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> Boeing or the military industrial complex would handle these things with precision and delivered ahead of time that's fantasy. I've never heard of either entity delivering on time or on budget let alone ahead of time.
>that's fantasy. I've never heard of either entity delivering on time or on budget let alone ahead of time. We went from not having a manned space program to landing men on the moon in 8 years. This country used to be able to do things.
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The ketamine addiction rumors are unproven, and Musk denies them. He says he takes it as prescribed against occasional depression.
No one should trust a thing he says after his baseless libel against the rescue divers in Thailand. ABSOLUTELY no one trust should anything he says after the "funding secured" BS, and if you got that far, saw the obvious lies and fakes he posted to Twitter even before he bought the place, I don't know what else to tell you.
At this point it's safer to assume that if Musk says something it's wrong.
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I don't know who else can, but I do seriously doubt SpaceX is going to be able to deliver within the next decade or so either.
They have a pretty good chance, actually. They are almost done with the hard parts of the Starship.
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.
Artemis is a joke. You can tell this is politically motivated by their stance on SLS. If they were serious they would give Spacex the SLS contract for being years and years behind schedule.
If they were serious, they'd properly look into ending SLS after the ones that are being built are launched, cancel the upgrade, go after the company that spent the entire launch tower budget before even starting construction, open up bids for rockets to fly Orion (probably Vulcan or New Glenn IIRC), and sort out their space suit issues. Maybe also seriously threaten Boeing with cancelations and restrictions for thei…
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The ketamine addiction rumors are unproven, and Musk denies them. He says he takes it as prescribed against occasional depression.
TBH, I believe him on this one. Knowing some folks who are working with their psychiatrists on their mental health and using ketamine under supervision: it seems ketamine is starting to prove effective for depressive issues. The challenge is it's extremely potent and the dose is extremely patient-dependent. Miss a dose, mis-dose, or fail to realize you don't have the calibration right yet, and the risk for side-effec…
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Not sure if you're being sarcastic. Have they managed to get starship to orbit yet?
> Not sure if you're being sarcastic. Have they managed to get to orbit anything bigger than a banana? Yes, about 4,000 metric tons. My IP packets are traveling through part of it now.
Anyone know the details of the scheduling situation here? 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.