in 69. They’re going to build a base there, just like the US wants to.
Personally, I think it matters whether its achieved by a private company versus by society. That's especially the case when the private company is so closely tied to someone who hates and alienates so much of society. I don't think that I could view a win for Musk as a win for anything that looks like my chunk of the US.
There's also the fact that part of NASA's mission is to share their knowledge with the public.
>Personally, I think it matters whether its achieved by a private company versus by society.
How exactly are you making the distinction? Space-X wouldn't exist without governemnt funding. CATL sells launches to commercial entities as well as servicing the government.
Official ownership? Because China seems to think a lot of what Space-X is doing can only be accomplished by the commercial sector and is funding startups in China to do the same thing.
https://spacenews.com/chinas-landspace-secures-state-backed-...
Who any profits go to would be an easy first measure.
> China seems to think a lot of what Space-X is doing can only be accomplished by the commercial sector and is funding startups in China to do the same thing.
That's how China's been running their economy for decades. Every few years, the government sets a direction everyone should row in, and generally lets private firms figure out which one of them will get there fastest.
> Personally, I think it matters whether its achieved by a private company versus by society.
People appreciate German cars just fine, and no one seems to be particularly bothered that they are produced by workers in private sector companies instead of 'by society'. Whatever that even means.
> so much of society
Much of society agrees with his points on crime
By h1b engineers
A policy of the US to attract talented people.
Immigration of talent is historically an American asset. Look bo further than the moon landing itself for an example.
What does that have to do with H1B engineers, who typically end up writing crud apps for banks?.
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.
To me, a significant part of the value presented by space exploration is the way that it inspires society. I think that whatever else we would do instead would need to be equally inspiring. Honestly, I can't really think of something comparable.
So lets focus on genetics and see if we can get fire breathing dragons instead. That should be just as inspiring
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.
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.
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.
The goal could be simply to learn how to do it again, since almost everyone who actually has done it--on any level, be it engineering, management, manufacturing, flight crew, ground crew, etc--is dead. That's a totally worthwhile exercise if it's actually a serious goal to explore further.
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).
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.
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.
I was talking about rapid miniaturization, not just miniaturization in general, which I agree was underway before any space development.
NASA literally had departments and budgets dedicated to miniaturization.
I’ll give you an example: the technology in the Instrument Unit on the Saturn V, which was the computer that controlled the Saturn V during launch, was largely derived from System/360. By technology here I mean things like the Unit Logic Devices (ULDs) out of which the logic boards in the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) were made. No surprise, I suppose, given that it was contracted to IBM’s Federal Systems Division.
Minuteman III perhaps.
Sending humans to the moon is just burning money though. It isn't useful at all.
That does seem to be the trend these days. See: AI proliferation, cryptocurrency.
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.
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.
Artemis II is not on the pad. It's in the VAB, and it isn't stacked yet (source: my sister's an engineer with NASA Exploration Ground Support and is one of the people in charge of assembling it).
There's a lot left to do before it's ready to launch: https://spaceflightnow.com/2025/10/17/orion-spacecraft-arriv...
Of course, compared to the decades-long SLS timeline, that's "ready to go".
> 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
If Luna is a textbook then we’ve read the section headings for chapter 15 of 43 and stolen half a page by ripping it out and taking it home. Oh and that’s just Volume I. There’s a whole Volume II (The Far Side) for which we’ve barely even read the sleeve notes.
In terms of field geology alone, we deserve permanent human presence on The Moon. Apollo was an impressive first shot but it is completely unrealistic to act like we know anything more than one percent of one percent about Moon’s geology. They nailed the flat bits on the marine side, but you’d laugh at someone who claimed they knew Earth’s geology after a few weeks in Buenos Aires, Houston, and Miami:
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/advice/skills/see-apollo-...
Who will be woken up by the first moonquake? Who will visit the first mooncaves? Who will find the first water-based anomaly — some kind of periodic waterfall maybe, in a heat trap that warms up one day a year? Who will see the first solar eclipse?
> Nothing based around SLS is remotely serious
Boeing and Lockheed will deliver on time and on budget.
IIUC there are few "prime" locations on the moon. NASA publicly named 13 specific candidate regions.
The nations will will likely use "safety zones" to exclude others from their base of operations. We'll see the radius of these zones but expect 200m - 2km for a start.
There is a reason to think that there is a race. Without very advanced automation all of this is pointless, but I am willing to wager that many think that advanced automation will occur within a short timeframe.
> The SpaceX Super Heavy has been more capable arguably as early as the second flight test and certainly now.
Well except with regard to astronaut travel: very different and controversial launch abort approach and no escape tower like apollo
That’s an upper-stage issue — I was talking about the booster (1st stage). A conventional stage could be placed on top, complete with a traditional abort system and/or something like what Dragon uses.
> 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.
Sailing vessels serve an actual purpose, though. The Dutch didn't build better boats for bragging rights.
National pride has long been tightly coupled to seafaring capabilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship) "Richly decorated as a symbol of the king's ambitions for Sweden and himself, upon completion she was one of the most powerfully armed vessels in the worl"
#1 doesn't matter if we don't know how to do so anymore.
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.
> 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?!
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.
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/wiki/List_of_automotive_manufacture...)
GM went bankrupt, and are not producing anything that would sell globally. They’re a dead company walking.
If the Chinese EV tariffs are dropped, or if BYD start manufacturing at scale in the US, all the old US auto manufacturers are dead.
Americans like f1/2/350 to much
It is a rent extraction/wealth transfer powerhouse.
At least for now.
Can you elaborate how SpaceX is an extraction/wealth transfer powerhouse?
I'm not sure which company you're referring to here but I do here this claim a lot about SpaceX and while i'm anti-rent-seeking I don't see SpaceX as a rent-seeking company. Yes it has gotten some grants to develop particular programs and promises from the US government to buy services but all up we're talking about (IIRC) $10-20 billion.
We just gave $40 billion to Argentina for pretty much no reason whatsoever.
