Earlier quoted context omitted.
the whole space industry is a joke; if it were healthy, there would be an ecosystem of multiple launch providers vs one finicky government-funded-Elon-company
> the whole space industry is a joke; if it were healthy, there would be an ecosystem of multiple launch providers vs one finicky government-funded-Elon-company ULA has been operating for many, many years (Atlas/Delta, now Vulcan Centaur), RocketLab has been putting up small payloads for the last few (with Electron, someday Neutron perhaps), and BO seems close to having New Glenn flying real missions this season. But…
NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
981–990 of 1001 posts
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#982Earlier quoted context omitted.
We know it's true because he deleted the tweet. How about releasing the Epstein files so we can all find out for sure? Or do you have a problem with that, and want to protect pedos just like Mike Johnson and Trump do? Charlie Kirk certainly wanted the Epstein files to be released, and look what happened to him.
No I'm just trying to understand how you're putting the information together.
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#983Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#984Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol this is a rhetorical trick. A joke is expected in the middle of a speech. Audience responses to a question generally aren't. If you were speaking to all the mathematicians in the world and decided halfway through to say "What's the integral of e^x dx?" you'd likely get silence in response. "OMG most mathematicians don't know how to integrate e^x holy shit humanity is doomed".
He asked "what is this?" at some point, referring to a diagram, and someone immediately answers "a PID controller". My claim remains that there are many who are working on Artemis that quietly believe it will not succeed. History will eventually reveal the truth about this; and yeah, I might be wrong, we will see.
There may be. But Destin’s video doesn’t demonstrate that.
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#985Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Unpopular” is a weird way to frame “is a Nazi”.
I mean.. Werner von Braun wasn't just "sort of a Nazi if you squint real hard", but an ACTUAL Nazi. At some point you need to focus on getting the job done, and not on purity tests and struggle sessions. THAT is why the US once got to the moon, while China starved 40 million of its own people, and the Soviet Union collapsed.
That’s absurd.
Either way, I’d personally rather today’s Nazis of all flavors to be dead. At the very least they seem a lot dumber than the old ones.
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#986Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 inno…
1. What is a "reasonable cost," and who decides? Reasonable cost is subjective, but NASA’s budget provides perspective. At 0.4 percent of the US federal budget, it amounts to just 27 billion dollars in 2023, while the defense budget is 842 billion dollars, or 13 percent of annual spending. Redirecting just 5 percent of defense funding, about 40 billion dollars, would more than double NASA's budget and allow for signi…
2) I see no probable route for fusion reactors to become a competitive source of terrestrial electricity for at least the next 50 years and possibly never; without that, Helium-3 is mostly worthless (even if your fusion bet works out, you rely on an approach winning that actually needs He3 instead of breeding its own Tritium). For everything else, I don't see extraterrestrial mining being able to compete with current prices, and any significant influx would have it crash/undermine its own market (e.g. we only extract hundreds of tons of palladium globally, per year; doubling the supply would have a major effect on price).
3) I'd argue that current Moon/Mars project are mostly ineffective showmanship/PR. If you actually wanted somewhat self-sustaining settlements/industry within the century, costs would easily eclipse our current defense budget, and without demonstrating the ability to build that on earth first the whole thing would not be credible anyway.
Our current approach to manufacturing (post industrialization) is totally incompatible with self-sustaining colonies, too. There is nothing we could realistically achieve on moon or mars even in a century that is anywhere close to self-sustaining, without basically reinventing how we build things.
So from a risk mitigation point of view the whole endeavour is useless, too (this might change within a century-- synthetic biology specifically would be very promising here).
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#987Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the point we've been - and we've learned there really isn't much there and it's not worth the effort? Even at the time people suspected that - but at least there was a chance of finding something unexpected. As to the knowledge is has been done, and therefore could be done again - sure that's valuable, but that knowledge belongs to the whole world not just to America. And in terms of national prestige or unitin…
Boots on the moon! Maybe we will want that helium 3 since it looks like fusion has a shot.
Also while He-3 doesn't produce radio-active by products, doesn't the reaction require much higher temps than a D-T one?
Perhaps it might be wise to get one working first before investing too much in a moon shot.
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#988There 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…
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#989Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Of course, there is a giant shift in what we could do. We can build far more reliable rockets. We have incredible progresses in materials science, in our understanding of the moon's geology. Likewise, we established the presence of water. We have more advanced solar panels, better batteries, we have a lot of recent research on modular, safe nuclear reactors that could probably lead more easily to moon-ready react…
I agree that we have all those things, but what do we do with them? What's the end benefit? I'm not asking rhetorically, and if the answer is that the knock-off effects of doing this will provide a ton of technology that will help the rest of Earth eat, live and pursue happiness then I think that's a pretty kick-ass answer. But is that where you were going?
Re: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
#990Earlier quoted context omitted.
> HLS requires on-orbit refueling. Anything from 10 to 20 refueling launches will be required. Did you think it required one refueling launch? The SH+SS stack will never be reusable or reliable enough to accomplish the refueling operation in time and on budget. >This means one moon mission will require the use of 10 launch pads The refueling ships are to be launched weeks/months in advance, one at a time. If you look…
Yeah and how many refuelings have they done yet?