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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

#191

Post by BurningFrog »

dangus wrote: post #145
BurningFrog wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ketamine addiction rumors are unproven, and Musk denies them. He says he takes it as prescribed against occasional depression.

The richest man in the world, a proven liar and baseless accuser of others, runs a social media platform he uses specifically to alter the political views of others for his financial benefit, doesn't deserve any level of benefit of the doubt or gracious fact-checking as he does not hold himself to that standard. No one with his level of wealth should exist as a basic concept. I submit the policy proposal that anyone…

The US federal government spends $20B per day. It could end world hunger without even noticing the expense if it really only cost $40B/year. But of course, that number is complete nonsense.

Here is your intellectual mistake: Wealth isn't fixed. Musk didn't take his fortune from anyone else. He has been part of creating a huge amount of new wealth in his companies.

Tesla didn't use to exist. Now it's worth $1500B. That's new wealth, and Musk owns a part of it.

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

#192

Post by dmix »

chasd00 wrote: post #74
nerdjon wrote: post #42

At the end of the day competition for SpaceX is a good thing so we don't become reliant on a single company and the whims of the person that owns it. I don't know enough about whether or not they really are behind or if this is just a bit of sensationalized reporting. But this is how it should have likely been from the beginning.

totally, i wish Blue Origin was neck and neck with SpaceX in terms of capabilities and rate of innovation. I'm pretty much a SpaceX superfan but they need the competition.

The article implies the competition is coming from China, who has multiple large projects on the go including one trying to clone Starship.

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

#193

Post by leobg »

FloorEgg wrote: post #183
gradientsrneat wrote: post #175

Duffy is a Trump appointee, so this could be part of the continuing fallout of the Trump/Elon relationship. The Republican majority Congress has also attempted to partially defund NASA, and the government is shut down because Congress couldn't pass a budget. On top of that, space engineering is hard. So, of course there are delays.

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…

Brave thing to say on HN. There are a few people here who will downvote any comment that contains the word “Elon”, “SpaceX” or “Tesla” if the comment’s saltiness score is less than 8/10.

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

#194

Post by [deleted] »

Arainach wrote: post #134
BurningFrog wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ketamine addiction rumors are unproven, and Musk denies them. He says he takes it as prescribed against occasional depression.

Musk says a lot of things. Most of them aren't true, a number of them criminally so. No one should trust a thing he says after his baseless libel against the rescue divers in Thailand. ABSOLUTELY no one trust should anything he says after the "funding secured" BS, and if you got that far, saw the obvious lies and fakes he posted to Twitter even before he bought the place, I don't know what else to tell you. At this p…

[deleted]

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

#195

Post by gryphonclaw »

ratelimitsteve wrote: post #184
random3 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the main motivation for the moon? Is it a better location than the international space station? What’s the reasoning there?

in space travel there's a saying: once you're out of atmosphere you're halfway to anywhere. it takes tons of energy to get over the friction of air resistance. That's way we want a future where space-related things are built in space as much as possible. Once we can solve the idea of permanent installations on the moon it will have several advantages over an orbital station such as ease of additional construction, po…

I think it's more escaping the gravity well, as the energy consumed by air resistance is fairly negligible compared to gravity and is more of a stability issue. But yeah, once in LEO you're halfway to anywhere as long as you can bring enough mass up for what you need.

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

#196

Post by dang »

IT4MD wrote: post #158

[flagged]

We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments and ignoring our request to stop.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

(Not a defensive of clown billionaires. Just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck.)

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

#198

Post by wat10000 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #66
jordanb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is starship on schedule?

Of course not. But a system that's "affordable, fixed price, highly capable, delayed" beats one that's "too expensive, cost+, marginally capable, delayed". Starship is not a drop-in replacement for SLS. But it sure casts a long shadow on the entire SLS project.

At $2.5 billion per launch, the worst thing that could happen with SLS is that it starts being used.

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

#200

Post by notahacker »

FloorEgg wrote: post #183
gradientsrneat wrote: post #175

Duffy is a Trump appointee, so this could be part of the continuing fallout of the Trump/Elon relationship. The Republican majority Congress has also attempted to partially defund NASA, and the government is shut down because Congress couldn't pass a budget. On top of that, space engineering is hard. So, of course there are delays.

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 dollar prestige projects, as will Blue Origin, as they would under any other government and frankly NASA is quite entitled to reopen the contract if SpaceX doesn't hit performance milestones. Whether the alternatives are any more likely to deliver adequate solutions on time, and whether the current US administration can be trusted not to make decisions one way or another for arbitrary political reasons or straight up corruption is another question entirely.

(The arbitrary political reason in this case may be more a desire to do things on unrealistic deadlines to credit it as a Trump admin achievement than to punish or favour any particular individual, but it's not like they're reluctant to do that either)

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