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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

#531

Post by FloorEgg »

notahacker wrote: post #200
FloorEgg wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon is competing with a lot of entrenched interests that would actively try to influence Trump to undermine Elon: - 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…

Elon spends more money highlighting his own flaws than all his opponents put together, and orchestrated his own spat with the Trump administration in public on his own website; no third party PR conspiracy is necessary here. Lockheed will of course be angling for this contract for reasons which have nothing to do with "undermining Elon" and everything to do with being keen on securing themselves more multibillion dol…

A conspiracy assumes secret cooperation, and I am not making any claim like that. I am merely pointing out that Elon has position himself as a rival against a lot of rich and powerful people. Rather than speculate on the specific arbitrary political reason, it might be mostly because of the underlying pressure or general anti-Elon baseline effect (and to attribute it to something more specific is a form of baseline or base rate neglect).

And to your point about him spending more money then the rest combined, maybe, he did spend a lot on twitter, but I don't think any of us can actually know how much all those people are spending. It might be closer than you think. Also the anti-Elon media brigade started long before he bought twitter, it just wasn't focused on the general public, it was focused on amateur investors.

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

#532

Post by ternus »

Stevvo wrote: post #461
allenrb wrote: post #373

There 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…

2) Artemis II is sitting on the pad ready to go. It will launch in a few months. But actually it's not relevant; the article makes no mention of SLS. There is suggestion of SLS getting the contract. SpaceX doesn't even have a timeline for Starship; they have no idea when it will be ready, but the one thing that is clear is it wont be ready to take humans to the moon in 2027.

Artemis II is not on the pad. It's in the VAB, and it isn't stacked yet (source: my sister's an engineer with NASA Exploration Ground Support and is one of the people in charge of assembling it).

There's a lot left to do before it's ready to launch: https://spaceflightnow.com/2025/10/17/orion-spacecraft-arriv...

Of course, compared to the decades-long SLS timeline, that's "ready to go".

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

#533

Post by panick21 »

mullingitover wrote: post #352
panick21 wrote: post #112

This is all just politics. Artemis from the beginning was just politics. And it wasn't driven by how to best do things, or any kind of coherent strategy. Its basically was a compromise, that had one of its pillars, that SLS and Orion need to continue to be used. Those two project have spend decades getting untold amounts of money. And even after all that money, their development isn't finished and they would need mor…

> The question the US (Congress/NASA) should be asking is not 'how can we get Artemis III' but rather 'what kind of Space program do we want over the next 30 years'. I think the big question is "What is it going to do to the global standing of the United States (let alone domestic politics) when China repeatedly lands people on the moon and we can't."

Not really, its only the big question if US makes it the question. If the US just says yeah we done that, that's not our focus.

And then China does maybe a flags and footprints landing, while shortly after the US has a base there.

The only reason this is even close at all is because the US spend the last 25 years and 200 billion $ in complete deadends.

And just going further into the deadend just to maybe get a set of footprints onto the moon first is shortsighted and frankly morinic strategy.

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

#535

Post by markus_zhang »

inglor_cz wrote: post #218
jordanb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From my previous reading, Excel 3 was one of the rare cases that the team pushed out the product only one week late.

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

#536

Post by heavyset_go »

chippiewill wrote: post #507
Spooky23 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 5th Amendment means everyone has the right to due process, but it means nothing if the government refuses to adhere to it.

We're currently seeing people being denied due process as a matter of federal policy all over the US.

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

#537

Post by heavyset_go »

simondotau wrote: post #389
zzrrt wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the impulse and it would be amusing, but I have a feeling people are sick of "dynasty" Dem candidates for president (Hillary after her husband, Biden/Harris after each being VPs.) Feels like his legacy and appeal has kind of faded too. He was an exciting first-time candidate and good-enough incumbent, but third term?

Hillary sure, but they explicitly said Obama, not Clinton. Nominating a VP as President isn’t dynastic, it’s been common practice for centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vice_presidents_of_the...

Something about powerful people handing power down being common practice for centuries seems dynasty-like to me.

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

#538

Post by jjk166 »

_diyar wrote: post #452
jjk166 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stainless steel was a questionable choice for starship. If the pros outweigh the cons, which is yet to be seen, it will be mostly due to the peculiarities of Starship's other design choices. In general it's a terrible choice for rockets. I'm not saying Boeing would do a better job, but any actual engineer doing a ground up redesign starting today would definitely go with carbon fiber.

> [if stainless works] it will be mostly due to the peculiarities of Starship's other design choices. Yea but isn‘t that the point of the Starship? It has a bunch of unusual design choices regarding reusability and payload capacity, and then the rest of the owl is drawn around them. I‘m not a rocket-scientist but I would hazard a guess they picked the best material given the options, right?

Well in the drawing analogy, they picked stainless steel while they were still trying to draw a sparrow.

Stainless steel was specifically chosen so that starship wouldn't need a heat shield and would survive re-entry with transpiration cooling. This would save substantial weight and make rapid reusability easy. The problem is that after designing starship around the stainless steel construction, they found that the transpiration cooling system wasn't workable, so now they have a stainless steel hull and a heat shield.

Further, I do not believe the drawbacks of stainless steel were fully appreciated at the time. Stainless steel on paper looks like it has better strength to weight ratio than aluminum, especially at the cryogenic temperatures of starship's fuel tanks. However a steel tank wall with the same strength as an aluminum wall is much thinner and so you wind up with different failure modes, namely buckling. In practice, a rocket made from steel is heavier than a rocket made from aluminum. This was why the Atlas rockets used stainless steel but subsequent rockets switched to aluminum in the first place.

Additionally, at the time much hooplah was made about stainless steel being cheaper and more formable which would reduce production costs. This is just nonsense. Stainless steel is expensive and tough to work with, which is why we don't use it for creating large structures despite its desirable material properties. It may be favorable compared to titanium, which was likely the only other option when transpiration cooling was the game plan, but for the current design aluminum would be far cheaper in addition to being lighter.

Now I'm sure SpaceX did some analysis after the transpiration cooling didn't work out and asked whether it made sense to start the design over and retool everything instead of continuing on with the stainless steel, and they decided at the time no. Since then they have had several further setbacks. The increased weight required them to reduce safety features, which may have contributed to some of its earlier losses. Starship has had to grow considerably and increase thrust to accommodate for these shortcomings. Would SpaceX have made the same decision to continue with the stainless with the benefit of hindsight? I can't say. But with the exception of a few chinese startups trying to carbon copy starship, other rocket manufacturers have not adopted stainless steel, likely with good reason.

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

#539

Post by newsclues »

bahmboo wrote: post #227

"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.

Ambition is scary for weak people.

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

#540

Post by fluoridation »

Waterluvian wrote: post #505
zdragnar wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It’s just as absurd today as it was in the 60s.

Nah. You can argue that the goal "land on the moon" is artificial, but it being artificial doesn't make it fake or abstract. If you're the first to achieve it then you're the first, and that's it. What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new.

Now, if you're not able to repeat it at all, that does say something. But if it takes you a few years longer, well, so what? It's not a race anymore, because it's already been won, by the US of fifty years ago.

The winner of the race to Mars is still undecided, though.

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