Good. With both Blue Origin and Space-X having flown heavy boosters, there's no need for a US$2 billion per launch Boeing booster, even if it works.
New Glenn deploys half that. Closer to a Falcon Heavy.
You can't really do a moon program without a super heavy rocket.
The moon is close enough that you can teleoperate robots, although the 2.5 second lag means you have to have autonomy for at least balance. That's where Tesla's robots are now.
Tank on the Moon (2007) is a French documentary film about the development, launch, and operation of the Soviet Moon exploration rovers, Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2 in the period from 1970 to 1973.
on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_0K2-Tf3Ko
A bit of sometimes overlooked history.
It's about time for a larger scale robot base .. good trial run for elsewhere at even greater distances.
What's the cost per ton? Make sure to include failure rate.
Smarter Every Day gave a talk directly to NASA that raises some of the same issues. It's a good one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU
A good way to be poor is to not advance technology.
Think of space exploration as basic research. It’s fundamental to moving human knowledge forward and that should be worth any price.
Space-X can’t even do this without government funding.
Today we are not at war, at least not one that concerns space or the Moon. China is in a fierce self-imposed race to land on the Moon and Do The Other Things because it (probably correctly) views the West as an enemy to overcome. The US has not reciprocated that sentient, we've just shut them out of our space programs and then left them be.
For the US government to fund another Moon program we definitely need an answer to the question of Why. So far we don't have one other than THE PRESTIGE and OUR SCIENCE GRANTS as evidenced by many other threads on similar subject matter here. That's not going to convince the taxpayers.
USA had that ability some 50 years ago. Since then companies changed, technologies were replaced, knowledge transformed and people got interested with other things, not to mention that risk threshold grew a lot. As a result, right now USA can't fly men to the Moon.
US government, however, doesn't want to give China the ability to say "yes, we're on the Moon - and we're the only nation which can do it today". And because of that, we have a rather similar conditions today as we had some 60 years ago - US government can't really allow China to fly men to the Moon without showing that Americans are also doing that, at the very same time.
Taxpayers, of course, are and were different - somebody doesn't care, somebody else cares a lot. I doubt US government want to assume those who care aren't that important.
In that case SLS definitely needs to be cancelled.
We are well beyond "basic research" into how a Moon program could be executed, private companies are already doing it and the only question left is how to commercialize it.
Leave it to the commercial world, and if they can't figure out a sustainable business model then it simply isn't meant to be (yet?).
Apollo quickly lost funding and popular support once the Cold War in space was effectively over. Space Shuttle ran on its fumes, and it had to be designed partially as a warplane in order to get additional funds from USAF that NASA couldn't get otherwise. SLS is an extension of that.
Also, we're living in 2025, not 1965. The reasons of the past do not translate perfectly to today.
>And as to whether we have the money for it, the U.S. is the wealthiest it has ever been and certainly much wealthier than we were in the 60s.
We are also literally many trillions in debt. There are many things we should be doing and arguably none of that involves another Moon program just for the sake of it. Been there, done that; we don't have the money.
Use two parts like Apollo but launch them separately?
Just two. Wow. That’s an unprecedented track record in the space industry.
Every industry has different critical indicators. “Late” doesn’t mean much here.
Even routine individual launches are often scheduled as “NET” or “No Earlier Than”.
For major new rocket designs, it’s a lot like me and social events. “If I’m not late, I’m not coming!”
But we all want to talk about dates anyway, so we get “delays” that are not delays at all because the dates are never, could never, be real.
A better way is to look at ambitious date projections as targets. If we don’t talk about dates, we feel less pressure and go even slower. But if we talk about dates, we get some urgency even when we miss them.
“Target date” is a good phrase that communicates we know we can’t beat that date, but if absolutely everything went to plan, we might hit it, so we are going to try for it. Knowing that as long as we keep having to learn anything whatsoever, we are going to have a moving target.
Also keep in mind that his previous missions realistically were only possible via SpaceX whether he liked them or not. Starliner was not (and is still not) ready, Orion isn't ready and is for NASA only anyway, and Russia/China aren't going to work well for geopolitical reasons. SpaceX is the only company left who has the capability to lob you into orbit.