Do you want to share some evidence that that has anything to do with the federal government's decision to choose Blue Origin? Or do you want to omit you're opining without any evidence?
It's risk mitigation. Elon Musk is an eccentric billionaire that gives no !@#$s. I'm not sure what evidence you need other than a million different headlines and his own Twitter account.
SpaceX is a here today gone tomorrow kind of company, because it does whatever Elon Musk wants it to do. You don't want space exploration for an entire country (and to some extent—at least currently—the entire world) to rest on the whims of one man.
The government often awards contracts to "backups". So NASA decided to sign a contract with a second eccentric billionaire. Lol. This is America.
I thought JB was pretty much a garden-variety billionaire. Is there something that sets him apart from the median billionaire? Or is it just his position at/near the tippy-top of the list (can't be bothered to check his position today) that makes him seem eccentric?
I don't think there's anything except speculation here on both sides.
People are speculating that the decision may have had something to do with Musk's behavior, without evidence (aside from the behavior they've seen from Musk- which may not have been taken into account).
People are speculating that the decision to choose Blue Origin may not have been based on Blue Origin's actual launch capabilities, without evidence (aside from the lack of launches so far- though they could have capabilities NASA knows about but the public does not).
SpaceX didn’t even bid for this because it’s explicitly for a SECOND lander provider, ie like commercial crew NASA wants two providers. So it has literally nothing to do with Musk running his mouth and those insisting it does clearly don’t know what they’re talking about.
Yes, while Bezos shakes the right hands, speaks the right words, nods to the right people to pull in $3.4 billion without needing a track record showing he'll actually deliver.
There has to be an optimum somewhere between the extremes as descried in "Atlas Shrugged" but this... this is not it.
I once heard a quote "Better to be possibly thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt", and man oh man, does that ever apply to Musk.
I once had a lot of respect for the dude, now I wonder who the actual competent players are at tesla and spacex who have actually got things done, because it's become pretty apparent the emperor has no clothes.
The old Shotwell is the reason for all the success anti-Musk line. Classic. Never gets old.
No matter that Shotwell or anybody else in the leadership of SpaceX would agree with this take.
And Shotwell overseeing the Starship program is just a dumb headline. What happened is that operation in Brownsville was simply integrated into the normal SpaceX structures rather then being a somewhat parallel operation. Shotwell was very involved before and after this administrative change. Neither means that much has changed in terms of how the program is lead technically.
It's important to note he was opening his mouth and making a fool of himself to those who knew what they were talking about well before Twitter. I don't understand why so many people ignored a plethora of bad takes that should have been clear.
I'm not the slightest bit interested in defending Musk, but I do want to point out the difference between technical competence and visionary leadership.
Good visionary leadership: 1. creates a big picture, 2. hires competent people to execute, and 3. then gets out of the way.
Musk largely succeeds on the first two, but waffles on the third. However, he creates enough fires to distract himself from interfering with all his companies all the time, so his failure on the third point is somewhat self-limiting.
Anybody that even remotely believes that Musk 'then gets out of the way' is just delusional. Literally any study of Musk would tell you the exact opposite is true.
He is well known to have 3-4h long discussions with engineering teams going into extreme detail (and doing so until into the night) and making choices and taking responsibility when they fail.
If anything is true about Musk then its that he is the opposite of 'getting out of the way'.
> so his failure on the third point is somewhat self-limiting.
Or what most people who study the subject actually believe, that him 'not getting out of the way' is actually why the companies are successful.
Bezos took the get out of the way approach and BO has spend like 10+ billion with no revenue and will never be profitable, while SpaceX is a highly successful company.
He's one of the few people actually pushing humanity forward in real tangible ways, and he's the bad man because he thinks independently and challenges the official narrative? Which itself is the one spreading the most dangerous conspiracy theories and disinformation all the time. Weapons of Mass Destruction, Russiagate, Hunter Biden's laptop, lab leak hypothesis is racist and so on. The people in charge lied about all of this and more to the American people and the entire world. Why are you defending them?
He points this out and stands up for free speech, which the marginalized need the most! It's the powerless who needs free speech and freedom broadly. Not the powerful.
Someone that uses his wealth to accelerate sustainable energy and reusable rockets and satellite internet for Ukraine and working almost every day instead of retiring and buying mansions for himself. He could do that and would get none of this hate. Unfucking believable. He has 0 mansions and 0 yachts and removing 0 freedoms and doesn't even hoard patents with Tesla and SpaceX. He praises other competing companies for moving to electric vehicles. But oh no, he's independent (who voted for Biden, fwiw) and challenges the official narrative and occasionally says and does dumb things. Spaceman bad.
As though the rest of us are all perfect and have made greater contributions to humanity and would have dedicated most of our time and resources into such projects after winning the Paypal stock lottery.
You're really going along with the corporate media and other powerful interests that he's the villain and not themselves who get us into devastating wars, are actively removing our freedoms and privacy, and managing our way into debt and collapse? Get real.
If you're going to cherrypick (and distort) some of the worst things people on one side have said, why not cherrypick his signal amplification of insane anti-reasoning and alt-right and fascist-adjacent bullshit?
