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I'm usually not one to defend Elmo, but it was a response to P47 threatening to defund SpaceX. It's like watching children. Poor USA, poor us.
One thing I wanted to ask somewhere, Jared Isaacman was NOT a Musk pick, or am I not right?
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You just did. The counter reply is that true capitalism drove NASA. The original space programs were built with hundreds of contractors selected from thousands of bids. The entire purpose of NASA was to create a viable commercial space program. Now we have two choices for some reason. I beat this drum a lot.. but this is "monopoly" and "oligarchy."
> Now we have two choices for some reason. Because its an insanely difficult problem when you have to be 99.9999% sure you won't kill an astronaut because we generally don't have the "if they die it sucks for them" attitude with space anymore.
We kind of do though, although we strongly pretend we don't. Each time after Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia, NASA has made a show of reforming their safety culture but either not sticking to it ot not actually doing it beyond a superficial level. Most recently, there has been a developing issue with the Artemis program. The Artemis I mission, unmanned, was intended to validate all the design and modeling of the Orion spacecraft before people fly on it. It was subsequently discovered that the Orion heat shield suffered severe damage during reentry, partially falling apart in a way that wasn't expected.
At this point, a space program which actually takes the preservation of human life as seriously as NASA claims would postpone the manned Artemis II flight and fly more test missions until they get the Orion heat shield to perform as expected. But that's not what NASA is doing. They are instead proceeding with Artemis II, confident that this time their modeling is accurate. Instead of reentering with the trajectory they tested, they're going to send humans on a completely new reentry trajectory they have never tested before. Their modeling failed to predict the heat shield damage that occurred during Artemis I, but now they are trusting their modeling to keep people alive for Artemis II. It's totally wreckless.
And yeah yeah, it's mostly Congress's fault, NASA funding and all that, SLS costs too much and NASA doesn't have any more to spare for tests and they don't have time anyway with the politically imposed deadlines, etc etc.
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One thing I wanted to ask somewhere, Jared Isaacman was NOT a Musk pick, or am I not right?
They pulled Jared Isaacman because it was revealed he had donated to Democrats.
I think it's more likely that Jared was pulled at the suggestion of some staffers that never liked him or Musk in the first place but weren't able to get their way with Trump as long as Musk was still around.
It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor, most likely Boeing or Boeing's largest rival, Lockheed-Martin.
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They pulled Jared Isaacman because it was revealed he had donated to Democrats.
That was their excuse. But they probably knew it already upfront, and of course Trump himself has done so and obviously knows that rich people donate to both parties just to cover their bases and that it means relatively little. I think it's more likely that Jared was pulled at the suggestion of some staffers that never liked him or Musk in the first place but weren't able to get their way with Trump as long as Musk…
The fact that he was quite competent and generally liked doesn’t matter to Trump, who seems set on defunding NASA and having someone there who won’t complain.
It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor, most likely Boeing or Boeing's largest rival, Lockheed-Martin.
I'm sorry but what? SpaceX is private, not public, and regardless the Pentagon has zero power to force any such thing. It's making gobs of money and growing pretty fast (around $12 billion revenue this year, prediction is/was ~$15.5 billion so something like a 30% YoY increase) with most of that from Starlink, then commercial launch and gov launch. It launches more mass to LEO then everyone else on the planet combined by a long shot, for far far less $/kg. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. There would be zero interest on either side in a merger, nor is there any particularly good national security argument for it.
The real plan is the same as it's always been: have a reasonably vibrant set of multiple motivated, competitive commercial launch providers. That'll take years more but is by far the better long term solution, and there are plenty of promising options, like Rocket Lab (their Neutron medium lift rocket is apparently close to maiden flight) and Blue Origin (who finally at last seem to have been shaken up and are actually launching rockets and making engines). Old Space wants out of the launch business, which is why ULA came to be at all.
People are also tossing around "nationalization" as if it's some quick fix too all of a sudden, but nationalization doesn't nullify the 5th Amendment (or 1st). The US government would have to come up with the arguably hundreds of billions of dollars present value of SpaceX, at a time of deep budget cuts, debt worries, and high interest rates. It would also have to win a set of massive lawsuits by an extremely well funded opposition about all aspects of the mess that would drag on for years. And a lot of the value of SpaceX is in its institutional knowledge, culture, key people etc etc. Nationalization could not prevent key people all bailing and destroying much of the capability. This would all be hugely disruptive, at a critical juncture, and a big political mess too. It's concerning how blasé folks can get about expensive, complicated big deal gordian knots.
It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor, most likely Boeing or Boeing's largest rival, Lockheed-Martin.
Also, it's still America. Good luck to anyone trying to "force" SpaceX, a private company, to do anything they don't want.
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NASA still cooperates heavily with Roscosmos and American astronauts regularly fly in paid Soyuz seats. The latest one is Johnny Kim who launched in late April on Soyuz MS-27 from Baikonur and will stay on the ISS until december. And Christopher Williams is already scheduled for the next Soyuz mission. China on the other hand will probably never happen because of the general political climate in the US and this admin…
Congress has forbidden NASA to cooperate with China for many years. It's been law since 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment Also I believe that Russia isn't being paid for astronauts to fly on Soyuz. Instead, cosmonauts fly on Dragon. It's a like-for-like exchange which is mutually beneficial (both countries need the other's cooperation to keep the ISS operational, so these exchanges ensure that can co…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing I wanted to ask somewhere, Jared Isaacman was NOT a Musk pick, or am I not right?
They pulled Jared Isaacman because it was revealed he had donated to Democrats.
It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor, most likely Boeing or Boeing's largest rival, Lockheed-Martin.
> It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor I'm sorry but what? SpaceX is private, not public, and regardless the Pentagon has zero power to force any such thing. It's making gobs of money and growing pretty fast (around $12 billion revenue this year, prediction is/was ~$15.5 billion so something like a 30% YoY increase) with most of that from Starlink, then commercial…
Ugh that is being way too generous. A private space industry exists despite their plans not because of them.