NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
cnn.com
cnn.com
1. We’ve already beaten China to the moon by 56 years, 3 months, and some change. And counting.
2. Nothing based around SLS is remotely serious. The cost and timeline of doing anything with it are unreasonable. It is an absolute dead-end. The SpaceX Super Heavy has been more capable arguably as early as the second flight test and certainly now. They could have built a “dumb” second stage at any time, but aren’t that short-sighted.
3. Blue Origin? I’ve had high hopes for the guys for two decades now. Don’t hold your breath.
4. Anyone else? Really, really don’t hold your breath.
This whole “race to the moon, part II” is almost criminally stupid. Land on the moon when we can accomplish something there, not just to prove we haven’t lost our mojo since Apollo.
Mars is out of reach and not feasible.
Mars is a total boondoggle - a colony would require constant supply runs from Earth to support a double-digit population - who is going to field the cost and what are they going to do there ?.
"The Martian" was work of fiction.
A lunar colony is cheaper and way more feasible.
If the point is a colony, then we should just do it on the moon. If the point is for the advances in technology it will bring, we don’t have to go to Mars to explore those things. We could just keep practicing on the moon.
Obviously it’s not exactly the same but idk, most of why I’d be interested in our going to mars can be answered with “it’s easier, more feasible, and generally just as useful to do it on the moon instead.” It’s still low gravity, no oxygen/breathable atmosphere, a hostile desert essentially, etc. but far closer. We can respond to emergencies more easily. We know for a fact we are currently capable of getting there and back safely.
TL;DR: we will likely get a lot more out of dumping our resources into trips to and from the moon and building something there than trying to go to mars for a very long time.
Funnelling a lot of government money into the pockets of the best candidate for the world's first trillionare.
Mars sucks. The moon sucks too. We need rotating space habitats. With gravity and hookers.
Mars is infinitely more viable than anywhere in Venus for the simple fact that you are on solid ground with resources all around you.
Without orbital infrastructure shipping supplies in neither are viable.
Use your non-sockpuppet, please.
People like you make no sense to me. I am a minority, and don't turn my head from this reality.
You're suggesting that the drop reveals a quota, but it really only shows a slight drop from the norm for black students from the period pre-Pandemic (from ~8% to 5%) and a slightly larger drop for Hispanic/Latino students (from ~17% to 11%). Most of the change across the larger timescale has been fewer white students and more Asian students.
Your "abuse" was a handful of years of slightly increased consideration of qualified black applicants post-George Floyd protests, after decades of racial considerations boosting black enrollment by maybe 2% or 3% compared to the most current incoming class's proportion. This boost is slightly higher for Hispanic/Latino applicants, but still not much to consider (insofar as it's roughly equal to the boost in proportion of Asian students).
We'll not talk about the fact that affirmative action is still alive and well in the admissions process, as gender is still a valid consideration.
This is specifically at MIT, which chooses its class from a pool of qualified applicants (which means that, even with the demographic changes, everyone who was there was someone who deserved to be there), without recognition of sports, legacy, and international student interests. This is decidedly not the case elsewhere, where racial consideration had little effect on class composition when compared to the aforementioned.
In short: your grievance is not serious. It's shallow and formed from misconceptions. If you cared about abuse in college admissions, you would accept that legacy and moneyed interests are more of a drag than racial consideration as a remedy to decades of discrimination. The protections were not only valid, but not even given serious consideration until after our most recent reckoning with America's structural racism, and just as quickly torn up at the first opportunity.
https://ir.mit.edu/projects/demographic-dashboard/
https://web.archive.org/web/20240829012444/https://mitadmiss...
the US may have gone to the Moon 50+ years ago but a lot has changed. There's no big enemy to rally behind as we manufactured in the Cold War. We don't have titans of industry anymore. We have titans of finance who coast on the inertia of early successes while raising prices, cutting costs and engaging in rent-seeking behavior.
There are serious design issues with Starship as a platform for going back to the Moon.
I'm not at all convinced the US can build anything anymore.
But it has! Look at all of our private industry! That's the point!
> We don't have titans of industry anymore.
What?!
Semiconductors? Nope.
High speed rail? Nope.
Auto industry? Nope.
Major infrastructure projects like bridges, tunnels, airports, etc? Nope.
Electronics (phones/laptops/etc)? Nope.
?????
The US is not exactly a manufacturing powerhouse.
At least for now.
We just gave $40 billion to Argentina for pretty much no reason whatsoever.
Now the US government has spent a whole lot more on SpaceX but they're buying services.
SpaceX is an incredible bargain compared to the alternatives like ULA.
The US is second in manufacturing and far ahead of numbers 3 and 4 (Germany and Japan IIRC).
I posit that software has no such supply chain dependency, literally anyone can do it, and thinking the US is unique in their ability to produce software isn't accurate.
Doesn't it seem odd to you that only the two largest economies in the world are doing something so lucrative if literally anyone can do it?
EUV tech is from American universities, licensed by choice by the US Government. In a world where Nikon was a much smaller optics player, they'd be the ones building EUV machines, and we'd be pretending Japan was the source of this tech.
The US's main contribution is doing the research required to make this whole thing possible.
They produce 1.8M cars/year while GM and Ford produce 6M and 4M, respectively. (2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_manufacture...)
If the Chinese EV tariffs are dropped, or if BYD start manufacturing at scale in the US, all the old US auto manufacturers are dead.
Of course, but there a few things to consider.
1. This is a new race. The olympics happen every four years to see which nation is the current best. It seems it’s time to find out again.
2. The last time the US was dominant was 56 years ago. That’s three generations. Based on SLS and the comments here, it seems extremely unlikely the US is still dominant. Let’s find out.
Personally I hope no human lands on the moon again. I like telling my parents they are so old humans walked on the moon in their lifetime (last human left the moon December 1972 - before I was born). There is no value in this statement, but it is still fun.
There are second, third, etc order effects to things like a space race.
IF you were talking about building a good public transit system the value is in building a team and keeping it running. However this is - for all we know - just a one off show and so there isn't value in getting experience. The people looking at Mars have value in experience, and there may be value in robotic moon missions, but so far as I can tell human missions are just for showing off and should be treated like a one time show off and then get rid of the team for another 50 years.
Unfortunately it feels more like the drive to return to the moon is just a way for the high school quarter back to relive his glory days, as the stereotype goes and is actually less about accomplishing something meaningful to push science and understanding. Tons of things we could do to push science and understanding that is novel that we may forgo to relive former glory.
Healthcare, worker's rights, voting rights, infrastructure, etc, are all more important (so I agree with you there), but also all have way more consequences that are wider-ranging and longer-term (which I'd say contributes do the political dysfunction around those topics).
This should be an "easy win" by comparison, and the "PR" impact of success (or failure) will be significant.
Edit: that said, if you gave me a magic wand to pick any one of these topics for the US to succeed at, it wouldn't be going to the moon.
Could we get the same ends via something more useful? In theory, sure, but it seems pretty evident that the answer in practice is no, since our congress has mostly been gridlocked for the past 16 years.
The matter of factness of the shuttle shows how good the program was, but we still had two explode completely.
NASA literally had departments and budgets dedicated to miniaturization.
Sure, this would likely have happend anyway, but possibly later with all related knock off effects.
What are we missing because they did that though? Or what came latter? There is no way to answer this. It is easy to see what happened because of effort, but not what you didn't get (or got latter) because to focused on something else.
I was really hoping someone could come up with an idea along a completely different line.
These days? The space race was 50 years ago.
The first time around, the space race was expensive, but not entirely unnecessary. There were real strategic advantages at play.
Literally every other nation is trying to catch up to Space-X and is nowhere close. An American company, based in American, primarily staffed by American engineers.
I don't know by what measure you'd say that the US isn's still far, far ahead but I don't know of any other country currently re-using rockets dozens of times. What did I miss?
There's also the fact that part of NASA's mission is to share their knowledge with the public.
How exactly are you making the distinction? Space-X wouldn't exist without governemnt funding. CATL sells launches to commercial entities as well as servicing the government.
Official ownership? Because China seems to think a lot of what Space-X is doing can only be accomplished by the commercial sector and is funding startups in China to do the same thing.
https://spacenews.com/chinas-landspace-secures-state-backed-...
That's how China's been running their economy for decades. Every few years, the government sets a direction everyone should row in, and generally lets private firms figure out which one of them will get there fastest.
Much of society agrees with his points on crime
Saying that his daughter is dead to him because she transitioned and working to remove trans rights is a bit more than just being "critical of the trans movement".
Again I don't know what to say. If sharing neo-Nazi material and doing a Hitler salute isn't anti-semitic then I don't know what is.
People appreciate German cars just fine, and no one seems to be particularly bothered that they are produced by workers in private sector companies instead of 'by society'. Whatever that even means.
When I say "by society" I mean a non-private organization like NASA.
> When I say "by society" I mean a non-private organization like NASA.
Is there any non-government organisation that can do any good in your opinion? What about a charitable trust? What about mostly unorganised protesters like those that moved Germany towards unification?
It's mainly profit oriented organizations that I don't trust.
Immigration of talent is historically an American asset. Look bo further than the moon landing itself for an example.
The whole point of this article, and the NASA admin steps to open up the contract and all of Berger’s recent reporting is that it’s almost a certainty China will beat the US back to the moon.
Let's imagine that China puts people on the moon next year in a method similar to the way the US did it in 1969 (but probably better in some ways). They still are mostly doing something that has been done before by the USA.
In that same year, the USA will probably continue to launch 80% of the rockets to space. Maybe we don't do our next trip to the moon for another five years. But there's good chance by then we will be using much more advanced and reusable rockets. Does that really make the US behind?
I want to see us invest more into space exploration. I think its sad that NASA's plan has been dumb. But getting two or three people to the moon is more about showing that China is capable (which is a very reasonable goal for them) then showing they have some long term advantage.
It's rich seeing all this unearned bluster about having the lead due to SpaceX, when SpaceX had to drag America kicking and screaming into that position.
I've seen no indication that they see it in these terms. They've been pretty low-key about their progress.
To me it looks like the US obsession with reframe everything in terms of a "new cold war". From the US perspective, in end you look stupid if you lose, and you look stupid if you just spend a ton of money to repeat what you did last time
China has always been insular, and they don't think about space glories that much at the moment. It would take a couple more generations for them to care about something like that.
"Glory" can exist without comparing yourself to others. When they built the three-gorges dam they probably weren't thinking "our dam is better than those American dams". It's just impressive in its own right
They can be working on going to space without constantly bringing out the proverbial measuring tape to compare themselves to the US.
I'm not totally in the loop with the Chinese zeitgeist, so my post was a genuine question. Maybe they are comparing, maybe not. Both seem sensible reactions
The US comparatively does boast a lot more that it's a bit of a meme on chinese social media.
Today’s America scores zero points for its accomplishments of the past. But I think one way it can be a good thing is the, “we’ve done it before, we can do it again” attitude. Which is somewhat opposite to “we already won!”
An open question as I really don’t have an answer either way: what’s the last mega project the U.S. succeeded in completing that wasn’t directly tied to a short term business plan? Something for future generations or a major environmental project or a transportation or infrastructure project, etc.
We might even be better to have no one advancing space travel than to have only the billionaires doing it. At least then they can't find some way to use it to screw us over.
SpaceX is majority owned by billionaires.
The idea that we need to land on the moon once a generation just to say that we are as good at landing on the moon as our parents is absurd.
It’s kind of like a FIRST Robotics Challenge for nations. The specific goal really doesn’t matter and can just as well be different than the moon. That’s not the interesting part.
Unfortunately, I think that's the problem with some of the rhetoric like "the green revolution will be the next space race!" For better or worse, solar panels aren't as inspiring to most people as space is.
If the same resources were put into popularizing advancements in energy, you'd see more excitement. As it is, there are kids growing up excited about environmentalism like there were kids growing up excited about space.
Look at the cult of personality the Soviet Union built around Yuri Gagarin, yes people were always going to find space exploration interesting, but manufacturing a folk hero means even more people will, too, and it becomes something aspirational and seemingly attainable. The Soviets were not unique in doing this, the US did similar things.
There are already some related things in popular culture that seem to inspire younger generations, like new urbanism. The hope for a new way of living can be a huge motivating force.
Nah. You can argue that the goal "land on the moon" is artificial, but it being artificial doesn't make it fake or abstract. If you're the first to achieve it then you're the first, and that's it. What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new.
Now, if you're not able to repeat it at all, that does say something. But if it takes you a few years longer, well, so what? It's not a race anymore, because it's already been won, by the US of fifty years ago.
The winner of the race to Mars is still undecided, though.
I’ve got to assume I’m misunderstanding the objection because it feels ridiculous to overstir the oxygen over semantics. Do we just need to call it Space Race 2?
Also unlike sports, space races are massively expensive and it's untenable to forever go from one to the next.
However I agree that manned space flight is a giant money pit with not much to show for. It should come out of our entertainment budget, not eat into our science budget.
If you want to do science in space, go unmanned.
You can do the same thing twice, and you can also lose the ability to do something.
The ability to do the thing is what is really being maintained and demonstrated.
Every country has the technology to go to the moon - it's well established now. But who can actually make it happen? That's a huge organizational, human, financial, industrial challenge. And people do notice when only one country can do it.
>But who can actually make it happen? That's a huge organizational, human, financial, industrial challenge. And people do notice when only one country can do it.
On the other side of the coin, it's such a huge expense just for bragging rights, that for any country it's not worth undertaking. It's much more preferable to just give the appearance that you could totally do it if you wanted to, but you just don't feel like it. I'd argue that the US is currently failing at this, but until anyone else flies a manned mission to the moon, it doesn't say anything.
Despite you throwing the word "obviously" at it, that is an extremely untrue claim. Even if we hadn't forgotten a lot of the details, we're solving new engineering challenges with modern material science and manufacturing, and learning a lot of new things about spacecraft design. There is a ton of invention in doing another landing after so long.
But even as stated, I don't think your argument holds up. "What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new."
Even if it was technically possible to not invent anything new, that path is not going to be taken. It would be even more expensive and worse in every way. Nobody is going to launch a rocket with just 60s/70s technology ever again. A new moon launch will have lots of invention and learning, and claiming we can still do it does need proof.
Like I said, you didn't have to invent anything new. In this case you put yourself in the awkward situation of having to reinvent the wheel by your own incompetence. So if you actually do do it, what have you proven?
>It would be even more expensive and worse in every way.
Worse and more expensive than what? The only rocket that has flown men to the moon is Saturn V. What exactly are you comparing it to?
The "you're certainly not learning anything new" argument only works if we do reuse old techniques. "You don't have to invent anything new" is not sufficient to support the argument.
> Worse and more expensive than what?
Trying to reinvent old techniques and rebuild a bunch of machines and factories that used those techniques would be worse than inventing new things. You'd have to deliberately choose to not learn anything and to waste extra money in pursuit of that choice.
> The only rocket that has flown men to the moon is Saturn V. What exactly are you comparing it to?
We don't have a time machine, so the contenders are "2020s rocket with techniques invented before 1970" or "2020s rocket with techniques invented before 2030".
> So if you actually do do it, what have you proven?
If you actually do it, in a reasonable way, then in addition to the inventions and learning and any proof to do with that, you prove you can go to the moon, because saying "oh of course we can, we could use the old method" is not a particularly strong claim as industries change and workers retire over the course of more than half a century.
Are you in manufacturing? Because when following perfectly mature process, defect still happens.
Then, how do you even "do the same steps for the first one"? After 50y, lots have lost.
Yes, you do.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-th...
I would love to see the kind of investment in NASA we had during the 60s. The scientific advancements were staggering. Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.
Apollo at its height commanded 0.8% of the entire US economy.
True excellence in engineering is being able to do amazing things within a limited budget.
(And overall, sending some primates to the moon should come out of our entertainment budgets. Manned space flight has been one giant money sink without much too show for. If you want to do anything scientifically useful in space, go for unmanned.
> Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.
Huh? You remember the cold war? The US spends less of its total income on weapons and warfare than back then. Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.)
Note that if you attribute interest for military-related debt to military spending(roughly 40-50% of our interest payments) then it ends up climbing in the ranking. But it’s true that we have other major expenses as well.
(And yes, the government can give labels to the debt, but that's more of a political exercise than fiscal reality.)
This is inaccurate. Here [1] is a nice table showing US military spending over time, inflation adjusted. Up, up, and away! And it's made even more insane because what really matters is discretionary spending. Each year lots of things are automatically paid - interest on the debt, pensions, medicare, social security, and so on. What's left over is in those giant budgetary bills that Congress makes each year that cover all spending on education, infrastructure, and all of the other things people typically associate government spending with.
And military spending (outside of things like pension) is 100% discretionary, and it consumes about half of our entire discretionary budget! And this is again made even more insane by the fact that discretionary spending, as a percent of all spending, continues to decline. This is because we're an aging population with a terrible fertility rate. So costs for social security, medicare, and other such things are increasing sharply while new revenue from our children is barely trickling in. Notably this will never change unless fertility rates change. Even when the 'old people' die, they will be replaced by even more old people, and with even fewer children coming of age.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
Perhaps I wasn't quite clear when I said "spends less of its total income". I meant as as a proportion of GDP.
I agree that the US has some weird distinction between discretionary and mandatory spending. And I also agree that much of the 'mandatory' spending needs a reform, and should probably not be on the government's balance sheet at all. Eg a fully funded pension system that invests globally is both off the government's balance sheet, and doesn't care about domestic fertility.
(Of course, you still want to have a means tested welfare system to catch those people who couldn't earn enough for retirement and other poor people in general.)
Sovereign wealth funds of the sort you're alluding to have a problem - governments can't ever control their spending, so the funds always end up getting plundered. The Alaska Permanent Fund is a great example. It was created after massive oil reserves were discovered in Alaska resulting in a huge windfall of money to the government. The government proceeded to completely waste all of that money with nothing to show for it, which made people less than happy. So the idea of the APF was to create a fund that could provide social dividends in both the present and even after the oil eventually runs out.
But as the government started, again, blowing money, they started dipping into the fund and eventually changed the law to normalize it and it's gradually turning into a joke. This years dividend was $1000, compared to $3300 (inflation adjusted) at its peak in 1999. The problem with 'well just make it where you can't do that' is that the same people that make that law, are the exact same that can unmake that law and give themselves lots of other people's money, which they will do, sooner or later.
Why not? I think it's close to the only useful metric across time.
> The distinction between mandatory and discretionary isn't weird - mandatory is payments that the government is legally required to make, discretionary is what they have the choice of spending.
Laws aren't god given. They can be changed. The political processes are slightly different, but if the voters want it, they can get it.
> Sovereign wealth funds of the sort you're alluding to have a problem - [...]
I'm not alluding to any sovereign wealth funds. What makes you think so?
I suggested to get pension systems out of the hands of government, not into them.
As for money vs GDP, our discussion on mandatory vs discretionary spending is already one reason why $$$ is far more informative. Dollars can, after inflation, be compared and paint a relatively clear picture. Percent of some other metric, which has often changed wildly over time, is instead more likely just to mislead.
So for instance we now spend hundreds of billions of dollars more on the war machine than we did during the Cold War when we were facing a very viable threat of nuclear annihilation. That's an extremely valuable metric that does mean a lot. Why are we spending so much on war?
The fantasy about it creating some sort of unstoppable war machine has clearly been clearly shattered. It's not even clear that would have been desirable if true. One thing this administration got completely right was renaming the Department of Defense to its old moniker of Depart of War, because that is what it really is.
This reality is completely muddled if you start trying to frame things as percent of some other metric, be that budget, GDP, or whatever else.
The modern argument is that we spend less as a percent of the federal budget, but it's mostly nonsensical. The government having more money available has nothing to do with the amount of money being spent on NASA or any other program. It's precisely due to this luxury that we've been able to keep NASA's budget so high in spite of them achieving nothing remotely on the scale of the Apollo program in the 50+ years since it was ended.
