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Comment by tectonic | Hacker News Reader

Actual press release: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-blue-origin-...

NASA needs multiple lander options; putting all their cards on a lunar Starship landing was always a bit ridiculous, even if it seems reasonably likely to happen. So if you want the Artemis program to actually succeed, this is likely a good thing. However, with Congress in a deadlock around the debt ceiling, and SLS costing $4B per launch, this is only going to add to Artemis's serious funding challenges.

If you're interested in the space industry in general, I'll cover this more next week in the weekly Orbital Index newsletter (https://orbitalindex.com) which I co-author with blach.

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Exactly, and if we (well you, I'm British) do get them on the moon with the intention of a permanent base, you absolutely want two landing options. If one is found to have a fatal flaw and people are stuck, you need an alternative.

On top of that, this is about promoting investment into infrastructure and vehicles that may one day take us to Mars, you can't just encourage one company to develop that. There needs to be a whole ecosystem of competing companies, we don't want a SpaceX monopoly.

> On top of that, this is about promoting investment into infrastructure

Gosh, I wish USA had access to potable tap water. Having less than 20 hours of electricity a day in winter is also a problem.

> If one is found to have a fatal flaw and people are stuck, you need an alternative.

That's why you test the hell out of one good one before you ever put humans in one. We didn't have alternatives for the Apollo missions. Failure just wasn't an option.

You can have an apollo style mission, or a strong ecosystem / competition that serves a wide range of consumers, but you can't have both from the same source.

This isn't a consumer mission though. All for competition when it makes sense, but you also risk diluting your limited budget and quality control at the cost of the project's success.

While that makes sense if you are only considering the single target of landing someone on the Moon, 1960s style, in this case it's about building a sustainable industry. The moon landing is just an excuse, and a target, something to be excited about. The real "mission" is build a bigger space industry, mostly because that creates jobs and pays contracts, but also because it pushes science and technology forward.

Just have a 2nd Apollo rocket on stand by. After Columbia, this is what NASA did with shuttle launches. There's the famous images of two shuttles on the launch pad at the same time.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/multimedia/images/08-09...

Sure, multiple vendors sounds like a nice idea, but rarely in real life does the 2nd vendor's product just act as a drop-in replacement. You might have 2 launch platforms with SpaceX and Blue Origin, but the payload meant for one will not just be able to be launched from the other. If you want that, then NASA needs to design the plans (or pick one set of plans) and then have multiple contractors building the agreed upon thing

Let me rephrase that: You can treat this as a sequential series of US Government specified projects, or you can attempt to bootstrap an economy around the problem and see if great things flourish.

Their doing option 2, I think, and I agree with that.

The Apollo program had failures with humans. People died. Failures happened, and many smaller failures happened even during the successful launch to the moon.

The Apollo 13 crew might have preferred to have a backup sent rather than piecing together a working craft from scraps.

There is a real question if splitting the budget into two options increases or reduces the chance for success.

Sure if money was magic you would like to have 10 options. But in reality that money is now not available for lots of other-things that are useful and could improve the moon missions in various way.

The thing is, there wasn’t a better option than Starship. Starship scored the best technically and could be funded for the least amount. It’s not crazy to pick the least technically risky option that’s simultaneously the lowest cost and highest capability.

> It’s not crazy to pick the least technically risky option that’s simultaneously the lowest cost and highest capability.

why buy one when you have two at (more than) twice the price?

Though it is not often appreciated re SpaceX/NASA, I side on the "competition is good" side of this argument.

I don't think gov should act like a single consumer, instead they should err on the side of producing an ecosystem of solutions to spur an economy around the problem.

So, two is cheaper than one long term, I hope.

Becuase money isn't magic and that money going to a very unsuccessful company BlueOrigin is now not available for space suits, habs, surface operations and many other potentially useful things.

Why does it need multiple options? Apollo didn't have multiple options.

Sorry that I can't answer your question in detail. I was listening to a podcast (maybe NPR or maybe some other interviews), the reason Apollo style program isn't used anymore is because it's not sustainable. I didn't understand the technical detail to give you a good answer.

Not having multiple options is not what made Appollo unsustainable.

And it wasn't actually unsustainable, it just wasn't sustainable while at the same time building shuttle.

Apollo was feasible because there was a very real risk of the entire USA being destroyed and every voter knew it. It was a race to technological and military superiority against the USSR and the Apollo program was a big part of that. That existential fear and risk doesn't exist today, there is no appetite for that level of commitment in the general population. AOC herself could kill a program proposal like Apollo with a single tweet about proposed bathroom door labels.

> AOC herself could kill a program proposal like Apollo with a single tweet about proposed bathroom door labels.

Hacker News becoming more like reddit every day with trash comments like this.

Hacker News was never anything more than a subreddit for elitist silicon valley VCs and FAANG programmers with 35 hours of free time per week.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

The lunar mission did not yield any kind of advanced military capabilities, though. We had cooperative space missions with the Soviets as early as 1975, when the Apollo program was still ongoing. See Apollo–Soyuz:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz

I can’t believe this is the first time I learn about this. How interesting!

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