Do you think that amplification is 'doing great things for the world'? Are these guys in desperate need of a platform? Why defend them?
Only in a framework of solipsism that, because it can't tell exactly where black turns to grey, declares with utter certainty that black and white[1] are the same thing.
The Daily Stormer founder's back on Twitter, and you're telling me that we can't call a spade a spade.
[1] Not that you seem to have any problems with telling black from white, given that you're happy to pooh-pooh particular political/cultural viewpoints as harmful, while splitting hairs and 'Is it really fascism?'-ing on this one.
> and he's the bad man because he disagrees with the official narrative? Which itself is the one spreading dangerous conspiracy theories and disinformation all the time
Oh, Elon is just telling us the truth that "the man" doesn't want us to know? Truths like: Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer by his gay lover? That the government is running a false flag on the latest mass shooter and his white supremacist viewpoints? That the guy leading the cave rescues in Thailand was a pedophile? And on. And on. And on.
I agree totally with you about the cave diver thing. And so does he. He said it was a huge mistake and he regrets it. Have we not all said things in the heat of the moment we regret?
The false claim about one of most powerful and privileged people (Pelosi) in the world was another mistake and something he quickly deleted. Oh no. Be sure to fall on your fainting couch. Elon gets false accusations like that sent his way every single day. But one sent briefly in the other direction is an unacceptable slight and worth endless hand wringing?
And please explain to us how any of those are remotely as consequential as examples like Weapons of Mass Destruction or Russiagate or stoking a race war for clicks.
Oh yes, Elon's furthering of humanity by "suggesting" Ukraine entirely surrender to Russia, let them keep everything they've seized violently, and just "carry on with their day".
Funnily enough, too, there are people who think that hey, maybe it's a better goal for humanity to y'know, fix the place we live, rather than vacuuming government billions to "colonize Mars". According to Musk he was intending to send a manned mission there next year and have established the first settlement by the end of the decade. Maybe that's what people mean when they talk about him being far more show than substance. (Also, to pre-empt the inevitable: this isn't to say "he hasn't achieved anything". Of course he has.)
Pilate in front of the crowd: “What’s worse, some guy who said ‘Love each other’ or Barabas who actually killed people?”
The crowd: “The guy who said ‘Love each other’”.
You’ll have to stand your ground in face of lions in arenas for a few more centuries to show humans who’s right, before they ditch their priests. If the priests say we should hate one or two guys because they are fascists and more dangerous than murderers, the crowd will.
SpaceX has more success in the space game? Blue Origin is pretty sad for the money they have. It's either a piss poor engineering org or primarily a toy for Bezos.
Their Artemis 3 proposal had a much lower price than the one by Blue Origin. SpaceX 2.8 billion, BO something like 8 billion if I remember correctly. SpaceX was also much more ambitious and forward looking, but I'm not sure whether NASA saw this as positive or negative.
Because their bid was better. But now BlueOrigin gets more money for a significantly worse bid.
The problem I am point out here is that NASA defines a narrow set of specification and don't value anything beyond those specifications.
NASA is not optimizing for the most useful money spend for the next 20 years. They define narrow specification for short term operations and only value that.
So now we have something that is incredibly revolutionary and could carry humanity all over the solar system getting less money then a hacked together solution from 3 contractors who have proven to perform extremely badly on such contracts getting more money.
It is only "painfully clear" to those who know nothing about it. Asking anyone who worked with him says otherwise. Examples include engineers like Tom Mueller and other early SpaceX people, astronauts like Garrett Reisman and many more. Or don't believe them, watch any in-depth technical interview with him. There's three-hour long videos on Raptor engines on YouTube where he speaks off-the-cuff on in-depth details about rocket engine design and hypersonic aerodynamics, among other things.
It's incredible to me that people try to insist (contrary to all evidence) that a serial entrepreneur who has become the richest man on the planet somehow lucked into his success and is really just a "showman."
Correct, but its part of a larger 'program' that NASA is conducting. And how and when how much of that money gets award to whom is very much to be questioned.
Not a bad way for NASA to generate revenue. License its brand to space manufacturers, who privately fund say, microgravity single-crystal silicon wafer fabs ;)
Also relevant and stated publicly by John, Blue Origin expects to cover more than 50% of the total cost.
To put this into perspective the DoD will happily invest north of $1 Trillion for a single fighter pilot development program (F-35) and I doubt Lockheed is willing to front any of that...
This is what happens when multiple influences combine to get the system completely off the rails. It is a worst-case, lowest common denominator perspective that would completely destroy society were it applied everywhere. There’s no reason to use it as a productive reference point.
I think your point is fair, but the point I'm making is that we should applaud when private industry is willing to shoulder a large proportion of the risk (vs. the traditional externalize risk, internalized profit).
The DoD didn't pay Lockheed Martin anywhere near $1 trillion to develop the F-35. The $1 trillion plus figures you see are for total program lifecycle cost including a lot more than just development.
Back in 1996 when the DoD awarded initial JSF prototype development contracts to Boeing and Lockheed they actually prohibited those contractors from putting in their own additional funds. There were major concerns about maintaining a viable industrial base after the end of the Cold War and the DoD couldn't risk having any of their few remaining prime contractors fail.