Now the US government has spent a whole lot more on SpaceX but they're buying services.
SpaceX is an incredible bargain compared to the alternatives like ULA.
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).
Anyone can write software, the idea that we're uniquely capable in that domain is foolhardy
Anyone can do any of those above industries as well, what's your point?
See the grandparent's comment about global supply chains. Everyone requires everyone else in those industries, no one does it all on their own.
I posit that software has no such supply chain dependency, literally anyone can do it, and thinking the US is unique in their ability to produce software isn't accurate.
Why doesn't everyone else simply start their own silocon valley!?
ByteDance, Alibaba, Baidu, three of Silicon Valley's most famous companies responsible for uniquely American successes like TikTok.
Data centers.
Teslas are built like shit compared to other cars.
It's possible we've simply reached the next step in the relationship between Trump/Musk: inevitable betrayal by Trump after the cooling off period.
> not just to prove we haven’t lost our mojo since Apollo.
Hasn’t that attempt at proof essentially already been lost?
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.
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.
This is a vastly oversimplified take; Mars will be a monumental effort, far beyond what it takes to get to/from the moon.
You'll need to launch more mass to get there but the technology isn't really any more complicated. It's also a more hospitable environment (reasonable gravity, day/night cycle, some atmosphere, water, etc.)
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.
> To what end ?
Funnelling a lot of government money into the pockets of the best candidate for the world's first trillionare.
Even a Venusian colony would be significantly more viable than mars.
Mars sucks. The moon sucks too. We need rotating space habitats. With gravity and hookers.
I'm not sure 500⁰C and 100x earth pressure is in any range of viable...
No, the surface sucks. The clouds are where its at.
Elevation.
I don't understand your response. I clearly said it's not worth it right now.
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.
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.
Because the protections get abused. See college admissions.
Mars is out of the gravity well only to fall into another, albert slightly shallower. It's just dumb.
I thought we wanted to save money ?
There was an attempt made to get to the moon which ended in the late 60s as people realized it would be impossible, and the decision was made to fake it to save face. Instead, the missions were filmed with extremely sophisticated simulators built for training for the real mission. The radiation environment halfway between the Earth and the Moon is highly hazardous. The constant background radiation from galactic cosmic rays is 2-4 times higher than what astronauts experience on the ISS and hundreds of times higher than on Earth. This poses a significant health risk. Finally, it is obvious that the lunar lander is a complete joke if you look closely. The longer you look the worse it gets. The builders of the second lunar lander scrapped large amounts of documentation and the lander itself because they "needed warehouse space." One of the most important tools used in one of the most important achievements in human history was scrapped "to make room in a warehouse." Please. I am hopeful that one day SpaceX will land the first man on the moon. It will be very painful because they can't claim to be the actual first people on the moon without tremendous reputational damage to the United States.
True, Apollo 11 was famously filmed on mars
Why didn’t the USSR point this fakery out?
It would have made them a laughing stock and the prospect of future cooperation would have been slammed shut. It would have made the USSR seem like sore losers. They were already public enemy number one thanks to the media PR machine. The Russians have been cooperating with the USA and ESA for many years on LEO missions, culminating in the successful ISS project.
We didn't go to the moon but the ISS is real?
Lots of people complaining that we have already won the "moon race" and that this makes no sense. This is a completely wrong reading of the situation.
Let's say we forgot how to do heart transplants. Once we did them a few times perfectly, got all surgical techniques right, but patients died shortly after the surgery due to rejection. We quit the whole transplants stuff for years, the techniques and the equipments were lost over time. But then, some 40 years later, we now knew a lot more about immunology, have incredibly advanced drugs, and an aging population. So, because of that, we decided to develop the surgical procedure techniques, long-lost, again.
This is a good analogy for the situation. The moon is an important milestone for further commercial and scientific exploration of the space. We lost the ability we once had to reach it. And anyway, we were not as ready as we are today to follow the next logical steps. If we manage to harvest water from moon ice now, we will be establishing the basis for a kind of serious exploration and development that we weren't nearly ready to achieve in the past.
So, no, we are not doing it just to prove "we haven't lost our mojo", for bragging rights. We are doing it because we are in a development stage where it makes sense to finally return to the moon.
Your example does not support your argument. Unlike heart surgery, there hasn't been a major shift in what we could do if we went back, and more exploration probably won't change the commercial or military prospects of the moon.
> more exploration probably won't change the commercial or military prospects of the moon
What are you basing this on?
burden of truth is on you. not them
It matters more to US politically than scientifically. It's totally about the US mojo in the eyes of politicians and thus funding.
American mojo have real world economic consequences. The value of the dollar depends a lot on how the rest of the world sees America.
You know what else has real world economic consequences? Dead astronauts.
I'm all for reinvigorating the global economy with a resurgence in scientific investment, but it only works if we do it patiently. China understands that, the CCP is quite capable of national planning that transcends administrations. You can't force a moon landing like it's a political OKR, if you do then you better have a pretty solid Plan B considering the amount of risk it represents.
This dismissal is quite shallow. Yes, it matters politically - but that has enormous downstream repercussions. China beating us to the Moon helps reinforce the narrative that the American century of global dominance is over, and China is the new superpower that is unseating it. The implications of that would go well beyond politics.
"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.
America is becoming a silly place. Lumberjack appointed as a head of NASA for his loyalty.
In Russia, loyalty is the highest virtue. In the USA, it's the other way around!
⁽"ᵀʰᵉ ʰᶦᵍʰᵉˢᵗ ᵛᶦʳᵗᵘᵉ ᶦˢ ˡᵒʸᵃˡᵗʸ"⁾
He’s a lumberjack and he’s okay.
He sleeps all night and he works all day.
Somewhat ironically a sketch ending in gender blending.
give him a little more credit than that, he was also on Real World: Boston
The silver lining is that they are operating under the assumption that he will leave office at the conclusion of his term.
Having a deadline is how things get done. With no deadline, nothing gets accomplished.