The big problem is that after Nixon defacto ended the human space program (largely because he feared that an accident might imperil his reelection chances), NASA gradually just got turned into a giant pork project. They have a lot of money but it's mostly wasted on things that people know aren't going anywhere or are otherwise fundamentally flawed, exactly like Artemis and the SLS.
In the sense that we don't need to do either, that's true. But if we want to claim we're still competent moon landers, we do need to repeat the task every once in a while to keep that capability. And there are good scientific benefits from continuing to do difficult space launches of many types.
This is sort of like saying Leif Erikson and the Icelandic Commonwealth won the "the new world race" in 1000AD. Whatever Columbus et al were up to would surely be of trifling concern to future generations.
(Although I think the moon landing is ridiculous there is no scientific reason for it).
And yes, it’s probably also about certain aspects of anxiety and probably some panic about the prospect of American decline after so many decades of squandering everything and letting itself both be bled dry and run off a cliff by a subversive element within.
After everything is all said and done, I wonder if it would be possible to build out a data project tracking the people and the decisions that led to the outcome and also where all the wealth went. I guess this is impossible because too many people are unnamed figures just doing their part succumbing to inertia.
For a bit of perspective, I just saw that James O'Keeffe just published a video yesterday that is related to that topic regarding the 8(a) set-aside fraud that he says amounts to $100 billion annually alone. Having some direct knowledge about that area in particular, I would not be surprised if it was even more than $100B annually, and that's just one of such schemes where I would guess about 80% of the money is full on defrauded by various means and methods, and of the remaining 20%, probably 15% are for things that are simply utterly useless, unproductive, pointless efforts; often even to do work in support of some other agency/department's work that is also utterly useless and inconsequential, i.e., a kind of circular fraud.
In case you are interested in the O'Keeffe video, even though it may be boring to some and utterly shocking to others [1]. Just remember, he is highlighting just one company and one tribe running this scheme/fraud, there are hundreds or even thousands of companies doing exactly that, and that is just one scheme/fraud of several that exist in federal contracting; even beyond just open and blatant corruption and nepotism and fraud you would not believe me if I told you, because you would not be able to square the fact that something so blatant could be occurring without law enforcement doing their jobs.
JWST is actually a good example. The (slow) unfolding of the telescope was a long-term nail-biting experience, because even very trivial problems that could have been easily fixed with a screwdriver or a finger poke on Earth could doom one of the most sophisticated pieces of scientific equipment ever produced.
We were lucky in the end, but if anything went wrong, the result would be immense frustration and the most expensive piece of space junk per unit of weight.
But in general, you probably don't need human bodies for such maintenance on the Moon, "just" very sophisticated and versatile robot mechanics. IDK what is easier.
Maybe you can save a lot on the equipment itself (because it does not have to be 99,99999% reliable - those extra nines cost a lot) and thus can also deploy more equipment, and instead of a single telescope you can have several farms thereof.
So not only do we still need to have an incredibly high degree of reliability for core critical parts of the mission, that mission is now massively larger, and it's now human lives on the line if things go wrong.
Can't we still have farms of telescopes if we wanted even if a few of them don't deploy perfectly?
Can't we just have a humanoid robot go and turn the screws for us?
That would indeed be the best solution, if we can build such robots. Notoriously, computers are much better at "thinking" (or simulating thereof) than at folding laundry.
"it's now human lives on the line if things go wrong."
That is quite normal in many professions. Programmers are usually somewhat sheltered, so the very idea of risking your life on a job is shocking to them. But I grew up in a mining town and, well, some people will take that bargain for money. Some people even like the bit of a thrill.
I'm just pointing out the risk of failure and its impacts on the overall program is much higher when we're talking about humans experiencing a massive sudden depressurization event compared to a foil sheet failing to unfurl. If you think its expensive trying to get a foil sheet to reliably unfold once, imagine how expensive it'll be to design a door to properly seal and unseal hundreds of times with sharp, hard, and fine regolith constantly working its way into the seams and hinges and seals. If you think it'll be difficult getting public support after your telescope isn't perfectly functional, imagine the reluctance of funding you'll get when you accidentally kill seven people in a horrific way.
The motivations to send humans to other bodies at this time are political; to prove who is and isn't a superpower of the 21st century.
After all, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Not one dollar was spent in space during the first space race.
What precisely is the difference? Where was space-race money spent that shouls be reallocated? My point is you eventually need to put the research into practice.
It was to prove that your economic system could muster the correct machinery to get to the moon. Once we got to the moon, nothing significantly changed scientifically, but politically it was a bombshell.
The act of getting the moon now is, once again, not a scientific endeavor. It is once again a holistic test of whether the country still can do it.
And from the looks at it, maybe not. America is not all aligned like we were during the Cold War. Then again, the stakes during the Cold War seems higher.
But this isn't the 1960s and the US has burned through its goodwill and ruined its credibility. I think the rest of the world would rather have a Chinese base on the moon than an American one.
Ditto. I’m in New Zealand.
i had a conversation with a colleague today - we both said that we'd feel more comfortable to visit China over the US, and for his next vacation where he would have to fly via the US he's now considering to take a different flight-path which avoids the US.
as someone from europe one of my dreams as a kid was to visit the great United States. 20 years later this has drastically changed, still never been to the US, but would now rather visit other places.
people are trying to migrate away from US tech to other alternatives.
just last weekend i was joking with the person i watch Formula1 with - the last race was in the US. anyways, we joked that we used to laugh at races and events being held in Azerbaijan, just because it seemed weird to hold western sports events in dictatorships, similar to the football world cup in Qatar. now a world cup and F1 race in the US feels at least as bad as the other options.
but that's my POV. another friend still wants to visit the US for a third time and wants me to go with him and someone else i now even recently got married in the US.
but for me and the people around me - yes, the status of the US has taken a hard nose-dive, especially in the last 1-2 years.
also doesn't help to grow up and learn about the US history, by which i mean the overthrowing of foreign governments, global NSA scandals, needless wars for oil, trade wars etc. etc. etc.
no ill will against the average american citizen, but writing this comment made me a bit angry again. your country's government and some parts of the population cause so much pain on a global scale, but y'all seem too isolated and privileged to realize that. add to this that not even US citizens seem to benefit from this, i mean even y'all get swindled.
you know, i still feel like visiting the US. i want to meet the people and get to know the culture which influences my life in a big way. it just feels wrong, almost like visiting Germany in the early 1930s or late 1920s as a tourist. hope y'all calm down sometime, you'll maybe catch me on Route66, in one of the big cities or wherever.
that's kind of the essence of my rant i think. i could list soooooo many places in the US i'd like to see. but right now and since a couple of years, i'd rather not. the world is big, nice places everywhere. y'all have some great marketing, that's for sure.
As the old Soviet joke goes, "everything for the citizen... and I've even seen that citizen!"
They're far from the only countries on my no go list though.
Now try again, except imagine everyone is a horse.
the point is to exemplify how over-generalized and stupid it is to mention the universal human feelings of xenophobia and paranoia that occur when people witness an adversary during a war-action, land expansion, or anything near those concepts as if it was somehow a uniquely American/Chinese phenomena.
But -- the question asked was 'what will the world-wide discussion look like', not 'How will the Americans respond and feel?'
So, with that in mind, how about an answer to the question asked?
My personal opinion is that there will be a frenzy to remove the groups in power at the moment without much thought of who will fill the vacuum, and then about 40 years of bellyaching from the globe after the cards fall where they may.
A lot of commercial tech was spun off from Apollo, and generated a bit of GDP a for a good while.
Incremental progress via building up infrastructure, including space station in Earth and Moon orbit, paving way to a lunar surface base. Also ways to make this affordable were explored, including reusable first stages, etc.
Then all focus switch to racing the Soviets and and anything that did not contribute flags and footprints on the lunar surface ASAP was skipped, opting for the fastest possible solution at all costs.
So no wonder that after the race was won, it was hard to do a meaningful followup with the architecture chosen.
One might even argue we would be further along space infra wise if the race did not happen or involved other objectives (possibly even including in space military buildup by both sides).
If the point was to prove which economic system is better, the outcome was clear: totalitarian dictatorship with a solid education system far outcompetes capitalism with strong government intervention. In fact it seems that the more there's a guy at the top forcing everyone to work towards an achievable goal, the more likely the goal is to be achieved. There are other reasons to dislike totalitarian dictatorships, of course.
Whether we can do it faster than China is the question. A question many people are in denial about because of patriotism. Many people can’t handle it if the answer in actuality was that China will be better.
Motorola was the first to create a handheld mobile phone, Apple just did not get that memo... :)
If we want to put people on Mars, we must prove we can put people on Moon, again.
It’s like saying visiting the marianas trench and Everest are the same because they’re both on earth
Mars would need water, air, energy, raw materials, fuel and everything else for (basically) ever.
There is zero to be gained (here) from a Mars colony. Mars lacks a magnetic field, air to breath, water to drink or cultivate crops, a temperature suitable for plant or animal life, fuel sources to build industry, supply chains for the construction or maintainence of the simplest electrical systems.
Talk of Mars is purely a PR play. Someone will be first. Yay. But Mars will play no part in Earth's future.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Ceres
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_the_asteroid_b...
For spaxe infrastructure however - sure, stuff mined and manufactured on the Moon can definitely help any planetary missions.
but we have satellites for that
High resolution photographs of the entire earth (as opposed to tiny pieces of it) would have a massive positive emotional effect on people. The Earthrise photo's enduring popularity is proof of this. There's water on the Moon; we could have bases there by now, even if they were limited in functionality and size, like the ISS. We could have remote-control or autonomous moon rovers and bipedal robots exploring there 24-7.
Instead we have Moon landing denialists one one hand and jaded 'it's just a rock, who cares' nay-sayers on the other.
Well, when US is not running out of money.
We already have this, it doesn't require being on the moon.
> There's water on the Moon; we could have bases there by now, even if they were limited in functionality and size, like the ISS.
The scale of going to the ISS versus the moon is massively different. Most of the research we'd be doing on the moon that isn't just for robots to do like digging in the dirt could still be done on an orbiting space station (like, how to mitigate effects of microgravity on the human body, how to cultivate plants in low gravity, studying microorganisms and chemistry in space, etc.)
> We could have remote-control or autonomous moon rovers and bipedal robots exploring there 24-7.
This doesn't require a human presence on the moon. We've had nearly uninterrupted robots on Mars for decades and haven't had a human on it.
> Instead we have Moon landing denialists one one hand
You had moon landing denialists even right after we landed. Us continuing to be on the moon isn't going to get rid of these naysayers. People are arguing the earth is flat, that anthropogenic climate change can't be possible, that the earth is 40,000 years old, and vaccines are mind control agents.
I get it would be cool and there probably is some science that could only be done with humans on the moon that I don't know about (I don't know everything, for sure). I think it would do a lot to push our engineering forward to have this kind of constant investment towards operating in space. But outside of being a means to funnel public funds to engineering firms to essentially find cooler ways to burn money I'm not sure it's all worth it.
Not saying we shouldn't have a space program! There's still lots we don't know about the universe and lots of cool science to learn. But do we need actual humans on the moon to achieve these goals?
I'm a tourist at the moment and everything looks like it is falling apart. The existing roading infrastructure is crumbling (apparently there's an Instagram about the worst examples). Everywhere I've driven, the roads are worse than earthquake hit Christchurch. Yet there is so much amazing old infrastructure that reeks of massive past investment.
Commonly I see power poles listing tipsily (or even broken); cable wires loose or hanging.
One bridge over the Mississippi has rust patches everywhere and needs a paint.
Is it just New Orleans, or a more general issue across the US?
Everything is so car oriented and spread out, that there isn't enough value to tax to pay for the maintenance on all the spread out infrastructure. So states and cities are always on the brink of default, scrambling to maintain all this stuff.
Happy to meet anyone else too.
Background: I'm a geeky type open to everybody; I don't like being judgemental. Travelling because I retired as soon as I had the minimum necessary to have a basic house plus a small retirement fund (as soon as the SaaS company I helped found could meet that goal). I picked LA to travel to because I liked the sarcasm and honesty I received here previously. To avoid disappointment: I have an awesome girlfriend so I'm not fishing for a date.
Cheers
Was: Didn't get any SMS or iMessage and I've got no idea why. I've double checked everything, and I just forced Amazon to send me a verification SMS which I received on that number. I admit so far I've only had heartache with iMessage screw ups. Maybe due to dual eSIM : I have my roaming NZ number for SMS "two-factor" verifications and NZ calls, and my Metro/T-Mobile for data and US calls. I am avoiding doxxing myself since HN publishing feels so permanent. How about you reply here with a time and place for Thursday or Friday? I will check in the morning. I don't know why I'm continually surprised by my modern tech roadbumps -- I see everyone else struggle (regardless of age or skill)!
Edit extra: I really don't understand why it doesn't fallback to SMS if the number isn't enabled in iMessage... I'll also do a test tomorrow noonish from a friend's US phone. I've used dual SIM before without problems, but always in countries with lots of Androids, so I didn't need iMessage setting because SMS worked (and in other countries there's often a different messaging app that everyone uses so maybe I wouldn't notice iMessage failing)
For what it's worth, it's not quite so bad everywhere. In New England infrastructure decays faster due to the weather, so most of our infrastructure is more frequently maintained or replaced. There's definitely some blighted areas, but the image of quaint New England towns with covered bridges is not a lie, and gentrification has caused local governments in our richer cities to invest more in infrastructure. This leads to a dramatic difference in appearance between e.g. New Orleans and Boston.
Landing on the moon only become the end-all-be-all when the US achieved it and the USSR could not (for various reasons).
first satellite? all sputnik could do was beep, and it ran out of batteries in three weeks.
first animal? laika died.
first station? there were two attempts to crew it -- the first failed to dock and everyone on the second mission fucking died. the soyuz 11 crew remain the only human deaths in space.
first *naut? yuri gagarin didn't even have manual controls.
the n1 was catastrophic. need i go on?
You are selecting goalposts that suit your team, and being disrespectful of the USSR (presumably because you don't want to acknowledge their successes).
Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space, first to orbit the earth.
To minimize these achievements is like saying the Wright Brothers test was meaningless because it only lasted 12 seconds. In truth each "first" represents a milestone, each required substantial effort.
In more recent times Russia alone was capable of manned space flight (2011 to 2020).
To return to your question, the USSR was critical to the space race. You cannot gave a race with 1 entrant. Without USSR constantly being in the news doing things first, there would not have been a space race at all.
Indeed, by the time of JFK's speech there was not much to race for except the moon. Once the Soviets stopped the US stopped as well. It's taken the talk of a Chinese mission for the US to even bother.
Earth satellites are an enormously valuable use of space. But very unsexy. Trips to the moon have pretty much no value. But they make for good PR.
Sure, for quite a while ISS depended on Russia for crew access, but China has been capable of human spaceflight since 1999, running many missions since & their own space station.
Atlas V can leave the pad it sits on because of the Russian RD-180 engine it uses.
I submit that a good candidate is: Space. It's in the name. It's not "the Moon race".
You know, getting a person to space and back. Yuri Gagarin, USSR, first successful crewed spaceflight, 1961.
Or, first artificial satellite in space. Sputnik, USSR 1957
I respect the USA's contributions to the space race too, but also I am amused by the USA under JFK picking something left undone, declaring that that as the only victory condition, doing it and then claiming total victory and celebrating it ever since. Got to salvage national pride somehow. Does that "steelman" it?
The eastern half of Europe took the first opportunity to run away from its grip, including my nation.
Happy (and naive) are the people who never lived under Moscow's rule.
* two big totalitarian systems, the USSR and the Reich, start the war together by dismembering Poland, then divide the region according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, very nice,
* the USSR spends two years providing the Nazi war machine with necessary resources, thus indirectly aiding our local subjugation,
* then, as usual with bandits, one turns on the other,
* four years later, one loses, the other occupies half of Europe and introduces their own dystopian totalitarian systems there.
The Soviet rule was better in the sense that they didn't consider us racial subhumans, but "liberation" contains the word "liberty", and personal liberty was an extremely scarce good in the Stalinist era.
Nazi Germany started the war. Full stop. The USSR did engage in appeasement from 1939-41, after the French and British sold out Czechoslovakia (and Poland opportunistically took a piece), which the USSR wanted to defend. The USSR knew that it was very high on the Nazis' target list (ideologically, Hitler viewed the Bolsheviks as his primary enemy), so Stalin decided to make a rotten deal with him to delay the war by as long as possible. Stalin was cowardly and opportunistic, but painting this as if the USSR started WWII is absurd.
If it weren't for the Red Army, the Nazis would have physically annihilated the entire Slavic population of Eastern Europe. That was their plan.
"The USSR knew that it was very high on the Nazis' target list (ideologically, Hitler viewed the Bolsheviks as his primary enemy), so Stalin decided to make a rotten deal with him to delay the war by as long as possible. Stalin was cowardly and opportunistic"
Of course the USSR knew, but they also knew that German forces would be engaged in the West, for some time at least. Moscow, together with everyone else, didn't expect France to fold so easily.
BTW I don't consider Stalin particularly cowardly, just psychopathic and evil.
"If it weren't for the Red Army, the Nazis would have physically annihilated the entire Slavic population of Eastern Europe. That was their plan."
True, I acknowledge that, and yet I loathe the USSR.
Imagine a girl caught by a murderer. A rapist comes along, saves her from the murderer, then proceeds to chain her in his house and rape her for several decades. Would you tell the girl "be at least somewhat respectful to your rapist, he saved your life"?
Heck no.
This is a complete rewrite of the history of WWII. The USSR did not initiate WWII. It was Nazi Germany that drove the escalating conflict and aimed to conquer Europe.
The argument you're making could be turned around to say that Poland co-started WWII when it conspired with Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia - something that Poland actually did in 1938. And by the way, at that time, the USSR was willing to go to war to defend Czechoslovakia from Nazi aggression, and it was Poland that blocked that idea by refusing to cooperate with the USSR. But that argument would be equally wrong as your argument: Poland simply acted opportunistically, while Germany was the one driving the conflict.
After the British and French sold out Czechoslovakia, the Soviets did an about face and decided to make a deal to save their own skin. Stalin was deathly afraid of a German invasion of the USSR, and wanted to make sure that Germany did not launch its war against the USSR first. Again, the driving factor in this was the knowledge that Germany was preparing for aggressive war. Without that, there simply would not have been WWII. The USSR was not planning any offensive war, nor was it in any position to launch one. Stalin was busy purging the Red Army officer corps.
Stalin was absolutely a coward on this issue. He was paralyzed by fear of a German invasion. He refused to accept the many different strands of intelligence which indicated that a German invasion was imminent. He kept sending supplies to Germany until the day of the invasion, in order to buy off the Germans. He was even told the exact date of the invasion by Richard Sorge, and he ignored it. The Red Army was caught completely flat-footed. Most of the air force was wiped out on the ground. That's not the sign of a country ready for an imminent war. Again, it was Germany driving events.
I do think you should be thankful to the USSR for saving you and your country from annihilation and extermination. They sacrificed millions of people to do so.
Nazi Germany was stronger and could plausibly plan continent domination, true. But the USSR was an active, albeit smaller participant. Why precisely did they attack Finland and attack and conquer the Baltic States? Hitler made them do it again?
No, that was pure imperial expansion, finding some weaker and richer states to loot and control.
I will not defend the Western powers on Munich, they betrayed us completely and reaped the whirlwind.
"I do think you should be thankful to the USSR for saving you and your country from annihilation and extermination."
Intent behind your action matters and if the intent is to enslave you, that is a very bad, criminal intent. I noticed that you didn't address my analogy with a rapist that saves you from a murderer in order to chain you down in their dungeon. This is why I will not be thankful to the USSR as a country and a system. Immediately after the front units, "SMERSH" secret police units murdered and abducted people who were on Stalins hit list, should I be thankful for that as well? Should their families be thankful for such "liberation"?
"They sacrificed millions of people"
Stalin sacrificed millions of people. He also did so on other occasions, like the mad purges of the 1930s, destroying kulaks by artificial famines or deporting various minorities into barely survivable deserts and polar regions.
Death of millions was Stalin's thing, in peace or war.
"to do so."
