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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

#861

Post by schiffern »

mortarion wrote: post #833
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…

Refueling the HLS in orbit, before it sets off to the moon requires at least 10 launches, but likely closer to 20, and neither Super Heavy or any future Starship tanker will be rapidly reusable that much is clear by now. For this system to work, SpaceX will need to build many more launch pads and the refueling sequence alone will take months due to boil off. It's a dumb system invented due to the whims of a madman wh…

  >neither Super Heavy or any future Starship tanker will be rapidly reusable that much is clear by now
Funny, because I would say for the first time there's a clear path to rapid reuse.

What insurmountable problem(s) do you expect?

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

#862

Post by myrmidon »

vincenthwt wrote: post #779
halapro wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> humanity’s future beyond Earth. Yes but why? It's cool that we can learn about what's around us, but in practice we're light years away from being interplanetary, we just can't afford it and our energy sources are laughable. Realistically speaking, how far are we really from "moon travel" that is both remotely affordable and worth the trip?

"Yes, but why?" If humans had never ventured beyond perceived limits, like crossing oceans or building planes, where would we be today? "We’re light-years away from being interplanetary; it’s too costly and our energy is laughable." If people doubted the Wright brothers or mocked the idea of landing on the Moon, should we have stopped trying? "How far are we from affordable Moon travel that’s worth it?" Humanity thri…

We have no lack of spending opportunities for "progress"; there are dozens of promising research fields, and the ressources we can realistically invest are limited.

Most historical progress was driven and motivated by incremental gains; exploration as an end in itself was not even enough to get Columbus funded, and big space projects are much more ressource intensive than that.

> Space is where the next wave of innovation and opportunity lies.

That's just, like, your opinion. I consider this extremely unlikely; to me, the most promising fields short and mid-term are AI and synthetic biology. Space exploration does not even come close-- even if we magically gained the capability to build large scale, self-sufficient cities on Mars and populated them with millions of people (which is extremely unlikely to happen in the next decades)-- what does that do for us? What progress do we gain? If you want to build habitats in unlivable, hostile environments, you can just as well do this in Antarctica, some desert or the deep sea, and I'd consider that likewise mostly an exercise in futility.

edit: To make my position a bit clearer: I think its fine to invest "reasonably" in space exploration; the current moon project I'd consider mostly a waste, but still somehwat justifiable. But spending twice or more of what NASA currently costs on Moon or Mars base projects would be a non justifiable waste in my eyes.

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

#863

Post by bluGill »

rkomorn wrote: post #495
alistairSH wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. So let’s do something useful and new. We know how to go to the moon - it’s just a matter of money (and political will). If there’s something else to do on the moon, let’s be clear that is the objective.

I actually think getting the political will, money, and execution together would be the part that would be a noteworthy show of force (and I'd argue being unable to get it done would be equally noteworthy in the other direction).

Fair enough, but IMO there are better places we should be focusing on getting political will together if we want to focus on something big.

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

#864

Post by vel0city »

anigbrowl wrote: post #755
skeeter2020 wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Apple didn't recreate the same mobile handset as Motorola or anybody else. There is very little value or scientific benefit in going back to the moon within the parameters of this mission; it's literally "do the same thing again".

Incredible lack of imagination. If we went back to the moon on the regular we could by now have high resolution cameras permanently installed there pointing back at Earth, sending video in real time. but we have satellites for that High resolution photographs of the entire earth (as opposed to tiny pieces of it) would have a massive positive emotional effect on people. The Earthrise photo's enduring popularity is pro…

> High resolution photographs of the entire earth

We already have this, it doesn't require being on the moon.

> There's water on the Moon; we could have bases there by now, even if they were limited in functionality and size, like the ISS.

The scale of going to the ISS versus the moon is massively different. Most of the research we'd be doing on the moon that isn't just for robots to do like digging in the dirt could still be done on an orbiting space station (like, how to mitigate effects of microgravity on the human body, how to cultivate plants in low gravity, studying microorganisms and chemistry in space, etc.)

> We could have remote-control or autonomous moon rovers and bipedal robots exploring there 24-7.

This doesn't require a human presence on the moon. We've had nearly uninterrupted robots on Mars for decades and haven't had a human on it.

