NASA picks Eric Schmidt's rocket company for Mars mission
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
So for many people like myself, the title is perfectly reasonable. The world does not revolve around SpaceX and its purported plans.
"NASA picks Eric Schmidt’s rocket company for Mars mission, setting up a race with SpaceX"
That title establishes a context in which looking at their relative goals is completely valid.
Russia were first to almost every other milestone, first orbit, first man in orbit, first woman in orbit, first EVA, first moon orbit, first (unmanned) moon landing, and many others.
Edited "Russians" to Soviets because lot was done by non-Russian parts of the union, my original reply just mirrored the OP use of Russians.
"NASA picks Eric Schmidt's rocket company for Mars mission" comes no where close to implying it was a manned mission while absolutely being accurate in it's a rocket company being selected for a mission going to Mars. You're reading into it a manned mission.
Not everything is about Elon’s wacky plan to settle Mars.
(yes, I'm a bit disappointed, I worked on a canceled European Mars mission long ago. Unfortunately, the financial math on why the entire company was canned was entirely correct, and yes I'm a bit angry that SpaceX gets such incredible funding, with a financial plan that, while better than the one we used, still isn't good enough)
Doubly so now it has been made clear that Falcon 9 is a failure. Reusable rockets are, as an innovation, in fact not good enough for a company to profitably sell access to earth orbit, as it turns out (but was extensively predicted)
(note: this is because starlink is of course using SpaceX funds, and is making a big loss doing it. In other words: the market for falcon9 launches is not big enough to sustain SpaceX, without artificial tricks that look good in the short term but unless something changes, increase the losses in the long term)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/nov/13/jeff-bezos-b...
They built a 3D printed small sat launcher which failed it's first launch. They cancelled further work in favour of Terran R which has less 3D printing. First launch probably early next year. First successful launch, probably late next year.
A Mars mission 2028 is not crazy but it's ambitious.
The way these always work is they pick a low-stakes mission to give a new competitor a chance to build the market. If they're on track to miss the deadline badly they'll switch vendors to SpaceX who they know can pick up the slack on a short timeline. And if they do manage to deliver, great.
Third parties will always build in profit to their services which is wasteful.
They even called their printers "Pylons" if recall (a nod to StarCraft's Protoss). The manufacturing tech has far broader implications than the application they were putting it toward.
My worry is that Eric bought them solely to get launch-for-compute in his pocket. Given his track record of "steal and when you get caught just have the lawyers 'clean all that up'" and "we didn't intend to unleash evil on the world, 'but it happened'" aren't encouraging. I always hope the golden goose doesn't get carved to pieces, but it usually happens.
Claude, make me a space rocket. Using only lisp, if and regex statements.That's gotta be some kind of rite of passage
SpaceX/Musk can always spin it as “we have more ambitious goals than some lowly scientific instruments”.
I say this as a huge fan of the OG SpaceX, and a space nerd in general.
I was thinking that I felt bad for the OG SpaceX folks working on rockets, and Starlink... with all the distractions. However, many of them just became millionaires. So, what do I know.
Elon is a heck of an economic engineer. I would probably want to be along for the ride.
Manufacturer: Boeing (S-IC), North American (S-II), Douglas (S-IVB)
The Saturn V[f] is a retired American super heavy-lift launch vehicle developed by NASA under the Apollo program for human exploration of the Moon.
NASA is not developing Relativity Space's rocket.
"On Tuesday, NASA said it hired the company to build a spacecraft to house a suite of scientific instruments, launch it into space, and fly it to Mars."
Plus, George Mueller, who managed the rocket team, worked for NASA, not some private company. So did all the engineers.
"The largest production model of the Saturn family of rockets, the Saturn V was designed at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama. The program was managed by American George Mueller; technical design was led by scientists relocated from Nazi Germany, most notably Wernher von Braun, as well as Kurt Debus and Arthur Rudolph. This group had developed the first US launch vehicles, the Redstone rocket family, under the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. All engines were built by Rocketdyne. Boeing built the kerolox S-IC first stage powered by five F-1 engines; these remain the most powerful single chamber liquid-fuelled engines ever built. North American Aviation the hydrolox S-II second stage, and Douglas Aircraft Company the hydrolox S-IVB third stage, powered by five and one J-2 engines respectively. IBM and MSFC designed the rocket's instrument unit. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mueller_(engineer)#NASA...
> Borrowing from the US Air Force Minuteman program, Mueller formed the Apollo Executive Group, which consisted of himself and the presidents of Apollo's main contractors.
This is not Arasaka.
How is using Schmidt’s company any different than any of the other thousands of military equipment programs? I don’t see how anything you said shows the difference.
These days NASA doesn’t even build the payloads.