Could this just be a pressure tactic on SpaceX?
Somewhat surprised they've waited this long, under the circumstances.
On top of working on a HLS lander, Blue Origin has a pretty large rocket developed already - New Glenn. They just don't have the reusability or the launch cadence, and their HLS needs at least two launches. So far, New Glenn has only ever flown once, with the first stage recovery attempt being unsuccessful. But they may get it into a good shape in time.
I do think that Artemis 3, currently stated for 2027, will be eventually delayed to ~2030, for many reasons. But I wouldn't trust Blue Origin to deliver before SpaceX even if they started the development at the same exact time, and they didn't. SpaceX is, by aerospace standards, a lean and mean company. SpaceX sets unhinged hyper-aggressive "if we lived in a perfect world" timelines, and delivers late. Blue Origin sets reasonable aerospace timelines, and still delivers late.
Blue Moon HLS is considerably less complex than Starship HLS, but it has a lot of the same milestones in front of it - including in-orbit propellant storage and fuel transfers from one vehicle to another. And currently, they certainly don't seem to be ahead of where SpaceX is now with Starship.
Other than Blue Origin and SpaceX? I just don't see anyone being able to squeeze out a HLS candndate in time for 2030. Who else is there in the space, with anywhere near the expertise? Firefly? Boeing?
That's the one thing in your comment I disagree with. Starship-based HLS has basically one base vehicle, modified into three variants (tanker, depot, and the lander itself). Refueling is done in LEO.
Blue Origin's HLS has three completely unique vehicles with no commonality (New Glenn, Transporter, and the lander), and refuels in multiple orbits, one of which is NRHO, which is likely to be far more challenging. And they're doing it with hydrogen.
Blue Origin's Mk1 cargo lander is simpler; their HLS architecture is not.
JMHO.
A major weakness of SpaceX's HLS approach is that it requires them to launch a lot of the same vehicle in a fairly short succession. But SpaceX are the kings of high volume aerospace manufacturing, and they are the driving force behind US launch cadence going up. Even if Starship reusability isn't truly perfected in time for Artemis HLS, they are already building those Starships pretty fast, and can eat some refueling vehicle losses.
Blue Origin doesn't have the raw performance figures of Starship, or SpaceX's unmatched manufacturing and launch cadence. So their HLS architecture is lighter and less launch hungry. That comes at an engineering cost of having to use more specialized vehicles. And they are using LH2 fuel - which delivers more of a punch per weight, but is even harder to stay on top of than CH4. More engineering effort would be required to store and transfer that in orbit, dealing with boil-off and all - but Blue Origin has used liquid hydrogen extensively already, so they have experience with it.
The SpaceX approach requires a lot of launches, but they're already proven experts at that. They've launched something like 130 rockets this year alone. That's one every couple of days.
High launch cadence is not complexity for SpaceX. It's normal for them. After the first half dozen or so refuels, it will be second nature, just like delivering satellites with Falcon is.
And they are, in essence, developing a single craft for it, just with a few variations.
Blue's architecture requires three distinct vehicles. Each one has to be developed separately. Then we get to the launch; last I saw, here is the comparison:
SpaceX:
* Launch the Depot
* Launch N tankers to fill the depot (this is the tedium I mentioned).
* Launch the HLS to LEO
* Refill the HLS in LEO
* Send the HLS to NRHO
* Rendevous with Orion in NRHO and transfer people
* Land on and then return from the moon
* Rendevous with Orion in NRHO and transfer people back.
That's a fairly complex architecture, but let's compare that against the last I saw of Blue's [1]:
* Launch the Transporter to LEO
* Launch tankers and refill the Transporter
* Launch the Lander to LEO "dry"
* Fill the Lander from the Transporter
* Send Lander to NRHO
* Launch tankers and refill the Transporter
* Raise Transporter to "stairstep" orbit
* Launch tankers and refill the Transporter again
* Send the Transporter to NRHO
* Refill the Lander again in NRHO
* Rendezvous with Orion and transfer people
* Land on moon and return with people
* Rendezvous with Orion and transfer people back
That is far more complex than what SpaceX is proposing.
The number of tanker launches is really quite irrelevant for both in this context. It's less risky for SpaceX due to their extensive ops experience, but both will be fine there I think. That's just tedium for both of them.
The complexity comes in with the number of operations and precisely where BO is doing the refueling. I'm not terribly worried about the LEO ops; they'll manage those. The NRHO refuelling though? That one strikes me much riskier if only due to comms lag.
And the sheer number of steps in Blue's architecture seems crazy to me.
So no, I can't agree that Blue's architecture is in any way simpler. Quite the opposite, in fact.
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20250008728/downloads/25... :: the last slide in the set.
(edit: formatting)
GIF reply "why are you gae" (this was his actual response btw)
Doubt
I don't think it's going to take them a decade, but they probably won't be ready within Trump's term, and I think that's the real reason for this latest push.
edit: the vindictive behavior of the current crop of politicians is just cutting off your nose to spite your face. All of it is going to come right back around when the parties swap places.
It's the most novel and riskiest. I wouldn't say it's hardest. That's launch, reëntry and reüse. They've substantially de-risked those components with IFT-11.
I'd put IFT-12 validating Block 3 as the actual hardest launch next year. If that goes smoothly, I'm betting they make orbit and propellant transfer before the end of the year. And if that happens, I'm betting they get at least one rocket off to Mars before year end.
That's what Musk wants you to believe.
In reality, reusability was the Achilles heel of the space shuttle, due to the thermal insulator tiles that could be easily damaged during reentry, so they had to be rechecked rigorously before the next flight, and the damaged tiles replaced. We haven't seen any of that - so far only the booster was reused, somewhat, as in 2 were reused, with one failure and one success, but only much later.
And then there is the orbital refueling, but that is so far in the future that it's not even worth discussing.
They had to take a lot of the back end of the shuttle apart after every landing, which was cumbersome because things weren't packed right for that. Also, they used hydrazine for the (many!) smaller rocket engines and that requires special protective suits and breathing equipment.