This is a political deadline with no grounding in reality.
JFK proposed we go to the Moon in 1962. We did it in 1969, 7 years later.
Crucially, not during his term (or his life, but that's irrelevant).
Also at the cost of a really stupendous amount of money.
~$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.
Not only that, he wanted to go to the moon before the end of the decade. They made it within that time.
Which is kind of the key point - Kennedy's deadline was a realistic one based on the technical difficulty of the challenge.
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.
It was never realistic. It turned out be possible, though.
Also, corners were cut in the testing. (Full stack testing.)
I don't know how you can claim a deadline that was achieved was not realistic.
Full stack testing was not cutting corners. After ground testing it was deemed that incremental testing would not be beneficial. Doing tasks in parallel instead of in series can introduce project risks, but that's not the same thing as cutting corners, which is where something necessary is not done at all.
It's not realistic that you can become a supermodel. But it's not impossible.
The idea that rocket X not exploding in a single launch makes it man-rated is cutting corners.
I am not a supermodel, I don't have the looks for it. But for everyone who has become a supermodel, it was most certainly realistic that they could become supermodels. If you have what it takes to accomplish a task, accomplishing the task is realistic. That's what the term realistic means.
Full stack testing was testing the entire rocket at the same time instead of using dummy stages to test parts of the rocket separately. There was opposition to it because if the rocket failed it might be difficult to diagnose why exactly it failed, which would slow the project down in the long run. Based on the ground testing and advances in instrumentation, the risk of a project delay from a failure was considered acceptable. It still took multiple launches to man rate the rockets. There's a reason the first manned launch of the Saturn V was Apollo 8.
> who has become
After the fact, it always looks inevitable.
Would you have gone up on that first manned Saturn launch? Not me. Recall how the space shuttle was safe, until it blew up. And then it was safe again, and broke up on reentry.
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?
>and the only reason we're doing it is to avoid losing face to the communist
Totally unlike the first time.
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?
I know, not disagreeing! You just left the ball bouncing and I couldn’t help writing the comment.
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!
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.
I don't agree. Deadlines are only partially made up, but not completely.
Nope, they're completely made up.
This is preferable to "we'll go back again maybe one day 5 decades from now, if we get around to it"
Hey, it worked when JFK did it!
Who was president during the moonlanding?
JFK got assassinated.....
And was the guy who took over after his assassination, and then won the next election, president during the moon landings?
So just like every other deadline I'm given, then.
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.
The entire Apollo program was a political stunt to upstage the USSR.
A political stunt for America to upstage the USSR, not to stroke the ego of a particular American.
It was a semi-covert program to be able to get to the USSR in 25 minutes with 150ktons of carryon luggage.
That was Mercury. All the ICBM systems predate Apollo.
Precisely. Trump wants to put his name on things for the history books.
https://www.obama.org/presidential-center/
Deadlines, 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.
Charles Lindbergh knew his chances of dying crossing the Atlantic were pretty high. After all, previous attempts resulted in many deaths.
Armstrong's personal estimate of his odds getting back alive were about 50%.
Apollo 13 came within a hair of killing its crew.
I fly across the North Atlantic at 30,000 feet, death in seconds if the hull is breached, in a comfortable chair, watching a movie and sipping a drink. Isn't that incredible? I still find it amazing.
But I know that was achieved through the loss of many, many lives.
Planes are incredible. And people die every day flying them. The public seems to have found that out this year
Crucially, American's typically don't die from commercial flight every day.
It's also entirely reasonable as an American to discount Polio / Ebola and a lot of other stuff that' aren't an issue for them. It doesn't mean that worldwide they aren't a problem. But historically, we've had systems to ensure these things aren't problems so when they become problems its newsworthy.
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.
Automation still cannot pick a strawberry.
The (aero)space industry tends to do rather well out of it being acceptable to miss deadlines though...
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?
With Trump, assume there will be massive kickbacks and corruption, most likely nothing useful will happen.
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.
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.
Testing rockets that fail is still progress. Deadlines that get pushed isn't an argument against deadlines.
Deadlines that get pushed is an argument against SpaceX. How many deadlines do we miss before we realize there is no actual plan to get to the moon?
To be fair, NASA schedules and goals have historically been politically aligned. It is also a known source of catastrophic failure.
My theory is they are shooting for an unmanned mission that allows immersive 3D 8K VR telepresence. Then they'll auction time slots to anyone who wants to golf on the moon.
Didn't JFK say something about going to the moon by the end of the decade?
Yes, but the program was started under his predecessor Eisenhower (a Republican) and "the end of the decade" was beyond the end of a hypothetical second term. The timeline was arbitrary and political - probably set primarily to beat the Soviets - but not self-serving.
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."
Yes, and three astronauts died.
No risk, no gain.
Deaths are always terrible. But unless we have a reason to only care about astronauts specifically, once we zoom out to the entire massive endeavor and how much everyone sacrifices for any big project, three particular deaths aren't a big factor and don't do much to say if we went too fast or too slow.
Sure, I just don't think people reacted the way GP did when JFK said it.
The current admin is different, the times are different, the people are largely different, thus the interpretations and reactions are different
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.
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?
It is not even "if" they should be funding these activities.... it is whether the public would "support" funding these activities, if there was a trail of deaths.
Sailboats were pretty well understood by then and in contrast to rockets there is much less potential for catastrophic failure.
…or a back door way of acknowledging he’s planning on a third term. :-/
The current 2027 deadline is a sad joke.
By now, a slip to NET 2030 is expected - but clearly, no one is in a hurry to break the news to Trump.
JFK did the same thing. Most people believe that succeeded. Obtuse, out-of-touch leadership can lead to some very interesting results when it doesn’t fail.
He was on Road Rules.... Let us not forget.
> "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...
> 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.
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.
Ambition is scary for weak people.
At least 10 people were killed in the apollo program
http://www.airsafe.com/events/space/astrofat.htm
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are they going to give nasa the money to actually do it though?
