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.
This gets back to why there is a "we need to start making things in America again" sentiment. We made a national policy decision and underwent an economic transformation based on financialization and globalization. Kept the design and services aspects of our greatest companies in the US but the nuts and bolts of manufacturing and assembly went overseas, relying on patents and IP law to control production from afar.
This approach was always going to have holes in it and sure enough we're now facing a difficult and uncertain endeavor, for example, to ever be able to make the best chips in the world on American soil again. (Or as in the headlines today, to source and process rare earths for all manner of production.) It turns out that, surprise surprise, there was tons of process knowledge and tons of capacity for innovation in the people who were closest to the actual work of production, now those people are no longer American and couldn't care less what America can and cannot do. So we're in a bind. Americans keep claiming they can build all the things but they haven't actually done so in many years.
There's no way to solve the problem other than to try, and that entails clawing back as much of the people, processes and materiel as you can by whatever means you can until you start cobbling together some genuine innovation. My gut tells me enough of the political class supports the idea that the financiers will just have to get used to capitalizing a lot of production on domestic soil again, politicians will of course be happy to print billions more dollars of free money and hand it to them for this.
Isn't the point we've been - and we've learned there really isn't much there and it's not worth the effort?
Even at the time people suspected that - but at least there was a chance of finding something unexpected.
As to the knowledge is has been done, and therefore could be done again - sure that's valuable, but that knowledge belongs to the whole world not just to America.
And in terms of national prestige or uniting goal - wouldn't it be better to have a goal to create a long term sustainable energy economy for example.
I think that has more strategic value than putting a man back ( or women for the first time ) on the moon.
> 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?
I've seen no indication that they see it in these terms. They've been pretty low-key about their progress.
To me it looks like the US obsession with reframe everything in terms of a "new cold war". From the US perspective, in end you look stupid if you lose, and you look stupid if you just spend a ton of money to repeat what you did last time
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.
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.
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. 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.
The British won out over the Spanish because they realized they didn't need enormous warships to win naval battles. The Spanish weren't ignoring the need for a navy--they miscalculated and misallocated resources.
The irony is that the commenters saying we must go back to the moon are more like the Spanish: sticking to a sentimental 1960s vision of human-based space exploration despite evidence clearly favoring robotics and remote control.
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.
Sure the SLS is a total mess, but from what I understand, there wasn't ever really a concrete plan on how to use SpaceX rockets to actually get to the moon. The following video is a presentation given at a NASA meeting explaining the issue.
The first time I ran into $ spent on manned missions v. space craft i was reflexively of course manned. That ended around Hubble (ok granted fixed by astronauts). I think better science is through robots to jupiter's moons, the next Webb, cosmolgy or dark matter experiments with probes, ligo in space etc. Going to the moon ... not feeling it ... even as a by way to mars
No, it wasn't "you". It was a generation that is mostly dead. As of now, Boeing cannot deliver a reasonably safe spaceship for mere travel to Low Earth Orbit.
Things change and without SpaceX, the US space industry would be slightly better than Roskosmos.
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).
Going to the moon is a symbol. It’s symbolic to China being better if China gets there first. It is the only reason why we want to go. There is no one else who can do it except for spacex, it’s likely he’s just applying pressure onto spacex.
Is it a valid reason? Depends on how prideful you are. Are you proud to be an American and are you proud to be the greatest economic super power on the planet?
For me it’s not valid. I don’t hold any pride about any country even though I’m American. Pride is a form of emotional bias.
If China becomes better, which is a highly likely possibility. The symbol of this being better is irrelevant.
In fact arguably China is already better than us in many ways.
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.
The most shocking thing to me about Blue Origin's New Glenn launch is that it didn't blow up. This isn't commentary on my opinion concerning Blue Origin's engineering expertise, just that I was expecting anything that big and complicated, on its inaugural flight, to fail fairly spectacularly. The historical trajectory of such space things is fail, fail big, fail less big, kinda work, kinda work, work mostly, etc.
If the second launch vehicle performs similarly, I might have to start watching them. We could use a decent alternative.
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.
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 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.
Not as criminally stupid as resting on our laurels and frittering away all the technical knowledge which we are now relearning the hard way. 'I can't think of things to do on the moon, therefore it's a waste of time' is an asinine argument.
Edited to add that I have long thought this dismissive smug attitude about how we already ticked that box and there's no need to tick it again directly contributes to the rise is nonsensical conspiracy theories like the the moon landing (or indeed space) being fake. And that acceptance of social and scientific ignorance goes a long way to explaining why we're currently governed by malicious fools.