> There were major concerns about maintaining a viable industrial base.
Maybe from the military industrial complex that was pulling in billions annually. Everyone else hoped that we would scale back after the insane global c*%k measuring contest that was the Cold War.
In retrospect, was the peace dividend a good idea? We got a europe that couldn't protect itself, the US playing bombs in the desert for 20 years and building anti-terrorism focused systems which will have no value against a near peer adversary, a navy that forgot how to build good boats, and a general refusal to learn the always relevant lesson of "build more ammo"
We did scale back. Military spending was cut back in real (inflation adjusted) terms at the end of the Cold War, and bottomed out as a percentage of GDP in 2000.
After 2001, military spending went way up of to fund the Global War on Terror. Most of that was a total waste and failure. Now the GWOT is essentially over and funding priorities have shifted to containing expansionist regimes in China and Russia (and to a lesser degree Iran) as part of Cold War 2. It is certainly an option to adopt an isolationist stance and cut the military-industrial complex down to the minimum size necessary to defend the homeland, but you might not enjoy the results of letting hostile foreign powers dominate the rest of the globe.
The real spending went down a tiny amount despite the largest army of the world was no longer in existence and there was no credible threat what so ever.
I always love how people fall for the false military budgets, the war cost, the veteran health, the nuclear cost and a lot of other associated cost that is conveniently hid outside of the 'military budget' despite it very clearly should be in the same bucket.
> It is certainly an option to adopt an isolationist stance and cut the military-industrial complex down
Ah the old 'anybody that doesn't believe absurd amount of military spending is an isolationist trope'. Never stops getting old that one.
How much should we cut the military budget? Please give a specific number and show your work.
We all understand that there is a huge amount of waste. But in practice it seems to be difficult to cut that waste without losing essential capabilities.
It's redundancy, not waste, in the majority of cases. Look at what's happened to the Russian army to see what happens when there's no redundancy built-in to your logistics and supply chain, redundancy is essential to the capability of US military might.
Starship development is projected to cost 2 billion this year alone, and they have a lot left to do (developing the HLS upper stage variant, orbital refueling) so it seems likely that SpaceX will lose money on this.
Yes, but keep in mind that Starship is mostly going to be used for launching Starship satellites in the early years, and that is super valuable to SpaceX. Falcon 9 is super cheap and has a low marginal cost to SpaceX, but to launch the full sized Gen2 Starlink system would cost ~$100 billion extra if done on Falcon 9 vs Starship (and that’s just initial launch… the constellation would need refreshing on a 5-10 year basis), so Starship is worth about $100 billion to the Starlink program alone. Refueling will also be helpful for launching commercial satellites to geosynchronous orbit, for crewed missions like Dear Moon, etc.
This is why SpaceX doesn’t mind co-investing on Starship.
The Lunar contract was never meant to pay the whole development. Starship is not a dedicated lunar architecture for NASA. NASA does not finance most of Starship development, but rather a variant of the upper stage for lunar landing.
So yes, SpaceX will 'lose' money but they will have a very versatile rocket that can use for everything.
Edit: And their Dragon capsule. SpaceX has been a very reliable partner for NASA. Don't believe the anti Musk sentiments spread by far-left journalists.
Really? The man has been flirting with antisemitism and that was just last week (I'm not Jewish btw, so this isn't personal). I cite that as an example and not one of many reasons I have to despise the current incarnation of the man.
Just because NASA is his cash cow, doesn't mean they should trust him as far as they could throw him.
The man has done incredible things, supported by an incredible team, but looking on from the outside ... he's just one blood sugar spike from screwing the whole thing up.
Musk is so fickel, he has been the CEO of a company for 20 years with a laser focus on a single goal. So fickel.
Also, you can't support companies on 'a lower level' if you want to do thing like land on the moon.
The question is how could NASA budget most effectively used to turn humanity into an advanced space flight spices.
The way NASA evaluated and financed these contracts is very questionable if those are the goals they had. But unfortunately their contracting is and was very restricted on a set of very particular minimum requirements. No extra money for over-achieving, even if over-achieving would have been incredibly useful.
P.S: And btw, with SpaceX they are trusting a real proven space company that has man costumers, lots of revenue and so on. BlueOrigin is just a Bezos hobby project that literally depends on multiple billions a year on Bezos private money, they have basically no revenue and want have for years.
The man has been flirting with antisemitism and that was just last week (I'm not Jewish btw, so this isn't personal). I cite that as an example and not one of many reasons I have to despise the current incarnation of the man.
Just because NASA is his cash cow, doesn't mean they should trust him as far as they could throw him. Alternatives are required.
The man has done incredible things, supported by an incredible team, but looking on from the outside ... he's just one blood sugar spike from screwing the whole thing up.
Obviously the second choice is going to be a worse deal, otherwise it would have been the first choice instead. I agree it does seem kinda backwards that SpaceX gets paid less for a better proposal, but it's kind of a natural consequence of how the bidding and selection process works.
Obviously the second-lowest bidder will have a higher price than the lowest bidder. Arguably a second-price policy would be fair in this case but it may not be legal for NASA to award any more money than necessary.
It all depends on how you do the selection and how you value the selection.
