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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

If NASA doesn't do this, there is still a very well financed private company that intends to do it, as a side effect of colonization, and is actively and credibly developing the capability. How much value is there in the state doing it first?

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Interesting, which company is that, and how reliable is their leadership at follow-through?

If you're referring SpaceX, the leadership is pretty damn good. Starship, catching it, landing the boosters autonomously, that's pretty serious leadership follow through. Not say they are all great, but SpaceX is certainly ahead in this regard.

Except, no, Starship is already hugely behind schedule when it comes to promises made for the Artemis program alone, and the design of Artemis has massive compromises to account for Starship (up to a dozen or more Starship launches for a single trip to the moon), which also requires SpaceX to come up with a solution for in-orbit refueling (which they don't yet have, and has never been demonstrated, and by all accounts SpaceX appears to be unreasonably optimistic about the shelf-life of rocket fuel in a hypothetical orbital depot, which is a huge risk to the feasibility of Artemis). In the meantime, Starship has limited independent economic prospects because the world just doesn't have the demand for that much launch capacity, and there's no reason to think that Starship will be more economical for the vast majority of launches (for the same reason that the vast majority of commercial airline flights are not on jumbo jets). SpaceX's mercurial leadership represents an existential risk to the entire company by working on the wrong things and making unrealistic promises that they have no clue how to fulfill, for the same reason that Tesla's mercurial leadership represents an existential risk to the entire company by working on the wrong things (cough, cybertruck, cough) and making unrealistic promises that they have no clue how to fulfill (cough, camera-only autonomous vehicles, cough).

Goals that Elon Musk projects did not achieve in the promised timeline: Tesla Model 3 production, Full-Self-Driving, Mars Colonization, Cybertruck, Starship.

Goals that NASA projects did not achieve in the promised timeline: Artimis I, II and III, Constellation Program, Mars Observer, Climate Orbiter, Polar Lander, and Phobos 1, Hubble Space Telescope, X-33 and -34.

In both cases I think that the unreliability stems not from incompetence, but the degree of difficulty.

Because the "well funding" that private company intends to use comes from...the US government?

If they are already well funding, for other goals, a company that intends to do it, why not just let them and focus on other priorities?

Guess it depends on the state. China is planning[1] to launch their Mars sample return mission in 2028, and I guess they do care about being first if they can.

[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-tianwen-3-...

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