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
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.
BOING!? new insult unlocked.
It's the sound their jets make when...
Isn't Rocket Lab doing carbon fibre rockets?
Carbon fibre second stages that melt/burn up on re-entry.
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
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).
So far the HLS project with SpaceX spent 3 billion and delivered nothing.
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.
Space X isn't much better. Its still Musks company.
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?
“Unpopular” is a weird way to frame “is a Nazi”.
To this discussion, IMHO the important part is that he's fallen out of favor. He wasn't loyal.
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.
They did experiment with carbon fiber if I recall correctly
Stainless steel is much more cost effective
And they abandoned it to try to eliminate the need for a heat shield. This plan did not pan out.
The whole point of a reusable launch system is the cost of the vehicle is amortized over many launches, so you can use expensive, high performance materials.
> [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?
Well in the drawing analogy, they picked stainless steel while they were still trying to draw a sparrow.
Stainless steel was specifically chosen so that starship wouldn't need a heat shield and would survive re-entry with transpiration cooling. This would save substantial weight and make rapid reusability easy. The problem is that after designing starship around the stainless steel construction, they found that the transpiration cooling system wasn't workable, so now they have a stainless steel hull and a heat shield.
Further, I do not believe the drawbacks of stainless steel were fully appreciated at the time. Stainless steel on paper looks like it has better strength to weight ratio than aluminum, especially at the cryogenic temperatures of starship's fuel tanks. However a steel tank wall with the same strength as an aluminum wall is much thinner and so you wind up with different failure modes, namely buckling. In practice, a rocket made from steel is heavier than a rocket made from aluminum. This was why the Atlas rockets used stainless steel but subsequent rockets switched to aluminum in the first place.
Additionally, at the time much hooplah was made about stainless steel being cheaper and more formable which would reduce production costs. This is just nonsense. Stainless steel is expensive and tough to work with, which is why we don't use it for creating large structures despite its desirable material properties. It may be favorable compared to titanium, which was likely the only other option when transpiration cooling was the game plan, but for the current design aluminum would be far cheaper in addition to being lighter.
Now I'm sure SpaceX did some analysis after the transpiration cooling didn't work out and asked whether it made sense to start the design over and retool everything instead of continuing on with the stainless steel, and they decided at the time no. Since then they have had several further setbacks. The increased weight required them to reduce safety features, which may have contributed to some of its earlier losses. Starship has had to grow considerably and increase thrust to accommodate for these shortcomings. Would SpaceX have made the same decision to continue with the stainless with the benefit of hindsight? I can't say. But with the exception of a few chinese startups trying to carbon copy starship, other rocket manufacturers have not adopted stainless steel, likely with good reason.
Your comment mixes a few kernels of truth with incorrect premises, false information and wild speculation.
>> Stainless steel was specifically chosen so that starship wouldn't need a heat shield and would survive re-entry with transpiration cooling.
Not really, no. When SpaceX switched to stainless steel in 2019, Musk simultaneously described using ceramic hex tiles on the windward side. They showed hex-tile testing publicly in March 2019. Tiles were not an afterthought added later because transpiration "failed". Musk did initially discuss transpiration/regenerative cooling concepts for hot spots (stuff like a double wall, or fluid-cooled steel skin) but this was framed as in addition to tiles, not as a full replacement.
>> Additionally, at the time much hooplah was made about stainless steel being cheaper and more formable which would reduce production costs. This is just nonsense.
It is not. In 2019, carbon fiber was $135/kg with 35% scrap (so effective cost was $200/kg) vs. $3/kg for stainless steel. That's a two orders of magnitude difference in raw materials.
300-series stainless (301/304L) is widely used precisely because it is formable (301 work-hardens to high strength) and readily weldable (304L). That doesn't make it effortless but it's still much easier to work with than aerospace aluminum-lithium, which requires specialized friction-stir welding and tight process control.
>> The increased weight required them to reduce safety features
This is just conjecture. There's no evidence that Starship has reduced safety features to compensate for stainless steel + heat shield weight.
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.
>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.
> 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.
Not sure if any of my anecdata when I was a contractor are relevant anymore given current circumstances, but among all the NASA facilities I worked with, JPL really seemed to be doing its own thing, mostly for better. They were a bit quirky to work with though, because they did seem to do so much more in-house than elsewhere. So I don't know if it's that independence or their zip code that has made them such a target, but I wonder if it has been that they have less political capital from moneyed interests keeping them off the chopping block. But any gutting of JPL is probably irreplaceable damage.
Yes, this. And the reason why congressional appropriations plummeted was that no one saw any need to maintain such high expenditures. There hasn’t been an actually coherent vision of what NASA is supposed to be working towards since the Apollo Program. Everything after that is lurching from one project to another, justifying it based on short-term possibility rather than committing to a longer-term goal the agency is supposed to be achieving. Just look at Shuttle. It accomplished some nice things, but it was always a dead end. Everybody in NASA knew it. ISS: accomplished some nice things, dead end. Sure, you can talk about how these were steps along the way to learning about long-term human habitation in space, but we’ve never had a coherent vision for that that everyone is aligned with. What they really were: make-work projects that were at least short-term justifiable, executed in order to preserve NASA’s capacity to do anything at all.
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?
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).
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.
Wait, TV signals weren't unknown in the '80s and '90s. Why were they using film instead of TV cameras?
Well for starters, this was the 70s - the space shuttle's development started in 1968 and its maiden flight was in 1981. The last spy satellite program to use film ran from 1971 to 1986. Further, the issue wasn't a lack of knowledge of TV signals - the first wireless video transmission had been made in 1923. The issue was producing digital video cameras of sufficient quality for the task in an appropriate size, and then transmitting such large files to the ground. Nobody in 1968 foresaw the massive improvements in digital electronics miniaturization that would unfold over the coming decades.
Rather than "very late to use tv" they were "very early to use CCDs". Even so that only happened in the 1980s. Before that film had to be used, same as we all had to use film for our holiday snaps until 2000.