Again, our survival mattered to Moscow only to the extent that most rational slave masters are interested in keeping their slaves alive and productive. (The Nazis were irrational in this regard.)
The Soviet Union did not see Central Europe as sovereign nations, but as a bounty to be conquered and abused, basically colonies for extraction. This view survives today in Russia. Visit any Russian-language forum where discussion turns to Ukraine and plenty of people will express the idea that we are their escaped property that, through negligence of Gorbachev, could find itself a new "master" (voluntary alignment between countries just does not register in this worldview) and now are being used as "pawns" against "the Russian civilization".
The view that smaller nations hate their previous subjugation by Moscow and don't want to repeat it is just incomprehensible to them. In their view, we should be thankful for being liberated from Hitler, and nothing else that happened afterwards counts.
You also seem to be of the idea that nothing else that happened afterwards counts... why?
I can at least see an argument to be thankful to individual Soviet soldiers who fought Hitler. They were often driven so by the threat of penal batallions, but still. But the USSR as a system was an evil totalitarian entity intent on occupying, looting and terrorizing everyone within their reach. Only the extent of their effective reach varied, from very weak in the 1930s to rather large by 1950. No thankfulness to this abomination, ever, that is what I will die upon.
Just like the Western Allies, the Soviets were acting in reaction to the insanely aggressive moves that Germany was taking. They viewed it as a life-or-death issue. Germany, the strongest state in Europe, had conducted a massive military buildup and was bent on conquering the continent.
Demonstrably false. The British aim was never to annex Iceland into the UK. The British did not establish a puppet government like the Soviets tried with the Finnish Democratic Republic. Nor did they start murdering Icelandic political and societal leaders to make it unselfgovernable, like the USSR did everywhere across Eastern Europe, nor did the British start resettling people to wipe out Icelandic culture and identity. Iceland's government continued to operate independently until the British forces withdrew in 1941. Russia still hold on to the ~11% of pre-war Finland that they grabbed and they've wiped out the native population.
The talking point about threat from Germany is also hollow, to put it mildly. The USSR and Germany were allies at the time, and their secret protocol had assigned Finland to the USSR for conquest. To support Germany's invasions under their agreement, the USSR supplied massive quantities of raw resources (such as oil, cotton and grains) to bypass the economic blockade of Germany and bolster the German war machine in 1939-1941. The USSR was delivering 140 000 tons of oil each month as Luftwaffe was bombing London and was short on fuel.
I will never understand why people living in free countries become apologists for the worst murderous regimes in history, but it is, as it is.
Given that this forum has some rules about being polite, I will just stop here without saying something awful.
It is very unfortunate that Stalinist apologia is still somehow acceptable in the West. It is a direct consequence of the fact that Stalin's concentration camps were never liberated by an external force that would forever document their horrors.
But at least I know whom I was talking to.
You need to quit your revisionism and Soviet apologia. The USSR was oppressive and expansionist. Not quite as much as the Nazis, but they weren't that far behind. You painting them as friendly liberators who really had no other choice but to invade and conquer, is exactly the kind of propaganda that Putin uses today to justify his wars.
The main reason that the USSR's role in the start of WW2 has been ignored for so long, is because they were part of the victorious side, and their contribution was absolutely vital to the defeat of the Nazis. But they did launch offensive wars, against Poland, Finland and the Baltic states. They're traditionally not seen as part of WW2 only because the Nazis weren't involved and they were initiated by one of the victors of the war, but they happened at the exact same time, while Germany was invading Poland and Scandinavia.
Russia's conquest of eastern Europe was no liberation.
>first animal? laika died.
Yes, but Belka and Strelka lived. They were the first to go to orbit and back. USSR too.
>first *naut? yuri gagarin didn't even have manual controls.
And Alan Shepard didn't even had a bath. I say this one doesn't count too.
In fact - nothing counts until your nation\program can't deliver a human to Alpha Centauri and black alive and well. Ideally in less than a year.
A real challenge, wouldn't you agree? :)
We need to land on the moon once a generation just to prove that we are still capable of landing on the moon.
Claiming that the new mission to the moon is a waste of time because "we already won the space race" is backward. Withholding an entire generation (multiple actually) from the awe and wonder that is associated with such an endeavour just because "it's been done before" is borderline criminal imo.
And frankly, the fact that the US is struggling to get it's rocket in the air, let alone get a human on the moon, even after they did so already and literally wrote the tutorial on how to do it, is very embarrassing.
Want to impress the world? End poverty. Advance cancer treatment. Build a viable nuclear fusion power plant. Make an HIV vaccine and sell it affordably across the world. We could be done with the Cold War-era rocket-waving.
China didn't _end_ poverty but they did lift hundreds of millions of people out of it and i've literally never seen anyone outside of China give them props for it
How so? Because you decided that reaching the Moon equals winning? Why not Mars?
Same way we can say that USSR won the race because they were the first ones to put man into space and bring him back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy_H2BeE_Nk Neil deGrasse Tyson on topic.
Isn't that what the next goal is, but we're so far away from it now?
America does keep reinventing itself. It has few of the same parts as before, but it still resembles some concept of “America” in many ways. In that way it is the same ship.
But is it the same ship? Can it win a space race today that a previous manifestation of America could? Maybe it’s not the same ship and what it could do in the 60s it can no longer do today.
I certainly don’t think it’s a question that demands an answer. Perfectly valid to choose not to show up to the starting line. But having run that race under the same banner generations ago doesn’t tell us much about the America today.
> I think it’s apt because the Ship of Theseus as a thought experiment is unanswerable.
It is answerable, you just need to go meta a little. You can argue that the Ship of Theseus doesn't exist (and didn't existed) because it is just a lot of wood. You can use reductionism further and say that wood doesn't exist, it is a bunch of atoms or quarks or whatever. The ship is just a leaky abstraction people are forced use because of their cognitive limitations. But if it is an abstraction, not a "real" thing, then I see no issues with the ship existing (in a limited sense) even after it changed all the atoms it consists of.
The other approach is to declare that a ship is not a thing, but a process. Like you do when talking about people, who change their atoms all the time, but they still keep they identity in a "magical" way. If you see people as a process, then it doesn't matter how often it replaces its matter with another matter. Like a tornado, which exists while exchanging matter with environment all the time and still being the same tornado. Or like a wave on a water surface, it doesn't have any atoms moving like a wave, but still a wave exists.
> It has few of the same parts as before, but it still resembles some concept of “America” in many ways.
It doesn't matter if there any old parts left, what matters is a continuous history.
> But is it the same ship?
It is the same ship, but its properties are changing over time. Like when people become older, some of them become wiser for example, some become physically weaker.
> But having run that race under the same banner generations ago doesn’t tell us much about the America today.
Yeah, with this I can fully agree. BTW we don't know was the Ship of Theseus becoming better or worse after repairs, but I'd bet that its maximum speed was changing due to repairs.
They arguably footed the bill.
(Unless you borrow from foreigners, which taps resources from outside the country that later have to be paid back. But I'm not sure the Apollo programme was financed with foreign loans?)
If one part of society sells bonds to another part of society, no real resources from the future have traveled back in time.
You’re right that, if overdone, it can lead to complacency. But if you treat every generation as a blank slate, you abandon the valuable capital of experience.
it has nothing to do with how you treat each generation. it's whether or not you have a continuous shared work experience from the elders to the youngsters over and over.
if your company abandoned big projects for small local stuff and then a few generations later suddenly decided to go big again, you'd suck at it.
if you're good at it, it's because the people right before you were doing it already and passed on their experience.
(this doesn't mean something can't be done the first time - it just means if you don't have institutional knowledge, you have to suck at it first and then get better).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidcoursey/2012/03/31/more-th...
He killed a lot of things to save Apple.
I wouldn't read too much into it.
For the same reason, Apple doesn't celebrate anniversaries.
Oh boy we're already there
The trouble arises when it’s 2025 and the last great achievement you can point to was 150 years ago. Then you have a problem and referencing the past becomes a misguided attempt to rest on old laurels. Like (to use popular American movie tropes) a popular high school captain of the team, boyfriend to the head cheerleader, who has been out of high school for 30 years and still talks about a goal in a game as the best moment of his life. That’s the “we already won!” attitude.
This approach was always going to have holes in it and sure enough we're now facing a difficult and uncertain endeavor, for example, to ever be able to make the best chips in the world on American soil again. (Or as in the headlines today, to source and process rare earths for all manner of production.) It turns out that, surprise surprise, there was tons of process knowledge and tons of capacity for innovation in the people who were closest to the actual work of production, now those people are no longer American and couldn't care less what America can and cannot do. So we're in a bind. Americans keep claiming they can build all the things but they haven't actually done so in many years.
There's no way to solve the problem other than to try, and that entails clawing back as much of the people, processes and materiel as you can by whatever means you can until you start cobbling together some genuine innovation. My gut tells me enough of the political class supports the idea that the financiers will just have to get used to capitalizing a lot of production on domestic soil again, politicians will of course be happy to print billions more dollars of free money and hand it to them for this.
Like, the whole story of the Industrial Revolution is that we invested continually in technology, training, process and plant, and the cost of producing things as measured by both dollars and labor decreased by orders of magnitude. It never stopped. It kept on working right up until we stopped trying and shipped production overseas. In fact even though they have cheaper labor and don't care as much in some of these overseas locations, usually it STILL happens. Technology, training, process, machinery, all get better, per unit cost of production just keeps on falling. Bring it back to America and focus on these four things and it will happen in America again too.
The failure to see this comes from putting the bean counters in charge. A bean counter can't model innovation. They don't know if and when a 10x cost reduction is going to happen somewhere in the industry and then spread. It's not their job to know, and they don't care. They see they can slash a cost by 20% right now by sending those jobs and factories offshore so that's what they do.
In most industries in America today the cost of production is still getting cheaper, but what's ballooning is management and administrative costs. They've grown so much that consumer prices are actually going up even as the cost of the essential process of producing the thing has gone down. That's the bean counters replicating.
It's all smoke and mirrors and lies. The forces that drove industrialization never stopped working. End the IP regimes, actually make stuff again, fire the bean counters, create competition for the consumer dollar in places where it was all acquired and consolidated into oblivion. The innovators will step in, deploy the next generation of plant, train the next generation of workers, stuff will get cheaper, and wages will actually be decent to boot because new and better processes create demand for new and scarcer skills.
https://youtu.be/L9f5SQQKr5o?feature=shared
Like this isn’t just manufacturing. If you go to China if you visit the tier one and tier two cities they look and feel Like cities of the future. You can’t even compare with US cities. One Chinese friend of mine visiting Los Angeles told me he didn’t realize that los Angeles was the country side.
He says it because The country side of China is literally just like Los Angeles. He’s talking about the backwardness and level of tech and density of the population.
https://youtu.be/AJ6a2vpLxGA?si=k7n9ibMlV6fIeNgz
This all happened in the last decade so it’s not surprising to see people who don’t get it. It’s a total paradigm shift in the balance of power.
The entire mindset of separating the world into "winners" and "losers" in the first place seems unhealthy to me.
because they has so much resource they can spend an multi billions effort on intangible things like this
Have you worked for a company where they never win at anything? Been in meetings where people want to hear about 'wins'?
Maybe you don't, but I do. I like to work for a winning team.
An alternative perspective on both space races, companies and life in general would be a collaborative one. I like to work on a productive, effective, successful teams, but I don't view that in terms of "winning" and "losing".
By the same logic, also no moral burden for its transgressions?
(Not making a claim one way or the other, just noting an asymmetry.)
Though "zero points" is also probably a bit too harsh. I think Americans should be proud of their peoples' past accomplishments, but should recognize that they're distinct from their own accomplishments and kind of irrelevant to the current race.
The current space race is really just about the US trying to show that it isn't in decline, that it's still more capable than a rising China. So, "my grandfather was alive when America set foot on the Moon, so we've already won!" is kind of a sad statement.
Even at the time people suspected that - but at least there was a chance of finding something unexpected.
As to the knowledge is has been done, and therefore could be done again - sure that's valuable, but that knowledge belongs to the whole world not just to America.
And in terms of national prestige or uniting goal - wouldn't it be better to have a goal to create a long term sustainable energy economy for example. I think that has more strategic value than putting a man back ( or women for the first time ) on the moon.
Also while He-3 doesn't produce radio-active by products, doesn't the reaction require much higher temps than a D-T one?
Perhaps it might be wise to get one working first before investing too much in a moon shot.
SpaceX doesn't even have a timeline for Starship; they have no idea when it will be ready, but the one thing that is clear is it wont be ready to take humans to the moon in 2027.
There's a lot left to do before it's ready to launch: https://spaceflightnow.com/2025/10/17/orion-spacecraft-arriv...
Of course, compared to the decades-long SLS timeline, that's "ready to go".
The Portuguese used to have the best sea-worthy ships throughout the 1400s. They were soon followed by the Spanish. It didn't matter, because by the 1600s the Dutch, and then the English, had transformed the world's big seas and oceans into their playground.
In other words, if you don't use it you lose it, and right now the Americans need to "use" it, they need to show that they're still capable of getting to the Moon and beyond.
The irony is that the commenters saying we must go back to the moon are more like the Spanish: sticking to a sentimental 1960s vision of human-based space exploration despite evidence clearly favoring robotics and remote control.
Realistically, the accomplishment will be a resource grab. It's not scientific. The moon will eventually be carved up by (disputed) territorial claims, like Antarctica. Countries will need to maintain bases to back their territorial claims. Eventually the claims will turn into mining rights. The resources are valuable for being in a reduced gravity zone. All those juicy water containing craters at the Lunar poles... [1]
Hasn’t that attempt at proof essentially already been lost?
Well except with regard to astronaut travel: very different and controversial launch abort approach and no escape tower like apollo
Boeing and Lockheed will deliver on time and on budget.
The nations will will likely use "safety zones" to exclude others from their base of operations. We'll see the radius of these zones but expect 200m - 2km for a start.
There is a reason to think that there is a race. Without very advanced automation all of this is pointless, but I am willing to wager that many think that advanced automation will occur within a short timeframe.
In terms of field geology alone, we deserve permanent human presence on The Moon. Apollo was an impressive first shot but it is completely unrealistic to act like we know anything more than one percent of one percent about Moon’s geology. They nailed the flat bits on the marine side, but you’d laugh at someone who claimed they knew Earth’s geology after a few weeks in Buenos Aires, Houston, and Miami:
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/advice/skills/see-apollo-...
Who will be woken up by the first moonquake? Who will visit the first mooncaves? Who will find the first water-based anomaly — some kind of periodic waterfall maybe, in a heat trap that warms up one day a year? Who will see the first solar eclipse?
Not as criminally stupid as resting on our laurels and frittering away all the technical knowledge which we are now relearning the hard way. 'I can't think of things to do on the moon, therefore it's a waste of time' is an asinine argument.
Edited to add that I have long thought this dismissive smug attitude about how we already ticked that box and there's no need to tick it again directly contributes to the rise is nonsensical conspiracy theories like the the moon landing (or indeed space) being fake. And that acceptance of social and scientific ignorance goes a long way to explaining why we're currently governed by malicious fools.
Modern moon exploration isn’t about repeating Apollo but progressing toward resource extraction and establishing humanity’s long-term presence in space. These missions are designed to achieve goals that were previously impossible and lay the foundation for humanity’s future beyond Earth.
Yes but why?
It's cool that we can learn about what's around us, but in practice we're light years away from being interplanetary, we just can't afford it and our energy sources are laughable.
Realistically speaking, how far are we really from "moon travel" that is both remotely affordable and worth the trip?
"We’re light-years away from being interplanetary; it’s too costly and our energy is laughable." If people doubted the Wright brothers or mocked the idea of landing on the Moon, should we have stopped trying?
"How far are we from affordable Moon travel that’s worth it?" Humanity thrives when it takes risks and embraces exploration. Space is where the next wave of innovation and opportunity lies, and waiting for "perfect timing" ensures we stay stagnant while others move ahead. Why choose doubt over progress?
Most historical progress was driven and motivated by incremental gains; exploration as an end in itself was not even enough to get Columbus funded, and big space projects are much more ressource intensive than that.
> Space is where the next wave of innovation and opportunity lies.
That's just, like, your opinion. I consider this extremely unlikely; to me, the most promising fields short and mid-term are AI and synthetic biology. Space exploration does not even come close-- even if we magically gained the capability to build large scale, self-sufficient cities on Mars and populated them with millions of people (which is extremely unlikely to happen in the next decades)-- what does that do for us? What progress do we gain? If you want to build habitats in unlivable, hostile environments, you can just as well do this in Antarctica, some desert or the deep sea, and I'd consider that likewise mostly an exercise in futility.
edit: To make my position a bit clearer: I think its fine to invest "reasonably" in space exploration; the current moon project I'd consider mostly a waste, but still somehwat justifiable. But spending twice or more of what NASA currently costs on Moon or Mars base projects would be a non justifiable waste in my eyes.
Reasonable cost is subjective, but NASA’s budget provides perspective. At 0.4 percent of the US federal budget, it amounts to just 27 billion dollars in 2023, while the defense budget is 842 billion dollars, or 13 percent of annual spending. Redirecting just 5 percent of defense funding, about 40 billion dollars, would more than double NASA's budget and allow for significant progress on Moon and Mars projects. This minor reallocation would not impact national security, making space exploration both affordable and worthwhile. When we consider the technological, scientific, and economic benefits, investing in space stands out as a smart, future-focused decision.
2. Are there any minerals on the Moon worth exploring?
The Moon holds valuable resources like helium-3 for clean fusion energy, water ice for fuel and life support, and rare earth metals for advanced technologies. Helium-3 could power nuclear fusion reactors and potentially yield trillions of dollars in energy benefits. Water ice can be converted into hydrogen and oxygen, creating rocket fuel that reduces reliance on costly Earth resupplies for space missions. Mining rare earth metals on the Moon could also lessen our dependency on Earth’s finite resources and help minimize ecological damage caused by terrestrial mining. The long-term financial value of these resources far outweighs the costs of extracting them.
3. Will Moon and Mars bases actually double NASA’s existing budget?
This claim is incorrect. The Artemis program, for example, is projected to cost 93 billion dollars over more than ten years, with yearly spending far below doubling NASA’s current 27 billion dollar budget. Additionally, technologies like reusable rockets, such as SpaceX’s Starship, have lowered launch costs by 90 percent, making Moon and Mars exploration increasingly achievable. With international collaborations and private investment, developing these projects is far less expensive than critics often assume, and will not significantly burden taxpayers.
4. What about other technologies, like AI or synthetic biology?
While AI and synthetic biology can offer exciting short-term benefits, they focus on Earth-based solutions and neglect humanity's long-term survival. Space exploration addresses critical long-term challenges, such as resource scarcity, reducing dependence on Earth, and avoiding extinction-level threats. Unlike efforts in Earth’s hostile environments like Antarctica or the deep sea, Moon and Mars exploration unlock completely new resources and pathways for innovation. Delaying investment in space exploration risks stagnating progress, and waiting for the "perfect time" could mean missing transformative opportunities that secure humanity's future.
2) I see no probable route for fusion reactors to become a competitive source of terrestrial electricity for at least the next 50 years and possibly never; without that, Helium-3 is mostly worthless (even if your fusion bet works out, you rely on an approach winning that actually needs He3 instead of breeding its own Tritium). For everything else, I don't see extraterrestrial mining being able to compete with current prices, and any significant influx would have it crash/undermine its own market (e.g. we only extract hundreds of tons of palladium globally, per year; doubling the supply would have a major effect on price).
3) I'd argue that current Moon/Mars project are mostly ineffective showmanship/PR. If you actually wanted somewhat self-sustaining settlements/industry within the century, costs would easily eclipse our current defense budget, and without demonstrating the ability to build that on earth first the whole thing would not be credible anyway.
Our current approach to manufacturing (post industrialization) is totally incompatible with self-sustaining colonies, too. There is nothing we could realistically achieve on moon or mars even in a century that is anywhere close to self-sustaining, without basically reinventing how we build things.
So from a risk mitigation point of view the whole endeavour is useless, too (this might change within a century-- synthetic biology specifically would be very promising here).