Starship doesn't use hydrazine and the big engines are pretty fast to remove/mount. We've seen them do that many times now.
Shuttle tiles were tested by having somebody going around and pinging them all with a special mallet and using a cart with a special computer that checked if they made the right sound.
Starship tiles can be inspected remotely and quickly with a camera.
Replacing a shuttle tile wasn't easy. Replacing a Starship tile is fairly easy. They have done it many, many times already. The question isn't whether they can do it fast (they can) or easily (they can) or whether they can detect bad tiles (they can). It's not even whether they can tolerate a few missing or defective tiles (they can). The only question there is whether enough fail so that the replacement time cuts too much into the recycling time budget for when they want to launch Starships really fast. We don't know that yet. They won't be needing really fast turnarounds for some time so there's plenty of opportunity to fix any issues with tile design/placement and with the underlying thermal blankets.
Don't argue by analogies. Especially not bad ones.
In comparison Starship is covered by mostly identical tiles attached to hull welded from milimeters thick (internet data indicates something between 4 and 2 mm thick & often multiplied in important places) steel plate.
The steel hull has demonstrated surviving missing tiles just fine - and during earlier flight even multiple burn throughs on the flaps with bits falling off and even back then Starship completed simulated landing to the ocean (including the flip manuever and landing burn!).
So even if SpaceX does not perfect rapid reusability of Starship immediately, they would still have hands down the best orbital launcher in the world, with the option of populating new Starship hulls with reused engines, acuators and avionics for the time being.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_thermal_protecti...
The first prototype of Starship only did its first hop in July 2019, so 6 years ago. The first flight integrated test only happened 2,5 years ago.
Nowadays they can return to Earth already and catch the booster. Why would you expect the rest of the development to drag until 2041?
Remember, they said that they'd have a rapidly reusable launch system going by March 2013. In 2011, Musk said that he'd be sending humans to Mars sometime between 2021 and 2031, but it doesn't look like they're anywhere near being able to do that yet.
Also remember that they started working on all of this in 2008.
I mean, I could be wrong! But I don't think I am.
They have blown a lot of deadlines, but they also produced a very reliable and relatively cheap launcher which now underpins the majority of human space activity, which we should, in fairness, consider a huge achievement.
And the Raptor engines look really good so far. Reliable engines are a huge must in space industry.
I don't think they are getting stymied by reentry problems forever. Already the latest IFT looked a lot better than the first one.
That saying is in no way at odds with my assertion.
Nevertheless, if we come back to the original assertion, I have one more argument against it.
If you look at Starbase, it has grown absolutely huge. It started off as a small group of tents and now it is a massive industrial area, plus SpaceX is expanding their presence at Cap Canaveral as well.
Which means that they have a strong incentive to turn Starship into something that makes money and can finance those structures. No one can subsidize such large scale efforts indefinitely, not even Musk. You can spend a lot of time at a drawing board, but once you cross into the industrial buildup phase, your expenses skyrocket (pun intended) and the schedule becomes tighter.
So they either deliver, or shut the shop within much less than a decade.
I mean don't get me wrong, it's exciting and I'm grateful to be alive for these developments along with all access insight in the process and high definition video of the tests and I really hope they make it. But it won't be fast or cheap.
Something can be copied from Dragon, but not all of those.
Yes, about 4,000 metric tons. My IP packets are traveling through part of it now.
Yes, they had expected to do more, sooner. So say that. What you’ve written here is nonsense.
Starship is trying to do more than anyone ever has. If all (ALL!) they’d wanted to do was build a giant rocket with a reusable booster and an expendable second stage, they’d already be done.
Apparently NASA is starting to have the same suspicions.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a32451633/china-long-...
That's 20 tons of mostly aluminium - 100+ ton stainless steel Starship would be potentially much more dangerous, so it is good SpaceX cares. :)
1. USA is no longer sponsoring groundbreaking research 2. USA had already begun outsourcing research to companies that are not grounded in long term employment of researchers.
This is mostly about the new human-rated lander, which is an engineering problem. Notably, the US never had a reasonably safe spaceship, although Dragon may yet prove good. Both Apollos and Space Shuttles, developed under NASA, were pretty dangerous to their crews.
You’re absolutely right. Astronauts sign a last will and testament before every flight. We think it’s routine because we’ve nailed down orbital science but in reality, we lack the quality assurance that space flight demands. It’s one thing to send up robots and satellites, it’s another to send up humans. The ISS is crawling with bacteria. We lack the physical protection for long space travel for a mars mission much less visiting anything past the Kuiper belt.
They suffocated/burned to death during a routine test, with Apollo 1 cabine being still firmly attached to Earth.
So is your skin. Everything related to Earth is crawling with bacteria. The concentration and species of bacteria on the ISS are what is relevant.
I think the real issue is that it's just still very, very hard. Margins are extremely thin. Airliners are extremely safe despite existing in a realm that's inherently dangerous because they spend margin on safety. You could make an airliner that's way lighter than what's currently flying if you didn't care about making it robust against, say, hitting a weather balloon. But the ability is there to protect against adverse events like that.
Spacecraft have almost no margin. The distance between normal operation and having a bad day is really small because getting people into orbit at all is still just about at the limits of available technology.
I do think there are some novel challenges left for the Artemis project however that do require a lot of research and development before they are put before the boring engineering happens.
Whereas all the competition has to use their own R&D budget to show capability to meet the requirements of the second contract, the winner of the first contract used the government's R&D money to be competitive.
Any company can do that to another company.
Welcome to Capitalism. Just because it is a government contract doesn't by default mean it is Socialism.
And, of course they can re-bid. Just like every other corporation does.
No I'm just assuming SpaceX will win the recompetition and complaining about that future event.
And no, it doesn't need to be an "of course they can" inevitability. The rules of competition define what can and can't happen. If the rules of this competition allow a rebid, then that is a conscious decision. Rules / laws could be changed to disallow rebidding on follow-on contracts if there was a failure to deliver on the first one.