Going to the moon isn't like weightlifting! If you need to preserve the technical knowledge, write it down. (Or record it in other ways if you think writing is limited.)
Kind of overlooks the fact that the guys he's threatening are also the same, having threatened to cancel SpaceX's contracts because Musk dared disagree with them (and we have all seen how rarely he does that).
> Land on the moon when we can accomplish something there, not just to prove we haven’t lost our mojo since Apollo.
I have been a die hard fan of space exploration since the first Columbia flight. It is one of my first memories. I dream of the day when the moon is populated, like the ISS. I am the largest proponent of space exploration you'll meet, if only just for the sense of exploration disregarding all other benefits. Humanity's future is either to progress beyond this planet, or stagnate here.
That's why I have been following the Artemis program since the beginning. And with all the funding changes, and all the mission profiles that have changed in accordance, two things have stood out as the primary goals. First, the cost. That space station double docking in the way down is not only unnecessary, it is also fraught with risk. The only possibly explanation for that component is to spend money. Second, the actual started goals have changed three or four times, but one goal has been consistent. Go look at NASA's Artemis webpage. It's the first words up there: "NASA's Artemis missions aim to land the first woman and first person of colour on the Moon ...". Really? That is the first, primary objective? And it is such a shame, because of you look at Glover's career and accomplishments, he is amazing. He should be flying that mission on his own personal merits, not because NASA was mandated to find some black guy. Frankly it is insulting to even see mention of that as a goal, much less the absolute first stated goal in the official materials, and the only consistent goal throughout the program.
I agree. DEI hiring is so offensive, to both white people and “diverse” people. The former because it punishes them for something outside of their control, and the latter because it rewards them and diminishes the hard work that they had to do if they’re actually qualified. DEI is such a low IQ policy.
I feel like “race to the moon, part II” is really just a race to prove someone can consistently land significant payloads outside of earth. The moon is just the closest place to test.
China beat "us" to movable type, if by "us" we mean Americans, by about 700 years. Me personally, I've neither landed on the moon nor made a letterpress print.
Refueling the HLS in orbit, before it sets off to the moon requires at least 10 launches, but likely closer to 20, and neither Super Heavy or any future Starship tanker will be rapidly reusable that much is clear by now. For this system to work, SpaceX will need to build many more launch pads and the refueling sequence alone will take months due to boil off.
It's a dumb system invented due to the whims of a madman who should listen to his engineers instead of trying to cosplay as a rocket scientist.
Pretty much everyone is heading in the direction of orbital fuel depots and orbital refueling.We're getting pretty good at launching rockets and docking things in orbit. Prior to Starship, ULA was considering having Vulcan's upper stage have refueling capabilities, but their parent company, Boeing, saw it as a threat to their SLS money and tried to get the associated engineers fired. All HLS proposals involved some sort of refueling and reuse capability, and both accepted proposals involve orbital fuel depots.
The only reason NASA hadn't already been investigating the relevant technologies is that politicians threatened to outright cancel space science funding if NASA so much as mentioned depots (the word was actually censored in documents from NASA about HLS until the relevant senator finally retired).
Regarding 1, I honestly don't think this comment is valid, and I believe the current generation should not rest on this particular laurel too much.
A lot of things have changed in the past 56.25 years. New people, new technology, hell I'd argue that the America of the 60's is not the same America as today. For all intents and purposes this "space race" is a completely separate and new thing, where two completely separate and new countries are competing for the crown.
China winning this will only further cement the perception that America is being leapfrogged technologically and left behind.
> We’ve already beaten China to the moon by 56 years, 3 months, and some change. And counting.
China wasn't trying to land people on the moon 56 years ago. You "beat" someone when both are competing to do it.
I learnt Python, Rust and Go in my twenties and Trump is like twice my age and can't code in any of these languages. I didn't "beat him" at it though, because he's not even trying.
Hopefully, your view is in the minority. If this mindset becomes prevalent in the US, nothing new will ever be invented, and no new regions of space will be explored.
Modern moon exploration isn’t about repeating Apollo but progressing toward resource extraction and establishing humanity’s long-term presence in space. These missions are designed to achieve goals that were previously impossible and lay the foundation for humanity’s future beyond Earth.
It's cool that we can learn about what's around us, but in practice we're light years away from being interplanetary, we just can't afford it and our energy sources are laughable.
