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NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

cnn.com

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Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

#161

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

Culonavirus wrote: post #130
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic. Have they managed to get starship to orbit yet?

Several times (if we keep disingenuous "wheeeel akchually" technical gotchas out of this). The fact that they keep safety in mind is a good thing. Any starship that got to space could have easily reached orbit, but it didn't because spacex cares more about NOT uncontrollably deorbiting a giant hunk of steel than impressing a "redditor" who doesn't understand how orbital mechanics work.

You're suggesting that they could and don't, I'm suggesting that they can't.

Apparently NASA is starting to have the same suspicions.

Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

#162

Post by kreetx »

arnaudsm wrote: post #137

I highly recommend this talk at the American Astronomical Society from last year, which talks about the engineering culture at NASA and why Artemis has been slower than Apollo so far. https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?t=1112

So many interesting details there!

Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

#163

Post by GuB-42 »

saubeidl wrote: post #78
radu_floricica wrote: post #54

I'm not really sure if keeping a strict schedule has any real relevance here, outside maybe PR and politics. Starships will drop the cost to other bodies in the same way Falcon dropped the cost to orbit. Why would anyone want to invest in a technology and a project that will be obsolete by the time it's implemented?

That is assuming Starship succeeds. Elon's track record hasn't exactly been stellar as of late.

Falcon 9 is a massive success. Raptor is currently the best engine for a first stage (unless there is something I am not aware of), and at least a very good one for an upper stage. The Starship itself is almost operational, being able to deliver dummy payloads into orbit, though it does require some reliability improvement.

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.

Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

#164

Post by philistine »

destitude wrote: post #87
sofixa wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Starships will drop the cost to other bodies 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.

They could have delivered today if they weren't concerned about reusability.

Reusability is not a bonus like Falcon 9. The whole concept assumes reusability to refuel the lunar lander in Earth orbit since it cannot get to the Moon on its own. It must be refuelled between 10 and 20 times. They won't even say exactly how many times yet. You cannot just yeet that many Starships to get to the Moon once. You must reuse.

Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

#165

Post by nilamo »

pfdietz wrote: post #98
nilamo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why must there be a NEED? Why did we ever send ships across the ocean to explore? Where was the need? People like doing science, and so we're doing science.

That was (for the western hemisphere) mostly to steal gold and silver from other civilizations. Oh, and to grow addictive drugs for export, like in Virginia. It was never done for other than banal reasons, although I'm sure pious rationalizations were offered to make people feel better about the ongoing genocides.

That feels like a bit of rewriting the past. How could someone plan on stealing valuables from somewhere across the ocean... before they know there even is an "across the ocean" to get to?

It also feels quite off to reduce all of human curiosity to a means of getting one over on someone.

Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

#166

Post by namlem »

This would be such a dumb move on the government's part. "Lose the new space race" is ridiculous PR-brain. We are not racing to the same goal! China is trying to land on the moon, we are trying to establish a permanent presence. There is no value to merely returning to the moon to say we did it, and Starship is the only vehicle that can plausibly deliver huge quantities of cargo to the lunar surface.

Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

#167

Post by JumpCrisscross »

verzali wrote: post #154
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is starship on schedule? 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.

Yes, but in the original schedule on HLS Starship was supposed to have done the prop transfer in Q4 2022, an uncrewed lunar landing in Q1 2024, and the actual thing in Q1 2025. 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).

> in the original schedule on HLS Starship was supposed to have done the prop transfer in Q4 2022, an uncrewed lunar landing in Q1 2024, and the actual thing in Q1 2025

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.

Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

#168

Post by random3 »

namlem wrote: post #166

This would be such a dumb move on the government's part. "Lose the new space race" is ridiculous PR-brain. We are not racing to the same goal! China is trying to land on the moon, we are trying to establish a permanent presence. There is no value to merely returning to the moon to say we did it, and Starship is the only vehicle that can plausibly deliver huge quantities of cargo to the lunar surface.

What’s the main motivation for the moon? Is it a better location than the international space station? What’s the reasoning there?

Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

#169

Post by prewett »

Arainach wrote: post #122
loourr wrote: post #20

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.

You don't want to rely on a single supplier for critical infrastructure. Their management can extort you, their failures leave you with no backup plan, if they go bankrupt you're really screwed. Keeping multiple companies capable of building it alive is essential.

My understanding is extorting the government as the single-supplier contract winner is the standard aerospace business plan, apart from SpaceX. Seems to me that if they're going to re-open SpaceX's contract because it's late, there's a whole bunch of other contracts they should re-open. Cross-referencing Trump's golfing calendar with the aerospace industry "leadership" has a decent chance of producing some insight into the decision.

Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

#170

Post by peterfirefly »

haspok wrote: post #135
peterfirefly wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a pretty good chance, actually. They are almost done with the hard parts of the Starship.

> 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…

Not just due to the tiles!

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.

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