Im not a musk fanboy or anything but who can do better? Its dangerous to support a monopoly but if one provider is far ahead of the others then it makes sense to just use that. How much of these delays are due to spacex and how much are just the inherent variance of the task
NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
501–510 of 1001 posts
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the point of winning though? We could be doing other things in stead, and I'm going to submit that they are more valuable (you are of course welcome to disagree - this is an opinion). Personally I hope no human lands on the moon again. I like telling my parents they are so old humans walked on the moon in their lifetime (last human left the moon December 1972 - before I was born). There is no value in this st…
The electronics we're typing these comments on were only rapidly miniaturized originally to be small and light enough to shoot into space. There are second, third, etc order effects to things like a space race.
Nah, that’s false. Miniaturization was already underway before the Space Race. The space program absolutely benefited from it, yes. But NASA wasn’t at the forefront of those developments.
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Elon's predictions are usually very late, but they do happen.
"I see a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly users in 12 to 18 months." — 11/27/2022
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#504"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?
JFK: "First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."
RFK Jr: "Measles ain't that bad, try this potion my friend came up with."
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re: 1. I think the America of Theseus mindset is a bit troubling. A lot of people like to identify with achievements that they played no role in. Based on zero expertise whatsoever, I have a sense that this is a bit self defeating. To be born a winner, to be taught you’re a winner… how can that be healthy? Today’s America scores zero points for its accomplishments of the past. But I think one way it can be a good thi…
America cannot possibly win the space race again, because it has already been won. The first to get there has already happened. The idea that we need to land on the moon once a generation just to say that we are as good at landing on the moon as our parents is absurd.
It’s just as absurd today as it was in the 60s. It’s an artificial challenge that focuses attention, with the goal of exercising government, industries, academics, etc. and maybe learn and invent a few things along the way. Yes, yes, Cold War and all those theories. But it had and can again have this greater effect.
It’s kind of like a FIRST Robotics Challenge for nations. The specific goal really doesn’t matter and can just as well be different than the moon. That’s not the interesting part.
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#506There is just so much wrong with this from start to finish. Here are a few things, by no means inclusive: 1. We’ve already beaten China to the moon by 56 years, 3 months, and some change. And counting. 2. Nothing based around SLS is remotely serious. The cost and timeline of doing anything with it are unreasonable. It is an absolute dead-end. The SpaceX Super Heavy has been more capable arguably as early as the secon…
> We’ve already beaten China to the moon by 56 years, 3 months, and some change. And counting Of course, but there a few things to consider. 1. This is a new race. The olympics happen every four years to see which nation is the current best. It seems it’s time to find out again. 2. The last time the US was dominant was 56 years ago. That’s three generations. Based on SLS and the comments here, it seems extremely unli…
>Based on SLS and the comments here, it seems extremely unlikely the US is still dominant.
Literally every other nation is trying to catch up to Space-X and is nowhere close. An American company, based in American, primarily staffed by American engineers.
I don't know by what measure you'd say that the US isn's still far, far ahead but I don't know of any other country currently re-using rockets dozens of times. What did I miss?
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which will backfire spectacularly when Obama is re-elected.
You can’t get elected if you don’t count the votes. That requires a joint session of congress. If due to an unprecedented emergency the congress cannot come into session there’s no clear rule what happens. Any number of emergent events may create an emergency preventing the congress from gathering. The congress are collaborators and the Supreme Court is compromised.
If that happens then Trump doesn't get to stay president, the 20th amendment means his term ends regardless.
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Elon Musk sometimes say things that are true. Has this ever happened in the last 10 years?
What questions do you have following the results of Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, etc? I've got a HW4 Tesla Model 3 right now and the FSD experience is so good I use it constantly...and I was one of those "I will never trust self driving cars" people for years.
>Tesla
His rapidly deteriorating market share in Europe and basically anything cybertruck related
>SpaceX
The contract they had that just reopened for bidding
>neuralink
Haven’t they stopped human trials because they were running into serious issues? I feel like I read something about that but I can’t recall the exact nature of the issue.
>starlink
Pretty sure the Canadian government abandoned their big contract with starlink. A cursory Google search shows that “several governments and organizations have paused or canceled their contracts.” AI summary so should probably be investigated more in depth but I imagine it’s largely accurate.
I see that his hyperloop company didn’t make the list, which went belly up just a year or two ago.
Robotaxi was shut down in Phoenix after all sorts of safety issues arose.
Several major projects have stalled or been shut down over the last few years.
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#509Why does this sounds so... Entitled? NASA regresses so far that they are now unable to do anything by themselves... Now suddenly there is a new moon race and they start pointing to a public company that is not sticking to a schedule. A company that does some impressive things, and has helped them out (probably not out of the goodness of their hearts, but hey), and is doing things they could not. I would be an adult a…
>NASA regresses so far that they are now unable to do anything by themselves... I keep running across this perception and I don't understand where it comes from. Overwhelmingly, like since the 1970s, NASA has not built anything per it's appropriations from congress. Their job is to 1) Define mission requirements and objectives, 2) Oversee contracts to execute those missions, 3) Test and verify elements of those syste…
Yes, this. And the reason why congressional appropriations plummeted was that no one saw any need to maintain such high expenditures. There hasn’t been an actually coherent vision of what NASA is supposed to be working towards since the Apollo Program. Everything after that is lurching from one project to another, justifying it based on short-term possibility rather than committing to a longer-term goal the agency is supposed to be achieving. Just look at Shuttle. It accomplished some nice things, but it was always a dead end. Everybody in NASA knew it. ISS: accomplished some nice things, dead end. Sure, you can talk about how these were steps along the way to learning about long-term human habitation in space, but we’ve never had a coherent vision for that that everyone is aligned with. What they really were: make-work projects that were at least short-term justifiable, executed in order to preserve NASA’s capacity to do anything at all.
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having a deadline is how things get done. With no deadline, nothing gets accomplished.
Dead lines, political pressure to ignore issues and get it done, is how you get astronauts dead. Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia. And of course Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 / Salyut 1; it's not just a problem for America. I fear it's going to happen again; Orion isn't safe and hasn't been successfully tested. The heat shield started to disintegrate the last time they tested it and instead of testing it again with their change…
Charles Lindbergh knew his chances of dying crossing the Atlantic were pretty high. After all, previous attempts resulted in many deaths.
Armstrong's personal estimate of his odds getting back alive were about 50%.
Apollo 13 came within a hair of killing its crew.
I fly across the North Atlantic at 30,000 feet, death in seconds if the hull is breached, in a comfortable chair, watching a movie and sipping a drink. Isn't that incredible? I still find it amazing.
But I know that was achieved through the loss of many, many lives.