SpaceX will have a huge payload capability that NASA didn't bid for. And therefore SpaceX gets no money for it.
This is just how NASA choose to do this. They could have instead award contracts sized based on the capability both long and short term a projects add to NASA plans.
One way to think about it is Starship is designed to be a generic space ship/lander like a 747, and SpaceX HLS contract is an agreement to build some modified 747s off the assembly line for this specific NASA purpose (along with tanker/etc that were already planned). Whereas the Blue Origin's proposal is more of a purpose-built lunar lander + tug vehicle.
So the pricing may actually make sense for all parties involved. It is interesting that BO plans to launch this on New Glenn but aren't going the Starship route of just landing New Glenn's upper stage on the Moon directly (even though with Jarvis it's intended to land on Earth?). But for NASA's purposes hedging on a more traditional lander might be preferable anyway.
But NASA gets a lot more future benefit from Starship tech, whereas the BO solution is completely useless for Mars, or really anything involving a larger crew. So the pricing makes not much sense. Of course this is an incredibly minor problem compared to the vast amounts of money that are wasted on SLS instead of being invested in private rockets.
This is kind of the issue here. NASA doesn't really have a long term strategy. The want to achieve X and then make everybody bid on X. Then Y and so on.
They don't say 'in 30 years we want to be able to do X, what are the steps we need to take'.
SpaceX has that approach luckily they can get some money from NASA to further that program.
I think the question is, "has Blue Origin gotten anything into orbit?" (I don't know the answer, I think as of a couple years ago it was still "no", but then I stopped paying attention)
And hundreds of fewer times than SpaceX as a whole. Surely a group who has actually been in space has more experience than a team that has launched a small dick rocket 80 miles up?
NASA needs multiple lander options; putting all their cards on a lunar Starship landing was always a bit ridiculous, even if it seems reasonably likely to happen. So if you want the Artemis program to actually succeed, this is likely a good thing. However, with Congress in a deadlock around the debt ceiling, and SLS costing $4B per launch, this is only going to add to Artemis's serious funding challenges.
If you're interested in the space industry in general, I'll cover this more next week in the weekly Orbital Index newsletter (https://orbitalindex.com) which I co-author with blach.
Exactly, and if we (well you, I'm British) do get them on the moon with the intention of a permanent base, you absolutely want two landing options. If one is found to have a fatal flaw and people are stuck, you need an alternative.
On top of that, this is about promoting investment into infrastructure and vehicles that may one day take us to Mars, you can't just encourage one company to develop that. There needs to be a whole ecosystem of competing companies, we don't want a SpaceX monopoly.
> If one is found to have a fatal flaw and people are stuck, you need an alternative.
That's why you test the hell out of one good one before you ever put humans in one. We didn't have alternatives for the Apollo missions. Failure just wasn't an option.
You can have an apollo style mission, or a strong ecosystem / competition that serves a wide range of consumers, but you can't have both from the same source.
This isn't a consumer mission though. All for competition when it makes sense, but you also risk diluting your limited budget and quality control at the cost of the project's success.
While that makes sense if you are only considering the single target of landing someone on the Moon, 1960s style, in this case it's about building a sustainable industry. The moon landing is just an excuse, and a target, something to be excited about. The real "mission" is build a bigger space industry, mostly because that creates jobs and pays contracts, but also because it pushes science and technology forward.
Just have a 2nd Apollo rocket on stand by. After Columbia, this is what NASA did with shuttle launches. There's the famous images of two shuttles on the launch pad at the same time.
Sure, multiple vendors sounds like a nice idea, but rarely in real life does the 2nd vendor's product just act as a drop-in replacement. You might have 2 launch platforms with SpaceX and Blue Origin, but the payload meant for one will not just be able to be launched from the other. If you want that, then NASA needs to design the plans (or pick one set of plans) and then have multiple contractors building the agreed upon thing
Let me rephrase that: You can treat this as a sequential series of US Government specified projects, or you can attempt to bootstrap an economy around the problem and see if great things flourish.
Their doing option 2, I think, and I agree with that.
The Apollo program had failures with humans. People died. Failures happened, and many smaller failures happened even during the successful launch to the moon.
There is a real question if splitting the budget into two options increases or reduces the chance for success.
Sure if money was magic you would like to have 10 options. But in reality that money is now not available for lots of other-things that are useful and could improve the moon missions in various way.
The thing is, there wasn’t a better option than Starship. Starship scored the best technically and could be funded for the least amount. It’s not crazy to pick the least technically risky option that’s simultaneously the lowest cost and highest capability.
Though it is not often appreciated re SpaceX/NASA, I side on the "competition is good" side of this argument.
I don't think gov should act like a single consumer, instead they should err on the side of producing an ecosystem of solutions to spur an economy around the problem.
Becuase money isn't magic and that money going to a very unsuccessful company BlueOrigin is now not available for space suits, habs, surface operations and many other potentially useful things.
Sorry that I can't answer your question in detail. I was listening to a podcast (maybe NPR or maybe some other interviews), the reason Apollo style program isn't used anymore is because it's not sustainable. I didn't understand the technical detail to give you a good answer.