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.
I'd say material science since the only non-ablative material we can use is too brittle compared to a normal fuselage. I really hope they succeed but it's a pretty fundamental problem to have unanswered this deep into the program development (and gating Artemis no less). Also hard to judge their progress without the data their heat shield team is getting, see https://x.com/mcrs987/status/1978183753114505496 for example. It's great that they can tolerate loss of vehicle & have better margins due to the steel fuselage but for Artemis and Mars they need to solve it or they'll be burning up hardware fast, literally.
> because pouring national wealth into gigantic single-use rockets was unsustainable
You mean what SpaceX does as a matter of course and proved you make it cheap just through scale and iteration?
SpaceX uses flight proven boosters. The rockets aren't quite as gigantic nor as single-shot as the Saturn V. Also, they launch satellites into LEO for commercial reasons. It's quite a different beast from lobbing LEMs at the moon where the money is essentially lit on fire.
But it’s not like NASA had a mission change - they were just forced to carry on doing the same thing but contracting out the tech building.
Reagan took office in the 80s. The 70s was Nixon, Ford, and Carter.
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.
>> 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.
Unless he gets a lucrative mining contract
> NASA regresses so far that they are now unable to do anything by themselves
they handed lots of space exploration stages to private industries, companies like spaceX got decades worth of knowledge exchange and access to nasa facilities.
Somehow people with no skin in the game shout the most stupid things these days.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if we'll get a demonstration from China in the next few decades.
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.
China's stated goal is to get people on the moon by 2030. This may slip by a year or two, but probably not much more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog...
The main hurdle is the CZ-10 rocket, which has not flown yet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_10
But they have plenty of rocketry experience and the YF-100K engine they'll use for CZ-10 has successfully flown on the CZ-12:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_12
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YF-100
(Yes, Chinese rocket numbering is weird, and CZ = Changzheng = Long March)
I’m still wanting a great explanation why we could do it in the 60s, but China can’t do it until 2030s.
The reason I’m told we don’t do it today, is that we don’t want to. OK, China does, so what is the hold up that applies now?
2030 is just a little over 4 years away. They have a lot of hardware to develop and test. It takes time to develop good hardware, as the US is also realizing (again). It was about 7 years between the first flight test of any Apollo related vehicle and Apollo 11.
China wants to put the first woman on the Moon before 2030.
They should give the rights to Starliner IP to Blue Origin so the US can have a legitimate backup to the dragon capsule.
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).
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.
> 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.
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).
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)
Extortion requires applied force from the vendor to the customer. You're simply describing failure to deliver goods.
Words have meaning.
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.
Is starship on schedule?
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.
At $2.5 billion per launch, the worst thing that could happen with SLS is that it starts being used.
> 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.
> 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.)
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 ??
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).
> 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 revëvaluate.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
I'm not sure what are talking about. I don't like giving contracts to SpaceX because they are the right kind of people, I like it because they tend to deliver faster and at less cost with something more modern and more future looking.
While on the contrary Boieng and friends try to use old tech they have in their archive to slap togetehr a minimal viable product to meet the requirment.
But the contract structure changes is not about giving contract to SpaceX only. Its about developing a space industry. And this has worked extremely well. Commercial cargo resulted in Falcon 9, Antares rockets. Antares team is now working with the Firefly startup for a next generation rocket. Clearly not as successful as Falcon, but without Falcon on the market it might have delivered differently.
It also produce Cargo Dragon and Cygnus. Both have seen a lot of further development since then and have all kinds of uses.
You can also look at CLIPS for moon landers, where some companies at small budgets have managed to build landers. And even those that weren't successful, training a lot of people on deep space probes.
If you comapre the explosion of the space industry since Commercial Cargo to the stgantion in the Shuttle/Constellation area you will see why many space fans are so in favor of the new model. And the amazing thing is, that a tiny fraction of the money was spent on the non-Shuttle/Constellation/SLS part.
In fact, I did the math and the total spend on just development of Constellation/SLS/Orion is going toward 200 billion $ over the last 25 years. And that is without actually delivering anything meaningful.
In comparison the complete development budget of Commercial Cargo was a few billion $ at most, and it has revolutionized the US space industry. The complete spend on all Commerical Cargo, Commercial Crew and Lunar development more like 20 billion $. And the impact is just hilariously larger.
Seems fairly obious what the way forward is, its just politically not feasable. As long as 50% of NASA discretionary budget is spent on ISS and Shuttle-derived stuff that will never be forward looking, you are playing the game with a hand tied behind your back and cement shoes.
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.
From my previous reading, Excel 3 was one of the rare cases that the team pushed out the product only one week late.
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.
Can't give up on the Senate Launch System. That'd be political suicide .
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
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.
> * I'm not seeing what makes SpaceX government funded beyond just that it provides services to the government*
Take away all of SpaceX‘s government contracts. You imagine SpaceX would still be in business?
As you said, every launch provider is basically dependent on government contracts to stay in business because the government is the only entity that has a legitimate need for launch capability such that it’s willing to pay for its development. There are no sufficiently profitable private contracts out there to sustain a launch provider.
Do you have any evidence for any of your claims beyond not liking the idiot that owns the company?
It’s true of all private launch providers, not just SpaceX.
None of this is real.
Duffy and Isaacman are fighting to be head of NASA. This is that fight spilling from Washington over the weekend onto Twitter today because of course it has with this administration.
Duffy, as acting head of NASA, is trying to lob a threat at Musk, Isaacman’s patron. He’s done so poorly, and so here we are.
In what way is Musk Isaacman's patron? He's a billionaire on his own.
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
This is Destin of SmarterEveryDay. This is a very good speech, very courageous and has implications for all of society.
American society seems to be more and more controlled by people in positions where they cannot fail. The example that originally put this idea in my head was the Mozilla CEO who, oversaw a year during which Firefox usership fell, and Mozilla workers were fired, and then the CEO received a pay raise. A job where it's not possible to fail. You get paid no matter what, probably get a raise.
