331–340 of 1001 posts
"The president and I want to get to the moon in this president's term" - Sean Duffy NASA administrator. A scary way to set a schedule on a complex project with lives at stake. They don't care though.
The silver lining is that they are operating under the assumption that he will leave office at the conclusion of his term.
"The president and I want to get to the moon in this president's term" - Sean Duffy NASA administrator. A scary way to set a schedule on a complex project with lives at stake. They don't care though.
Didn't JFK say something about going to the moon by the end of the decade?
"The president and I want to get to the moon in this president's term" - Sean Duffy NASA administrator. A scary way to set a schedule on a complex project with lives at stake. They don't care though.
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And he is super well known for making accurate predictions of the future.
Elon's predictions are usually very late, but they do happen. Falcon 9 landings, self driving vehicles, etc... Later than predicted, but they happened.
Here's a list; https://elonmusk.today/
Remind me why we need to get to the moon again?
For a serious answer: it's a lot cheaper to launch rockets from there, and we're running out of stuff to do in the region immediately surrounding Earth.
And even then, you have to get whatever you want to launch to the moon in the first place...
1. Starship is still far from being production-ready, proven to be reliable and rated for human transport, a goal that will itself take many launches beyond being proven for delivering payloads to LEO and geosynchronous orbits (as well, I guess, deep space missions?);
2. The market for commercial Starship launches is far from proven and the risk of this is being ignored or downplayed by so many. Starship's biggest problem and competitor is... the Falcon 9, something the Falcon 9 never had to contend with. The market for even larger payloads seem to be limited. The evidence? There are over 100 Falcon 9 launches a year. There's about ~1 Falcon Heavy launch per year. And Falcon Heavy is pretty cost effective. The biggest customer seems to be the military who wants to get really large payloads to geosynchronous orbit. Now will Starlink bootstrap Starship demand in the same way that it did for Falcon 9 reusable boosters? Maybe. But it's not proven; and
3. Starship just doesn't make a great Moon lander. Why? You have to land this really tall vehicle in low gravity on unknown ground when it could possibly tip over in a way that Apollo landers never really could (because they were short, wide and significantly lighter). And then when you land? Your astronauts are ~40 meters off the ground. How are they getting back and forth?
Starship actually reminds me of the Steve Ballmer "Windows everywhere" era. Or the F35 jet-for-all-branches boondoggle. Ballmer wanted to run Windows on every device where Apple launched iOS alongside MacOS. Ballmer bought Sidekick, which was really successful at the time, and basically killed it by not innovating and trying to migrate it to Windows Mobile OS.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of simple minds." as the quote goes.
These projects end up being not very good at any application in an effort to be able to do too much. I'm starting to wonder if this is Starship's core problem.
What might save Starship is that BlueOrigin is absolutely nowhere, ULA is a joke, the Europeans are nowhere and SLS is a massive jobs program. I have more faith in China's space program than any of those.
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America is becoming a silly place. Lumberjack appointed as a head of NASA for his loyalty.
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>> I'm afraid Elon is about to give them the finger and drive around on the moon by himself, two fingers pointing at NASA head quarters. I don't think Elon cares much about going to the moon. It would probably delay the Mars mission to devote resources to a moon mission.
Unless he gets a lucrative mining contract