re: NASA unhappy with SpaceX's progress, will open moon lander contract to other companies

So using a phone and key board is more important than doing the actual work.

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keeping up with that Starship thing, I don't see how they are going to get it reusable any time soon. It scorches every time it reenters and something burns off or holes burn through it. On the edges of the fin things edges burn off. And Musk wants that to go to Mars.
And, how is that thing going to land on the moon, kicking up all those rocks and not screw up the engines?

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That's a lot of words to tell everyone that you don't know shite about engineering.

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That's a lot of words to tell everyone that you don't know shite about engineering.

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I'll admit that. I am not an engineer. When do you think it will be ready? My eye test given the fact that it either blows up or it burns off pieces tells me it is not close to prime time. On the other hand, the Falcon 9 and Super Heavy are bueno.

Do you remember when the early Starship boosters blew apart the launch pad as concrete and shite circulated about? And it damaged engines? And then they decided to bring in a water flooding mechanism? Is that going to be on the moon? For the Apollo missions, it didn't matter if there was damage to the lower stage. Because they used a different engine to get off the moon. Is this somewhat accurate?

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I hear this shite in every Space X thread.......why not just replace NASA with Space X..they rely on them for everything, NASA cant do anything blah blah blah...

Its as dumb as saying why not replace the Air Force with Lockheed Martin..the Air Force cant build anything themselves!

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Drives me insane.

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You really think it's going to take spacex 5 more years to get starship working?

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Define working?.....like regularly transporting cargo and people from the earth to the moon.....yea it could take that long. Their initial goal set in 2021 was to have unmanned flights already going to the moon....actually a year ago.....and they have barely made orbit..

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For the Apollo missions, it didn't matter if there was damage to the lower stage. Because they used a different engine to get off the moon. Is this somewhat accurate?

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This is where SpaceX and NASA are on different ballparks. SLS is meant to go to outer space once per build at the collosal waste of billions of dollars. On top of that it's using technology that's essentially decades old, taking longer than Apollo, and with far less competency.

SpaceX on the other hand is almost entirely re-usable and moving at orders of magnitude faster. I will let you decide which will last longer.

Threads like this drive me nuts.

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Working with Russia was cost effective at the time. Boeings Starliner craft failed.......space travel aint easy and Space X picked up the slack. Acting like that was some sort of massive failure on NASA's part is ignorant.

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It was absolutely a failure on NASA (and the US government’s) part. They had no choice but to deal with Russia since they cancelled the shuttle with no replacement ready. It had nothing to do with being cost effective. They also dropped the Constellation program that set things back years.

Regarding the comments about Starship and “heat damage”, SpaceX is purposely leaving tiles off in different locations to see if Starship can handle reentry without tiles (something the shuttle couldn’t do which cost lives). There are also going to be multiple iterations of Starship. The lunar lander will be similar in size and shape to the one you see now, but that’s about it. It won’t need heat tiles because it’s never going to land back on Earth.

NASA is smart to hedge their bets, but people betting against SpaceX are foolish, and many don’t know what they’re talking about.

Stuff like this makes me question the moon landing. They basically invented cell phones for the moon landing in the 60s and here we are with the equivalent of over a thousand 1960’s supercomputers in everyone’s iPhone. Makes you wonder how it’s this hard to go to the moon when we are so much more technologically advanced than we were in the 1960s…

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Stuff like this makes me question the moon landing. They basically invented cell phones for the moon landing in the 60s and here we are with the equivalent of over a thousand 1960’s supercomputers in everyone’s iPhone. Makes you wonder how it’s this hard to go to the moon when we are so much more technologically advanced than we were in the 1960s…

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I think the answer is pretty straightforward.

1. We spent a shitload of money on the Apollo program. It accounted for over 55% of NASA’s budget from 1961-1972. Something like $320 billion in 2025 dollars. NASA’s 2025 budget is $24.9 billion. So even if you extrapolate that over a 10-year period and allocate 100% of it to a lunar program, it would still only account for like 78% of Apollo’s funding.

2. As others have mentioned in this thread, the Artemis mission is fundamentally different from Apollo. NASA doesn’t just want to send astronauts to the moon then bring them back home. They want to build a base on the moon. They also want to build a space station in orbit of the moon to support the surface operations. That means a lot more payload, and much more overall complexity as there are a ton of interconnected pieces to the program.

If NASA were simply trying to replicate Apollo using newer rockets, that would probably be much cheaper. But the point isn’t to replicate Apollo. The point is to develop logistical systems that can support future manned missions to Mars.

ETA: Another way to think about it.. the problem facing NASA today isn’t computing power. You’re right, we have way more of that than we did in the 1960’s. Today’s problem is cost per ton to orbit.

SpaceX is like Mondo Duplantis. Make super small incremental progress each launch and keep the incentive money flowing. Same as Tesla and using EV tax credits for income. Musk is the biggest welfare baby of all time.