SpaceX has consistently been on the wrong end of what you write about, with ULA/Boeing/whatever pulling that kind of stunt again and again. Just look at the SLS budget.
I don't hate the player, I hate the game.
Think of it as a vote of no confidence. The incumbent has the advantage. But if they've squandered their advantage so thoroughly that a new entrant can match their capabilities, this is an opportunity to switch horses.
NASA should have done this, for example, when Bechtel began shitting the bed with ML2 [1].
[1] https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-016.pd...
Still marking his words on self-driving vehicles so I guess we can add this to the list. What’s the casualty count so far on that one btw?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
Elon Musk sometimes say things that are true.
Elon Must sometimes say things that are not true.
In this case, it's the first one.
Has this ever happened in the last 10 years?
Yes his vision and direction matters. But let’s not act like the dude did that himself. Especially while he was so distracted having his nose up Trump’s proverbial rear.
I've got a HW4 Tesla Model 3 right now and the FSD experience is so good I use it constantly...and I was one of those "I will never trust self driving cars" people for years.
> you need to keep two things in your mind at the same time
This was unnecessary and patronizing.
TBH, with this administration, I wouldn't trust whatever either NASA or SpaceX say or do as a sign of anything.
Starship is not a drop-in replacement for SLS. But it sure casts a long shadow on the entire SLS project.
Difficult to say relative to current Artemis timelines, which have to date been mainly delayed by Orion. They're currently looking on schedule to perform an orbital propellant transfer in 2026. That likely means a commercial launch before the end of next year, which is crazy.
How that relates to HLS is up in the air, and probably will be until the end of next year.
Of course that was always wishful thinking. I'm sure SpaceX has their "real" schedule somewhere, and maybe NASA has one too (at least from what I've heard, it is likely they have an unofficial idea of it somewhere).
Now do Orion and ML2.
Artemis is behind schedule. Nobody debates that. Currently, the bottleneck is with Orion. SpaceX just massively de-risked the Starship platform with IFT-11. If IFT-12 validates Block 3, we should wait until the end of 2026 before trying to revëvaluate.
It's not difficult to say. They are behind schedule and everyone, not just Duffy, is talking about it and have been for awhile.
I don't care - beyond how getting to the moon will help future space exploration - and risk is high when developing new tech, but I also don't care about SpaceX. It's very possible Starship won't work out; that's risk and I'm sure SpaceX and NASA people understand that. Why must people on HN defend SpaceX at every turn, like a PR agency. Does anyone point out a genuine, significant, negative about Starship? Why might it not work? What are the risks?
I think more competition is great and hope they reopen the contract. Private industry competing on what is now prosaic space technology, such as orbit and even the moon, is great. Let NASA do the cutting edge stuff like flying to Europa or looking back to the beginning of time or investigating climate change. (Notice that private industry still can't land on the moon reliably - 56 years after NASA demonstrated it.)
Starship is trying to do the hardest thing in the history of space flight. And of course its not on schedule, its schedule was always insane.
The way of approching things as 'is X on schedule' is a fundamentally false way of approching the problem. The question is who makes the schedules and why. Who decides the budget and why. Who planes for the architecture and why.
Just thrwing around and accusing different groups about who is 'delayed' is kind of counter-productive.
The fact is, the schedule is something Trump made up to sound cool in his first term, and has since been revised for multible reasons. And the demand for a lander was equally rushed. So the schedule is mostly just whatever politics at the moment wants to project.
Ah, but SLS were the right kind of people. Allegedly. /s
SpaceX, less so. Allegedly.
Doesn't that attitude, in reverse, describe most HN commenters every time SpaceX or SLS is mentioned?
Building new things is genuinely hard.
But I have seen some serious, albeit delayed, successes.
Humans are relentlessly overoptimistic in their planning, and that's likely because if we weren't we often wouldn't even start... plus, the future is really, really hard to predict.
Maybe also seriously threaten Boeing with cancelations and restrictions for their constant failures and corruption. We've had the espionage scandal that forced the formation of ULA, SLS's extreme delays and overruns, supressing Vulcan's capabilities to prevent it from impinging on SLS's blank check, Starliner's inability to deliver (and at this point it seems unlikely the station will be around long enough for their 6 flights), and the scandal that caused their disqualification from the original HLS bid.
Starship is being painted as the sole blocker in Artemis, but I can't think of any component of Artemis that has any contractors delivering competently and on-time.
We still haven't heard anything about the status of the EVA suits, which the US has an even worse track record on than rockets. My understanding is that they haven't been able to build and bring a new suit into use, for 25+ years now, and not due to a lack of spending.
Getting everyone involved in Artemis to deliver on time, let alone on budget, would require nothing short of divine intervention.
Keeping multiple companies capable of building it alive is essential.
I'm pretty sure this is what's been happening with Blue Origin: in 25 years they've delivered close to nothing, but they keep getting contracts because "we need a SpaceX alternative". What is that if not extortion.
(EDIT: the sibling comment correctly points out that Boeing is an even more obvious case. Starliner is a money pit, but we have to keep throwing more money down it so that there's no single supplier)
Words have meaning.
IIRC they managed to extort additional money out of NASA for Starliner too (despite it being fixed price), for that exact reason.
SpaceX hasn't fallen to such tactics yet, but, agreed, it'll be too late to start on setting up competitors when SpaceX eventually does fall to that level (Boeing wasn't always so bad after all).
I'm not seeing what makes SpaceX government funded beyond just that it provides services to the government? The same as any other launch provider would be doing? At this point the vast majority of SpaceX's activity, and likely cashflow, is from its mostly self-funded Starlink.
SpaceX won the original HLS contract because their design actually had hardware in testing, actually met NASA's payload, landing area and testing requirements, had a clear path to commercialization and was willing to cover most of the cost themselves, as otherwise NASA wouldn't have been able to choose anyone given the limited funding allocated by Congress.
