NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by terminalshort » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 7:01 PM UTC

ecshafer wrote: post #116

saubeidl wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wasn't Elon kind of treated like a child to be distracted and kept at arms length at Spacex? He is apparently really really good at fundraising, marketing and publicity (well he used to be anyways). But the stories that have come out of Tesla, and Paypal and SpaceX seem to me like the people actually running the show have tried to distract him as much as possible, and any of his actual decisions have been awful. I re…

When something goes wrong a one of Elon Musk's companies, it's clearly his fault. When something goes right, it's because he isn't actually running the company. Schrodinger's CEO!

But let's pretend for a minute that you're right and all Elon Musk does is hire great people that then do all the work building the company for him and keep him at arms length doing nothing. The skill to hire like that alone still puts him in the top 0.01% of CEOs.

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

#212

Post by notahacker » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 7:01 PM UTC

philipwhiuk wrote: post #88

dtj1123 wrote: post #32

Remind me why we need to get to the moon again?

American Republicans have invented that it's in a race with China even though it's already been and it's not clear China thinks it's a race.

I suspect China thinks that dominance of space comes with superior research capability, and are delighted that the current US government is doing everything it can to sabotage that whilst fixating on a symbolic achievement which shouldn't really matter much to the US...

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

#213

Post by inglor_cz » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 7:04 PM UTC

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.

Now recall what the incentive to put the first man on the Moon was...

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

#214

Post by testing22321 » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 7:06 PM UTC

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.

Elon just said starship will do the entire moon mission:

“Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.”

To address your question, what is the incentive for going to Mars

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

#215

Post by terminalshort » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 7:07 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #106

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?

I think the situation here from NASAs perspective is that these were the choices:

1. Back a low risk moon mission that is basically a repeat of Apollo using proven, but extremely expensive tech that has a very low probability of failure.

2. Back a high risk strategy that relies on the development of new technology that can potentially deliver hundreds of tons of cargo to the lunar surface for a fraction of the cost of Apollo and support a sustained human presence on the lunar surface. This of course comes with a near 100% chance of significant delays and cost overruns, and also a high probability of total failure.

IMO NASA made the obviously correct choice here and it's not close. This is exactly the kind of thing that I want my tax money spent on.

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

#216

Post by inglor_cz » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 7:07 PM UTC

CursedSilicon wrote: post #204

nialse wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Musk is complicated to say the least. He seems to have a pattern of expensive overreactions to what he perceives as slights.

Allegedly, SpaceX only exists because some Russian engineer spit on him during tense price negotiations back in 2002.

His purchase of Twitter wasn't cheap either.

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

#217

Post by wmf » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 7:08 PM UTC

epicureanideal wrote: post #209

wmf wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

As much as I would enjoy watching Elon personally annex Somalia, that's not a thing.

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

#218

Post by inglor_cz » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 7:09 PM UTC

jordanb wrote: post #57

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.

Is starship on schedule?

I have never seen even a software project on schedule, including all of mine and everything I encountered in the academia.

Building new things is genuinely hard.

But I have seen some serious, albeit delayed, successes.

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

#219

Post by Laremere » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 7:10 PM UTC

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.

SpaceX's lander bid was in large part so competitive because they were already planning on developing 90% of the technology anyways. Low earth orbit service was developed for NASA, but has found other paying customers. The moon has to have more people who would be interested in paying. Also the moon remains a good stepping stone for technological development for getting people to Mars, the stated main goal of the company. Also it's almost certainly not happening in the next few years anyways so they may only need to wait for the next administration.

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

#220

Post by Ekaros » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 7:10 PM UTC

vrindavan1 wrote: post #172

random3 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can we actually? And I mean in any reasonable time frame say 100 years? And by self-sustaining I take fully independent from Earth supply chain for absolutely everything. A civilization that could continue existing without single delivery for Earth.