In the video Destin keeps asking "we're going right?", throughout the whole video, and the truth is everyone in the room is hesitant to say yes.
Destin keeps narrating and apologizing for his own speech (because he doesn't want to burn every bridge he has with NASA), but history will make Destin look like a prophet I think. I think this speech is worthy of the history books.
> is a very good speech, very courageous
Really? It’s eye opening. But Destin seems to miss the point.
We’re not trying to go back to the Moon, one and done. That was Apollo. We’re trying to build a system that reduces the repeat cost of Moon access, with medium-term plans for permanent settlement. (Like in Antarctica. Not The Expanse.)
His criticism of Artemis is on point. But his anchoring to Apollo is bewilderingly blind. If we’re just redoing Apollo, the programme should be defunded. (If a NASA administrator set that as a goal, I’d argue the NASA manned spaceflight programme might need to be overhauled.)
> everyone in the room is hesitant to say yes
This is like Trump complaining his generals won’t laugh at his jokes.
These are senior NASA scientists. They’re listening to a talk, not a rally.
(American _Astronautical_ Society)
So many interesting details there!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think there were any visible burn throughs this way around at the flaps.
Who cares? Even if they never solve the flap issue, the cost of bolting on new flaps every flight is minimal.
That's like bolting new wings on a 777 after every flight. It's going to cost a LOT and you won't be able to just load up fuel/passengers and take off again.
I'm sure SpaceX will eventually fix the problem. They are well funded, the materials exist, and they have amazing engineers. They just haven't reached that point yet.
'Cost a LOT' is relative though.
Expensive compared to a 777 flight? Sure. Expensive compared to every other moon capable rocket? No.
When the current industry standard is that the whole 777 is replaced every flight, that's one hell of an improvement.
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.
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.
Starship (the upper stage) can launch from Mars and bring humans back to Earth. The problem is that they need a lot of propellant to do this, and they can't bring that much from Earth. Their current plan is to generate it on Mars, which requires complex infrastructure built by unmanned missions. A simpler approach could be developing a smaller ascent vehicle:
https://spacenews.com/how-carrying-enough-water-to-make-retu...
https://spacenews.com/crewed-mars-missions-will-require-a-ne...
But I'm sure that approach also has drawbacks.
What’s the main motivation for the moon? Is it a better location than the international space station? What’s the reasoning there?
If there is water ice there, as suspected, it is the most realistic path to a self sustaining space economy. If you can earn money in space, there is a reason for people to work in space, and you can extend the economy into space.
It's political. Mars is the obvious next step, but too far in the future.
A stepping stone to Mars, iiuc. Look up NASA's cislunar plans, oriented around developing the many new technologies needed for humans visiting Mars.
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.
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.
I think its to prepare for mars (sort of), its the closest place where we can build a self-sustaining civilization.
"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.
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.
We have to start at some point don't we?
Many including myself would say we do not have to. And even we really should not.
Why do you say that we "really should not"?
We should focus on simple problems here first.
because this civilization is not self-sutaining?
If you value complexity, life, diversity, and adventure, then two self sustaining civilizations are better than one.
I think the general idea is to set up a radio telescope there
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.
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.
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 .
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.
If you’ve played KSP you should know how totally useless Mun bases are.
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.
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?
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?
> 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.
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.
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/downloads/25... :: the last slide in the set.
(edit: formatting)
I think the main problem for Starship is that they need to do a large number of tanker launches (about 20 I believe) in a timeframe in which the propellant in the LEO depot doesn't boil off. I assume they need to develop some good sun shielding for that. 20 launches could take quite a long time (multiple months? a year?) since it will probably take quite a few years till Starship, especially the upper stage, is rapidly reusable. They can't wait that long with Artemis 3, with Sean Duffy adding pressure.
On launches, it's conceivable that they can do the launches in 20 days if they do one a day. I ignore reusability, because I don't see it as required to meet the need.
They're known for moving fast, and they're building multiple pads. They're also building enormous mass manufacturing facilities in the background of all this (Gigabay and whatever). Not sure how many ships they'll be able to produce per month once the design is nailed down, but I'll bet it will surprise everyone.
SH Boosters are already effectively reusable for the purposes of this discussion; a couple of them have already re-flown. That's half the battle right there.
Boiloff prevention is presumably one of the main modifications needed for the depot. I think it's supposed to be easier with methalox than with hydrolox (which BO is using), but I have no idea the particulars of what they'll have to do there to achieve effectiveness. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if they try to cut that corner at least once; should be interesting.
The big risk that I see is neither launch nor boiloff, but rather simple fuel availability. Can they get that much methane and LOX shipped around the country that fast? I have no idea, but it seems concerning to me. Logistics...
Thing about the deadline, though, is who's going to do it faster? Blue has worse issues with their current crewed lander proposal. Nobody else has even started on one AFAIK.
My prediction is that nobody can build and fully qualify a safe moon lander with a more or less clean-sheet design in three years.
On the other hand, I can easily see Starship succeeding in a moon landing in three or four years if things go well with V3 and the refuelling research. It's a stretch -- things aren't likely to go completely smoothly -- but it's conceivable.
SpaceX is years behind schedule. Blue Origin is decades behind schedule.
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.
> Could this just be a pressure tactic on SpaceX?
Yes! I'm disappointed I had to scroll down so far to see this. The CNN headline isn't even accurate. The actual NASA statement is:
> "I’m going to open up the contract. I’m going to let other space companies compete with SpaceX."
SpaceX is behind schedule, but still years ahead of its competitors. No one is even in the same ballpark on the main metric that ultimately matters: dollars per kilogram to orbit. The main effect of this NASA statement, or of NASA sending a few dollars to SpaceX's competitors, is to give SpaceX a kick in the pants.
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.
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.
This contract isn’t for launch - that will be SLS (in theory) - rather for the lander.
Which highlights how unserious this whole thing is. SLS hardly works and is way behind schedule.