Columbus claimed it was radically smaller in diameter than previous calculations, and was begging for funding to go around the other side of the world to get a good trade route to India and China for trade goods. He was following some bad math, and adding his own worse math to the mix.
People were sure he was going to die, because they did not bring enough provisions to actually go around the world.
It also feels quite off to reduce all of human curiosity to a means of getting one over on someone.
2. The masses need circuses. As for bread, Marie Antoinette's press secretary said it best.
3. Trump thinks he'll corner the market on cheese.
And even then, you have to get whatever you want to launch to the moon in the first place...
It would be really nice to do much more biology research under no and low gravity conditions, of course, but not at those prices.
Dreams aside, this story is court politics: "Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who is NASA’s acting administrator, has told people that he wants to lead the space agency" [2]. "So does Jared Isaacman—the billionaire entrepreneur who was the nominee earlier this year before President Trump withdrew his support."
With "both men...jockeying to lead NASA," and, just "this past weekend, advisers and lawmakers representing Duffy and Isaacman [having] called contacts in the Trump administration—including the president himself," this announcement is politics through PR.
Duffy may threatening Elon to have his man back down. He may be going scorched Earth, signalling to Trump that Musk's decision making isn't to be trusted.
[1] https://opsjournal.org/DocumentLibrary/Uploads/The_Lunar_Spa... 2017; 2bn US2017 ~ 2.6bn US2025
[2] https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-nasa-administrator...
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.
You don't see the relevance of Artemis III launching in mid-2027 [1] or 2028 versus, say, after November 2028?
There are enough contractors involved and enough delay potential on the table that getting all the ducks in the row in time for the 2027 date would require nothing short of divine intervention.
Or a fuckton of money for an administration priority.
> outside maybe PR and politics
It's still a bad idea, objectively.
Assuming SpaceX can deliver it. They've failed to do a successful test flight with even a fraction of the officially planned capacity. Who knows how long it will take them, if they can even pull it off, to deliver it.
Some conclusions / opinions: Starship so far is relatively cheap compared to the previous program that took Americans to the moon. Developing a moon capable rocket takes a long time, especially if they don't just copy the existing designs from 60 years ago. And a single purpose rocket will long-term be more expensive than a more generalised / reusable platform, but that's more capitalist objectives than political (e.g. beating the commies).
[0] https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/nasa-ig-artemis-will-cost...
SpaceX's, on the other hand, has been.
But let's pretend for a minute that you're right and all Elon Musk does is hire great people that then do all the work building the company for him and keep him at arms length doing nothing. The skill to hire like that alone still puts him in the top 0.01% of CEOs.
SpaceX may not be stellar, but it is definitely out of this world ;)
Elon Musk is just a guy, a key figure for SpaceX, but there are 10000+ other people, including Gwynne Shotwell who most people say is really in charge. In fact, I am not sure if Elon Musk does any actual work at SpaceX and Tesla now.
That alone overshadows everything NASA has done since the moon landing.
This work could revolutionise America's manufacturing/industrial base, if there was someone around who could direct the ship in that direction.
I could imagine, given a bit of funding bump, the van-lifers and the earthship folks could find themselves with a life-support-system revolution to participate in .. especially if it were oriented not just towards starship interiors, but life-on-the-streets/in-the-woods/on-mars solutions .. the good ol' USA has tons of test monkeys for that scenario.
A lot of institutional knowledge is locked behind corporate walls. We can assume a crew cabin will be partly designed by engineers poached from other companies who can leak some of the institutional knowledge. That said, some of the crew cabin will be designed whole-cloth. At some point SpaceX will need to build it's own knowledge base. I would be curious to see how other components were built, i.e. the parachutes. A parachute has a lot of built-in institutional knowledge, and I'd be curious to see behind the curtains where SpaceX got that knowledge. You can't exactly check out a library book.
The concept of boutique engineering shops tackling chunks of the design is an interesting premise. But I don't see how the financials work. The more realistic scenario is that SpaceX will build it's own machine shops under it's umbrella.
Winnebago is churning out Ekko campervans at $250,000 and somebody is buying those. But you look at the quality of the interior, it's same as everyone else, lots of particle board. The point is, the most expensive campervans built by the corporate world are using cheap throwaway materials, not space age innovation. I shudder to think of the cost of what a space age campervan costs.
The Apollo program was at the unique juncture in history where distributed companies with institutional knowledge were rapidly maturing their products concurrently with NASA's demand. In today's world, you will not see the same number of companies spooling up assembly lines without massive costs.
It's true, but I think this subject will scale throughout the entire survival category.
Cheap throwaway materials is one thing .. in situ 3D replication, another thing entirely.
The cottage industries can do a lot of the innovation. I think the sailboat/winnebago/portable-living engineering is going to come to a head, eventually .. and we will see new technologies, perhaps, springing up around the subject of human/biosphere construction.
If you're suggesting that we won't have winnebago's on Mars, I don't wanna go there.
Now that this has happened, expect a future democrat administration to have its revenge on human spaceflight centers in red states. Given the rot that has set in under that politically protected status, I can't see this as a bad thing.
Make Puerto Rico a state and move Cape Canaveral there.
Most were expected, when pushing the rocket to its limits to see where it would fail.
> the company achieved two sub-orbital missions for its monster rocket - impressive, but still more than 200,000 miles (322,000 km) from the Moon.
The test flights are suborbital due to FAA licensing requirements until they are ready to test returning to the launch tower. The role of Starship lander version in Artemis is not to directly launch to the Moon, but act as a shuttle between an orbiting vessel around the Moon and the surface of the Moon. So the comparison in miles is non-sensical.
> Acting Administrator Sean Duffy said the company was "behind schedule"
SpaceX is planning to test orbital refueling in 2026. It was originally scheduled for late summer of 2025, so not late with more than a couple of months. It is certainly not the slowest cog in the system. Now, it is scheduled for 2027, and SpaceX will likely test in H1 of 2026.
> Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, fired back: "SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry. Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words."
SpaceX can completely drop out of the Artemis program and still bring astronauts to the moon earlier than Artemis.
---
There are also delays with Boeing, Axiom, Lockheed Martin (and Blue Origin although for a different mission).
That's wildly optimistic. Falcon 9 launches operationally 100+ a year and single boosters with 20+ uses. Even if in the next 2 years, China has some kind of first stage that lands, its in no way 'like Falcon 9'.
So lets not be unreasonably optimistic just because its China. China isn't magic and they wont have such a rocket no matter if they invest in it or not.
> But someone in the USA? People are delusional.
BlueOrigin is much closer then anybody in China. They have actually attempted launching a large rocket, China has not. And BlueOrigin has made its own advacned reusable engine and flown them to Orbit, argaubly China has not done that.
Is this a "SpaceX spread itself too thin and wasn't able to keep its own pre-agreed deadlines" situation or a "The government-specified contract was unrealistically aggressive / so vaguely-specified that it could not be realized within its original timetable" situation?
Basically, originally Starship has entered development for SpaceX had nothing todo with any of this. SpaceX started to spend on Starship for their own reasons.
Then in Trump 1, he simply inveded a super agressive 'get to the moon' goal. 'Moon 2024'. This was mostly a fantasy goal but it sounded good politically. NASA for various reasons, had aboslutly no money to fund a moon lander. But if the president asked, they have to do it. So they threw out very opened ended ask for a moon lander, and a single moon landing.
There wasn't the kind of question asked like, what kind of system should we use for moon exploration in the next 2 decades. Or anything like that. It was more like 'how can we land on the moon once in 2024 and then we do new contracts after that'.
SpaceX, naturally justed adopted their existing Starship platform. But to make that work, they would need to figure out many things beyond just a 'lander'. And SpaceX bid was wildly to ambitious. It in many cases provided far, far more then NASA asked for. But NASA doesn't care about the capability, only if the bid can do the minium they asked for.
SpaceX won because they were willing to pay for almost all of it themselves, only asking for 2.3 billion $. And that included a test moon landing before the real one.
This is of course only a fraction of the cost for the whole Starship program.
So Space didn't spread themselves to thin, they are all in on Starship, but the simple reality is, its an incredibly difficult wide reaching program. And the moon lander part is just a little add on to that larger project. And that's the only reason 2.3 billion $ would be acceptable to SpaceX.
The simple reality is, nobody on the planet knows how to do a moon lander for 2.3 billion $, literally nobody.
So the time table way always fantasy and literally everybody knew that as soon as it was announced. Nobody was to public about it because offending Trump is bad, so lets all just collectivly pretend its real.
The government contract was unfocused and short term focused, without a larger strategy for moon exploration.
The real issue however isn't with this one contract, but the how the whole NASA Human Spaceflight program is organized.
1. Back a low risk moon mission that is basically a repeat of Apollo using proven, but extremely expensive tech that has a very low probability of failure.
2. Back a high risk strategy that relies on the development of new technology that can potentially deliver hundreds of tons of cargo to the lunar surface for a fraction of the cost of Apollo and support a sustained human presence on the lunar surface. This of course comes with a near 100% chance of significant delays and cost overruns, and also a high probability of total failure.
IMO NASA made the obviously correct choice here and it's not close. This is exactly the kind of thing that I want my tax money spent on.
Artemis from the beginning was just politics. And it wasn't driven by how to best do things, or any kind of coherent strategy. Its basically was a compromise, that had one of its pillars, that SLS and Orion need to continue to be used. Those two project have spend decades getting untold amounts of money. And even after all that money, their development isn't finished and they would need more money.
Then with the very, very little money left over, NASA tried to precure a moon lander. It was basically no money at all.
SpaceX won this competition, because SpaceX was willing to do things for an absurdly cheap price. Mostly because they are already investming themselves into the project. And their own investment was significantly larger then what NASA paid them.
Only after BlueOrigin lost, did they start a massive lobby campaign to figure out how to get more money out of congress so they could fund another lander.
But both landers, SpaceX and BlueOrigin, do not receive enough money to cover their cost. Not even close. So basically the US is relaying on massive companies in SpaceX case, and simply the private money of Bezos in BlueOrigins case to sponsor a moon program for them. Because all NASA money is going into legacy contracts that have very bad return on invesmtent.
The political move to now blame SpaceX for being late is just an excuse so that the overall project doesn't have to be reevaluated. The reality is, SpaceX is likely not the only reason for a delay. The suits are unlikley to be ready anyway. And even if Artemis III goes off, the SLS Block 2 is behind as well and will cost many additional billions.
And threating SpaceX with paying some legacy company to do a cost-plus lander isn't going to do anything, its just a fantasy thread, or at best the deamnd by some in congress to push even more money into legacy companies. Its not going to fix Artemis III or anything. Its funny how delays in cost-plus contract always lead to simply more money and more political support. Almost as if there was some other motives behind the decition when delays are unacceptable and when they are.
The reality of all of this is that NASA is completely mismanaged and fundamentally set up incorrectly. And just making big political waves on blaming whoever is politically out of favor will never actually work. The only reason SpaceX and the New Space economy exist is because clever teams inside of NASA and in Obamas team managed to sneak a few good programs, Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew past congress. Without those people, the US would already be far behind in terms of space.
The question the US (Congress/NASA) should be asking is not 'how can we get Artemis III' but rather 'what kind of Space program do we want over the next 30 years'. The US has an incredible space industry, and more private investment then everybody combinaed. There is no question that the US and NASA could be far, far beyond everbody else, and achieve amazing thigns, but Congress and NASA fundamentally misguided approch is holding it back.
So please, stop talking about Artemis III and start asking some more fundmanetal questions.
I think the big question is "What is it going to do to the global standing of the United States (let alone domestic politics) when China repeatedly lands people on the moon and we can't."