Realistically speaking, how far are we really from "moon travel" that is both remotely affordable and worth the trip?
In this administration, government agencies are not expected to have any independence and cannot express doubts about administration goals without risking being fired. In addition, the administration has a taste for extortion and this may simply be a way to raise money from Musk and Bezos for the political and personal enrichment of the President.
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.
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.
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."
Yeah, I'm sure astronauts will be thrilled to know that the thing that should bring them to the moon (and back!) was not only built by the lowest bidder (as that famous quote of uncertain origin states), but also by the one who managed to build it fastest so an arbitrary deadline could be kept. Ok, TBF Kennedy also set an arbitrary deadline when he said that Americans should land on the moon before the end of the decade (meaning the 1960s)...
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?
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.
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.
I mean JFK said basically the same thing, and with way more unknowns facing him. I dunno if the reception was that he doesn't care about astronauts lives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, there is a giant shift in what we could do. We can build far more reliable rockets. We have incredible progresses in materials science, in our understanding of the moon's geology. Likewise, we established the presence of water.
We have more advanced solar panels, better batteries, we have a lot of recent research on modular, safe nuclear reactors that could probably lead more easily to moon-ready reactors. We have better batteries. Not only that, but we have better high power semiconductor gear that could lead to high orbit solar power stations over the poles feeding a polar base via microwaves.
We have decades of accumulated knowledge of human physiology under zero gravity.
We are way more prepared to have a permanent presence on the moon today that we could possibly have in the 70s because of those advancements.
Yes, taking Space-X out of it is stupid. SLS is a joke. Boeing idem. On this part of the problem people have my complete agreement. But the moon is a worthwhile goal because we cannot turn our backs to space.
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.
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.
> but any actual engineer doing a ground up redesign starting today would definitely go with carbon fiber.
You seem like commenting on a situation as one would comment about a moon visuals by looking at it without a telescope. But maybe I'm wrong and you are very close to SpaceX engineers and know some folks that work there or other internals...
But you should then have known that Tesla/SpaceX is very well known to remove stupid requirements or solutions if there is much better alternative. And they don't leave stupid decisions there.
I'm no expert that I can attribute the durability of the vehicle to the choice of stainless steel or whatever alloy they have there, but me and online folks have been amazed at IFT1 when starship tumbled and didn't break apart... or IFT11 when heat tiles were purposefully removed on critical spots and the ship still landed. Maybe suffered burn-thru but it didn't prevent a soft ocean splashdown.
Can it be attributed to stainless steel? I'm no engineer, so I don't know. It's just that the observable result is amazing.
> [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?
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.
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?
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 don't understand the modern US trend of putting unqualified people in charge. It's not just the republicans though, seems like a deeper cultural issue. There has been close to zero scientists in charge of policy in the last several decades.
This sort of thing is why China keeps pulling ahead. While we have this dude figuring out how NASA can be gutted further, China has ~2.5 space agencies, and without Spacex doing our heavylifting, they would have been already ahead. They expect to have something like Falcon 9 pretty soon, which implies a starlink competitor in a matter of years.
> 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.
I think it's more fair to say that transportation from ground to orbit became commoditized to the point where the better allocation of NASA's talents became designing and building telescopes (like the JWST), Martian rovers / aircraft, Earth observation satellites, and plans for future deep space exploration missions.
It's beneficial for NASA, companies, and other countries to have cost-effective access to a range of competing American launch providers (whether SpaceX, ULA, RocketLab, and perhaps BO in the next few years).
> 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.
This makes me think of Intels decline over the last decade or so. It feels to me like a canary in a coal mine. Perhaps of a failing in the US system as a whole. It is possible we are not quite the world leader we once were, despite bailouts, despite legislation like the CHIPS act, despite a CEO dedicated to a roadmap to regain technical superiority … maybe we cannot win this race.
Have we reached a point where managing public perception is more important than truth, where wealth inequality has reached a point of a new feudal like caste system, where our institutions now function to primarily manage and preserve an unhealthy society that is primarily exploitative and does not have the needs of the populace first and foremost. Where economic indicators, economic lingo and policy just uses a vernacular to hide its direct purpose to provide safety for the haves at the expense of the have nots.
I realize this is a negative take but looking at Lockheed Martin , looking at Boeing, on and on. Maybe we cannot get back to the moon, maybe we cannot design the best new modern passenger jet, maybe just maybe China has already surpassed or at least equaled the US as a superpower.
