181–190 of 1001 posts
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What’s the main motivation for the moon? Is it a better location than the international space station? What’s the reasoning there?
I think its to prepare for mars (sort of), its the closest place where we can build a self-sustaining civilization.
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I think its to prepare for mars (sort of), its the closest place where we can build a self-sustaining civilization.
because this civilization is not self-sutaining?
Duffy is a Trump appointee, so this could be part of the continuing fallout of the Trump/Elon relationship. The Republican majority Congress has also attempted to partially defund NASA, and the government is shut down because Congress couldn't pass a budget. On top of that, space engineering is hard. So, of course there are delays.
- 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.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Elon Musk sometimes say things that are true. Has this ever happened in the last 10 years?
Catching of a booster which everyone else thought was the stupidest craziest thing ever and they did it on first try.
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.
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The first moon landing? Kennedy wanted it done before the end of the decade and they landed in 1969. I guess you could argue that it was on schedule rather than ahead.
Their actual internal deadlines were significantly missed
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.
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.
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?
There is still a lot of work to be done on Starship before it is going to be useful for going to other bodies. The entire interior/cabin/life-support system, for example. This is years away from hitting factory tooling. 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-li…
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.
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There is still a lot of work to be done on Starship before it is going to be useful for going to other bodies. The entire interior/cabin/life-support system, for example. This is years away from hitting factory tooling. 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-li…
Seeing some sort of van-life/starship-crew-cabin crossover would be interesting. But i'm not confident that your aspiration makes sense. 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 p…
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.
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> not really sure if keeping a strict schedule has any real relevance here You don't see the relevance of Artemis III launching in mid-2027 [1] or 2028 versus, say, after November 2028? [1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-iii/
I don't see any real possibility of Artemis 3 launching before 2030, frankly. That "mid-2027" timeline is a joke said with a straight face. 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.