A full-flow staged combustion engine, which proven works (yay) most of the time (not yay). If you follow the Starship launches, look at the random engines that go out on the Super Heavy every time it launches. The engines going out during ascent aren't planned outages.
A rapidly re-usable second stage. This is by far the most challenging part of the program. It turns out, returning things from space is mad difficult. And while I think it's great that we are investigating ways to make this happen, I'm a bit bearish on whether Starship itself will be the vehicle and team that ultimately figures this out. However, at the very least, there's a ton of science being done here that will ultimately help making this a reality.
Starship isn't returning in any meaningfully reusable form just yet. And while they've figured out how to get the thing up suborbital, there's yet no guarantee on the survivability of the vehicle itself. I am for sure certain that Elon is very likely unhappy with having to use heat shield tiles because they are not reusable. We don't yet know the stresses on the vehicle itself when returning from space and just how reusable the second stage actually is. Nor, for that matter, just how usable the second stage is.
Do I think they'll figure out how to get it to orbit? Of course. Do I think they'll figure out how to make it rapidly reusable? I'm not sure. And we won't yet know for a couple of years.
Getting a payload to LEO as far as rocket launches are concerned is "easy" relative to the loftier goals of the Moon, and by much further extension, Mars. The Moon is significantly harder to pull off and that's why the Saturn V was a 3-stage rocket.
In order to make all of this worth it, Starship and Super Heavy must be rapidly reusable--with a turnaround measured in hours/days, not weeks and months. And I'm just not sure it's there yet. Which really sucks, because getting mass to orbit is critically important for us to dominate our solar system.
I think the research is important, personally. And I'm glad we're investing at least some money into these projects. But there's no way Starship and Super Heavy meet the timelines allocated. But I'm wishing the best for the team to figure out something. And if not them, then some future generation that piggybacks off of the work they did to do it better.
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.)
If the planets are aligned the Delta-V is not that different between the two (Mars is about twice as much Delta-V for 100x the distance). You can use aerobraking in the Mars atmosphere but can do no such thing on the Moon. And then the last problem is that on the Moon you need to budget for a round trip, but on Mars we could produce fuel on the surface for the return trip. When you start thinking about all that it's obvious that Mars makes more sense.
A permanent Moon base would allow research opportunities that private LEO stations can't: ISRU, low gravity research, the far side of the Moon offers unique opportunities for astronomy (any spectrum), etc. pp. Long term, who knows what additional opportunities it opens up.
For landing hovever it makes things signifficantly easier! You can break full arrival speed from lunar or interplanetary space (successfully done by Apollo missions) with a relatively light passive heatshield & land on parachutes. You can even brek to orbit instead or use the atmosphere to change incliunation of your orbit and other tricks (there are proposals for air breathing ion engines, etc.).
Lack of sufficient atmosphere is what makes landing on Mercury (no atmosphere, need to break to zero using rcoket thrust) and Mars (enough atmosphere to break from arrival speed, not enough to use parashutes or gliders for a soft landing) so difficult .
Falcon Heavy seems to have that capability though. I suspect that Starship will have similar cost to Falcon Heavy when they get done with it. Maybe marginally cheaper. The re-entry problem is really throwing a wrench into things.
Also, as far as I can tell from their last test video, they are still shredding their Flaperons at the joint.
Even if by some miracle Starship carries people to Mars, there won't be anything for them to do there. They'll be stuck in their Starship and that would be the end of that mission, since there isn't even a plan to return.
- 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 as someone who really tries to have a balanced opinion on Elon and the topic as a whole, including recognition of all of Elon's flaws.
The military-media-industrial complex can be out to get Elon and spending a lot of money to turn the public against him AND he can have a lot of flaws AND he can be not as bad as everyone thinks because of said media influence.
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)
I wonder why this happened. Hopefully not to satisfy the ego of the POTUS.
That kind of rush leads to disaster
Four years may sound insane to you, but they did in 8 during a time they were still using slide rules and the integrated circuit didn't even exist for 80% of the duration.
To me it's more insane that anyone is putting priority into more manned missions when you can launch at least 10x unmanned for the same cost. Scientifically speaking, I'm not sure what exists to be gained by a human on another planet versus a rover. A manned colony sounds cool but that's about the extent of its usefulness.
That probably does require some imagination. Starting with any incentive to do so.
Allegedly, SpaceX only exists because some Russian engineer spit on him during tense price negotiations back in 2002.
His purchase of Twitter wasn't cheap either.
And Musk got the best revenge evar!
“Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.”
To address your question, what is the incentive for going to Mars
My comment wasn’t putting any faith in the suggestion spacex will, merely saying Elon thinks they will.
Here's a list; https://elonmusk.today/
by 2017!
To occupy it. Just look at Musk's t-shirt. Isn't the entire point of SpaceX to go to Mars? Everything else they do is just steps in achieving the occupation of Mars.
What? No, it is to concentrate public wealth into the hands of one man.
Most CEOs presumably do want their companies to succeed and do good things in the abstract, but a lot of them would happily have them fail if it made them a huge pile of cash.
To be honest I don’t understand this argument of “no one can’t spend billions in a lifetime so no one should have billions at all”. Why do we set a limit on billions? Why do we use the idea of “can’t spend in a lifetime”?
There's a website dedicated to the empty promises Elon has made. Can't find it though, anyone remember?
Edit: https://elonmusk.today/
Look at that, Morocco beats NASA to the moon!
https://deepnewz.com/company-earnings/spacex-2025-revenue-to...
The primary, chartered, goal of NASA is to create a commercial space industry. Ignoring this is a sign of extreme immaturity.
We were last on the moon in 1972. We haven't been back since. That's nothing even remotely like "vanity." I think there's a vanity involved in making this type of comment.
> and congressional pork
If the public wants it then it's not pork.
> more than scientific needs.
"Scientific needs" is not a well defined category. Those who proclaim to represent it while expecting it to hold a higher value than the will of the voters are misanthropic bullies.
Much better for making your friends rich.
