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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

#201

Post by terminalshort »

foxyv wrote: post #187
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.

Starship has yet to demonstrate that capability. They would need to show rapid re-usability for it to be viable. Not to mention docking and orbital re-fueling. 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.

SpaceX has already successfully landed and reused a booster, which is the most expensive part of the rocket. As for the reentry problem, that seems to have been solved in the last couple of test flights. Still much more economically viable than SLS even if they can't reuse the upper stage.

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

#202

Post by nialse »

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #199
heisgone wrote: post #197

I can imagine SpaceX choosing to self-finance a mission to the moon and beat NASA at it.

> I can imagine That probably does require some imagination. Starting with any incentive to do so.

Imagine hurt egos with deep pockets and it ain’t that hard.

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

#203

Post by terminalshort »

ACCount37 wrote: post #58
bhouston wrote: post #3

Is this realistic? Doesn't the development timelines for a new large rocket stretch into more than a decade? Unless someone else had one under development... Could this just be a pressure tactic on SpaceX?

Blue Origin is explicitly named in Duffy's statement. And if SpaceX's Starship HLS catches enough delays, they can slide into Blue Origin's Blue Moon HLS timeline - which is now being developed for Artemis 5, in 2030. On top of working on a HLS lander, Blue Origin has a pretty large rocket developed already - New Glenn. They just don't have the reusability or the launch cadence, and their HLS needs at least two launc…

SpaceX is years behind schedule. Blue Origin is decades behind schedule.

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

#204

Post by CursedSilicon »

nialse wrote: post #202
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can imagine That probably does require some imagination. Starting with any incentive to do so.

Imagine hurt egos with deep pockets and it ain’t that hard.

Cheaper for them to just whine to the orange painted king, at least right now

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

#207

Post by notahacker »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #109
pfdietz wrote: post #89

It should be clear that the protection NASA had as a pork delivery vehicle has been breached. Witness the slaughter at JPL and, more generally, attack on research spending in general. Now that this has happened, expect a future democrat administration to have its revenge on human spaceflight centers in red states. Given the rot that has set in under that politically protected status, I can't see this as a bad thing.

> expect a future democrat administration to have its revenge on human spaceflight centers in red states Make Puerto Rico a state and move Cape Canaveral there.

That would be interesting. But they don't even have to do anything radical, just spend more in California where there's already a major space centre and less in Florida, Texas or Alabama...

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

#208

Post by wat10000 »

reactordev wrote: post #126
inglor_cz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, yes, but in this specific instance, groundbreaking research or its lack isn't the core of the problem. This is mostly about the new human-rated lander, which is an engineering problem. Notably, the US never had a reasonably safe spaceship, although Dragon may yet prove good. Both Apollos and Space Shuttles, developed under NASA, were pretty dangerous to their crews.

As evident in Challenger and Columbia… You’re absolutely right. Astronauts sign a last will and testament before every flight. We think it’s routine because we’ve nailed down orbital science but in reality, we lack the quality assurance that space flight demands. It’s one thing to send up robots and satellites, it’s another to send up humans. The ISS is crawling with bacteria. We lack the physical protection for long…

The safety requirement for the Commercial Crew program was a probability of fatality of no more than 1 in 270. Which would be absolutely atrocious for any other mode of transport. And Boeing couldn't even achieve that much.

I think the real issue is that it's just still very, very hard. Margins are extremely thin. Airliners are extremely safe despite existing in a realm that's inherently dangerous because they spend margin on safety. You could make an airliner that's way lighter than what's currently flying if you didn't care about making it robust against, say, hitting a weather balloon. But the ability is there to protect against adverse events like that.

Spacecraft have almost no margin. The distance between normal operation and having a bad day is really small because getting people into orbit at all is still just about at the limits of available technology.

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

#209

Post by epicureanideal »

wmf wrote: post #205
heisgone wrote: post #197

I can imagine SpaceX choosing to self-finance a mission to the moon and beat NASA at it.

I predict that NASA would find some pretense to block any such mission to the moon or Mars to avoid embarrassment.

They’d probably launch from a sea platform on behalf of some random country just to spite NASA at that point.

Look at that, Morocco beats NASA to the moon!

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

#210

Post by themafia »

xnx wrote: post #206

The best outcome would be the cancellation of manned moon missions. The original space race was a pissing match between the US and USSR. I would've hoped we had matured past that.

Which would be a salient point if _nothing_ of value came out of the space program. That's about as far from reality as you can get.

The primary, chartered, goal of NASA is to create a commercial space industry. Ignoring this is a sign of extreme immaturity.

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