1. You didn’t address my main argument: reallocating 5% of the U.S. defense budget to NASA could double its budget without raising taxes. Instead, you reframed it as additional taxation. My point is about redistributing current resources, not increasing taxpayer obligations.
2. Do you believe reallocating 5% of defense spending would harm national security? Or could it be a reasonable way to reprioritize national spending towards long-term scientific advancement?
Moon Resources
1. You claim extraterrestrial mining could "crash the market," but cheaper, abundant resources typically foster innovation and develop new industries (e.g., space-based solar power or advanced batteries), which could benefit consumers. Can you provide examples where resource surpluses caused economic collapse instead of creating opportunities?
2. You argue helium-3 is "mostly worthless" because fusion is 50+ years away. However, companies like Helion Energy predict commercial fusion by the 2030s, and technologies like aneutronic fusion could make helium-3 a critical resource. What specific evidence supports your lengthy timeline?
Effectiveness and Feasibility of Moon/Mars Projects
1. You claim Moon/Mars projects would exceed the defense budget but provide no data. NASA’s Artemis program, for example, is projected to cost $93B over a decade, far below $842B in annual U.S. defense spending. What data supports your claim of higher costs?
2. Reusable rockets, such as SpaceX’s Starship, have already reduced launch costs by up to 90%, directly countering your cost concerns. Why did you not address this?
3. Advancements in in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), 3D printing, and automated production are already paving the way for sustainable off-world colonies. Why do you dismiss these technologies entirely when critiquing the concept of self-sustainability?
4. While you note "showmanship" is a factor, history shows symbolic exploration fuels technological advancement. Apollo, for example, spurred breakthroughs in computing, communications, and materials science. Moon/Mars exploration could provide similar transformative benefits.
Comparison to AI and Synthetic Biology
1. You claim synthetic biology is more promising than space exploration, but can you provide evidence to support this? Space exploration directly addresses existential risks like resource scarcity and planetary threats.
2. Do you agree that space research fuels advancements in robotics, AI, and materials science, which vastly benefit Earth and humanity’s long-term survival? Why can’t space exploration and other emerging technologies work together to create a stronger foundation for humanity’s future?
3. Delaying space exploration may result in lost opportunities for innovation that could directly impact Earthly and extraterrestrial problems.
Conclusion
You raise important points, but much of your argument lacks supporting evidence and is based on speculation. I encourage further consideration of current research and advancements like reusable rockets, ISRU, and fusion energy, which prove the feasibility and value of space exploration. I appreciate your thoughts and look forward to continuing the discussion.
National budget items have to stand on their own merit. I agree that the US overspends on defense, but "waste" in one place is no justification for "waste" elsewhere. You could apply the exact same argument to bloat any number of budget items in the 10 billion range, e.g. US foreign aid, and for a lot of those the humanitarian utility (and possibly even purely financial ROI) is much easier to argue than for a space program, too.
# Feasibility
The problem with any kind of space industry or self sustaining settlement is that you have to get all things there, first. How we build things currently is simply not amenable for remote bootstrapping, at all, even disregarding the fact that many critical industrial inputs easily available on earth are just... not... in space. Contrast this with biological life, which is much better at this aspects by relying on small, self-replicating building blocks for everything.
Self-sufficient colonies are currently completely out of reach. The same applies to space mining, indirectly. For those to be a credible next step, we would need to have some baseline industry already established, that would e.g. be capable of growing tens of tons of food (or refine tens of tons of aluminum per year) as a fundamental input. That is an unskippable step on the path to self-sufficiency, and an incredibly early one, too. But not only do we not have that right now, there are not even fleshed out concepts (much less projects) in the pipeline for this currently.
I confidently claim competitive mining (or independent settlements) are impossible in the next decades even with the full defense budget because there are too many intermediate steps missing that all the money in the world can not conjure up (=> see paragraph above for examples).
Cheaper launch costs or 3D printers change absolutely nothing; the problem with doing anything in space is that it costs you more than its own weight in fuel (in practice: many multiples) to get anything there, and I see no realistic paths to get "overhead costs" (separate from fuel) lower than for, say, air travel.
If you had to build a self-sufficient industry on earth that would already be incredibly challenging for any non-trivial industrial output (just think: how large is the total footprint of every industry involved in building you keyboard alone, or phone? sure there is some potential for consolidation but MUCH less than you would like without changing everything fundamentally).
If you had to pay for every single ton of material/personnel to be flown like 5 times around the full equator just to get there, it would be impossible to achieve self-sufficient industry economically, even on earth, in atmosphere, with human workforce and finetuned processes and a lot of other helpful inputs we won't have in space, and this calculus is unlikely to change anytime soon.
# Effectiveness
Even at best, say you have massive space mining industry and self-sufficient cities on Mars by the end of the century (again: this is a complete pipedream): What does that actually change? What does it get us? Basically nothing. We have a ton of problems, but doubling the available iron, aluminium, or electric energy is not gonna solve any of those. If ressource allocation is fundamentally broken, multiplying the input side simply won't help at all.
As far as mitigating extinction threats goes: Thats nice to have, but almost worthless, and you won't have any real benefit until the space colonies are fully self-sufficient. With worthless I mean: given some very conservative assumption (an asteroid impact killing every single human every 50M years, $20M per statistical human life), the "extinction insurance" would be $100M per year for the US-- not enough to pay for anything in space, really.
# Sidenote
Did not want to derail this into a fusion energy discussion, but Helion marketing is most obviously going to give the earliest timeline imaginable because the want investment dollars.
Consider critically: How far away are they from a design that can be built industrially/economically? Has to be several generations/iterations of prototype plants (this is very obvious from what they have right now). If you compare their past timelines with the present, you will find that they were ridiculously overoptimistic and they are far from finished, this is gonna get progressively worse. Technical feasibility is one thing, but economics are hard if you have to compete with panels of refined sand that harvests kilowatts of direct electrical power in a few square metres and costs less than a window of the same size...
I have already asked for specific data to back up your assumptions, but none has been provided.
Without evidence, this discussion remains purely speculative. I recommend looking into the significant advancements in reusable rockets, in-situ resource utilization, and fusion research before dismissing their potential. Unsupported claims about feasibility or value are simply unsubstantiated opinion.
The biggest problem of the moon mission isn't SLS, it's that the moon is a big dry ball of rock with nothing of any value or use there. There's literally no reason to go.
For instance, the Moon has helium-3, a rare isotope that could one day power clean nuclear fusion energy, a trillion-dollar industry waiting to happen. Lunar water ice can be converted into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel and life support, making sustainable space exploration feasible and reducing the need for costly Earth-based resources. The Moon also has rare earth metals that are vital for technology and renewable energy systems, helping us address resource scarcity and reduce the environmental damage caused by terrestrial mining.
We do not explore the Moon for its own sake. The point of space exploration is to create a foundation for future industries and innovation while solving long-term challenges, such as resource depletion and planetary risks. Given the enormous technological, economic, and environmental benefits these resources could provide, the Moon is far more than just a barren rock; it holds the key to securing humanity's future.
I can't wait for the time when "we" is we-humans/humanity/the planet Earth and not some inter-country trade bs.
A lot of things have changed in the past 56.25 years. New people, new technology, hell I'd argue that the America of the 60's is not the same America as today. For all intents and purposes this "space race" is a completely separate and new thing, where two completely separate and new countries are competing for the crown.
China winning this will only further cement the perception that America is being leapfrogged technologically and left behind.
No, it wasn't "you". It was a generation that is mostly dead. As of now, Boeing cannot deliver a reasonably safe spaceship for mere travel to Low Earth Orbit.
Things change and without SpaceX, the US space industry would be slightly better than Roskosmos.
> Land on the moon when we can accomplish something there, not just to prove we haven’t lost our mojo since Apollo.
That's why I have been following the Artemis program since the beginning. And with all the funding changes, and all the mission profiles that have changed in accordance, two things have stood out as the primary goals. First, the cost. That space station double docking in the way down is not only unnecessary, it is also fraught with risk. The only possibly explanation for that component is to spend money. Second, the actual started goals have changed three or four times, but one goal has been consistent. Go look at NASA's Artemis webpage. It's the first words up there: "NASA's Artemis missions aim to land the first woman and first person of colour on the Moon ...". Really? That is the first, primary objective? And it is such a shame, because of you look at Glover's career and accomplishments, he is amazing. He should be flying that mission on his own personal merits, not because NASA was mandated to find some black guy. Frankly it is insulting to even see mention of that as a goal, much less the absolute first stated goal in the official materials, and the only consistent goal throughout the program.
It's a dumb system invented due to the whims of a madman who should listen to his engineers instead of trying to cosplay as a rocket scientist.
>neither Super Heavy or any future Starship tanker will be rapidly reusable that much is clear by now
What insurmountable problem(s) do you expect?
The only reason NASA hadn't already been investigating the relevant technologies is that politicians threatened to outright cancel space science funding if NASA so much as mentioned depots (the word was actually censored in documents from NASA about HLS until the relevant senator finally retired).
5. The owner of SpaceX threatens to cancel projects when he gets into social media spats with the president he thought he'd bought, or his NASA chief
I don't understand why anyone tolerates a man like Musk having material control over state projects.
China wasn't trying to land people on the moon 56 years ago. You "beat" someone when both are competing to do it.
I learnt Python, Rust and Go in my twenties and Trump is like twice my age and can't code in any of these languages. I didn't "beat him" at it though, because he's not even trying.
Is it a valid reason? Depends on how prideful you are. Are you proud to be an American and are you proud to be the greatest economic super power on the planet?
For me it’s not valid. I don’t hold any pride about any country even though I’m American. Pride is a form of emotional bias.
If China becomes better, which is a highly likely possibility. The symbol of this being better is irrelevant.
In fact arguably China is already better than us in many ways.
If the second launch vehicle performs similarly, I might have to start watching them. We could use a decent alternative.
A scary way to set a schedule on a complex project with lives at stake. They don't care though.
We are in year 8 of Artemis. In year 8 of Apollo there were multiple manned missions including one that went to the moon but did not land.
Also, corners were cut in the testing. (Full stack testing.)
Full stack testing was not cutting corners. After ground testing it was deemed that incremental testing would not be beneficial. Doing tasks in parallel instead of in series can introduce project risks, but that's not the same thing as cutting corners, which is where something necessary is not done at all.
The idea that rocket X not exploding in a single launch makes it man-rated is cutting corners.
Full stack testing was testing the entire rocket at the same time instead of using dummy stages to test parts of the rocket separately. There was opposition to it because if the rocket failed it might be difficult to diagnose why exactly it failed, which would slow the project down in the long run. Based on the ground testing and advances in instrumentation, the risk of a project delay from a failure was considered acceptable. It still took multiple launches to man rate the rockets. There's a reason the first manned launch of the Saturn V was Apollo 8.
After the fact, it always looks inevitable.
Would you have gone up on that first manned Saturn launch? Not me. Recall how the space shuttle was safe, until it blew up. And then it was safe again, and broke up on reentry.
Everyone on the first manned Saturn test died. Do you know why people got into the second manned test? It was not that they knew with certainty it would be safe, but because they thought it was realistic that they could accomplish their goal.
People die in car accidents every day, that does not make my plan to drive to work tomorrow unrealistic.
I think the US is lacking the organization, culture, and on-a-mission mentality today, not money. I believe the money is the easiest part of the equation, the rest can't be faked or supplied at the click of a button. The US is no longer a serious nation hell-bent on accomplishing great/difficult things. Congress knows if they supply the $30 billion per year, what we'll get in the end is a broken program that won't achieve the set aims, and it'll just take 15 years at $40 billion per year instead, without a single Moon landing. They know full well how dysfunctional the US is, everybody is just acting when the cameras are on.
So, I imagine if he hadn't been assassinated, they probably would've landed on the moon around the same time, which would be after a possible 2nd term (unless he lost re-election and then won again).
> so I take it it probably would've still happened
I'm talking about the Apollo 1 fire.
The risk of people dying is sometimes an acceptable risk. We accept it every time a firefighter goes into a burning building. Is a national vanity project like Moon missions worth the risk? Maybe then, when it was novel and inspirational, but now, when it's a retro throwback and the only reason we're doing it is to avoid losing face to the communist Chinese?
Totally unlike the first time.
We let people do stupid shit and kill themselves all the time. Driving 80+ MPH, driving motorcycles, recreational drugs, alcohol, climbing Everest, etc.
I think it's fine. If I were in the position, I'd sign up to do this.
The moon is meaningful.
What part of the comment you're replying to lead you to believe that the person you're replying to does not understand the value of deadlines?
This is just the same deadline being pushed another year because of failures. Deadlines that get constantly pushed aren't deadlines at all.
As I recall, SpaceX and Artemis project was supposed to be Moon by 2024. At least originally. But then SpaceX blew up all the rockets (successfully testing them or something) and now we've wasted damn near a decade.
Yeah, we've been there already, but it's been many decades and we haven't exactly kept all the tech and procedures up to date in the intervening years. And that first go-round itself missed it's intended deadline by about 7-8 years.
I fear it's going to happen again; Orion isn't safe and hasn't been successfully tested. The heat shield started to disintegrate the last time they tested it and instead of testing it again with their changes they're going to put people in it next time.
Armstrong's personal estimate of his odds getting back alive were about 50%.
Apollo 13 came within a hair of killing its crew.
I fly across the North Atlantic at 30,000 feet, death in seconds if the hull is breached, in a comfortable chair, watching a movie and sipping a drink. Isn't that incredible? I still find it amazing.
But I know that was achieved through the loss of many, many lives.
It's also entirely reasonable as an American to discount Polio / Ebola and a lot of other stuff that' aren't an issue for them. It doesn't mean that worldwide they aren't a problem. But historically, we've had systems to ensure these things aren't problems so when they become problems its newsworthy.
Today (AFAIK) 2028 is considered quite aggressive, mostly due to the lack of progress on Starship, and the facts driving that conclusion are not any more amenable to change via political pressure than they were last time.
Bean counters make excuses. Put the right people in the right places and shit gets done.
We don't expect each new nuclear warhead to cost as much as the Manhattan Project did relative to the national budget. Likewise, after 60 years of technological development beyond what we had in the 60s, there is no reason to expect a modern day lunar mission to cost the same relatively.
By some rough math, the cost of the Artemis program as a fraction of national budget is on the order of 1/10 that of Apollo in its day (comparing entire program costs to national budgets in representative years). So no, I'm not sure anyone would expect (or accept) that, and indeed it does not seem to be the case. It would be even cheaper if Congress had not mandated that SLS be built from repurposed STS parts (and later that Artemis fly on SLS), and if Congress and the executive branch had generally maintained a realistic and consistent vision for the program since work on it began (arguably with Constellation in the 2000s).
Funding makes it happen. Fund it, it will happen. Don't fund it, it won't happen. American space exploration has been chronically underfunded relative to its ambitions, which is why all we have to show for our manned exploration programs since STS (edit: or including it, if you like!) is a string of broken promises. I am hopeful that Artemis will get there, but I am simply telling you the shape of reality as it currently exists—a shape that doesn't care about your definition of "reasonable" in this context. I also don't think we will beat the Chinese unless something major changes.
The Apollo mission had to invent technology from scratch that did not exist in the 60s. We have all of that knowledge today and then some, plus computers that are millions of times more powerful.
There is no reason to believe that the 8th mission to the moon in the 2020s should cost just as much relative to the national budget as the original did in 1969. We don't expect each new nuclear warhead to cost as much as the Manhattan Project did relative to the national budget.
Funding doesn't make things happen. In some ways funding can be a curse, and bureaucracies will grow to waste whatever funds are allocated. People make things happen. Competent people make things happen. Strong leadership makes things happen. The current NASA has leadership and talent gaps galore. It is also saddled with bureaucratic cruft that has caked onto its gears in the last 5 decades. It is not the same ambitious upstart that it once was. Could it be reformed? Yes, but not without cleaning house.
For what its worth, I don't think we should exclude SpaceX, obviously, as they are clearly iterating at such a rapid rate relative to everyone else that it seems hard to believe anyone will catch up (and at the most efficient cost basis).
I'm not sure why you think the Chinese will win, as even their smaller rockets are regularly crashing back to earth, one just yesterday: https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/chinese-rocket-crash...
But sure, at least they are deploying, at least they're in the running, which is more than most nations can say.
Still, they are iterating. That may be crazy and they may not care about things like blowing up neighborhoods, but they are iterating, and I am not so naive as to think that their capabilities will remain static.
Go ahead and land on the moon without spending any money on it, then.
I'll wait.
In the 1960s it cost as much as $100,000/kilogram to send a payload to outer space. Today Falcon Heavy does it for $1500/kilogram.
SpaceX has a fraction of NASA's budget, and certainly in its early days as they proved out the Falcon design, were running on less than $2 billion in funding.
That's because the right people were placed in the right positions.
The public has spend billions of dollars on this program, if the end result is astronauts getting cooked during reentry then how could that possibly be an outcome worth the expense?
>The public has spend billions of dollars on this program, if the end result is astronauts getting cooked during reentry then how could that possibly be an outcome worth the expense?
The public has spent [tons of 15th century money] on earth exploration. If the end result is sailors drowning, then then how could global exploration be an outcome worth the expense?
A 50% death rate from scurvy alone was assumed.
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-age-of-s...
He sleeps all night and he works all day.
He puts on women’s clothing and hangs around in bars.
1. The lumberjack song (I'm a lumberjack and that's ok) is a Monty Python sketch [0]
2. The song goes from the singer being proud he's a lumberjack to being proud that he puts on women's clothing and hangs around in bars, and wishes he were a girlie (just like his dear papa)
3. Trump and his administration is famously anti-trans and anti-drag
4. The current secretary of transportation was a lumberjack before
So, overall, the joke is that the secretary of transportation was a lumberjack, which has this comedic queer association because of the Monty Python sketch, that Trump would hate.
⁽"ᵀʰᵉ ʰᶦᵍʰᵉˢᵗ ᵛᶦʳᵗᵘᵉ ᶦˢ ˡᵒʸᵃˡᵗʸ"⁾
RFK Jr: "Measles ain't that bad, try this potion my friend came up with."
Im not sure the current admin is prepared for the risk that entails, unlike the last time we did this:
https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events...
https://www.discovermagazine.com/if-the-apollo-11-astronauts...
I mean that's how we did it last time.
Artemis is projected to take longer than Apollo, unless, well, they land on the moon before Trump leaves office.
By now, a slip to NET 2030 is expected - but clearly, no one is in a hurry to break the news to Trump.
Let's say we forgot how to do heart transplants. Once we did them a few times perfectly, got all surgical techniques right, but patients died shortly after the surgery due to rejection. We quit the whole transplants stuff for years, the techniques and the equipments were lost over time. But then, some 40 years later, we now knew a lot more about immunology, have incredibly advanced drugs, and an aging population. So, because of that, we decided to develop the surgical procedure techniques, long-lost, again.
This is a good analogy for the situation. The moon is an important milestone for further commercial and scientific exploration of the space. We lost the ability we once had to reach it. And anyway, we were not as ready as we are today to follow the next logical steps. If we manage to harvest water from moon ice now, we will be establishing the basis for a kind of serious exploration and development that we weren't nearly ready to achieve in the past.
So, no, we are not doing it just to prove "we haven't lost our mojo", for bragging rights. We are doing it because we are in a development stage where it makes sense to finally return to the moon.
You win it using the playbook the CCP has been systematically and very successfully implementing for a few decades. They are very good at long-term planning. The US plans in 4-year (or 8-year) cycles, and often times reverse course completely at the end of those.
I'm all for reinvigorating the global economy with a resurgence in scientific investment, but it only works if we do it patiently. China understands that, the CCP is quite capable of national planning that transcends administrations. You can't force a moon landing like it's a political OKR, if you do then you better have a pretty solid Plan B considering the amount of risk it represents.
What are you basing this on?
Of course, there is a giant shift in what we could do. We can build far more reliable rockets. We have incredible progresses in materials science, in our understanding of the moon's geology. Likewise, we established the presence of water.