The tiny Electron is entirely carbon, isn't it?
Their new Neutron has a fully reusable first stage, also out of carbon fiber. For Neutron, they have the largest automated fiber placement machine known to exist:
Yea but isn‘t that the point of the Starship? It has a bunch of unusual design choices regarding reusability and payload capacity, and then the rest of the owl is drawn around them.
I‘m not a rocket-scientist but I would hazard a guess they picked the best material given the options, right?
A scary way to set a schedule on a complex project with lives at stake. They don't care though.
I think the US is lacking the organization, culture, and on-a-mission mentality today, not money. I believe the money is the easiest part of the equation, the rest can't be faked or supplied at the click of a button. The US is no longer a serious nation hell-bent on accomplishing great/difficult things. Congress knows if they supply the $30 billion per year, what we'll get in the end is a broken program that won't achieve the set aims, and it'll just take 15 years at $40 billion per year instead, without a single Moon landing. They know full well how dysfunctional the US is, everybody is just acting when the cameras are on.
The risk of people dying is sometimes an acceptable risk. We accept it every time a firefighter goes into a burning building. Is a national vanity project like Moon missions worth the risk? Maybe then, when it was novel and inspirational, but now, when it's a retro throwback and the only reason we're doing it is to avoid losing face to the communist Chinese?
Totally unlike the first time.
We let people do stupid shit and kill themselves all the time. Driving 80+ MPH, driving motorcycles, recreational drugs, alcohol, climbing Everest, etc.
I think it's fine. If I were in the position, I'd sign up to do this.
The moon is meaningful.
What part of the comment you're replying to lead you to believe that the person you're replying to does not understand the value of deadlines?
This is just the same deadline being pushed another year because of failures. Deadlines that get constantly pushed aren't deadlines at all.
As I recall, SpaceX and Artemis project was supposed to be Moon by 2024. At least originally. But then SpaceX blew up all the rockets (successfully testing them or something) and now we've wasted damn near a decade.
Yeah, we've been there already, but it's been many decades and we haven't exactly kept all the tech and procedures up to date in the intervening years. And that first go-round itself missed it's intended deadline by about 7-8 years.
I fear it's going to happen again; Orion isn't safe and hasn't been successfully tested. The heat shield started to disintegrate the last time they tested it and instead of testing it again with their changes they're going to put people in it next time.
Today (AFAIK) 2028 is considered quite aggressive, mostly due to the lack of progress on Starship, and the facts driving that conclusion are not any more amenable to change via political pressure than they were last time.
Bean counters make excuses. Put the right people in the right places and shit gets done.
Funding makes it happen. Fund it, it will happen. Don't fund it, it won't happen. American space exploration has been chronically underfunded relative to its ambitions, which is why all we have to show for our manned exploration programs since STS (edit: or including it, if you like!) is a string of broken promises. I am hopeful that Artemis will get there, but I am simply telling you the shape of reality as it currently exists—a shape that doesn't care about your definition of "reasonable" in this context. I also don't think we will beat the Chinese unless something major changes.
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?
Which extended also how exactly those rockets were produced... and by whom.
EDIT: Yeah, I get it, the Zwangsarbeiter from the camps building the rockets are not very conductive to the carefully whitewashed "hero technocrat" image certain "hackers" just love to invest in. :T
He was a brilliant designer, engineer, and project leader but he is an extremely problematic person for the methods he was comfortable using to achieve his goals.
Von Brain used literal concentration camp slave labor. You should reconsider your use of “slave-driving” here because it is a very bad look.
He sleeps all night and he works all day.
⁽"ᵀʰᵉ ʰᶦᵍʰᵉˢᵗ ᵛᶦʳᵗᵘᵉ ᶦˢ ˡᵒʸᵃˡᵗʸ"⁾
Nominating a VP as President isn’t dynastic, it’s been common practice for centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vice_presidents_of_the...
Any number of emergent events may create an emergency preventing the congress from gathering. The congress are collaborators and the Supreme Court is compromised.
Yes, he's in such excellent health, I can definitely see him living (and non-comatose!) long enough for that.
My real question, if/when that happens, who is pulling the strings with the most sway?
Im not sure the current admin is prepared for the risk that entails, unlike the last time we did this:
https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events...
https://www.discovermagazine.com/if-the-apollo-11-astronauts...
I mean that's how we did it last time.
SpaceX: makes political contribution to executive branch
NASA: "SpaceX is back on the menu, boys!"
I would be an adult about it and respond reasonable, perhaps even ask NASA for help, publicly. I'm afraid Elon is about to give them the finger and drive around on the moon by himself, two fingers pointing at NASA head quarters. I would smile about that a bit, I admit.
It's a terrible idea to rely on this. Why would you want people to work this way when you can just have a regular-person financial transaction that aligns your interests?
I don't think Elon cares much about going to the moon. It would probably delay the Mars mission to devote resources to a moon mission.
I keep running across this perception and I don't understand where it comes from. Overwhelmingly, like since the 1970s, NASA has not built anything per it's appropriations from congress. Their job is to 1) Define mission requirements and objectives, 2) Oversee contracts to execute those missions, 3) Test and verify elements of those systems, and very distant 4) do some in-house research and development for cutting edge technology (still mostly contracted out). ~75% of their budget is contracts to private companies to execute missions.
NASA's job, as defined NASA directors over the years and by congress via appropriations, is to come up with ideas and fund private companies to execute them.
Shuttle's heatshield would've been much less dangerous if it wasn't facing a giant ice and insulation covered external tank (like, if it was mounted on top of a booster), but the Air Force's demand for crossrange forced giant wings, which forced the lower mounting position.
They could've iterated on heat shield designs, particularly with attachment mechanisms, but every mission had to carry people, so you couldn't risk it, and anyway, the industry culture was already set in the "even the simplest things must cost large amounts of money and time" stage.