> where wealth inequality has reached a point of a new feudal like caste system
This is a global problem, not limited to the US. It's also the end-state of capitalism because having (access to) more money makes it easier to have access to more money, and money drives everything else.
> where our institutions now function to primarily manage and preserve an unhealthy society that is primarily exploitative and does not have the needs of the populace first and foremost.
For me, it has always looked like the use was primarily exploitative and completely opposed to supporting the populace.
> Where economic indicators, economic lingo and policy just uses a vernacular to hide its direct purpose to provide safety for the haves at the expense of the have nots.
This is not new. Chomsky told us this in the 60s. The Catholic Church used a similar strategy for over a millennia.
I'm not disagreeing with you, only attempting to disperse your sense of surprise.
There's no such thing as capitalism without government. Depending on how the government regulates capitalism, you don't necessarily get wealth inequality.
Wealth equality is not a desirable goal. Optimizing absolute standards of living is a much better target and inevitably allows for some people to have better lives than others. This obsession with other people's things has always been known to be a societal detriment. Exodus 20:17
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.
Replace "despite" with "because of" and you'll get a clearer picture. The US is looted. China is holding on because they've managed to reign in their billionaires and their greed towards their own population. The US commoditized it's own population a long time ago, with the whole world watching and shaking it's head. Life expectancy is a good indicator for this.
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.
Payload capacities to trans-lunar injection (source wikipedia):
SLS Block 1: >27,000 kg (59,500 lb)
SLS Block 1B: 42,000 kg (92,500 lb)
SlS Block 2: >46,000 kg (101,400 lb)
Vulcan Centaur: 12,100 kg (26,700 lb)
New Glenn: 7,000 kg (15,000 lb)
Orion crew module by itself weighs 10,400 kg (22,900 lb), the service module is 15,461 kg (34,085 lb).
Orion is a heavy spacecraft. SLS, like or not (I don't), it has a lot of lift. Unless you're sticking an Orion inside of a Starship (lol), Orion basically dies with SLS.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
No, and even if the first HLS lander was built and launched tomorrow, it still needs to be filled up in orbit a dozen times, something that has never been done before and SpaceX doesn't have the capability for and won't have for another decade.
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.
> 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
ULA has been operating for many, many years (Atlas/Delta, now Vulcan Centaur), RocketLab has been putting up small payloads for the last few (with Electron, someday Neutron perhaps), and BO seems close to having New Glenn flying real missions this season. But yes, one hopes that the others can become competitive on price eventually.
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.
Readit News
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.
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!”
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.
This approach was always going to have holes in it and sure enough we're now facing a difficult and uncertain endeavor, for example, to ever be able to make the best chips in the world on American soil again. (Or as in the headlines today, to source and process rare earths for all manner of production.) It turns out that, surprise surprise, there was tons of process knowledge and tons of capacity for innovation in the people who were closest to the actual work of production, now those people are no longer American and couldn't care less what America can and cannot do. So we're in a bind. Americans keep claiming they can build all the things but they haven't actually done so in many years.
There's no way to solve the problem other than to try, and that entails clawing back as much of the people, processes and materiel as you can by whatever means you can until you start cobbling together some genuine innovation. My gut tells me enough of the political class supports the idea that the financiers will just have to get used to capitalizing a lot of production on domestic soil again, politicians will of course be happy to print billions more dollars of free money and hand it to them for this.
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 entire mindset of separating the world into "winners" and "losers" in the first place seems unhealthy to me.
Even at the time people suspected that - but at least there was a chance of finding something unexpected.
As to the knowledge is has been done, and therefore could be done again - sure that's valuable, but that knowledge belongs to the whole world not just to America.
And in terms of national prestige or uniting goal - wouldn't it be better to have a goal to create a long term sustainable energy economy for example. I think that has more strategic value than putting a man back ( or women for the first time ) on the moon.
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By the same logic, also no moral burden for its transgressions?
(Not making a claim one way or the other, just noting an asymmetry.)
They arguably footed the bill.
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.
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?
I've seen no indication that they see it in these terms. They've been pretty low-key about their progress.
To me it looks like the US obsession with reframe everything in terms of a "new cold war". From the US perspective, in end you look stupid if you lose, and you look stupid if you just spend a ton of money to repeat what you did last time
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.
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
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.
The irony is that the commenters saying we must go back to the moon are more like the Spanish: sticking to a sentimental 1960s vision of human-based space exploration despite evidence clearly favoring robotics and remote control.