We have more advanced solar panels, better batteries, we have a lot of recent research on modular, safe nuclear reactors that could probably lead more easily to moon-ready reactors. We have better batteries. Not only that, but we have better high power semiconductor gear that could lead to high orbit solar power stations over the poles feeding a polar base via microwaves.
We have decades of accumulated knowledge of human physiology under zero gravity.
We are way more prepared to have a permanent presence on the moon today that we could possibly have in the 70s because of those advancements.
Yes, taking Space-X out of it is stupid. SLS is a joke. Boeing idem. On this part of the problem people have my complete agreement. But the moon is a worthwhile goal because we cannot turn our backs to space.
I'm not asking rhetorically, and if the answer is that the knock-off effects of doing this will provide a ton of technology that will help the rest of Earth eat, live and pursue happiness then I think that's a pretty kick-ass answer. But is that where you were going?
I love space exploration too, but its expensive, and we should focus on areas that have the best scientific or economic payoff. Sending humans back to the moon just isn't the best use of resources.
Much better for making your friends rich.
The tiny Electron is entirely carbon, isn't it?
Their new Neutron has a fully reusable first stage, also out of carbon fiber. For Neutron, they have the largest automated fiber placement machine known to exist:
If you were to ask Musk technical questions, he would make up shit like he has done hundreds of times in the interviews.
The definition of confirmation bias right there.
Every single time this exact thing happens, its the same story. Musk fans/conservatives get proven wrong, get quiet for a bit, and then act like nothing happened and repeat the same bullshit again.
The reason why that happens is because you don't actually listen to what he has to say. If you truly believed what he said was accurate, you would be able to repeat it, and explain why its accurate in your own words, without referencing anything he said. Instead, you are just simply an ideological fan of his, so no matter how many times he gets proven wrong, its not going to change your mind about him.
Overall in general, he and all the other conservatives have done enough damage to their credibility with straight up lies that are so easily verifiable to such an extent that, its totally fine to just discredit anything the say right off the bat. The onus is on them to provide extraordinary evidence if they wanna convince people otherwise.
That's just you repeating confirmation bias again. I am not an ideological fan of Musk. You just assumed so because I said that Musk was correct or competent in some areas.
If I said Hitler was a vegetarian (true btw) and that this is a moral act (also true), does this make me a Nazi? Of course not.
Musk is consistently wrong about so many conspiracy theories it would be laughable if not for the influence he yields.
HOWEVER, we must also be able to accept that sometimes he's actually competent at something. Those are two different things and can both be true.
> Overall in general, he and all the other conservatives have done enough damage to their credibility with straight up lies that are so easily verifiable to such an extent that, its totally fine to just discredit anything the say right off the bat.
See, the issue here is that this logic can also be easily applied to US liberals. You just can't listen to the biggest idiots of a given group and judge the entire group by it, and certainly not ALL behavior of ALL the members of said group.
Because liberals threatened white people that had dreadlock with violence, does this mean I should stop listening to all liberals when they say the sky is blue? See how this logic is crazy?
To make it clear: I am liberal. Not US liberal (I'm Swedish), but I believe in gay rights and the right of abortion for example. I also believe SpaceX is partially great because Musk has done an amazing job. I furthermore believe Musk has done horrible damage by spreading misinformation.
That’s absurd.
Either way, I’d personally rather today’s Nazis of all flavors to be dead. At the very least they seem a lot dumber than the old ones.
HLS requires on-orbit refueling. Anything from 10 to 20 refueling launches will be required. Did you think it required one refueling launch? The SH+SS stack will never be reusable or reliable enough to accomplish the refueling operation in time and on budget.
This means one moon mission will require the use of 10 launch pads and probably 20 complete stacks to even be feasible, because reuse will not help one iota.
Their upper stage reuse will never pan out. Sure they will catch a few, then they will remove the engines and stick the rest in a shredder for scraps to be melted down and recycled.
Elon's HLS is completely detached from reality. I won't even call it a SpaceX system because it's unlikely anyone but Elon came up with it.
Not that this actually helps with any thesis of "Yee Haw, look at Us! We're America! We're number one!"
* And now I'm worrying the initials might have been deliberate on his part; hadn't even considered that before seeing your comment…
>This means one moon mission will require the use of 10 launch pads
The refueling ships are to be launched weeks/months in advance, one at a time. If you look at the rate of Falcon launches this is nothing out of the ordinary.
Yea but isn‘t that the point of the Starship? It has a bunch of unusual design choices regarding reusability and payload capacity, and then the rest of the owl is drawn around them.
I‘m not a rocket-scientist but I would hazard a guess they picked the best material given the options, right?
Stainless steel was specifically chosen so that starship wouldn't need a heat shield and would survive re-entry with transpiration cooling. This would save substantial weight and make rapid reusability easy. The problem is that after designing starship around the stainless steel construction, they found that the transpiration cooling system wasn't workable, so now they have a stainless steel hull and a heat shield.
Further, I do not believe the drawbacks of stainless steel were fully appreciated at the time. Stainless steel on paper looks like it has better strength to weight ratio than aluminum, especially at the cryogenic temperatures of starship's fuel tanks. However a steel tank wall with the same strength as an aluminum wall is much thinner and so you wind up with different failure modes, namely buckling. In practice, a rocket made from steel is heavier than a rocket made from aluminum. This was why the Atlas rockets used stainless steel but subsequent rockets switched to aluminum in the first place.
Additionally, at the time much hooplah was made about stainless steel being cheaper and more formable which would reduce production costs. This is just nonsense. Stainless steel is expensive and tough to work with, which is why we don't use it for creating large structures despite its desirable material properties. It may be favorable compared to titanium, which was likely the only other option when transpiration cooling was the game plan, but for the current design aluminum would be far cheaper in addition to being lighter.
Now I'm sure SpaceX did some analysis after the transpiration cooling didn't work out and asked whether it made sense to start the design over and retool everything instead of continuing on with the stainless steel, and they decided at the time no. Since then they have had several further setbacks. The increased weight required them to reduce safety features, which may have contributed to some of its earlier losses. Starship has had to grow considerably and increase thrust to accommodate for these shortcomings. Would SpaceX have made the same decision to continue with the stainless with the benefit of hindsight? I can't say. But with the exception of a few chinese startups trying to carbon copy starship, other rocket manufacturers have not adopted stainless steel, likely with good reason.
That's revisionist history.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-elon-musk-nixes-starship-sw...
Starship was switched to stainless steel in 2018. It was originally supposed to have an all-metallic heat shield. Ceramic heat shields for critical areas were added months later in march 2019, only in July of 2019 did the windward ceramic heat shield get added, which was after the starhopper prototype had flown and several more prototypes were already being built, and transpiration was still in active development at the time. Transpiration cooling was not dropped until 2020. The heat shield has been steadily growing since then, with the addition of more tiles to cover a larger area and an ablative underlayment to provide more protection to the underlying steel.
> It is not. In 2019, carbon fiber was $135/kg with 35% scrap (so effective cost was $200/kg) vs. $3/kg for stainless steel. That's a two orders of magnitude difference in raw materials.
And what did aluminum cost at the time? Yes stainless is cheap compared to the most expensive alternative, that does not make it cheap.
> 300-series stainless (301/304L) is widely used precisely because it is formable (301 work-hardens to high strength) and readily weldable (304L).
Work hardening is bad for formability.
> it's still much easier to work with than aerospace aluminum-lithium, which requires specialized friction-stir welding and tight process control.
Lithium aluminum is an exotic aluminum alloy. You would use an alloy like 7005 which is weldable.
> There's no evidence that Starship has reduced safety features to compensate for stainless steel + heat shield weight.
That is what reduced margin means. Every rocket has less safety features than it would if weight were not an issue. The more weight increases, the more everything has to give to still remain capable of completing the mission. IFT 9's failure was due to Starship relying on autogenous supercharging to save weight. No one can say how much better starship would be if it had more margin, but it undoubtedly would be better.
Stainless steel is much more cost effective
The whole point of a reusable launch system is the cost of the vehicle is amortized over many launches, so you can use expensive, high performance materials.
You seem like commenting on a situation as one would comment about a moon visuals by looking at it without a telescope. But maybe I'm wrong and you are very close to SpaceX engineers and know some folks that work there or other internals...
But you should then have known that Tesla/SpaceX is very well known to remove stupid requirements or solutions if there is much better alternative. And they don't leave stupid decisions there.
I'm no expert that I can attribute the durability of the vehicle to the choice of stainless steel or whatever alloy they have there, but me and online folks have been amazed at IFT1 when starship tumbled and didn't break apart... or IFT11 when heat tiles were purposefully removed on critical spots and the ship still landed. Maybe suffered burn-thru but it didn't prevent a soft ocean splashdown.
Can it be attributed to stainless steel? I'm no engineer, so I don't know. It's just that the observable result is amazing.
I've worked directly with both SpaceX and Tesla; this is patently false. Tesla's worse than SpaceX but both are terrible at removing stupid and obsolete requirements.
> I'm no engineer, so I don't know.
I am an engineer. Starship's "durability" is neither particularly technically impressive, nor evidence that stainless steel was a good, nonetheless optimal, material choice.
I would be an adult about it and respond reasonable, perhaps even ask NASA for help, publicly. I'm afraid Elon is about to give them the finger and drive around on the moon by himself, two fingers pointing at NASA head quarters. I would smile about that a bit, I admit.
It's a terrible idea to rely on this. Why would you want people to work this way when you can just have a regular-person financial transaction that aligns your interests?
This sort of thing is why China keeps pulling ahead. While we have this dude figuring out how NASA can be gutted further, China has ~2.5 space agencies, and without Spacex doing our heavylifting, they would have been already ahead. They expect to have something like Falcon 9 pretty soon, which implies a starlink competitor in a matter of years.
I don't think Elon cares much about going to the moon. It would probably delay the Mars mission to devote resources to a moon mission.
I keep running across this perception and I don't understand where it comes from. Overwhelmingly, like since the 1970s, NASA has not built anything per it's appropriations from congress. Their job is to 1) Define mission requirements and objectives, 2) Oversee contracts to execute those missions, 3) Test and verify elements of those systems, and very distant 4) do some in-house research and development for cutting edge technology (still mostly contracted out). ~75% of their budget is contracts to private companies to execute missions.
NASA's job, as defined NASA directors over the years and by congress via appropriations, is to come up with ideas and fund private companies to execute them.
Shuttle's heatshield would've been much less dangerous if it wasn't facing a giant ice and insulation covered external tank (like, if it was mounted on top of a booster), but the Air Force's demand for crossrange forced giant wings, which forced the lower mounting position.
They could've iterated on heat shield designs, particularly with attachment mechanisms, but every mission had to carry people, so you couldn't risk it, and anyway, the industry culture was already set in the "even the simplest things must cost large amounts of money and time" stage.
One of the key points that I feel a lot of people miss is that Starship is pretty much the first program actually doing the flight testing needed to understand the engineering requirements for an efficient fully reusable heatshield. They don't have much prior art to look at for tile spacing, mounting mechanisms, metal tiles or transpiration cooling. The fundamental materials haven't changed a lot, but we can see over test flights that SpaceX are figuring things out.
In the early days they used to lose tiles all the time, even after just pressure testing IIRC. Nowadays they may barely lose any tiles on static fire tests. Similarly, tile loss on reentry has decreased greatly, and we've gone from seeing plasma leaving the fins barely attached, to the latest test, where the fins were pretty much fully intact.
You mean what SpaceX does as a matter of course and proved you make it cheap just through scale and iteration?
NASA JPL built all the Mars rovers, and Mars Helicopter. JPL is operated by Caltech, but it is a NASA-branded laboratory that builds and operates planetary exploration robots itself.
This pedantry just to honor the amazing work these people have done.
they handed lots of space exploration stages to private industries, companies like spaceX got decades worth of knowledge exchange and access to nasa facilities.
Somehow people with no skin in the game shout the most stupid things these days.
It's beneficial for NASA, companies, and other countries to have cost-effective access to a range of competing American launch providers (whether SpaceX, ULA, RocketLab, and perhaps BO in the next few years).
This is a global problem, not limited to the US. It's also the end-state of capitalism because having (access to) more money makes it easier to have access to more money, and money drives everything else.
> where our institutions now function to primarily manage and preserve an unhealthy society that is primarily exploitative and does not have the needs of the populace first and foremost.
For me, it has always looked like the use was primarily exploitative and completely opposed to supporting the populace.
> Where economic indicators, economic lingo and policy just uses a vernacular to hide its direct purpose to provide safety for the haves at the expense of the have nots.
This is not new. Chomsky told us this in the 60s. The Catholic Church used a similar strategy for over a millennia.
I'm not disagreeing with you, only attempting to disperse your sense of surprise.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.
Perhaps Taylor Swift is the thief for singing in a way a lot of people like. Must be an Eleventh Commandment or something.
Starship is not a drop-in replacement for SLS. But it sure casts a long shadow on the entire SLS project.
Difficult to say relative to current Artemis timelines, which have to date been mainly delayed by Orion. They're currently looking on schedule to perform an orbital propellant transfer in 2026. That likely means a commercial launch before the end of next year, which is crazy.
How that relates to HLS is up in the air, and probably will be until the end of next year.
Of course that was always wishful thinking. I'm sure SpaceX has their "real" schedule somewhere, and maybe NASA has one too (at least from what I've heard, it is likely they have an unofficial idea of it somewhere).
Now do Orion and ML2.
Artemis is behind schedule. Nobody debates that. Currently, the bottleneck is with Orion. SpaceX just massively de-risked the Starship platform with IFT-11. If IFT-12 validates Block 3, we should wait until the end of 2026 before trying to revëvaluate.
It's not difficult to say. They are behind schedule and everyone, not just Duffy, is talking about it and have been for awhile.
I don't care - beyond how getting to the moon will help future space exploration - and risk is high when developing new tech, but I also don't care about SpaceX. It's very possible Starship won't work out; that's risk and I'm sure SpaceX and NASA people understand that. Why must people on HN defend SpaceX at every turn, like a PR agency. Does anyone point out a genuine, significant, negative about Starship? Why might it not work? What are the risks?
I think more competition is great and hope they reopen the contract. Private industry competing on what is now prosaic space technology, such as orbit and even the moon, is great. Let NASA do the cutting edge stuff like flying to Europa or looking back to the beginning of time or investigating climate change. (Notice that private industry still can't land on the moon reliably - 56 years after NASA demonstrated it.)
They aren't delivering, so maybe not. People on HN state the SpaceX talking points like they are reality. It's an Internet mob; there is no room for any serious examination of the issue.
How do you square that with "not delivering"? I don't doubt that China could surpass them in the next 5 years, but nobody else is realistically close to doing so.
As I said, people here will do anything to promote SpaceX.
Starship is trying to do the hardest thing in the history of space flight. And of course its not on schedule, its schedule was always insane.
The way of approching things as 'is X on schedule' is a fundamentally false way of approching the problem. The question is who makes the schedules and why. Who decides the budget and why. Who planes for the architecture and why.
Just thrwing around and accusing different groups about who is 'delayed' is kind of counter-productive.
The fact is, the schedule is something Trump made up to sound cool in his first term, and has since been revised for multible reasons. And the demand for a lander was equally rushed. So the schedule is mostly just whatever politics at the moment wants to project.
Ah, but SLS were the right kind of people. Allegedly. /s
SpaceX, less so. Allegedly.
Doesn't that attitude, in reverse, describe most HN commenters every time SpaceX or SLS is mentioned?
While on the contrary Boieng and friends try to use old tech they have in their archive to slap togetehr a minimal viable product to meet the requirment.
But the contract structure changes is not about giving contract to SpaceX only. Its about developing a space industry. And this has worked extremely well. Commercial cargo resulted in Falcon 9, Antares rockets. Antares team is now working with the Firefly startup for a next generation rocket. Clearly not as successful as Falcon, but without Falcon on the market it might have delivered differently.
It also produce Cargo Dragon and Cygnus. Both have seen a lot of further development since then and have all kinds of uses.
You can also look at CLIPS for moon landers, where some companies at small budgets have managed to build landers. And even those that weren't successful, training a lot of people on deep space probes.
If you comapre the explosion of the space industry since Commercial Cargo to the stgantion in the Shuttle/Constellation area you will see why many space fans are so in favor of the new model. And the amazing thing is, that a tiny fraction of the money was spent on the non-Shuttle/Constellation/SLS part.
In fact, I did the math and the total spend on just development of Constellation/SLS/Orion is going toward 200 billion $ over the last 25 years. And that is without actually delivering anything meaningful.
In comparison the complete development budget of Commercial Cargo was a few billion $ at most, and it has revolutionized the US space industry. The complete spend on all Commerical Cargo, Commercial Crew and Lunar development more like 20 billion $. And the impact is just hilariously larger.
Seems fairly obious what the way forward is, its just politically not feasable. As long as 50% of NASA discretionary budget is spent on ISS and Shuttle-derived stuff that will never be forward looking, you are playing the game with a hand tied behind your back and cement shoes.
IOW, it doesn't matter what SpaceX or the others are doing, SpaceX is the 'right kind of people' to them.
And those comments are usually not long or detailed. Almost everybody that actually engadges in the discussion doesn't seem to defend that position.
Sorry that complex government contracts valued at 100s of billions of $ can't be discussed in snarky one-liners and throwing around random judgments based on nothing. You seem like somebody that should be on tiktok, not HN.
Building new things is genuinely hard.
But I have seen some serious, albeit delayed, successes.
Humans are relentlessly overoptimistic in their planning, and that's likely because if we weren't we often wouldn't even start... plus, the future is really, really hard to predict.
Maybe also seriously threaten Boeing with cancelations and restrictions for their constant failures and corruption. We've had the espionage scandal that forced the formation of ULA, SLS's extreme delays and overruns, supressing Vulcan's capabilities to prevent it from impinging on SLS's blank check, Starliner's inability to deliver (and at this point it seems unlikely the station will be around long enough for their 6 flights), and the scandal that caused their disqualification from the original HLS bid.
Starship is being painted as the sole blocker in Artemis, but I can't think of any component of Artemis that has any contractors delivering competently and on-time.
We still haven't heard anything about the status of the EVA suits, which the US has an even worse track record on than rockets. My understanding is that they haven't been able to build and bring a new suit into use, for 25+ years now, and not due to a lack of spending.
Getting everyone involved in Artemis to deliver on time, let alone on budget, would require nothing short of divine intervention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog...
The main hurdle is the CZ-10 rocket, which has not flown yet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_10
But they have plenty of rocketry experience and the YF-100K engine they'll use for CZ-10 has successfully flown on the CZ-12:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_12
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YF-100
(Yes, Chinese rocket numbering is weird, and CZ = Changzheng = Long March)
The reason I’m told we don’t do it today, is that we don’t want to. OK, China does, so what is the hold up that applies now?
No one is ever able to explain why now, and doubly so why when now is still in the future.
2. The institutional knowledge of working directly on the Apollo program has largely been lost in the US, and certainly isn't present in China.
Those are the unimportant pieces. The real reason is:
3. The US was actively at war with Russia. While it was a cold war (except for the proxy wars), the Apollo program had a wartime budget (spent nearly half a trillion in today's dollars), and a wartime risk tolerance (Neil Armstrong thought they had a 10% chance of not making it back).
2. Uh huh. The knowledge for 1960s tech is limited, agreed, but the tech is so much more superior now, and China as a nation has a high understanding. What does China not have that would be of any relevance?
3. Cool, China is in an economic Cold War with the USA.
I remain unconvinced.
SLS Block 1: >27,000 kg (59,500 lb)
SLS Block 1B: 42,000 kg (92,500 lb)
SlS Block 2: >46,000 kg (101,400 lb)
Vulcan Centaur: 12,100 kg (26,700 lb)
New Glenn: 7,000 kg (15,000 lb)
Orion crew module by itself weighs 10,400 kg (22,900 lb), the service module is 15,461 kg (34,085 lb).
Orion is a heavy spacecraft. SLS, like or not (I don't), it has a lot of lift. Unless you're sticking an Orion inside of a Starship (lol), Orion basically dies with SLS.