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)
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?
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.
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.
>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.
> 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/
I do, which is why I specifically said:
> outside maybe PR and politics
It's still a bad idea, objectively.
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.
> 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.
Does anyone vote for a president based on their ability to land on the moon?
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).
Holy crap yes. Millions of Americans vote for a president based on exceedingly dumber reasons too.
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.
Why? Trump is friendly with Boeing.
> 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.
They could have delivered today if they weren't concerned about reusability.
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.
Probably not for the price they offered though.
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
That is assuming Starship succeeds. Elon's track record hasn't exactly been stellar as of late.
> Elon's track record hasn't exactly been stellar as of late
SpaceX's, on the other hand, has been.
The point of the OP is that SpaceX is not performing; we don't need to infer or speculate.
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).
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.
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.
stellar :)
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.
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.
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.
If believing these things makes you feel better, great.
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.
sounds like fairy tales
The one about PayPal and a switch to Windows isn't all wrong.
I can imagine SpaceX choosing to self-finance a mission to the moon and beat NASA at it.
> I can imagine
That probably does require some imagination. Starting with any incentive to do so.
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
And he is super well known for making accurate predictions of the future.
“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.
So far his spacex track record is quite impressive
Elon's predictions are usually very late, but they do happen. Falcon 9 landings, self driving vehicles, etc... Later than predicted, but they happened.
What about hyperloop, martian colonization, or rocket replacing airplanes?
Here's a list; https://elonmusk.today/
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
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!
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.
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/
>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.
People believing that helps to keep stock prices and Mr Elon high.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if there is something you can do with $500B but not with the $200B or so he has from SpaceX?
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”?
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.
> SpaceX isn't public, but has raised money at a $400+B valuation and Musk owns 42% of that.
The company raised money? I could not find any article that states that, only some rumors about the intent to do so.
Regardless, when company raises money its company's money, not Elon's.
I would assume that aggressive scaling of rocket building capabilities would require capital, but I have no idea what is the figure needed for that.
He's also said we'd have humans on Mars in 2022...
Look into the history of Elon's promises around Mars. While I wish his promises meant something, they do not.
if I had a dollar for every time Elon said mark my words and nothing was “marked” I’d be richer than him
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.
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.
SpaceX advert on the moon, giant and bright for the world to see every night for the next 50 years.
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.
Now recall what the incentive to put the first man on the Moon was...
Imagine hurt egos with deep pockets and it ain’t that hard.
Cheaper for them to just whine to the orange painted king, at least right now
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.
> SpaceX only exists because some Russian engineer spit on him
And Musk got the best revenge evar!
I predict that NASA would find some pretense to block any such mission to the moon or Mars to avoid embarrassment.
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!
The Mouse That Roared?
The Mouse on the Moon… watched it with the kids a couple weeks ago. So cheesy but fun…
As much as I would enjoy watching Elon personally annex Somalia, that's not a thing.
Yeah they would say he is going to damage the environment or something, and suggest an eco friendly Russian rocket is used instead
I can imagine SpaceX and Blue Origin still sitting ducks if it was not for full knowledge sharing and access to nasa facilities.
50 easy payments with Klarna.
Self-finance ? Is that what you call US government money?
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...
According to your link those numbers are for this year, not last one. Also they are predictions by Musk, not real numbers.
NASA Budget is 25 Billion
Trump wants to cut it by 25%.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Posture, no one can compete, not even NASA.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah who is going to deliver faster and more reliable than SpaceX? Boeing? LM?
Doubt
Not sure if you're being sarcastic. Have they managed to get starship to orbit yet?
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.
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. :)
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.
We know they can.
> 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.
As far as I know they only deployed some Starlink dummies so far.
On starship?
You said "they". They are SpaceX. Their expertise is transferable to Starship.
Clearly not, because they've launched about 10 Starships and have failed to achieve orbit.
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.
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.
They have a pretty good chance, actually. They are almost done with the hard parts of the Starship.
I wouldn't say "almost done" - orbital refueling is likely one of the hard parts, and it wasn't attempted yet.
> 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, reëntry and reüse. 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.
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.
> 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.
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_protecti...
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.
Good thing SpaceX learned from that mistake and built a much simpler heat shield out of identical tiles that can be cheaply and easily replaced.
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.
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.
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).
"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?
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.
This is a good argument.
Something can be copied from Dragon, but not all of those.
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.
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.
> There is a saying that SpaceX turns the impossible into merely late.
That saying is in no way at odds with my assertion.
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.
Elon is handling this well
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/why-are-you-gay-elon-mus...
Aren’t all of the other providers even further behind than SpaceX?
(explodes before it can reach)SpaceX is just as rushed as Boeing is. I wouldn't trust Sean Duffy to successfully watch paint dry, let alone anything space related.
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.
NASA: "We may need to boot SpaceX"
SpaceX: makes political contribution to executive branch
NASA: "SpaceX is back on the menu, boys!"
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
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.
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%.
Yeah, right. And replace them with whom?
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.
It's a government agency. Politics is always involved.
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.
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...
Shockingly that seems to have been bullshit, which you just wouldn’t expect from Elon Musk.
Is there any other player that will commit with fixed-cost contract? Cost-plus is a joke.
Elon should land a mission on the moon completely independently of NASA and tell them to stuff it. Which is very probably what NASA is afraid of.
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.
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.
The article implies the competition is coming from China, who has multiple large projects on the go including one trying to clone Starship.
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?
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.
> 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."
Not really, its only the big question if US makes it the question. If the US just says yeah we done that, that's not our focus.
And then China does maybe a flags and footprints landing, while shortly after the US has a base there.
The only reason this is even close at all is because the US spend the last 25 years and 200 billion $ in complete deadends.
And just going further into the deadend just to maybe get a set of footprints onto the moon first is shortsighted and frankly morinic strategy.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps. I am doing my best to stay emotionally detached from this topic and maintain a balanced view, and very open to reasoned arguments and being wrong.