Apollo was feasible because there was a very real risk of the entire USA being destroyed and every voter knew it. It was a race to technological and military superiority against the USSR and the Apollo program was a big part of that. That existential fear and risk doesn't exist today, there is no appetite for that level of commitment in the general population. AOC herself could kill a program proposal like Apollo with a single tweet about proposed bathroom door labels.
The lunar mission did not yield any kind of advanced military capabilities, though. We had cooperative space missions with the Soviets as early as 1975, when the Apollo program was still ongoing. See Apollo–Soyuz:
NASA's entire mandate is to develop new technologies and do things that haven't been done before. If you could just order a lunar lander off Amazon, what would be the point?
Given the context, either Bezos must have given some pretty amazing guaranty, like killer late fees and refund if you don't get to the moon, or and offered something politically important outside of this deal entirely.
Negative. It’s pay for performance, and Blue is already pitching in more money to help fund it than the contract is worth. So negative money. That’s the advantage of commercial contracting as opposed to cost-plus contracting. A lot of idiotic takes on private spaceflight have this completely backwards.
There are milestone payments. So even if they fail to get to the moon, if they meet some of the other milestones they'll get some of the money from the contract. But not enough to turn a profit either way.
Oh great - more private space exploration funding by public money. Instead of the people owning the tech at the end of spending 3.4bil, jeff owns it. Boo.
And then stagnated for decades when an administration with no interest beyond LEO came into power, which was exacerbated further by each following administration changing NASA's direction, preventing any kind of sustained focus.
That's the problem with publicly funded spaceflight: it's subject to the whims of both politicians and public favor, meaning that if it doesn't happen within the span of a single favorable administration it's probably not going to happen. That's extremely limiting, because spaceflight (especially the crewed variety) is extremely difficult and operates on decadal timelines.
in a way i suppose. Tesla being public almost killed teh entire company when the shorts came after them. SpaceX being (and remaining) private is probably 25% of the reason they're able to accomplish what they can accomplish. Imagine the stock price hit after the starship test, that would take so much time and effort to repair. Also, there's probably 100s of live cams all around Boca Chica spying and watching on every single test and weld. The stock price would fluctuate wildly based on what's happening on those cams. SpaceX remaining private is probably priority 1 on the financial side of things.
At least a few years ago, spacex didn't do debt financing, which means that fluctuation of the stock price on the secondary market wouldn't matter... The company's finances are affected by the stock price only through cost of capital. If you aren't raising money or taking on debt then the co doesn't care about the stock price at all.
To an extent, but depending on how the company is set up it can create a layer of indirection that mitigates outside meddling.
So for example in the case of SpaceX, a good chunk of their revenue comes from selling their launch services to other companies and selling Starlink, and it's an explicit goal to keep R&D cheap. This lets them start projects even without NASA's interest (as they've done with Starship+Superheavy). If NASA expresses interest somewhere down the line that's great, but the project's going to happen anyway. It's not living or dying by the whims of congressmen.
This in turn allows them to have a grander focus that they continue to work towards over the course of decades since they aren't having their direction jerked around constantly.
The Apollo system landed our grandparents on the moon for 2.5% of US annual GDP for 10 years. An incredible achievement at spectacular cost. Then stopped going as the cost/benefit was perceived unfavorable.
I think the more reasonable interpretation of the post that you are replying to considers the previous generation that you're discussion "private space exploration with public money" as well. That they want NASA itself to hire the engineers, build and own the technology, rather than contracting/subcontracting it out.
The comment that started this chain didn't say "we should do it like we used to", rather it said "we shouldn't do it like this". The fact that that "this" happens to describe how we've always done it doesn't change the meaning of the comment. People are allowed to suggest doing new thing that haven't been done before.
I figure it's the same page with criminals and other stuffs that public service failed to do a 6/10 job. Because it's doing so badly let's contract it out to private companies (or just turn an eye away in the case of petty crimes).
I really think the best way to do it is to get a better public service. Well this is all talk though, I don't know how to achieve that, whatever.
And the information that you think this leads to based on all the lovely documentation you can find of the Apollo program, it’s gone, none of that happens now, it’s all subcontractors and ITAR and patents and intellectual property, the “public” part of public paying for this stuff was mostly dead by the late 1980s.
My best example is the AX-5 hard shell spacesuit. Public funding research done at NASA Ames, not commercialised, not brought up to flight readiness so it’s hardly going to justify some secrecy, and all the documentation is basically nonexistent other than some thin on the ground engineering documentation in non-public access engineering journals. Amazing engineering work and basically none of it is published in and open way.
I don’t know how to tell you this, but virtually all of the work done for the spacecraft and launch vehicles and such for Apollo was done by private contractors, defense contractors. This is no different except the companies are pitching in much of the funding and will be paying for their own missions with their vehicles (well, at least SpaceX is).
it would be funny to see a SpaceX flag planted on the moon first. SpaceX needs the FAA to launch but do they need anything else once in space? afaik anyone can do anything they want once up high enough. If it's SpaceX astronauts would they control their own human rating process too? If SpaceX has the money and tech SpaceX should just goto the moon themselves first.