Supposedly, as of a week ago, LM sees at least some possible routes to having Orion without SLS to not outright give up on the idea, but doesn't have specifics for now: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/once-unthinkable-nasa-...
Keeping multiple companies capable of building it alive is essential.
I'm pretty sure this is what's been happening with Blue Origin: in 25 years they've delivered close to nothing, but they keep getting contracts because "we need a SpaceX alternative". What is that if not extortion.
(EDIT: the sibling comment correctly points out that Boeing is an even more obvious case. Starliner is a money pit, but we have to keep throwing more money down it so that there's no single supplier)
Words have meaning.
IIRC they managed to extort additional money out of NASA for Starliner too (despite it being fixed price), for that exact reason.
SpaceX hasn't fallen to such tactics yet, but, agreed, it'll be too late to start on setting up competitors when SpaceX eventually does fall to that level (Boeing wasn't always so bad after all).
Companies and the capability of building are two separate things. It is not at all a desirable thing to keep a company alive which refuses to develop and implement the capabilities to compete, in the process depriving resources from those that would develop those capabilities. If a company dies, its talent and equipment do not vanish into thin air, they get bought up by competitors who can put them to better use.
Unless you are actually duplicating efforts to have multiple firms produce the same things, a large number of potential suppliers does nothing to reduce your risk once you select one to move forward - especially if you still are required to use them after repeated failure. There are just a greater number of potential failure points as any of your suppliers, all of whom you rely on, might fail.
Further, in spreading contracts out among many firms, you reduce the economies of scale of any individual firm. They can not build out the additional capability that more work would afford them, all the while they are taking resources away from genuine productive capability by duplicating effort with excessive overhead.
Concentrated monopolies are bad for common consumers, who have no negotiating power and can be extorted. Governments don't have that weakness. On a purely economic level, the government is a single buyer - it's a heck of a lot easier for them to find a new rocket maker than it is for a rocket maker to find a new government that will buy from them. Beyond that, governments have a monopoly on violence, piss them off enough and bankruptcy is the least of your worries. If it really wanted to, the government could just do the work in house, either setting up new public firms or nationalizing existing ones. Excessively costly government contracts are graft, or at best pork; the government could easily get much more favorable terms if its leaders were so inclined.
I'm not seeing what makes SpaceX government funded beyond just that it provides services to the government? The same as any other launch provider would be doing? At this point the vast majority of SpaceX's activity, and likely cashflow, is from its mostly self-funded Starlink.
SpaceX won the original HLS contract because their design actually had hardware in testing, actually met NASA's payload, landing area and testing requirements, had a clear path to commercialization and was willing to cover most of the cost themselves, as otherwise NASA wouldn't have been able to choose anyone given the limited funding allocated by Congress.
Take away all of SpaceX‘s government contracts. You imagine SpaceX would still be in business?
As you said, every launch provider is basically dependent on government contracts to stay in business because the government is the only entity that has a legitimate need for launch capability such that it’s willing to pay for its development. There are no sufficiently profitable private contracts out there to sustain a launch provider.
ULA has been operating for many, many years (Atlas/Delta, now Vulcan Centaur), RocketLab has been putting up small payloads for the last few (with Electron, someday Neutron perhaps), and BO seems close to having New Glenn flying real missions this season. But yes, one hopes that the others can become competitive on price eventually.
American society seems to be more and more controlled by people in positions where they cannot fail. The example that originally put this idea in my head was the Mozilla CEO who, oversaw a year during which Firefox usership fell, and Mozilla workers were fired, and then the CEO received a pay raise. A job where it's not possible to fail. You get paid no matter what, probably get a raise.
In the video Destin keeps asking "we're going right?", throughout the whole video, and the truth is everyone in the room is hesitant to say yes.
Destin keeps narrating and apologizing for his own speech (because he doesn't want to burn every bridge he has with NASA), but history will make Destin look like a prophet I think. I think this speech is worthy of the history books.
Really? It’s eye opening. But Destin seems to miss the point.
We’re not trying to go back to the Moon, one and done. That was Apollo. We’re trying to build a system that reduces the repeat cost of Moon access, with medium-term plans for permanent settlement. (Like in Antarctica. Not The Expanse.)
His criticism of Artemis is on point. But his anchoring to Apollo is bewilderingly blind. If we’re just redoing Apollo, the programme should be defunded. (If a NASA administrator set that as a goal, I’d argue the NASA manned spaceflight programme might need to be overhauled.)
> everyone in the room is hesitant to say yes
This is like Trump complaining his generals won’t laugh at his jokes.
These are senior NASA scientists. They’re listening to a talk, not a rally.
Does anyone expect were going to launch Artemis rockets over and over for decades? Aren't they extremely expensive?
My claim remains that there are many who are working on Artemis that quietly believe it will not succeed. History will eventually reveal the truth about this; and yeah, I might be wrong, we will see.
I'll address this to the third parties in the room who are not me or you: Click through and listen and if you are convinced it's a question you can go with Buttons840. If you're not convinced it's a question you can go with me. But it'll take you 10 seconds max. Worth it for you to see it yourself. No need to let anyone convince you.
There may be. But Destin’s video doesn’t demonstrate that.
If the planets are aligned the Delta-V is not that different between the two (Mars is about twice as much Delta-V for 100x the distance). You can use aerobraking in the Mars atmosphere but can do no such thing on the Moon. And then the last problem is that on the Moon you need to budget for a round trip, but on Mars we could produce fuel on the surface for the return trip. When you start thinking about all that it's obvious that Mars makes more sense.
A permanent Moon base would allow research opportunities that private LEO stations can't: ISRU, low gravity research, the far side of the Moon offers unique opportunities for astronomy (any spectrum), etc. pp. Long term, who knows what additional opportunities it opens up.
For landing hovever it makes things signifficantly easier! You can break full arrival speed from lunar or interplanetary space (successfully done by Apollo missions) with a relatively light passive heatshield & land on parachutes. You can even brek to orbit instead or use the atmosphere to change incliunation of your orbit and other tricks (there are proposals for air breathing ion engines, etc.).
Lack of sufficient atmosphere is what makes landing on Mercury (no atmosphere, need to break to zero using rcoket thrust) and Mars (enough atmosphere to break from arrival speed, not enough to use parashutes or gliders for a soft landing) so difficult .
Falcon Heavy seems to have that capability though. I suspect that Starship will have similar cost to Falcon Heavy when they get done with it. Maybe marginally cheaper. The re-entry problem is really throwing a wrench into things.
They have set a hard goal, but they definitely have the expertise to make it work. I look forward to seeing the first orbital re-fueling.
Also, as far as I can tell from their last test video, they are still shredding their Flaperons at the joint.
I'm sure SpaceX will eventually fix the problem. They are well funded, the materials exist, and they have amazing engineers. They just haven't reached that point yet.
Expensive compared to a 777 flight? Sure. Expensive compared to every other moon capable rocket? No.
Even if by some miracle Starship carries people to Mars, there won't be anything for them to do there. They'll be stuck in their Starship and that would be the end of that mission, since there isn't even a plan to return.
https://spacenews.com/how-carrying-enough-water-to-make-retu...
https://spacenews.com/crewed-mars-missions-will-require-a-ne...
But I'm sure that approach also has drawbacks.
Duffy and Isaacman are fighting to be head of NASA. This is that fight spilling from Washington over the weekend onto Twitter today because of course it has with this administration.
Duffy, as acting head of NASA, is trying to lob a threat at Musk, Isaacman’s patron. He’s done so poorly, and so here we are.
But politically impotent. Isaacman was Musk's man at NASA. His nomination came up because of Musk. It was annulled because of Musk.
The question seems to be coming back up due to Isaacman's work. But because Isaacman is Musk's client, it's risen back to Musk and Duffy trading insults on Twitter. (Which, to be clear, is an elevation Duffy--purposely or inadvertently--caused.)
Could this just be a pressure tactic on SpaceX?
Somewhat surprised they've waited this long, under the circumstances.
On top of working on a HLS lander, Blue Origin has a pretty large rocket developed already - New Glenn. They just don't have the reusability or the launch cadence, and their HLS needs at least two launches. So far, New Glenn has only ever flown once, with the first stage recovery attempt being unsuccessful. But they may get it into a good shape in time.
I do think that Artemis 3, currently stated for 2027, will be eventually delayed to ~2030, for many reasons. But I wouldn't trust Blue Origin to deliver before SpaceX even if they started the development at the same exact time, and they didn't. SpaceX is, by aerospace standards, a lean and mean company. SpaceX sets unhinged hyper-aggressive "if we lived in a perfect world" timelines, and delivers late. Blue Origin sets reasonable aerospace timelines, and still delivers late.
Blue Moon HLS is considerably less complex than Starship HLS, but it has a lot of the same milestones in front of it - including in-orbit propellant storage and fuel transfers from one vehicle to another. And currently, they certainly don't seem to be ahead of where SpaceX is now with Starship.
Other than Blue Origin and SpaceX? I just don't see anyone being able to squeeze out a HLS candndate in time for 2030. Who else is there in the space, with anywhere near the expertise? Firefly? Boeing?
That's the one thing in your comment I disagree with. Starship-based HLS has basically one base vehicle, modified into three variants (tanker, depot, and the lander itself). Refueling is done in LEO.
Blue Origin's HLS has three completely unique vehicles with no commonality (New Glenn, Transporter, and the lander), and refuels in multiple orbits, one of which is NRHO, which is likely to be far more challenging. And they're doing it with hydrogen.
Blue Origin's Mk1 cargo lander is simpler; their HLS architecture is not.
JMHO.
A major weakness of SpaceX's HLS approach is that it requires them to launch a lot of the same vehicle in a fairly short succession. But SpaceX are the kings of high volume aerospace manufacturing, and they are the driving force behind US launch cadence going up. Even if Starship reusability isn't truly perfected in time for Artemis HLS, they are already building those Starships pretty fast, and can eat some refueling vehicle losses.
Blue Origin doesn't have the raw performance figures of Starship, or SpaceX's unmatched manufacturing and launch cadence. So their HLS architecture is lighter and less launch hungry. That comes at an engineering cost of having to use more specialized vehicles. And they are using LH2 fuel - which delivers more of a punch per weight, but is even harder to stay on top of than CH4. More engineering effort would be required to store and transfer that in orbit, dealing with boil-off and all - but Blue Origin has used liquid hydrogen extensively already, so they have experience with it.
The SpaceX approach requires a lot of launches, but they're already proven experts at that. They've launched something like 130 rockets this year alone. That's one every couple of days.
High launch cadence is not complexity for SpaceX. It's normal for them. After the first half dozen or so refuels, it will be second nature, just like delivering satellites with Falcon is.
And they are, in essence, developing a single craft for it, just with a few variations.
Blue's architecture requires three distinct vehicles. Each one has to be developed separately. Then we get to the launch; last I saw, here is the comparison:
SpaceX:
* Launch the Depot
* Launch N tankers to fill the depot (this is the tedium I mentioned).
* Launch the HLS to LEO
* Refill the HLS in LEO
* Send the HLS to NRHO
* Rendevous with Orion in NRHO and transfer people
* Land on and then return from the moon
* Rendevous with Orion in NRHO and transfer people back.
That's a fairly complex architecture, but let's compare that against the last I saw of Blue's [1]:
* Launch the Transporter to LEO
* Launch tankers and refill the Transporter
* Launch the Lander to LEO "dry"
* Fill the Lander from the Transporter
* Send Lander to NRHO
* Launch tankers and refill the Transporter
* Raise Transporter to "stairstep" orbit
* Launch tankers and refill the Transporter again
* Send the Transporter to NRHO
* Refill the Lander again in NRHO
* Rendezvous with Orion and transfer people
* Land on moon and return with people
* Rendezvous with Orion and transfer people back
That is far more complex than what SpaceX is proposing.
The number of tanker launches is really quite irrelevant for both in this context. It's less risky for SpaceX due to their extensive ops experience, but both will be fine there I think. That's just tedium for both of them.
The complexity comes in with the number of operations and precisely where BO is doing the refueling. I'm not terribly worried about the LEO ops; they'll manage those. The NRHO refuelling though? That one strikes me much riskier if only due to comms lag.
And the sheer number of steps in Blue's architecture seems crazy to me.
So no, I can't agree that Blue's architecture is in any way simpler. Quite the opposite, in fact.
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20250008728/downloads/25... :: the last slide in the set.
(edit: formatting)
They're known for moving fast, and they're building multiple pads. They're also building enormous mass manufacturing facilities in the background of all this (Gigabay and whatever). Not sure how many ships they'll be able to produce per month once the design is nailed down, but I'll bet it will surprise everyone.
SH Boosters are already effectively reusable for the purposes of this discussion; a couple of them have already re-flown. That's half the battle right there.
Boiloff prevention is presumably one of the main modifications needed for the depot. I think it's supposed to be easier with methalox than with hydrolox (which BO is using), but I have no idea the particulars of what they'll have to do there to achieve effectiveness. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if they try to cut that corner at least once; should be interesting.
The big risk that I see is neither launch nor boiloff, but rather simple fuel availability. Can they get that much methane and LOX shipped around the country that fast? I have no idea, but it seems concerning to me. Logistics...
Thing about the deadline, though, is who's going to do it faster? Blue has worse issues with their current crewed lander proposal. Nobody else has even started on one AFAIK.
My prediction is that nobody can build and fully qualify a safe moon lander with a more or less clean-sheet design in three years.
On the other hand, I can easily see Starship succeeding in a moon landing in three or four years if things go well with V3 and the refuelling research. It's a stretch -- things aren't likely to go completely smoothly -- but it's conceivable.
> My prediction is that nobody can build and fully qualify a safe moon lander with a more or less clean-sheet design in three years.
I tend to agree, though there are possible solutions that are technically simpler (if less ambitious) than either Starship or Blue Moon, while not even requiring SLS. Though it is probably too late now to try those. It's all the more surprising that Lockheed Martin still tries to offer an alternative solution:
> In a statement to Reuters, Bob Behnken, vice president of Exploration and Technology Strategy at Lockheed Martin's space unit, said the company this year has been conducting "significant technical and programmatic analysis for human lunar landers."
> "We have been working with a cross-industry team of companies and together we are looking forward to addressing Secretary Duffy's request to meet our country’s lunar objectives," said Behnken, a retired NASA astronaut.
https://www.reuters.com/science/us-seek-rival-bids-artemis-3...
But their offer would likely be very expensive, and it would be very questionable whether it can be faster than Starship HLS. So I don't think they will receive a contract.
I look forward to seeing what happens with all this. :)
Look up how many refueling launches are required and you'll see the problem, especially because no matter if Elon says so, the upper stage will never be reusable, even if caught.
Every moon mission will require that they pre-build a HLS and probably 15 full stacks.
Ridiculous.
Even if I'm wrong, though, it wouldn't invalidate the point I'm making in this thread: BO's Mk2 has the exact same issues in a more complex architecture.
The Space Shuttle was reusable, and SpaceX is using an improved variant of the Space Shuttle heat shield, so it seems quite certain that Starship will be reusable. The question is more: how much refurbishment will it need? The Space Shuttle required extensive amounts. SpaceX will likely be able to improve on that a lot, though it isn't clear how long it will take.
GIF reply "why are you gae" (this was his actual response btw)
Yes! I'm disappointed I had to scroll down so far to see this. The CNN headline isn't even accurate. The actual NASA statement is:
> "I’m going to open up the contract. I’m going to let other space companies compete with SpaceX."
SpaceX is behind schedule, but still years ahead of its competitors. No one is even in the same ballpark on the main metric that ultimately matters: dollars per kilogram to orbit. The main effect of this NASA statement, or of NASA sending a few dollars to SpaceX's competitors, is to give SpaceX a kick in the pants.
You don't see the relevance of Artemis III launching in mid-2027 [1] or 2028 versus, say, after November 2028?
There are enough contractors involved and enough delay potential on the table that getting all the ducks in the row in time for the 2027 date would require nothing short of divine intervention.
Or a fuckton of money for an administration priority.
> outside maybe PR and politics
It's still a bad idea, objectively.
Assuming SpaceX can deliver it. They've failed to do a successful test flight with even a fraction of the officially planned capacity. Who knows how long it will take them, if they can even pull it off, to deliver it.
Some conclusions / opinions: Starship so far is relatively cheap compared to the previous program that took Americans to the moon. Developing a moon capable rocket takes a long time, especially if they don't just copy the existing designs from 60 years ago. And a single purpose rocket will long-term be more expensive than a more generalised / reusable platform, but that's more capitalist objectives than political (e.g. beating the commies).
[0] https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/nasa-ig-artemis-will-cost...
SpaceX's, on the other hand, has been.
If you want to look long term, well, they're still stellar :) Considering everything they're achieving, and how they're so much better than everybody else in the field.
It's a failure only if you look at a rather small time range and criteria. Which I don't think was a surprise for anybody - Elon is famous for going for moon shots and failing, but still delivering better than anybody else.
But let's pretend for a minute that you're right and all Elon Musk does is hire great people that then do all the work building the company for him and keep him at arms length doing nothing. The skill to hire like that alone still puts him in the top 0.01% of CEOs.
SpaceX may not be stellar, but it is definitely out of this world ;)
Elon Musk is just a guy, a key figure for SpaceX, but there are 10000+ other people, including Gwynne Shotwell who most people say is really in charge. In fact, I am not sure if Elon Musk does any actual work at SpaceX and Tesla now.
That alone overshadows everything NASA has done since the moon landing.
This work could revolutionise America's manufacturing/industrial base, if there was someone around who could direct the ship in that direction.
I could imagine, given a bit of funding bump, the van-lifers and the earthship folks could find themselves with a life-support-system revolution to participate in .. especially if it were oriented not just towards starship interiors, but life-on-the-streets/in-the-woods/on-mars solutions .. the good ol' USA has tons of test monkeys for that scenario.
A lot of institutional knowledge is locked behind corporate walls. We can assume a crew cabin will be partly designed by engineers poached from other companies who can leak some of the institutional knowledge. That said, some of the crew cabin will be designed whole-cloth. At some point SpaceX will need to build it's own knowledge base. I would be curious to see how other components were built, i.e. the parachutes. A parachute has a lot of built-in institutional knowledge, and I'd be curious to see behind the curtains where SpaceX got that knowledge. You can't exactly check out a library book.
The concept of boutique engineering shops tackling chunks of the design is an interesting premise. But I don't see how the financials work. The more realistic scenario is that SpaceX will build it's own machine shops under it's umbrella.
Winnebago is churning out Ekko campervans at $250,000 and somebody is buying those. But you look at the quality of the interior, it's same as everyone else, lots of particle board. The point is, the most expensive campervans built by the corporate world are using cheap throwaway materials, not space age innovation. I shudder to think of the cost of what a space age campervan costs.
The Apollo program was at the unique juncture in history where distributed companies with institutional knowledge were rapidly maturing their products concurrently with NASA's demand. In today's world, you will not see the same number of companies spooling up assembly lines without massive costs.
It's true, but I think this subject will scale throughout the entire survival category.
Cheap throwaway materials is one thing .. in situ 3D replication, another thing entirely.
The cottage industries can do a lot of the innovation. I think the sailboat/winnebago/portable-living engineering is going to come to a head, eventually .. and we will see new technologies, perhaps, springing up around the subject of human/biosphere construction.
If you're suggesting that we won't have winnebago's on Mars, I don't wanna go there.
That probably does require some imagination. Starting with any incentive to do so.
Allegedly, SpaceX only exists because some Russian engineer spit on him during tense price negotiations back in 2002.
His purchase of Twitter wasn't cheap either.
And Musk got the best revenge evar!
“Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.”
To address your question, what is the incentive for going to Mars
My comment wasn’t putting any faith in the suggestion spacex will, merely saying Elon thinks they will.
Here's a list; https://elonmusk.today/
by 2017!
"I see a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly users in 12 to 18 months." — 11/27/2022
To occupy it. Just look at Musk's t-shirt. Isn't the entire point of SpaceX to go to Mars? Everything else they do is just steps in achieving the occupation of Mars.
