I am sure they could give Boeing a few more billion dollars
to expand on their successful Starliner platform to build a
moon rocket in way less time than SpaceX.
NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
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Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#722There 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…
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Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#723Earlier quoted context omitted.
and what about him openly stating how he's considered declaring martial law to suspend elections? an apt comparison I saw elsewhere is that the left side of the aisle is acting like the opposing team from Air Bud: "hey, a dog can't play basketball, it's against the rules!!" meanwhile, the dog is making shots over and over again.
"declaring martial law to suspend elections?" This would also absolutely trigger a civil war.
i don’t think we should lull ourselves into complacency with projected certainties. if you listen to right-wing discourse, you’d know there is an not insignificant contingent of folks that are very okay with that path
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#724Lots of people complaining that we have already won the "moon race" and that this makes no sense. This is a completely wrong reading of the situation. Let's say we forgot how to do heart transplants. Once we did them a few times perfectly, got all surgical techniques right, but patients died shortly after the surgery due to rejection. We quit the whole transplants stuff for years, the techniques and the equipments we…
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Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#725Earlier quoted context omitted.
It succeeded in the 60s because we didn't just focus attention, we focused a LOT OF MONEY on it. In comparison, today's NASA has a meager budget which has only been further slashed by the current administration. I would love to see the kind of investment in NASA we had during the 60s. The scientific advancements were staggering. Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.
Technological progress should allow us to repeat ancient feats for cheaper. True excellence in engineering is being able to do amazing things within a limited budget. (And overall, sending some primates to the moon should come out of our entertainment budgets. Manned space flight has been one giant money sink without much too show for. If you want to do anything scientifically useful in space, go for unmanned. > Toda…
> The US spends less of its total income on weapons and warfare than back then. Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.
This is inaccurate. Here [1] is a nice table showing US military spending over time, inflation adjusted. Up, up, and away! And it's made even more insane because what really matters is discretionary spending. Each year lots of things are automatically paid - interest on the debt, pensions, medicare, social security, and so on. What's left over is in those giant budgetary bills that Congress makes each year that cover all spending on education, infrastructure, and all of the other things people typically associate government spending with.
And military spending (outside of things like pension) is 100% discretionary, and it consumes about half of our entire discretionary budget! And this is again made even more insane by the fact that discretionary spending, as a percent of all spending, continues to decline. This is because we're an aging population with a terrible fertility rate. So costs for social security, medicare, and other such things are increasing sharply while new revenue from our children is barely trickling in. Notably this will never change unless fertility rates change. Even when the 'old people' die, they will be replaced by even more old people, and with even fewer children coming of age.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#726Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which will backfire spectacularly when Obama is re-elected.
If they do this approach they will surely say that the constitutional limit is two consecutive terms, and since Trump's two terms were non-consecutive, he's still eligible to run again.
No, the approach will be to put Trump second on a ticket as vice president, and then have the top name on the ticket abdicate on day one.
The constitution says he can’t be elected president, but on an extremely pedantic reading, it doesn’t say he can’t be elected vice president.
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#727NASA: "We may need to boot SpaceX" SpaceX: makes political contribution to executive branch NASA: "SpaceX is back on the menu, boys!"
NASA: "We may need to boot SpaceX"
SpaceX: makes the only rockets capable of actually doing anything
NASA: "SpaceX is back on the menu, boys!"
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#728Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is to avoid "China can do this feat but US is no longer capable"
Small sample, but in New Orleans, the US isn't even capable of maintenance. I'm a tourist at the moment and everything looks like it is falling apart. The existing roading infrastructure is crumbling (apparently there's an Instagram about the worst examples). Everywhere I've driven, the roads are worse than earthquake hit Christchurch. Yet there is so much amazing old infrastructure that reeks of massive past investm…
Everywhere. The US has an infrastructure problem. Whenever I return to visit I can’t believe my eyes.
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#729Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#730Earlier quoted context omitted.
the reds did space much, much worse. first satellite? all sputnik could do was beep, and it ran out of batteries in three weeks. first animal? laika died. first station? there were two attempts to crew it -- the first failed to dock and everyone on the second mission fucking died. the soyuz 11 crew remain the only human deaths in space. first *naut? yuri gagarin didn't even have manual controls. the n1 was catastroph…
Failing fast is easier when lives are valued cheaply. “If it’s not failing, you’re not pushing hard enough.” You are selecting goalposts that suit your team, and being disrespectful of the USSR (presumably because you don't want to acknowledge their successes).
Ok, name some goalposts that steelman the USSR's contributions to the space race.