The reduced circle of Washington bureaucrats have too much control over the world. It's time to diversify. Using less the dollar, paying taxes in other jurisdictions, ignoring their sanctions, etc. Specially Europe should realize that hinging on the US at every step is not a realistic plan.
It always seemed bonkers to me that Starship was selected as the moon lander when the first lunar mission will require five fuel transfers in orbit, a technology that has never been demonstrated, along with the ability to land a tall rocket vertically on lunar terrain. What was so terrible about the 1960's mission architecture?
The chief goal of the Artemis program is to solve difficult bureaucratic problems at NASA. As an engineering or exploration program it makes no sense on the merits, and the sooner it dies the better.
The 1960s architecture was not sustainable. Artemis is supposed to be sustainable, was supposed to have reusable landers, which implies refueling. So refueling as a technology was already something NASA desired.
Starship is also about 50 times more capable than the Apollo LM.
Artemis is also supposed to be preparing for Mars, which Apollo didn’t do.
Artemis is also less well funded than Apollo.
I’m not sure why Starship HLS gets the hate it does. It’s by far the best choice NASA could’ve made, and it’s cheap enough that NASA can select a second lander provider, allowing redundancy.
"Sustainability" is a bureaucratic requirement, not a technical requirement. The reason the mission architecture has been stuffed full of reusable components like Orion, Starship and the Gateway is to make one-off capital expenses into long-term operational expenses that are difficult to cut. This is the same reason important parts of the whole program are being farmed out to ESA.
Starship gets hated on because it's vaporware being promoted by someone with a long track record of creative promise making across multiple fields of endeavor.
“Idlewords” indeed. No one with actual deep knowledge of the space industry thinks Starship is vaporware. SpaceX has been launching more stuff to orbit on Falcon than the rest of the planet combined, and virtually all on a mostly-reusable orbital rocket, the only one that is in operation today. They also have been the sole domestic provider for orbital crew launch in the US since Shuttle retired. This is not “empty promises.” Compare that to New Glenn, for instance, which is years behind schedule. The first orbital rocket from a company that was started before SpaceX.
> What was so terrible about the 1960's mission architecture?
They knew in the 60's that the Apollo architecture was sub-optimal. The reason they chose the one giant stack architecture of Apollo was because it had a better chance of making Kennedy's 1969 deadline than a refueling deadline than a multi-launch structure which would have been both cheaper and more useful for non-lunar missions.
Yet the Blue Origin lander, the (now cancelled) Leiden/Dynetics lander, and the original NASA lander "Altair" (for the cancelled Constellation program) would all use the the same basic concept of the Apollo Lunar Module. So approximately nobody thought the Apollo approach was suboptimal.
The reason SpaceX was chosen for Artemis 3 probably had only to do with their very low price. NASA has no problem spending ungodly amounts of money on their own projects (Orion, SLS, their now cancelled spacesuits) but when they switch to private companies they try to save as much money as possible. It is likely that NASA could have funded all three Artemis launchers while still staying below what they would have spent on Altair.
> What was so terrible about the 1960's mission architecture?
That it could get 2 people to the moon for a few days. While Starhip can get 5-10 people to the moon for a few months including lots research capabilities, showers, ground artifacts and much more.
You are basically comparing a scooter to a truck. How does that make sense?
There is a reason that non of the contractors went with that kind of architecture when the original contract was bid.
Bezos & Blue Origin's end game is to try and set up an industrial economy in space. It's a long game, Bezos does not expect to live long enough to see it. Bezos was heavily influenced by the work of Gerard O'Neill while at Princeton.
This seems a bit odd in comparison to how the Apollo program worked with private contractors - each contractor was assigned a specific task, e.g. "Boeing was responsible for designing and producing the Command and Service Module", etc.
Generally the competition and the bid takes place before the awarding of the government contract, doesn't it? This is rather like having two companies build competing bridges and then deciding which one to use after both are built, or am I missing something?
I suspect the Bezos lobbying machine had a hand in this decision:
> "There are a lot of opportunities for influence once you get your own people insinuated into the elite clubs, schools, and other social venues in D.C."
Having two suppliers for critical services has been common practice where possible for NASA and USSF for quite some time now. Commercial Resupply (SpaceX and OSC/NG), Commercial Crew (SpaceX and Boeing), National Security Space Launch (SpaceX and ULA),
not exactly an endorsement for NASA considering how little they've accomplished in recent decades. To me it makes sense to focus on funding the R/D "primitives" for space technology rather than funding essentially duplicate projects reinventing the wheel. That's what worked for Apollo, the new strategy has been a colossal failure and SpaceX alone has hiding a lot of NASA's flaws
Because people who have successfully acquired massive amounts of wealth and power know full well that opening up access to space will yield more material and energy wealth than any previous leap human civilization has ever made.
Small thinkers are satisfied keeping their imagination on Earth alone, but small thinkers don't lead massive leaps of prosperity.
Space is going to be industrialized, sooner or later. Since it takes massive amount of capital to do so, you can pretty much limit this kind of thing to wealthy nations or multi-billionaires such as Musk, Bezos and Branson.