What? No, it is to concentrate public wealth into the hands of one man.
SpaceX has always complied with the regulations and timings needed by regulatory bodies. This isn't a thing.
Most CEOs presumably do want their companies to succeed and do good things in the abstract, but a lot of them would happily have them fail if it made them a huge pile of cash.
To be honest I don’t understand this argument of “no one can’t spend billions in a lifetime so no one should have billions at all”. Why do we set a limit on billions? Why do we use the idea of “can’t spend in a lifetime”?
I have no argument about limiting anyone's money. I'm just wondering if there is a (real, useful) feat he can pull off now with $500B, but that he couldn't do with a mere $200B.
The company raised money? I could not find any article that states that, only some rumors about the intent to do so.
Regardless, when company raises money its company's money, not Elon's.
I would assume that aggressive scaling of rocket building capabilities would require capital, but I have no idea what is the figure needed for that.
There's a website dedicated to the empty promises Elon has made. Can't find it though, anyone remember?
Edit: https://elonmusk.today/
Look at that, Morocco beats NASA to the moon!
https://deepnewz.com/company-earnings/spacex-2025-revenue-to...
Is this a "SpaceX spread itself too thin and wasn't able to keep its own pre-agreed deadlines" situation or a "The government-specified contract was unrealistically aggressive / so vaguely-specified that it could not be realized within its original timetable" situation?
Basically, originally Starship has entered development for SpaceX had nothing todo with any of this. SpaceX started to spend on Starship for their own reasons.
Then in Trump 1, he simply inveded a super agressive 'get to the moon' goal. 'Moon 2024'. This was mostly a fantasy goal but it sounded good politically. NASA for various reasons, had aboslutly no money to fund a moon lander. But if the president asked, they have to do it. So they threw out very opened ended ask for a moon lander, and a single moon landing.
There wasn't the kind of question asked like, what kind of system should we use for moon exploration in the next 2 decades. Or anything like that. It was more like 'how can we land on the moon once in 2024 and then we do new contracts after that'.
SpaceX, naturally justed adopted their existing Starship platform. But to make that work, they would need to figure out many things beyond just a 'lander'. And SpaceX bid was wildly to ambitious. It in many cases provided far, far more then NASA asked for. But NASA doesn't care about the capability, only if the bid can do the minium they asked for.
SpaceX won because they were willing to pay for almost all of it themselves, only asking for 2.3 billion $. And that included a test moon landing before the real one.
This is of course only a fraction of the cost for the whole Starship program.
So Space didn't spread themselves to thin, they are all in on Starship, but the simple reality is, its an incredibly difficult wide reaching program. And the moon lander part is just a little add on to that larger project. And that's the only reason 2.3 billion $ would be acceptable to SpaceX.
The simple reality is, nobody on the planet knows how to do a moon lander for 2.3 billion $, literally nobody.
So the time table way always fantasy and literally everybody knew that as soon as it was announced. Nobody was to public about it because offending Trump is bad, so lets all just collectivly pretend its real.
The government contract was unfocused and short term focused, without a larger strategy for moon exploration.
The real issue however isn't with this one contract, but the how the whole NASA Human Spaceflight program is organized.
1. Back a low risk moon mission that is basically a repeat of Apollo using proven, but extremely expensive tech that has a very low probability of failure.
2. Back a high risk strategy that relies on the development of new technology that can potentially deliver hundreds of tons of cargo to the lunar surface for a fraction of the cost of Apollo and support a sustained human presence on the lunar surface. This of course comes with a near 100% chance of significant delays and cost overruns, and also a high probability of total failure.
IMO NASA made the obviously correct choice here and it's not close. This is exactly the kind of thing that I want my tax money spent on.
Option one basically lights a huge pile of money on fire, for a vanity goal.
Option two uses a much smaller pile of money to do something useful long term.
You can read the technical selection paper. Both Blue and SpaceX proposal met the minimal requirments, and SpaceX was cheaper by at least 50%. So they won the selection.
A full-flow staged combustion engine, which proven works (yay) most of the time (not yay). If you follow the Starship launches, look at the random engines that go out on the Super Heavy every time it launches. The engines going out during ascent aren't planned outages.
A rapidly re-usable second stage. This is by far the most challenging part of the program. It turns out, returning things from space is mad difficult. And while I think it's great that we are investigating ways to make this happen, I'm a bit bearish on whether Starship itself will be the vehicle and team that ultimately figures this out. However, at the very least, there's a ton of science being done here that will ultimately help making this a reality.
Starship isn't returning in any meaningfully reusable form just yet. And while they've figured out how to get the thing up suborbital, there's yet no guarantee on the survivability of the vehicle itself. I am for sure certain that Elon is very likely unhappy with having to use heat shield tiles because they are not reusable. We don't yet know the stresses on the vehicle itself when returning from space and just how reusable the second stage actually is. Nor, for that matter, just how usable the second stage is.
Do I think they'll figure out how to get it to orbit? Of course. Do I think they'll figure out how to make it rapidly reusable? I'm not sure. And we won't yet know for a couple of years.
Getting a payload to LEO as far as rocket launches are concerned is "easy" relative to the loftier goals of the Moon, and by much further extension, Mars. The Moon is significantly harder to pull off and that's why the Saturn V was a 3-stage rocket.
In order to make all of this worth it, Starship and Super Heavy must be rapidly reusable--with a turnaround measured in hours/days, not weeks and months. And I'm just not sure it's there yet. Which really sucks, because getting mass to orbit is critically important for us to dominate our solar system.
I think the research is important, personally. And I'm glad we're investing at least some money into these projects. But there's no way Starship and Super Heavy meet the timelines allocated. But I'm wishing the best for the team to figure out something. And if not them, then some future generation that piggybacks off of the work they did to do it better.
Now that this has happened, expect a future democrat administration to have its revenge on human spaceflight centers in red states. Given the rot that has set in under that politically protected status, I can't see this as a bad thing.
Make Puerto Rico a state and move Cape Canaveral there.
Doubt
I don't think it's going to take them a decade, but they probably won't be ready within Trump's term, and I think that's the real reason for this latest push.
edit: the vindictive behavior of the current crop of politicians is just cutting off your nose to spite your face. All of it is going to come right back around when the parties swap places.
It's the most novel and riskiest. I wouldn't say it's hardest. That's launch, reëntry and reüse. They've substantially de-risked those components with IFT-11.
I'd put IFT-12 validating Block 3 as the actual hardest launch next year. If that goes smoothly, I'm betting they make orbit and propellant transfer before the end of the year. And if that happens, I'm betting they get at least one rocket off to Mars before year end.
That's what Musk wants you to believe.
In reality, reusability was the Achilles heel of the space shuttle, due to the thermal insulator tiles that could be easily damaged during reentry, so they had to be rechecked rigorously before the next flight, and the damaged tiles replaced. We haven't seen any of that - so far only the booster was reused, somewhat, as in 2 were reused, with one failure and one success, but only much later.
And then there is the orbital refueling, but that is so far in the future that it's not even worth discussing.
They had to take a lot of the back end of the shuttle apart after every landing, which was cumbersome because things weren't packed right for that. Also, they used hydrazine for the (many!) smaller rocket engines and that requires special protective suits and breathing equipment.
Starship doesn't use hydrazine and the big engines are pretty fast to remove/mount. We've seen them do that many times now.
Shuttle tiles were tested by having somebody going around and pinging them all with a special mallet and using a cart with a special computer that checked if they made the right sound.
Starship tiles can be inspected remotely and quickly with a camera.
Replacing a shuttle tile wasn't easy. Replacing a Starship tile is fairly easy. They have done it many, many times already. The question isn't whether they can do it fast (they can) or easily (they can) or whether they can detect bad tiles (they can). It's not even whether they can tolerate a few missing or defective tiles (they can). The only question there is whether enough fail so that the replacement time cuts too much into the recycling time budget for when they want to launch Starships really fast. We don't know that yet. They won't be needing really fast turnarounds for some time so there's plenty of opportunity to fix any issues with tile design/placement and with the underlying thermal blankets.
Don't argue by analogies. Especially not bad ones.
In comparison Starship is covered by mostly identical tiles attached to hull welded from milimeters thick (internet data indicates something between 4 and 2 mm thick & often multiplied in important places) steel plate.
The steel hull has demonstrated surviving missing tiles just fine - and during earlier flight even multiple burn throughs on the flaps with bits falling off and even back then Starship completed simulated landing to the ocean (including the flip manuever and landing burn!).
So even if SpaceX does not perfect rapid reusability of Starship immediately, they would still have hands down the best orbital launcher in the world, with the option of populating new Starship hulls with reused engines, acuators and avionics for the time being.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_thermal_protecti...
The first prototype of Starship only did its first hop in July 2019, so 6 years ago. The first flight integrated test only happened 2,5 years ago.
Nowadays they can return to Earth already and catch the booster. Why would you expect the rest of the development to drag until 2041?
Remember, they said that they'd have a rapidly reusable launch system going by March 2013. In 2011, Musk said that he'd be sending humans to Mars sometime between 2021 and 2031, but it doesn't look like they're anywhere near being able to do that yet.
Also remember that they started working on all of this in 2008.
I mean, I could be wrong! But I don't think I am.
They have blown a lot of deadlines, but they also produced a very reliable and relatively cheap launcher which now underpins the majority of human space activity, which we should, in fairness, consider a huge achievement.
And the Raptor engines look really good so far. Reliable engines are a huge must in space industry.
I don't think they are getting stymied by reentry problems forever. Already the latest IFT looked a lot better than the first one.
That saying is in no way at odds with my assertion.
Nevertheless, if we come back to the original assertion, I have one more argument against it.
If you look at Starbase, it has grown absolutely huge. It started off as a small group of tents and now it is a massive industrial area, plus SpaceX is expanding their presence at Cap Canaveral as well.
Which means that they have a strong incentive to turn Starship into something that makes money and can finance those structures. No one can subsidize such large scale efforts indefinitely, not even Musk. You can spend a lot of time at a drawing board, but once you cross into the industrial buildup phase, your expenses skyrocket (pun intended) and the schedule becomes tighter.
So they either deliver, or shut the shop within much less than a decade.
I mean don't get me wrong, it's exciting and I'm grateful to be alive for these developments along with all access insight in the process and high definition video of the tests and I really hope they make it. But it won't be fast or cheap.
Something can be copied from Dragon, but not all of those.
Yes, about 4,000 metric tons. My IP packets are traveling through part of it now.
Yes, they had expected to do more, sooner. So say that. What you’ve written here is nonsense.
Starship is trying to do more than anyone ever has. If all (ALL!) they’d wanted to do was build a giant rocket with a reusable booster and an expendable second stage, they’d already be done.
Maybe. But instead, in addition to building a giant rocket with a reusable booster and an expendable second stage, they also on want it to reach orbit, that's why it's not done yet. And likely will never be, because starship is severely underpowered.
Otoh, maybe best to just believe what you want to. That’s sort of what we do these days, isn’t it?
I mean if you have to remove important parts to get to orbit, you can't say that you could get to orbit. You couldn't, you just admited that you'd have to remove such and such. What am I missing?
Apparently NASA is starting to have the same suspicions.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a32451633/china-long-...
That's 20 tons of mostly aluminium - 100+ ton stainless steel Starship would be potentially much more dangerous, so it is good SpaceX cares. :)
1. USA is no longer sponsoring groundbreaking research 2. USA had already begun outsourcing research to companies that are not grounded in long term employment of researchers.
This is mostly about the new human-rated lander, which is an engineering problem. Notably, the US never had a reasonably safe spaceship, although Dragon may yet prove good. Both Apollos and Space Shuttles, developed under NASA, were pretty dangerous to their crews.
You’re absolutely right. Astronauts sign a last will and testament before every flight. We think it’s routine because we’ve nailed down orbital science but in reality, we lack the quality assurance that space flight demands. It’s one thing to send up robots and satellites, it’s another to send up humans. The ISS is crawling with bacteria. We lack the physical protection for long space travel for a mars mission much less visiting anything past the Kuiper belt.
They suffocated/burned to death during a routine test, with Apollo 1 cabine being still firmly attached to Earth.
So is your skin. Everything related to Earth is crawling with bacteria. The concentration and species of bacteria on the ISS are what is relevant.
I think the real issue is that it's just still very, very hard. Margins are extremely thin. Airliners are extremely safe despite existing in a realm that's inherently dangerous because they spend margin on safety. You could make an airliner that's way lighter than what's currently flying if you didn't care about making it robust against, say, hitting a weather balloon. But the ability is there to protect against adverse events like that.
Spacecraft have almost no margin. The distance between normal operation and having a bad day is really small because getting people into orbit at all is still just about at the limits of available technology.
I do think there are some novel challenges left for the Artemis project however that do require a lot of research and development before they are put before the boring engineering happens.
SpaceX: makes political contribution to executive branch
NASA: "SpaceX is back on the menu, boys!"
SpaceX: makes the only rockets capable of actually doing anything
NASA: "SpaceX is back on the menu, boys!"
why?
"it's 10 years from now and they're behind schedule", what kind of schedule is this?
> "We have been working with a cross-industry team of companies and together we are looking forward to addressing Secretary Duffy's request to meet our country’s lunar objectives," said Behnken, a retired NASA astronaut.
https://www.reuters.com/science/us-seek-rival-bids-artemis-3...
I don't know enough about whether or not they really are behind or if this is just a bit of sensationalized reporting. But this is how it should have likely been from the beginning.
Artemis from the beginning was just politics. And it wasn't driven by how to best do things, or any kind of coherent strategy. Its basically was a compromise, that had one of its pillars, that SLS and Orion need to continue to be used. Those two project have spend decades getting untold amounts of money. And even after all that money, their development isn't finished and they would need more money.
Then with the very, very little money left over, NASA tried to precure a moon lander. It was basically no money at all.
SpaceX won this competition, because SpaceX was willing to do things for an absurdly cheap price. Mostly because they are already investming themselves into the project. And their own investment was significantly larger then what NASA paid them.
Only after BlueOrigin lost, did they start a massive lobby campaign to figure out how to get more money out of congress so they could fund another lander.
But both landers, SpaceX and BlueOrigin, do not receive enough money to cover their cost. Not even close. So basically the US is relaying on massive companies in SpaceX case, and simply the private money of Bezos in BlueOrigins case to sponsor a moon program for them. Because all NASA money is going into legacy contracts that have very bad return on invesmtent.
The political move to now blame SpaceX for being late is just an excuse so that the overall project doesn't have to be reevaluated. The reality is, SpaceX is likely not the only reason for a delay. The suits are unlikley to be ready anyway. And even if Artemis III goes off, the SLS Block 2 is behind as well and will cost many additional billions.
And threating SpaceX with paying some legacy company to do a cost-plus lander isn't going to do anything, its just a fantasy thread, or at best the deamnd by some in congress to push even more money into legacy companies. Its not going to fix Artemis III or anything. Its funny how delays in cost-plus contract always lead to simply more money and more political support. Almost as if there was some other motives behind the decition when delays are unacceptable and when they are.
The reality of all of this is that NASA is completely mismanaged and fundamentally set up incorrectly. And just making big political waves on blaming whoever is politically out of favor will never actually work. The only reason SpaceX and the New Space economy exist is because clever teams inside of NASA and in Obamas team managed to sneak a few good programs, Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew past congress. Without those people, the US would already be far behind in terms of space.
The question the US (Congress/NASA) should be asking is not 'how can we get Artemis III' but rather 'what kind of Space program do we want over the next 30 years'. The US has an incredible space industry, and more private investment then everybody combinaed. There is no question that the US and NASA could be far, far beyond everbody else, and achieve amazing thigns, but Congress and NASA fundamentally misguided approch is holding it back.
So please, stop talking about Artemis III and start asking some more fundmanetal questions.
I think the big question is "What is it going to do to the global standing of the United States (let alone domestic politics) when China repeatedly lands people on the moon and we can't."
And then China does maybe a flags and footprints landing, while shortly after the US has a base there.
The only reason this is even close at all is because the US spend the last 25 years and 200 billion $ in complete deadends.
And just going further into the deadend just to maybe get a set of footprints onto the moon first is shortsighted and frankly morinic strategy.
Could we just bring back the shuttle?
- oil and gas industry
- ICE automotive industry
- telecom industry
- media industry
- and of course... Aerospace and defense industry (Boeing, Lockheed, etc.)
There are a lot of very rich very powerful people that want Elon to fail, and any way they can undermine him would be a win for them.
I say this as someone who really tries to have a balanced opinion on Elon and the topic as a whole, including recognition of all of Elon's flaws.
The military-media-industrial complex can be out to get Elon and spending a lot of money to turn the public against him AND he can have a lot of flaws AND he can be not as bad as everyone thinks because of said media influence.
Hacker News is one of the last places I feel comfortable engaging in this way, and not always (sometimes I step on a land mine and get surprised), but if it's not here, I don't know where else to go, and that feels like a shame.
I don't care much about the points, so long as I can keep engaging. So I do my best to follow the guidelines and have faith in the moderation to keep me and others in check, even if sometimes I slip up or encounter what seems like an unfair reaction.
To censor myself from being inquisitive or rationally explore a sensitive topic in a place like this just feels too dystopian for me to accept.
Lockheed will of course be angling for this contract for reasons which have nothing to do with "undermining Elon" and everything to do with being keen on securing themselves more multibillion dollar prestige projects, as will Blue Origin, as they would under any other government and frankly NASA is quite entitled to reopen the contract if SpaceX doesn't hit performance milestones. Whether the alternatives are any more likely to deliver adequate solutions on time, and whether the current US administration can be trusted not to make decisions one way or another for arbitrary political reasons or straight up corruption is another question entirely.
(The arbitrary political reason in this case may be more a desire to do things on unrealistic deadlines to credit it as a Trump admin achievement than to punish or favour any particular individual, but it's not like they're reluctant to do that either)
And to your point about him spending more money then the rest combined, maybe, he did spend a lot on twitter, but I don't think any of us can actually know how much all those people are spending. It might be closer than you think. Also the anti-Elon media brigade started long before he bought twitter, it just wasn't focused on the general public, it was focused on amateur investors.
the idea that an uncoordinated group is spending more than $44b on defaming Elon and this is what made people go out and buy the "I bought this car before Elon went mad" and not any of the things he started doing and saying on his own very public platform is also too ridiculous for even a hardened Elon stan to contemplate, never mind someone trying to maintain a "balanced view" of his positive and negative qualities.
I noticed this pattern start in 2017 and watched how all narratives the media was peddling unfolded as untrue (Elon is a fraud, Tesla is going bankrupt). Then I noticed how the scale and scope of the anti-Elon narratives grew.
Yes, Elon did all sorts of egotistical things that didn't help. Yes, he deserves plenty of criticism. I'm not denying any of that.
But there are distinct quantitative financial dynamics here that can be traced back a long time that point at a "big problem" for some very rich and powerful people, and that's not even taking into account the potential lost future revenue of all the entrenched industries I mentioned.
So yes, I stand by my point. There is an anti Elon base effect going on and it's probably having a bigger effect on the situation than most people realize.
Your skepticism of my view without a substantive rebuttals (you aren't taking the most respectful interpretation of my point or "steel manning" it as they say), doesn't speak to me having an unbalanced perspective, if speaks to you having a narrower one, taking less scope across time and dimensions into consideration.
Have you done the math to estimate how much NPV Elon's companies threaten entrenched interests? Have you calculated the liability of the short positions against Tesla and how its grown over the last 8 years?
Do you know who pays for the media you consume? How much the publishers receive in revenue, and multiplied that over 8 years?
If Elon represents a $1tn threat to a bunch of random uncoordinated rich people, why is it so hard to believe some of them might have spent tens of billions (combined) on lobbying and "sponsored content" to fight back? No coordination is even needed on their part. Just a collective "oh man f#@k this guy" attitude.
Are you uncomfortable with the idea that your own strongly anti-Elon opinion might have been manipulated by a bunch of rich people? If you weren't constantly reading anti-Elon articles and social media posts, would you even care about it or be paying attention? All kinds of bad people do all kinds of bad things all the time and we don't hear about it. So why do we hear so much negative stuff about Elon specifically?