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.
But it has! Look at all of our private industry! That's the point!
> We don't have titans of industry anymore.
What?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU
No, it wasn't "you". It was a generation that is mostly dead. As of now, Boeing cannot deliver a reasonably safe spaceship for mere travel to Low Earth Orbit.
Things change and without SpaceX, the US space industry would be slightly better than Roskosmos.
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.
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".
Is it a valid reason? Depends on how prideful you are. Are you proud to be an American and are you proud to be the greatest economic super power on the planet?
For me it’s not valid. I don’t hold any pride about any country even though I’m American. Pride is a form of emotional bias.
If China becomes better, which is a highly likely possibility. The symbol of this being better is irrelevant.
In fact arguably China is already better than us in many ways.
Well except with regard to astronaut travel: very different and controversial launch abort approach and no escape tower like apollo
If the second launch vehicle performs similarly, I might have to start watching them. We could use a decent alternative.
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?
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.
Mars is out of reach and not feasible.
Not as criminally stupid as resting on our laurels and frittering away all the technical knowledge which we are now relearning the hard way. 'I can't think of things to do on the moon, therefore it's a waste of time' is an asinine argument.
Edited to add that I have long thought this dismissive smug attitude about how we already ticked that box and there's no need to tick it again directly contributes to the rise is nonsensical conspiracy theories like the the moon landing (or indeed space) being fake. And that acceptance of social and scientific ignorance goes a long way to explaining why we're currently governed by malicious fools.
5. The owner of SpaceX threatens to cancel projects when he gets into social media spats with the president he thought he'd bought, or his NASA chief
I don't understand why anyone tolerates a man like Musk having material control over state projects.
Boeing and Lockheed will deliver on time and on budget.
That's why I have been following the Artemis program since the beginning. And with all the funding changes, and all the mission profiles that have changed in accordance, two things have stood out as the primary goals. First, the cost. That space station double docking in the way down is not only unnecessary, it is also fraught with risk. The only possibly explanation for that component is to spend money. Second, the actual started goals have changed three or four times, but one goal has been consistent. Go look at NASA's Artemis webpage. It's the first words up there: "NASA's Artemis missions aim to land the first woman and first person of colour on the Moon ...". Really? That is the first, primary objective? And it is such a shame, because of you look at Glover's career and accomplishments, he is amazing. He should be flying that mission on his own personal merits, not because NASA was mandated to find some black guy. Frankly it is insulting to even see mention of that as a goal, much less the absolute first stated goal in the official materials, and the only consistent goal throughout the program.
It's a dumb system invented due to the whims of a madman who should listen to his engineers instead of trying to cosplay as a rocket scientist.
The only reason NASA hadn't already been investigating the relevant technologies is that politicians threatened to outright cancel space science funding if NASA so much as mentioned depots (the word was actually censored in documents from NASA about HLS until the relevant senator finally retired).
What insurmountable problem(s) do you expect?
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Hasn’t that attempt at proof essentially already been lost?
A lot of things have changed in the past 56.25 years. New people, new technology, hell I'd argue that the America of the 60's is not the same America as today. For all intents and purposes this "space race" is a completely separate and new thing, where two completely separate and new countries are competing for the crown.
China winning this will only further cement the perception that America is being leapfrogged technologically and left behind.
I can't wait for the time when "we" is we-humans/humanity/the planet Earth and not some inter-country trade bs.
China wasn't trying to land people on the moon 56 years ago. You "beat" someone when both are competing to do it.
I learnt Python, Rust and Go in my twenties and Trump is like twice my age and can't code in any of these languages. I didn't "beat him" at it though, because he's not even trying.
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Modern moon exploration isn’t about repeating Apollo but progressing toward resource extraction and establishing humanity’s long-term presence in space. These missions are designed to achieve goals that were previously impossible and lay the foundation for humanity’s future beyond Earth.
Yes but why?
It's cool that we can learn about what's around us, but in practice we're light years away from being interplanetary, we just can't afford it and our energy sources are laughable.
Realistically speaking, how far are we really from "moon travel" that is both remotely affordable and worth the trip?
A scary way to set a schedule on a complex project with lives at stake. They don't care though.
⁽"ᵀʰᵉ ʰᶦᵍʰᵉˢᵗ ᵛᶦʳᵗᵘᵉ ᶦˢ ˡᵒʸᵃˡᵗʸ"⁾
He sleeps all night and he works all day.
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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.
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?
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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.
