Nasa Chief Suggests Spacex May Be Booted From Moon Mission
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NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from the moon mission due to delays, sparking controversy and debate about the Artemis program, SpaceX's capabilities, and the role of politics in space exploration.
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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.
Could this just be a pressure tactic on SpaceX?
Somewhat surprised they've waited this long, under the circumstances.
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?
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.
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.
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20250008728/downloads/25... :: the last slide in the set.
(edit: formatting)
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.
> 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.
I tend to agree, though there are possible solutions that are technically simpler (if less ambitious) than either Starship or Blue Moon, while not even requiring SLS. Though it is probably too late now to try those. It's all the more surprising that Lockheed Martin still tries to offer an alternative solution:
> In a statement to Reuters, Bob Behnken, vice president of Exploration and Technology Strategy at Lockheed Martin's space unit, said the company this year has been conducting "significant technical and programmatic analysis for human lunar landers."
> "We have been working with a cross-industry team of companies and together we are looking forward to addressing Secretary Duffy's request to meet our country’s lunar objectives," said Behnken, a retired NASA astronaut.
https://www.reuters.com/science/us-seek-rival-bids-artemis-3...
But their offer would likely be very expensive, and it would be very questionable whether it can be faster than Starship HLS. So I don't think they will receive a contract.
I look forward to seeing what happens with all this. :)
Look up how many refueling launches are required and you'll see the problem, especially because no matter if Elon says so, the upper stage will never be reusable, even if caught.
Every moon mission will require that they pre-build a HLS and probably 15 full stacks.
Ridiculous.
The Space Shuttle was reusable, and SpaceX is using an improved variant of the Space Shuttle heat shield, so it seems quite certain that Starship will be reusable. The question is more: how much refurbishment will it need? The Space Shuttle required extensive amounts. SpaceX will likely be able to improve on that a lot, though it isn't clear how long it will take.
Even if I'm wrong, though, it wouldn't invalidate the point I'm making in this thread: BO's Mk2 has the exact same issues in a more complex architecture.
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.
GIF reply "why are you gae" (this was his actual response btw)
Doubt
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
That saying is in no way at odds with my assertion.
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.
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.
Something can be copied from Dragon, but not all of those.
Yes, about 4,000 metric tons. My IP packets are traveling through part of it now.
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.
Maybe. But instead, in addition to building a giant rocket with a reusable booster and an expendable second stage, they also on want it to reach orbit, that's why it's not done yet. And likely will never be, because starship is severely underpowered.
Otoh, maybe best to just believe what you want to. That’s sort of what we do these days, isn’t it?
Apparently NASA is starting to have the same suspicions.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
They suffocated/burned to death during a routine test, with Apollo 1 cabine being still firmly attached to Earth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 don't hate the player, I hate the game.
Because it's sad that other space companies are shit? Yea ok. I can get behind it.
Because you dislike Elon and would rather see the US space program turn to shit than allow Elon to get a symbolic win? Then I'm not onboard anymore.
My issue is purely with the US government's acquisitions process that seems to encourage a lack of competition and actually seems to actively hinder good research and development.
This monopsony needs an alternative.
The "monopoly" you are complaining about IS the competition. SpaceX literally cut US government spending on launch by billions over the years. AND it meant the US didn't have to go begging Putin for astronaut seats to the ISS.
Again: you can dislike Musk, and any sane person does, but from going from a dislike of a person to contorting the factually inaccurate stuff you just said just to satisfy your dislike of a person is crazy. You must see that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
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...
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...
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.
Has this ever happened in the last 10 years?
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.
Again: you must be able to keep two things in your head at once. I understand that Elon is an absolute ass, but also that he has made several incredible (literally!) things happen. Give credit where credit is due, and give blame where blame is do. Don't confuse the two.
You need to stop saying this it is incredibly rude and patronizing. I specifically pointed this out the first time you said it, so I can only assume you’re doing it intentionally at this point out of disrespect.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
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.
When people are willing to waste taxpayer funds to go with a solution 3x more expensive, it's absolutely a short sighted political motivation. Nobody who actually answers to their constituents could waste money to that degree.
> That said, there was later controversy in 2023 reports about a 2022 incident where Musk refused to extend or activate Starlink coverage over Russian-occupied Crimea to prevent its use in a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea fleet, citing concerns over escalating the war. Musk has stated this was to avoid complicity in a “major act of war,” and clarified that coverage wasn’t active in that area to begin with, so he declined Ukraine’s request to enable it.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/22/tesla-ear...
> It also reported a net income of $1.4bn, down from $2.2bn, a drop of 37% in its profits.
I’m not saying the company is doomed but there are some serious red flags going up in recent months
Revenues keep growing. Drops in profit are from margin and R&D increases (Optimus, taxis, etc).
It's as if people think Tesla is just a car company.
In 2024 they made 10 billion just from their solar energy business.
https://www.autonews.com/tesla/ane-europe-top-50-september-2...
> The nice thing is, if you’ve got friends in different cities and they’re playing the same game, you can both go online at the same time and play the game together even though you’re in different cities.
Of course he says true things. And on purpose too! (Unlike Trump :P)
https://www.rev.com/transcripts/elon-musk-interview-with-don...
> you need to keep two things in your mind at the same time
This was unnecessary and patronizing.
TBH, with this administration, I wouldn't trust whatever either NASA or SpaceX say or do as a sign of anything.
SpaceX is far and away the most credible contractor. And it's not even close.
> This was unnecessary and patronizing
And yet, you said something that was uninformed AGAIN just after I pointed out how uninformed that take was. Doubling down on the mistake is even MORE reason for me to keep reminding you to keep the two things in view at the same time.
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.
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).
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.
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.)
They aren't delivering, so maybe not. People on HN state the SpaceX talking points like they are reality. It's an Internet mob; there is no room for any serious examination of the issue.
How do you square that with "not delivering"? I don't doubt that China could surpass them in the next 5 years, but nobody else is realistically close to doing so.
As I said, people here will do anything to promote SpaceX.
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.
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?
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.
IOW, it doesn't matter what SpaceX or the others are doing, SpaceX is the 'right kind of people' to them.
And those comments are usually not long or detailed. Almost everybody that actually engadges in the discussion doesn't seem to defend that position.
Sorry that complex government contracts valued at 100s of billions of $ can't be discussed in snarky one-liners and throwing around random judgments based on nothing. You seem like somebody that should be on tiktok, not HN.
Building new things is genuinely hard.
But I have seen some serious, albeit delayed, successes.
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.
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.
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)
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?
No one is ever able to explain why now, and doubly so why when now is still in the future.
2. The institutional knowledge of working directly on the Apollo program has largely been lost in the US, and certainly isn't present in China.
Those are the unimportant pieces. The real reason is:
3. The US was actively at war with Russia. While it was a cold war (except for the proxy wars), the Apollo program had a wartime budget (spent nearly half a trillion in today's dollars), and a wartime risk tolerance (Neil Armstrong thought they had a 10% chance of not making it back).
2. Uh huh. The knowledge for 1960s tech is limited, agreed, but the tech is so much more superior now, and China as a nation has a high understanding. What does China not have that would be of any relevance?
3. Cool, China is in an economic Cold War with the USA.
I remain unconvinced.
Getting everyone involved in Artemis to deliver on time, let alone on budget, would require nothing short of divine intervention.
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