I have been genuinely curious about this situation for 8+ years now and I still am. I'm open to having my mind changed, but you need to bring novel facts, not just the same old "but Elon's bad and does bad things" like everyone says who has read a bunch of stuff slagging Elon. Saying something akin to "it's obviously Elon's fault because Elon is bad because everyone says Elon is bad" is not critical thinking, it's groupthink, brought to you by all the people who paid for all the stuff you read that says Elon is bad.
I love the way you talk about critical thinking and steelmanning, and yet write a wall of text characterising all criticism of Elon as that, whilst lacking either the critical thinking skills or the good faith to engage with my actual points, which were that the supposed "anti Elon base effect" had absolutely nothing to do with the fact Elon was best buddies with the Trump administration a few months ago and isn't now
Imagine seriously trying to argue that short sellers had more impact on Trump's opinion of Elon than Elon tweeting about Trump being in the Epstein files, or indeed that Sean Duffy would be fine with Elon running Twitter polls suggesting his "chimp skills" don't qualify him to run NASA if it wasn't for the pesky "baseline effect". I mean, I'd be the last person to suggest that Trump and his cronies were immune to groupthink or persuasion by moneyed interests, but I think there might be something else going on here, y'know...
Once you've grasped the idea that people's change of opinion of Elon might be more swayed by him personally insulting him than business interests which have been threatened by Elon for well over a decade now - probably more when he was at peak popularity - you'll be shocked to learn that people also have strong opinions on politics independently of Tesla short interest, and that Elon might have been prominent in that sphere lately...
Fun fact: I work in the same industry as Elon and hear positive sentiments about him all the time, sometimes managing to be well-reasoned, sincere and gushing. Also quite a few negative ones from people who depend on his business continuing to do well for their livelihoods, some of whom even worked with him in the past. The social media account which has had the most negative impact on my opinion of him is @elonmusk. It's amazing that you are "genuinely curious" about trends in opinion of Elon Musk, believe they owe a lot to social media and appear to be unaware of this heavily promoted account which keeps upsetting demographics that were previously neutral or favourably disposed towards him. Wonder which moneyed interest that represents...
I don't disagree with the majority of what you're saying, except for the exclusion/rejection of the baseline effect.
So to steelman your perspective is to say the topic of this entire thread (proposition of a change in nasa's plan) is entirely due offensive things Elon has said on Twitter, and probably in another contexts, including (but not limited to) him criticizing Trump's bill, making the Epstein claims, offensive polls about the NASA chief (which is a really good example to hold up). Basically him being brash, offensive and placing his ego above maintaining certain relationships. Maybe characterized as his tendency to be offensive and disagreeable. And yes, I do see all these and yes they aren't helping, and they probably have a material impact on the situation.
To steelman my argument is to consider that in addition to all the points your making (not instead of them) there is also a money-power-struggle going on behind the scenes, and a lot of what we are seeing are second or third order consequences of that. One way this might be happening is that these interest sabotage something, Elon learns about it behind closed doors, and then lashes out in public in a childish manner.
So please understand that my lack of acknowledging your points wasn't as dismissal of them it was the opposite. I didn't mention them because I agree with them. The focus of my comments were what they were because I was trying to make a case for an additional effect at play.
If you want to convince me there isn't a baseline effect at play like I'm trying to point to, what would do so is not pointing to more examples of Elon being stupid on Twitter, it would be to somehow convince me that the extremely wealthy and powerful interests that seem to obviously want Elon to fail actually want him to succeed or don't care either way. That's a hard case to make, but I would be really open to it, because it's the thing most likely to shift my mental model of the situation.
It's kind of like you're talking about the weather and I'm talking about the climate. You're refusing to entertain my climate perspective. I'm not refusing to entertain your weather perspective.
I mean, it's hard not to notice a large number of extremely wealthy and powerful interests that obviously want Elon to succeed. Investors in his companies for one, whose stake in them obviously exceed the short sellers which is why the share prices of his public companies are what they are and entities holding short positions haven't been crushed by short squeezes. Nobody with the slightest understanding of stock markets believes there's a $40B incentive to character assassinate Musk there, even if if he wasn't capable of alienating people himself.
The fact some of the people who don't like Musk are rich is moot. Nobody needs to spend $40b drawing attention to Musk's politics because he's done that himself. When he didn't do that barely anyone cared.
The entities that wanted electric cars to fail wanted electric cars to fail when Tesla was the only game in town, but that was a time when most people didn't know who Elon was and those that did tended to admire him. On the other hand I don't know who the CEO of the world's current biggest and fastest growing car company is, never mind what their politics are. This isn't because Big Oil wants people to buy BYD or Geely, it's because the CEOs of BYD and Geely don't wade into culture wars on multiple continents never mind buy the entire social media platform to promote those tweets just in case anyone had any doubt about whether they wanted people to know about them.
I'm sorry, but if you're going to make the extraordinary claim that Musk bought a website to become social media's most prominent figure and opted to use that pulpit to culture war against the demographic that bought his cars, and now to personally and publicly attack both sides of the aisle that funds his space launch services because special interests are somehow forcing him to do that, the burden of proof sits squarely on you.
And if your "mental model of the situation" refuses to countenance the possibility Elon speaking out against people and the things they believe in might be sufficient cause for them to dislike him unless you can be convinced no wealthy third parties disapprove of Elon, then please at least have the decency to drop the veneer of openmindedness...
I don't know how you can expect to change my mind when you communicate with me so disrespectfully.
That said, I fall into this trap too sometimes, so I will be quick to forgive if you are interested in reconciliation and a constructive dialogue.
If not, then I guess we are done here...
Are they ahead of everyone else? yes, sadly, but Starship is a questionable design for a lunar mission, starting with the fact that it'll require an elevator to go up and down... 50 meters down.
And for Mars it's even worse, no real way of refueling and even if there was, it's also hard enough for them to get off Earth imagine winging it from Mars with all the potential hazards such as dust.
Well at least Musk will make good money from space launches, hopefully Starlink is declared illegal for the potential future atmospheric catastrophy the massive launches of LEO satellites might cause.
Diabolical stuff.
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/why-are-you-gay-elon-mus...
Most were expected, when pushing the rocket to its limits to see where it would fail.
> the company achieved two sub-orbital missions for its monster rocket - impressive, but still more than 200,000 miles (322,000 km) from the Moon.
The test flights are suborbital due to FAA licensing requirements until they are ready to test returning to the launch tower. The role of Starship lander version in Artemis is not to directly launch to the Moon, but act as a shuttle between an orbiting vessel around the Moon and the surface of the Moon. So the comparison in miles is non-sensical.
> Acting Administrator Sean Duffy said the company was "behind schedule"
SpaceX is planning to test orbital refueling in 2026. It was originally scheduled for late summer of 2025, so not late with more than a couple of months. It is certainly not the slowest cog in the system. Now, it is scheduled for 2027, and SpaceX will likely test in H1 of 2026.
> Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, fired back: "SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry. Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words."
SpaceX can completely drop out of the Artemis program and still bring astronauts to the moon earlier than Artemis.
---
There are also delays with Boeing, Axiom, Lockheed Martin (and Blue Origin although for a different mission).
spacex: at work
nasa: not at work
I wonder why this happened. Hopefully not to satisfy the ego of the POTUS.
That kind of rush leads to disaster
Four years may sound insane to you, but they did in 8 during a time they were still using slide rules and the integrated circuit didn't even exist for 80% of the duration.
To me it's more insane that anyone is putting priority into more manned missions when you can launch at least 10x unmanned for the same cost. Scientifically speaking, I'm not sure what exists to be gained by a human on another planet versus a rover. A manned colony sounds cool but that's about the extent of its usefulness.
tbh i would rather they use slide rules than chatgpt to build rockets.
First he is now called Sean Dummy. “Should someone whose biggest claim to fame is climbing trees be running America’s space program?”
Things were very awkward on the ISS a few Februaries ago.
1. Starship is still far from being production-ready, proven to be reliable and rated for human transport, a goal that will itself take many launches beyond being proven for delivering payloads to LEO and geosynchronous orbits (as well, I guess, deep space missions?);
2. The market for commercial Starship launches is far from proven and the risk of this is being ignored or downplayed by so many. Starship's biggest problem and competitor is... the Falcon 9, something the Falcon 9 never had to contend with. The market for even larger payloads seem to be limited. The evidence? There are over 100 Falcon 9 launches a year. There's about ~1 Falcon Heavy launch per year. And Falcon Heavy is pretty cost effective. The biggest customer seems to be the military who wants to get really large payloads to geosynchronous orbit. Now will Starlink bootstrap Starship demand in the same way that it did for Falcon 9 reusable boosters? Maybe. But it's not proven; and
3. Starship just doesn't make a great Moon lander. Why? You have to land this really tall vehicle in low gravity on unknown ground when it could possibly tip over in a way that Apollo landers never really could (because they were short, wide and significantly lighter). And then when you land? Your astronauts are ~40 meters off the ground. How are they getting back and forth?
Starship actually reminds me of the Steve Ballmer "Windows everywhere" era. Or the F35 jet-for-all-branches boondoggle. Ballmer wanted to run Windows on every device where Apple launched iOS alongside MacOS. Ballmer bought Sidekick, which was really successful at the time, and basically killed it by not innovating and trying to migrate it to Windows Mobile OS.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of simple minds." as the quote goes.
These projects end up being not very good at any application in an effort to be able to do too much. I'm starting to wonder if this is Starship's core problem.
What might save Starship is that BlueOrigin is absolutely nowhere, ULA is a joke, the Europeans are nowhere and SLS is a massive jobs program. I have more faith in China's space program than any of those.
Dreams aside, this story is court politics: "Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who is NASA’s acting administrator, has told people that he wants to lead the space agency" [2]. "So does Jared Isaacman—the billionaire entrepreneur who was the nominee earlier this year before President Trump withdrew his support."
With "both men...jockeying to lead NASA," and, just "this past weekend, advisers and lawmakers representing Duffy and Isaacman [having] called contacts in the Trump administration—including the president himself," this announcement is politics through PR.
Duffy may threatening Elon to have his man back down. He may be going scorched Earth, signalling to Trump that Musk's decision making isn't to be trusted.
[1] https://opsjournal.org/DocumentLibrary/Uploads/The_Lunar_Spa... 2017; 2bn US2017 ~ 2.6bn US2025
[2] https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-nasa-administrator...
Musk ... decided to respond by posting a meme of a reporter saying, “Why are you gay?” ... He called Duffy “Sean Dummy” ... Musk posted a reality TV clip calling him an “a*s rocket”
Makes you wonder, since Musk knew Trump is a pedo all along (and he loves calling people out as "pedo guy"), why did he invest so much money, time, reputation, ketamine, and Nazi salutes into getting Trump elected, then cowardly retract one of the only true things he ever tweeted, just to support the coverup instead of the truth?
How about releasing the Epstein files so we can all find out for sure? Or do you have a problem with that, and want to protect pedos just like Mike Johnson and Trump do? Charlie Kirk certainly wanted the Epstein files to be released, and look what happened to him.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(Not a defensive of clown billionaires. Just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck.)
If Musk was still in tight with Trump, and this potential booting was based on a strong, factual basis, would it still be in the works? Who knows!
Still marking his words on self-driving vehicles so I guess we can add this to the list. What’s the casualty count so far on that one btw?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
Elon Musk sometimes say things that are true.
Elon Must sometimes say things that are not true.
In this case, it's the first one.
Has this ever happened in the last 10 years?
Yes his vision and direction matters. But let’s not act like the dude did that himself. Especially while he was so distracted having his nose up Trump’s proverbial rear.
Again: you must be able to keep two things in your head at once. I understand that Elon is an absolute ass, but also that he has made several incredible (literally!) things happen. Give credit where credit is due, and give blame where blame is do. Don't confuse the two.
You need to stop saying this it is incredibly rude and patronizing. I specifically pointed this out the first time you said it, so I can only assume you’re doing it intentionally at this point out of disrespect.
I've got a HW4 Tesla Model 3 right now and the FSD experience is so good I use it constantly...and I was one of those "I will never trust self driving cars" people for years.
His rapidly deteriorating market share in Europe and basically anything cybertruck related
>SpaceX
The contract they had that just reopened for bidding
>neuralink
Haven’t they stopped human trials because they were running into serious issues? I feel like I read something about that but I can’t recall the exact nature of the issue.
>starlink
Pretty sure the Canadian government abandoned their big contract with starlink. A cursory Google search shows that “several governments and organizations have paused or canceled their contracts.” AI summary so should probably be investigated more in depth but I imagine it’s largely accurate.
I see that his hyperloop company didn’t make the list, which went belly up just a year or two ago.
Robotaxi was shut down in Phoenix after all sorts of safety issues arose.
Several major projects have stalled or been shut down over the last few years.
SpaceX accounts for over 90% of global space launch payloads.
Neuralink…this is from Oct 10th.
https://x.com/neuralink/status/1976803020190236915?s=46
Starlink is changing the world, airlines, cruises, rural areas and defeated Russian interference in Ukraine. They lost contracts in Canada due to short sited political motivations who were willing to waste 3 times as much tax payer funds because of it. Starlink is doing great.
Stock prices =/= their sales aren’t plummeting in Europe. You asked what questions we had, my question is “what is he going to do about their reputation in countries that care about his unhinged behavior as it’s clearly effecting their sales?” Also, we’re both on HN. We both know that stock price does not directly correlate with the health of a business.
Starlink was withheld from Ukraine early in the war at an incredibly critical time in case you forgot - he literally dictated where they could and couldn’t use the service (denied access in Crimea for drone operations). Should musk be unilaterally deciding the fate of Ukraine’s military operations, without warning at that? I hope we both agree the answer is “no.” And whether it’s short sighted or not the contracts Starlink lost were to the tune of 9 figures. You blame “short sighted” political motivations, I blame a ketamine-addled fickle billionaire who can’t keep his impulses in check. He consistently acts like a petulant, drunk child. We’ve seen it over and over again.
You ignored half the companies/projects I mentioned.
When people are willing to waste taxpayer funds to go with a solution 3x more expensive, it's absolutely a short sighted political motivation. Nobody who actually answers to their constituents could waste money to that degree.
> That said, there was later controversy in 2023 reports about a 2022 incident where Musk refused to extend or activate Starlink coverage over Russian-occupied Crimea to prevent its use in a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea fleet, citing concerns over escalating the war. Musk has stated this was to avoid complicity in a “major act of war,” and clarified that coverage wasn’t active in that area to begin with, so he declined Ukraine’s request to enable it.
In that situation, there's very little difference from asking him to pull the trigger himself. You might not like the decision, but you have to acknowledge that it's not an easy one.
That’s not really my issue though - I’m saying “who wants to trust Elon musk’s finger on a trigger, let alone such an important one?”
I think we can all agree that he has a pretty “unpredictable” way of operating. If he holds those keys, whether or not it is a “difficult decision,” that could make a government rightfully nervous. His politics and erratic behavior are a serious problem. It’s not just a polite ideological disagreement that doesn’t impact his actions/how he runs his companies. Quite the opposite.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/22/tesla-ear...
> It also reported a net income of $1.4bn, down from $2.2bn, a drop of 37% in its profits.
I’m not saying the company is doomed but there are some serious red flags going up in recent months
Revenues keep growing. Drops in profit are from margin and R&D increases (Optimus, taxis, etc).
It's as if people think Tesla is just a car company.
In 2024 they made 10 billion just from their solar energy business.
https://www.autonews.com/tesla/ane-europe-top-50-september-2...
> The nice thing is, if you’ve got friends in different cities and they’re playing the same game, you can both go online at the same time and play the game together even though you’re in different cities.
Of course he says true things. And on purpose too! (Unlike Trump :P)
https://www.rev.com/transcripts/elon-musk-interview-with-don...
> you need to keep two things in your mind at the same time
This was unnecessary and patronizing.
TBH, with this administration, I wouldn't trust whatever either NASA or SpaceX say or do as a sign of anything.
SpaceX is far and away the most credible contractor. And it's not even close.
> This was unnecessary and patronizing
And yet, you said something that was uninformed AGAIN just after I pointed out how uninformed that take was. Doubling down on the mistake is even MORE reason for me to keep reminding you to keep the two things in view at the same time.
They didn't handle the scale up in vehicle size well. They didn't have a guy who really understood electronics. I'd say those were the biggest problems. They did have an amazing metal worker (and I don't think they ever understood how important that was) and an amazing programmer.
Whereas all the competition has to use their own R&D budget to show capability to meet the requirements of the second contract, the winner of the first contract used the government's R&D money to be competitive.
Any company can do that to another company.
Welcome to Capitalism. Just because it is a government contract doesn't by default mean it is Socialism.
And, of course they can re-bid. Just like every other corporation does.
No I'm just assuming SpaceX will win the recompetition and complaining about that future event.
And no, it doesn't need to be an "of course they can" inevitability. The rules of competition define what can and can't happen. If the rules of this competition allow a rebid, then that is a conscious decision. Rules / laws could be changed to disallow rebidding on follow-on contracts if there was a failure to deliver on the first one.
SpaceX has consistently been on the wrong end of what you write about, with ULA/Boeing/whatever pulling that kind of stunt again and again. Just look at the SLS budget.
I don't hate the player, I hate the game.
Because it's sad that other space companies are shit? Yea ok. I can get behind it.
Because you dislike Elon and would rather see the US space program turn to shit than allow Elon to get a symbolic win? Then I'm not onboard anymore.
My issue is purely with the US government's acquisitions process that seems to encourage a lack of competition and actually seems to actively hinder good research and development.
This monopsony needs an alternative.
The "monopoly" you are complaining about IS the competition. SpaceX literally cut US government spending on launch by billions over the years. AND it meant the US didn't have to go begging Putin for astronaut seats to the ISS.
Again: you can dislike Musk, and any sane person does, but from going from a dislike of a person to contorting the factually inaccurate stuff you just said just to satisfy your dislike of a person is crazy. You must see that.
Think of it as a vote of no confidence. The incumbent has the advantage. But if they've squandered their advantage so thoroughly that a new entrant can match their capabilities, this is an opportunity to switch horses.
NASA should have done this, for example, when Bechtel began shitting the bed with ML2 [1].
[1] https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-016.pd...
That's wildly optimistic. Falcon 9 launches operationally 100+ a year and single boosters with 20+ uses. Even if in the next 2 years, China has some kind of first stage that lands, its in no way 'like Falcon 9'.
So lets not be unreasonably optimistic just because its China. China isn't magic and they wont have such a rocket no matter if they invest in it or not.
> But someone in the USA? People are delusional.
BlueOrigin is much closer then anybody in China. They have actually attempted launching a large rocket, China has not. And BlueOrigin has made its own advacned reusable engine and flown them to Orbit, argaubly China has not done that.
Columbus claimed it was radically smaller in diameter than previous calculations, and was begging for funding to go around the other side of the world to get a good trade route to India and China for trade goods. He was following some bad math, and adding his own worse math to the mix.
People were sure he was going to die, because they did not bring enough provisions to actually go around the world.
Banal, depends on what you mean by this word.
It also feels quite off to reduce all of human curiosity to a means of getting one over on someone.
2. The masses need circuses. As for bread, Marie Antoinette's press secretary said it best.
3. Trump thinks he'll corner the market on cheese.
And even then, you have to get whatever you want to launch to the moon in the first place...
It would be really nice to do much more biology research under no and low gravity conditions, of course, but not at those prices.
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1lojll9/if_its_th...
The primary, chartered, goal of NASA is to create a commercial space industry. Ignoring this is a sign of extreme immaturity.
We were last on the moon in 1972. We haven't been back since. That's nothing even remotely like "vanity." I think there's a vanity involved in making this type of comment.
> and congressional pork
If the public wants it then it's not pork.
> more than scientific needs.
"Scientific needs" is not a well defined category. Those who proclaim to represent it while expecting it to hold a higher value than the will of the voters are misanthropic bullies.