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Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

Probably not a coincidence that this announcement arrives barely a week after SpaceX's absurdly ambitious Mars architecture announcement.

It's a good bet that any politician meaning business about this will award numerous private contracts as part of the initiative. SpaceX intends to make manned exploration of Mars a lot cheaper than NASA has ever suggested possible, and cost is the main factor.

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Yeah I was surprised to see that he didn't mention SpaceX anywhere in the article. It seems that Elon usually pays tribute to NASA -- he did in his Mars announcement.

It seems like if there are only two entities trying to go to Mars, and they work together through a contracting relationship, then it makes sense to mention the relation to the other one.

Otherwise I'm just left confused about the two efforts.

Maybe he just forgot?

He didn't call out ULA or any private company. It gets tricky to call out specific companies in a broad statement like this one.

The problem is NASA has stated they do not want private sector going to deep space. They think only the government should be doing deep space exploration and colonization. This is also why Elon specifically mentioned building parts of the ship for going to Mars in the Gulf states where there are already manufacturing plants for building components for NASA. Elon hopes to influence the public/politicians to help fund SpaceX instead of focusing on NASA doing it all.

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