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RFK Jr: "Measles ain't that bad, try this potion my friend came up with."
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...
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?
http://www.airsafe.com/events/space/astrofat.htm
I mean that's how we did it last time.
By now, a slip to NET 2030 is expected - but clearly, no one is in a hurry to break the news to Trump.
Artemis is projected to take longer than Apollo, unless, well, they land on the moon before Trump leaves office.
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.
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.
Of course, there is a giant shift in what we could do. We can build far more reliable rockets. We have incredible progresses in materials science, in our understanding of the moon's geology. Likewise, we established the presence of water.
We have more advanced solar panels, better batteries, we have a lot of recent research on modular, safe nuclear reactors that could probably lead more easily to moon-ready reactors. We have better batteries. Not only that, but we have better high power semiconductor gear that could lead to high orbit solar power stations over the poles feeding a polar base via microwaves.
We have decades of accumulated knowledge of human physiology under zero gravity.
We are way more prepared to have a permanent presence on the moon today that we could possibly have in the 70s because of those advancements.
Yes, taking Space-X out of it is stupid. SLS is a joke. Boeing idem. On this part of the problem people have my complete agreement. But the moon is a worthwhile goal because we cannot turn our backs to space.
What are you basing this on?
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Much better for making your friends rich.
You seem like commenting on a situation as one would comment about a moon visuals by looking at it without a telescope. But maybe I'm wrong and you are very close to SpaceX engineers and know some folks that work there or other internals...
But you should then have known that Tesla/SpaceX is very well known to remove stupid requirements or solutions if there is much better alternative. And they don't leave stupid decisions there.
I'm no expert that I can attribute the durability of the vehicle to the choice of stainless steel or whatever alloy they have there, but me and online folks have been amazed at IFT1 when starship tumbled and didn't break apart... or IFT11 when heat tiles were purposefully removed on critical spots and the ship still landed. Maybe suffered burn-thru but it didn't prevent a soft ocean splashdown.
Can it be attributed to stainless steel? I'm no engineer, so I don't know. It's just that the observable result is amazing.
Stainless steel is much more cost effective
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?
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.
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.
This sort of thing is why China keeps pulling ahead. While we have this dude figuring out how NASA can be gutted further, China has ~2.5 space agencies, and without Spacex doing our heavylifting, they would have been already ahead. They expect to have something like Falcon 9 pretty soon, which implies a starlink competitor in a matter of years.
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.
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.
It's beneficial for NASA, companies, and other countries to have cost-effective access to a range of competing American launch providers (whether SpaceX, ULA, RocketLab, and perhaps BO in the next few years).
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?
This is a global problem, not limited to the US. It's also the end-state of capitalism because having (access to) more money makes it easier to have access to more money, and money drives everything else.
> where our institutions now function to primarily manage and preserve an unhealthy society that is primarily exploitative and does not have the needs of the populace first and foremost.
For me, it has always looked like the use was primarily exploitative and completely opposed to supporting the populace.
> Where economic indicators, economic lingo and policy just uses a vernacular to hide its direct purpose to provide safety for the haves at the expense of the have nots.
This is not new. Chomsky told us this in the 60s. The Catholic Church used a similar strategy for over a millennia.
I'm not disagreeing with you, only attempting to disperse your sense of surprise.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.
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.
Getting everyone involved in Artemis to deliver on time, let alone on budget, would require nothing short of divine intervention.
SLS Block 1: >27,000 kg (59,500 lb)
SLS Block 1B: 42,000 kg (92,500 lb)
SlS Block 2: >46,000 kg (101,400 lb)
Vulcan Centaur: 12,100 kg (26,700 lb)
New Glenn: 7,000 kg (15,000 lb)
Orion crew module by itself weighs 10,400 kg (22,900 lb), the service module is 15,461 kg (34,085 lb).
Orion is a heavy spacecraft. SLS, like or not (I don't), it has a lot of lift. Unless you're sticking an Orion inside of a Starship (lol), Orion basically dies with SLS.
Keeping multiple companies capable of building it alive is essential.
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)
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.
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).
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.
Building new things is genuinely hard.
But I have seen some serious, albeit delayed, successes.
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 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.
ULA has been operating for many, many years (Atlas/Delta, now Vulcan Centaur), RocketLab has been putting up small payloads for the last few (with Electron, someday Neutron perhaps), and BO seems close to having New Glenn flying real missions this season. But yes, one hopes that the others can become competitive on price eventually.
https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?t=1112
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.