One of the key points that I feel a lot of people miss is that Starship is pretty much the first program actually doing the flight testing needed to understand the engineering requirements for an efficient fully reusable heatshield. They don't have much prior art to look at for tile spacing, mounting mechanisms, metal tiles or transpiration cooling. The fundamental materials haven't changed a lot, but we can see over test flights that SpaceX are figuring things out.
In the early days they used to lose tiles all the time, even after just pressure testing IIRC. Nowadays they may barely lose any tiles on static fire tests. Similarly, tile loss on reentry has decreased greatly, and we've gone from seeing plasma leaving the fins barely attached, to the latest test, where the fins were pretty much fully intact.
NASA JPL built all the Mars rovers, and Mars Helicopter. JPL is operated by Caltech, but it is a NASA-branded laboratory that builds and operates planetary exploration robots itself.
This pedantry just to honor the amazing work these people have done.
Things were very awkward on the ISS a few Februaries ago.
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1lojll9/if_its_th...
1. Starship is still far from being production-ready, proven to be reliable and rated for human transport, a goal that will itself take many launches beyond being proven for delivering payloads to LEO and geosynchronous orbits (as well, I guess, deep space missions?);
2. The market for commercial Starship launches is far from proven and the risk of this is being ignored or downplayed by so many. Starship's biggest problem and competitor is... the Falcon 9, something the Falcon 9 never had to contend with. The market for even larger payloads seem to be limited. The evidence? There are over 100 Falcon 9 launches a year. There's about ~1 Falcon Heavy launch per year. And Falcon Heavy is pretty cost effective. The biggest customer seems to be the military who wants to get really large payloads to geosynchronous orbit. Now will Starlink bootstrap Starship demand in the same way that it did for Falcon 9 reusable boosters? Maybe. But it's not proven; and
3. Starship just doesn't make a great Moon lander. Why? You have to land this really tall vehicle in low gravity on unknown ground when it could possibly tip over in a way that Apollo landers never really could (because they were short, wide and significantly lighter). And then when you land? Your astronauts are ~40 meters off the ground. How are they getting back and forth?
Starship actually reminds me of the Steve Ballmer "Windows everywhere" era. Or the F35 jet-for-all-branches boondoggle. Ballmer wanted to run Windows on every device where Apple launched iOS alongside MacOS. Ballmer bought Sidekick, which was really successful at the time, and basically killed it by not innovating and trying to migrate it to Windows Mobile OS.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of simple minds." as the quote goes.
These projects end up being not very good at any application in an effort to be able to do too much. I'm starting to wonder if this is Starship's core problem.
What might save Starship is that BlueOrigin is absolutely nowhere, ULA is a joke, the Europeans are nowhere and SLS is a massive jobs program. I have more faith in China's space program than any of those.
If Musk was still in tight with Trump, and this potential booting was based on a strong, factual basis, would it still be in the works? Who knows!
spacex: at work
nasa: not at work
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 second flight test and certainly now. They could have built a “dumb” second stage at any time, but aren’t that short-sighted.
3. Blue Origin? I’ve had high hopes for the guys for two decades now. Don’t hold your breath.
4. Anyone else? Really, really don’t hold your breath.
This whole “race to the moon, part II” is almost criminally stupid. Land on the moon when we can accomplish something there, not just to prove we haven’t lost our mojo since Apollo.
Mars is out of reach and not feasible.
Mars is a total boondoggle - a colony would require constant supply runs from Earth to support a double-digit population - who is going to field the cost and what are they going to do there ?.
"The Martian" was work of fiction.
A lunar colony is cheaper and way more feasible.
If the point is a colony, then we should just do it on the moon. If the point is for the advances in technology it will bring, we don’t have to go to Mars to explore those things. We could just keep practicing on the moon.
Obviously it’s not exactly the same but idk, most of why I’d be interested in our going to mars can be answered with “it’s easier, more feasible, and generally just as useful to do it on the moon instead.” It’s still low gravity, no oxygen/breathable atmosphere, a hostile desert essentially, etc. but far closer. We can respond to emergencies more easily. We know for a fact we are currently capable of getting there and back safely.
TL;DR: we will likely get a lot more out of dumping our resources into trips to and from the moon and building something there than trying to go to mars for a very long time.
Funnelling a lot of government money into the pockets of the best candidate for the world's first trillionare.
the US may have gone to the Moon 50+ years ago but a lot has changed. There's no big enemy to rally behind as we manufactured in the Cold War. We don't have titans of industry anymore. We have titans of finance who coast on the inertia of early successes while raising prices, cutting costs and engaging in rent-seeking behavior.
There are serious design issues with Starship as a platform for going back to the Moon.
I'm not at all convinced the US can build anything anymore.
But it has! Look at all of our private industry! That's the point!
> We don't have titans of industry anymore.
What?!
Semiconductors? Nope.
High speed rail? Nope.
Auto industry? Nope.
Major infrastructure projects like bridges, tunnels, airports, etc? Nope.
Electronics (phones/laptops/etc)? Nope.
?????
The US is not exactly a manufacturing powerhouse.
At least for now.
Of course, but there a few things to consider.
1. This is a new race. The olympics happen every four years to see which nation is the current best. It seems it’s time to find out again.
2. The last time the US was dominant was 56 years ago. That’s three generations. Based on SLS and the comments here, it seems extremely unlikely the US is still dominant. Let’s find out.
Personally I hope no human lands on the moon again. I like telling my parents they are so old humans walked on the moon in their lifetime (last human left the moon December 1972 - before I was born). There is no value in this statement, but it is still fun.
Today’s America scores zero points for its accomplishments of the past. But I think one way it can be a good thing is the, “we’ve done it before, we can do it again” attitude. Which is somewhat opposite to “we already won!”
First he is now called Sean Dummy. “Should someone whose biggest claim to fame is climbing trees be running America’s space program?”
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They didn't handle the scale up in vehicle size well. They didn't have a guy who really understood electronics. I'd say those were the biggest problems. They did have an amazing metal worker (and I don't think they ever understood how important that was) and an amazing programmer.
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