I think this is absolutely part of it, I was just trying to separate whether the correlation between being a billionaire and enjoying space for non-industrialization reasons is correlated
The coolest thing about this proposal IMO is that they plan on being able to keep the lander on the moon for a full lunar day/night cycle (aka, a month). That means extreme heat and extreme cold. Which is extremely difficult when you rely on liquid hydrogen which boils at -250C.
Well I would hope that NASA wouldn't trust their astronauts to someone as sloppy as Elon Musk. Hopefully they looked at how his self-driving statements compared vs reality, and noped outta there really fast.
In the 80s standards declined and astronauts ended up dying. Afterwards NASA tightened up again.
What you go a long time without accidents you forget the benefit of being meticulous with safety. I believe there's a name for this.
You'll see, SpaceX is gonna get people killed, NASA is gonna commission an investigation, and find that NASA was sloppy by accepting SpaceX's sloppiness.
Its pretty funny how you didn't know even the most basic thing about NASA.
And then when somebody gave the most basic information you instantly jump to 'i know all about this and why it is bad'.
Given that you didn't know SpaceX flew astronauts, it clearly you don't have the slightest clue about the standard for safety applied by NASA, how and why they work with SpaceX. You heard 'Musk' and jump to 'oh NASA is bad'.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadreally curious conversation, really thought provoking
You're hilarious.
SpaceX is a here today gone tomorrow kind of company, because it does whatever Elon Musk wants it to do. You don't want space exploration for an entire country (and to some extent—at least currently—the entire world) to rest on the whims of one man.
The government often awards contracts to "backups". So NASA decided to sign a contract with a second eccentric billionaire. Lol. This is America.
People are speculating that the decision may have had something to do with Musk's behavior, without evidence (aside from the behavior they've seen from Musk- which may not have been taken into account).
People are speculating that the decision to choose Blue Origin may not have been based on Blue Origin's actual launch capabilities, without evidence (aside from the lack of launches so far- though they could have capabilities NASA knows about but the public does not).
There has to be an optimum somewhere between the extremes as descried in "Atlas Shrugged" but this... this is not it.
I once had a lot of respect for the dude, now I wonder who the actual competent players are at tesla and spacex who have actually got things done, because it's become pretty apparent the emperor has no clothes.
For SpaceX, do not wonder, this is known:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
https://gizmodo.com/spacex-nasa-elon-musk-gwynne-shotwell-tw...
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/gwynne-shotwell-aiming...
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-gwynne-shotwell-to-oversee-...
No matter that Shotwell or anybody else in the leadership of SpaceX would agree with this take.
And Shotwell overseeing the Starship program is just a dumb headline. What happened is that operation in Brownsville was simply integrated into the normal SpaceX structures rather then being a somewhat parallel operation. Shotwell was very involved before and after this administrative change. Neither means that much has changed in terms of how the program is lead technically.
Good visionary leadership: 1. creates a big picture, 2. hires competent people to execute, and 3. then gets out of the way.
Musk largely succeeds on the first two, but waffles on the third. However, he creates enough fires to distract himself from interfering with all his companies all the time, so his failure on the third point is somewhat self-limiting.
He is well known to have 3-4h long discussions with engineering teams going into extreme detail (and doing so until into the night) and making choices and taking responsibility when they fail.
If anything is true about Musk then its that he is the opposite of 'getting out of the way'.
> so his failure on the third point is somewhat self-limiting.
Or what most people who study the subject actually believe, that him 'not getting out of the way' is actually why the companies are successful.
Bezos took the get out of the way approach and BO has spend like 10+ billion with no revenue and will never be profitable, while SpaceX is a highly successful company.
I had a rough sense that this was the case, but those quotes (and sources) make it undeniably clear.
[Insert standard caveat about his wide array of harmful and toxic behavior]
He points this out and stands up for free speech, which the marginalized need the most! It's the powerless who needs free speech and freedom broadly. Not the powerful.
Someone that uses his wealth to accelerate sustainable energy and reusable rockets and satellite internet for Ukraine and working almost every day instead of retiring and buying mansions for himself. He could do that and would get none of this hate. Unfucking believable. He has 0 mansions and 0 yachts and removing 0 freedoms and doesn't even hoard patents with Tesla and SpaceX. He praises other competing companies for moving to electric vehicles. But oh no, he's independent (who voted for Biden, fwiw) and challenges the official narrative and occasionally says and does dumb things. Spaceman bad.
As though the rest of us are all perfect and have made greater contributions to humanity and would have dedicated most of our time and resources into such projects after winning the Paypal stock lottery.
You're really going along with the corporate media and other powerful interests that he's the villain and not themselves who get us into devastating wars, are actively removing our freedoms and privacy, and managing our way into debt and collapse? Get real.
If you're going to cherrypick (and distort) some of the worst things people on one side have said, why not cherrypick his signal amplification of insane anti-reasoning and alt-right and fascist-adjacent bullshit?
Do you think that amplification is 'doing great things for the world'? Are these guys in desperate need of a platform? Why defend them?
The Daily Stormer founder's back on Twitter, and you're telling me that we can't call a spade a spade.
[1] Not that you seem to have any problems with telling black from white, given that you're happy to pooh-pooh particular political/cultural viewpoints as harmful, while splitting hairs and 'Is it really fascism?'-ing on this one.
