Congress fires warning shot at NASA after SpaceX Moon lander award | Hacker News Reader

Congress fires warning shot at NASA after SpaceX Moon lander award

arstechnica.com

26 points_Microft13 comments

Space X is moving ahead with or without government funding using profits from Starlink and private sources. Blue Origin is sitting around with their hands out waiting for the government check. Boeing wants money to build a useless rocket. Who do you think will be the first to the moon?

yeah man, or they bribed nasa to get a gimme grant to break the rules.

ya know, good ole fashion crony capitalism.

So disappointing. It reads just like the petty office politics where the successful employee is attacked and criticized, by the others who spend all their time figuring out ways to attack and complain, instead of doing their job better. It's some strange human trait seen in every company, office, environment. And I assume it's a global issue. Meanwhile the successful engineer, teacher, developer, is blind to this, because they are working hard at doing a great job. Is it driven by jealousy? Fear?

This is fine, just make getting the money contingent upon Blue Origin doing 2 things:

1. shipping fully functional engines to ULA for the Vulcan rocket on-time and on-budget (it looks like they have pretty much done this so far with only minor issues, but still not fully tested on the rocket)

2. putting their New Glenn rocket into orbit

Then they can have their beloved billions. If they can't do that, NASA should take the money and give it to RocketLab.

Look at the cost difference... spacex 2.9B, Blue Origin 10.2B... even before comparing achievements and viability...

Why do we need two landing systems?

In general it's better to have multiple working designs. First, in case something happens with one, another can keep the traffic; that's what happened e.g. with ISS manned flights, when after the Columbia destruction flights moved to Soyuzes. Second, market - if the service is bought from a commercial company, competition helps keeping prices in check. Cost plus scheme, used by the NASA for a long time, does a rather poor job, evidenced by the USA leaving international launch market before the SpaceX coming.

Yea that is a nice to have. But why is going to the Moon so critical and time sensitive we need redundant transport systems? If the Moon lander breaks we wait a few years for the fix. Not a big deal.

Money is not free, there is another priority not getting funded. A better solution would be to buy one Moon lander system and take the money saved and fund other critical tech.

I really like the part where this is about using government money for "out-competing, out-innovating, outgrowing communist China".

And then ignoring the American capitalist company doing exactly that.

It seems like you misunderstood this part.

It was Senator Todd Young who expressed frustration that Senator Cantwell piggybacked the unrelated amendment to the bill that is meant to help with "out-competing, out-innovating [and] outgrowing communist China" (<- this is by Mr. Young).

I did indeed misunderstand. I do nonetheless find it remarkable that he thinks of this bill as creating a government entity to create jobs for the purpose of defeating Communism.

Remember, USA won the Moon race by running centrally-planned project with strong government leadership, while USSR lost Moon race by having Korolev, Chelomey and Yangel design bureaus competing with each other.

In this case we have SpaceX as a driving force and potentially NASA which provides much needed incentives - both to SpaceX (they won't reject the money) and others (so SpaceX knows it's not alone). Government is still critical, as there is little commercial gain to get in a short term from the Moon.

SpaceX has a couple of aces at hand - Starlink and potential for wide use of Starship near Earth. China companies don't have as much of commercial incentives - for them, government participation is even more critical.

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