Hacker News is one of the last places I feel comfortable engaging in this way, and not always (sometimes I step on a land mine and get surprised), but if it's not here, I don't know where else to go, and that feels like a shame.
I don't care much about the points, so long as I can keep engaging. So I do my best to follow the guidelines and have faith in the moderation to keep me and others in check, even if sometimes I slip up or encounter what seems like an unfair reaction.
To censor myself from being inquisitive or rationally explore a sensitive topic in a place like this just feels too dystopian for me to accept.
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)
A conspiracy assumes secret cooperation, and I am not making any claim like that. I am merely pointing out that Elon has position himself as a rival against a lot of rich and powerful people. Rather than speculate on the specific arbitrary political reason, it might be mostly because of the underlying pressure or general anti-Elon baseline effect (and to attribute it to something more specific is a form of baseline or base rate neglect).
And to your point about him spending more money then the rest combined, maybe, he did spend a lot on twitter, but I don't think any of us can actually know how much all those people are spending. It might be closer than you think. Also the anti-Elon media brigade started long before he bought twitter, it just wasn't focused on the general public, it was focused on amateur investors.
Stupid politics
What else are they going to use? A trampoline?
it's really just a massive sign of disrespect, clearly there's no one capable of competing with spacex, who is already known for beating deadlines, but they insist on insulting them like this
why?
"it's 10 years from now and they're behind schedule", what kind of schedule is this?
Who is ahead of SpaceX for payloads of similar scale?
current employee status
spacex: at work
nasa: not at work
Elon Musk has reacted in his usual professional manner. https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/10/elon-musk-rages-against-...
Musk ... decided to respond by posting a meme of a reporter saying, “Why are you gay?” ... He called Duffy “Sean Dummy” ... Musk posted a reality TV clip calling him an “a*s rocket”
Instead of competing with other nations, what if we all worked together as humans?
We tried that but then Russia kept invading it's neighbors.
Things were very awkward on the ISS a few Februaries ago.
Now we know why Isaacman was removed from nomination because he wouldn't have put up with this BS.
"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...
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.
> 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.
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...
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
This is some hilarious shit to anyone even remotely interested in rocketry. Lol. Lmao even.
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?”
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!
> 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
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.
> during a time they were still using slide rules
tbh i would rather they use slide rules than chatgpt to build rockets.
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.
Tangent but while the joint strike fighter program's decision to "save costs" by developing one platform for three branches may arguably have been a bad idea, by all respects except for perhaps long term maintenance costs the f35 is the most effective fighter in the skies.
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> 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...
That's a fun list, but it feels like an odd thing to have its own article on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_odd_lists_that_have_th... beckons.
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.
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.
> 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.
That's fair too
> Elon Musk sometimes say things that are true.
Has this ever happened in the last 10 years?
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?
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.
>Tesla
His rapidly deteriorating market share in Europe and basically anything cybertruck related
>SpaceX
The contract they had that just reopened for bidding
>neuralink
Haven’t they stopped human trials because they were running into serious issues? I feel like I read something about that but I can’t recall the exact nature of the issue.
>starlink
Pretty sure the Canadian government abandoned their big contract with starlink. A cursory Google search shows that “several governments and organizations have paused or canceled their contracts.” AI summary so should probably be investigated more in depth but I imagine it’s largely accurate.
I see that his hyperloop company didn’t make the list, which went belly up just a year or two ago.
Robotaxi was shut down in Phoenix after all sorts of safety issues arose.
Several major projects have stalled or been shut down over the last few years.
Tesla stock price has never been higher…
SpaceX accounts for over 90% of global space launch payloads.
Neuralink…this is from Oct 10th.
https://x.com/neuralink/status/1976803020190236915?s=46
Starlink is changing the world, airlines, cruises, rural areas and defeated Russian interference in Ukraine. They lost contracts in Canada due to short sited political motivations who were willing to waste 3 times as much tax payer funds because of it. Starlink is doing great.
Glad to see neuralink is working. Truly. Of all the projects he’s involved in that one and SpaceX are two I am actively rooting for and hope succeed.
Stock prices =/= their sales aren’t plummeting in Europe. You asked what questions we had, my question is “what is he going to do about their reputation in countries that care about his unhinged behavior as it’s clearly effecting their sales?” Also, we’re both on HN. We both know that stock price does not directly correlate with the health of a business.
Starlink was withheld from Ukraine early in the war at an incredibly critical time in case you forgot - he literally dictated where they could and couldn’t use the service (denied access in Crimea for drone operations). Should musk be unilaterally deciding the fate of Ukraine’s military operations, without warning at that? I hope we both agree the answer is “no.” And whether it’s short sighted or not the contracts Starlink lost were to the tune of 9 figures. You blame “short sighted” political motivations, I blame a ketamine-addled fickle billionaire who can’t keep his impulses in check. He consistently acts like a petulant, drunk child. We’ve seen it over and over again.
You ignored half the companies/projects I mentioned.
Catching of a booster which everyone else thought was the stupidest craziest thing ever and they did it on first try.
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.
About damn time!
Who do you think is capable of competing, given that they didn't win the bid the first time round?
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.
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.
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.
I don't really care, give Carmack ten billion dollars and at least it'll run DooM.
Armadillo Aerospace did a mediocre job at best with its funding.
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.
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.
Too bad Orion can't get to Lunar Orbit to meet the lander.
All hail the cislunar transporter.
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??
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Remind me why we need to get to the moon again?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
The first time was to beat the soviets. This time is to beat china
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
China will remind us soon enough.
So we can delay dealing with the complete unrealism of our expectations of the future.
To look for the Epstein files!
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.
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)
It ain’t, though. NASA hasn’t retained much of their previous capabilities, and China’s space program is making progress fast.
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.
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.
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.
Space exploration is great, but manned missions are dictated by vanity and congressional pork more than scientific needs.
> 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.
Yea, it was an insane achievement in 1969, but today the technology exists, it's really just the money that's missing.