> Instead we have Moon landing denialists one one hand

You had moon landing denialists even right after we landed. Us continuing to be on the moon isn't going to get rid of these naysayers. People are arguing the earth is flat, that anthropogenic climate change can't be possible, that the earth is 40,000 years old, and vaccines are mind control agents.

I get it would be cool and there probably is some science that could only be done with humans on the moon that I don't know about (I don't know everything, for sure). I think it would do a lot to push our engineering forward to have this kind of constant investment towards operating in space. But outside of being a means to funnel public funds to engineering firms to essentially find cooler ways to burn money I'm not sure it's all worth it.

Not saying we shouldn't have a space program! There's still lots we don't know about the universe and lots of cool science to learn. But do we need actual humans on the moon to achieve these goals?

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

#865

Post by deadbabe »

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…

We can build a data center there. Off world file storage.

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

#866

Post by bookofjoe »

f1shy wrote: post #830
kranke155 wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first thing Steve Jobs did when he arrived back at Apple is he got rid of the little “Apple museum” they had in the building. A bunch of old machines. I believe he thought Apple shouldn’t live off its past.

Do you have a source for that. Would be nice to have that in my list :)

>Shortly after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he canceled plans to create a corporate museum and gave Stanford all of the archives in 1997.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidcoursey/2012/03/31/more-th...

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

#867

Post by Garvi »

roody15 wrote: post #848

This makes me think of Intels decline over the last decade or so. It feels to me like a canary in a coal mine. Perhaps of a failing in the US system as a whole. It is possible we are not quite the world leader we once were, despite bailouts, despite legislation like the CHIPS act, despite a CEO dedicated to a roadmap to regain technical superiority … maybe we cannot win this race. Have we reached a point where managi…

Replace "despite" with "because of" and you'll get a clearer picture. The US is looted. China is holding on because they've managed to reign in their billionaires and their greed towards their own population. The US commoditized it's own population a long time ago, with the whole world watching and shaking it's head. Life expectancy is a good indicator for this.

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

#868

Post by oskarkk »

testing22321 wrote: post #679
georgeecollins wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is already too bad that the US's plan to get to the moon was so flawed that it has been delayed again and again and money was wasted. Let's imagine that China puts people on the moon next year in a method similar to the way the US did it in 1969 (but probably better in some ways). They still are mostly doing something that has been done before by the USA. In that same year, the USA will probably continue to launch…

China’s plan looks nothing like what was done in 69. They’re going to build a base there, just like the US wants to.

Yeah, their plan is more extended than Apollo, but their initial part of the plan with which they can beat US to the moon is just like Apollo. The later parts of their plan need a rocket which doesn't exist yet (and they recently decided that it will be Starship-like). Meanwhile Starship may be delayed and be later than the first Chinese landing, but it allows to send unprecedented payload to the Moon from the start.

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

#869

Post by buellerbueller »

mikkupikku wrote: post #317
buellerbueller wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the first people to sail the globe did so knowing the risks. I suspect if we reduced astronaut safety thresholds by a factor of 10, we will still have a surplus of high quality candidates for space missions.

I am sure the astronauts know and accept the risks, but does that really mean the public should be funding such reckless activities? They can go paragliding or base jumping on their own dime if they want an adrenaline rush. The public has spend billions of dollars on this program, if the end result is astronauts getting cooked during reentry then how could that possibly be an outcome worth the expense?

That's the debate we should be having, but aren't. It isn't by definition "reckless." It is a calculated risk. The thing with science and exploration is that you never know what is at the end of it. Maybe we should just give up science and exploration?

>The public has spend billions of dollars on this program, if the end result is astronauts getting cooked during reentry then how could that possibly be an outcome worth the expense?

The public has spent [tons of 15th century money] on earth exploration. If the end result is sailors drowning, then then how could global exploration be an outcome worth the expense?

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

#870

Post by buellerbueller »

pantalaimon wrote: post #408
buellerbueller wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the first people to sail the globe did so knowing the risks. I suspect if we reduced astronaut safety thresholds by a factor of 10, we will still have a surplus of high quality candidates for space missions.

Sailboats were pretty well understood by then and in contrast to rockets there is much less potential for catastrophic failure.

At least two orders of magnitude wrong, if we are talking about human death.

A 50% death rate from scurvy alone was assumed.

https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-age-of-s...

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