Oh, Elon is just telling us the truth that "the man" doesn't want us to know? Truths like: Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer by his gay lover? That the government is running a false flag on the latest mass shooter and his white supremacist viewpoints? That the guy leading the cave rescues in Thailand was a pedophile? And on. And on. And on.
The false claim about one of most powerful and privileged people (Pelosi) in the world was another mistake and something he quickly deleted. Oh no. Be sure to fall on your fainting couch. Elon gets false accusations like that sent his way every single day. But one sent briefly in the other direction is an unacceptable slight and worth endless hand wringing?
And please explain to us how any of those are remotely as consequential as examples like Weapons of Mass Destruction or Russiagate or stoking a race war for clicks.
Funnily enough, too, there are people who think that hey, maybe it's a better goal for humanity to y'know, fix the place we live, rather than vacuuming government billions to "colonize Mars". According to Musk he was intending to send a manned mission there next year and have established the first settlement by the end of the decade. Maybe that's what people mean when they talk about him being far more show than substance. (Also, to pre-empt the inevitable: this isn't to say "he hasn't achieved anything". Of course he has.)
Pilate in front of the crowd: “What’s worse, some guy who said ‘Love each other’ or Barabas who actually killed people?”
The crowd: “The guy who said ‘Love each other’”.
You’ll have to stand your ground in face of lions in arenas for a few more centuries to show humans who’s right, before they ditch their priests. If the priests say we should hate one or two guys because they are fascists and more dangerous than murderers, the crowd will.
The problem I am point out here is that NASA defines a narrow set of specification and don't value anything beyond those specifications.
NASA is not optimizing for the most useful money spend for the next 20 years. They define narrow specification for short term operations and only value that.
So now we have something that is incredibly revolutionary and could carry humanity all over the solar system getting less money then a hacked together solution from 3 contractors who have proven to perform extremely badly on such contracts getting more money.
> According to Blue Origin's lunar lander head John Couluris, Blue Origin privately contributed 'well north' of the contract's $3.4 billion payout.
To put this into perspective the DoD will happily invest north of $1 Trillion for a single fighter pilot development program (F-35) and I doubt Lockheed is willing to front any of that...
Back in 1996 when the DoD awarded initial JSF prototype development contracts to Boeing and Lockheed they actually prohibited those contractors from putting in their own additional funds. There were major concerns about maintaining a viable industrial base after the end of the Cold War and the DoD couldn't risk having any of their few remaining prime contractors fail.
Or everyone took the money and ignored what Present Eisenhower had to say.
Maybe from the military industrial complex that was pulling in billions annually. Everyone else hoped that we would scale back after the insane global c*%k measuring contest that was the Cold War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_dividend
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/mili...
After 2001, military spending went way up of to fund the Global War on Terror. Most of that was a total waste and failure. Now the GWOT is essentially over and funding priorities have shifted to containing expansionist regimes in China and Russia (and to a lesser degree Iran) as part of Cold War 2. It is certainly an option to adopt an isolationist stance and cut the military-industrial complex down to the minimum size necessary to defend the homeland, but you might not enjoy the results of letting hostile foreign powers dominate the rest of the globe.
I always love how people fall for the false military budgets, the war cost, the veteran health, the nuclear cost and a lot of other associated cost that is conveniently hid outside of the 'military budget' despite it very clearly should be in the same bucket.
> It is certainly an option to adopt an isolationist stance and cut the military-industrial complex down
Ah the old 'anybody that doesn't believe absurd amount of military spending is an isolationist trope'. Never stops getting old that one.
We all understand that there is a huge amount of waste. But in practice it seems to be difficult to cut that waste without losing essential capabilities.
This is why SpaceX doesn’t mind co-investing on Starship.
So yes, SpaceX will 'lose' money but they will have a very versatile rocket that can use for everything.
Support successful companies at a lower level. Encourage competitors. Cannot have just one option - especially with an owner as fickle as Musk.
Edit: And their Dragon capsule. SpaceX has been a very reliable partner for NASA. Don't believe the anti Musk sentiments spread by far-left journalists.
Really? The man has been flirting with antisemitism and that was just last week (I'm not Jewish btw, so this isn't personal). I cite that as an example and not one of many reasons I have to despise the current incarnation of the man.
Just because NASA is his cash cow, doesn't mean they should trust him as far as they could throw him.
The man has done incredible things, supported by an incredible team, but looking on from the outside ... he's just one blood sugar spike from screwing the whole thing up.
Also, you can't support companies on 'a lower level' if you want to do thing like land on the moon.
The question is how could NASA budget most effectively used to turn humanity into an advanced space flight spices.
The way NASA evaluated and financed these contracts is very questionable if those are the goals they had. But unfortunately their contracting is and was very restricted on a set of very particular minimum requirements. No extra money for over-achieving, even if over-achieving would have been incredibly useful.
P.S: And btw, with SpaceX they are trusting a real proven space company that has man costumers, lots of revenue and so on. BlueOrigin is just a Bezos hobby project that literally depends on multiple billions a year on Bezos private money, they have basically no revenue and want have for years.
The man has been flirting with antisemitism and that was just last week (I'm not Jewish btw, so this isn't personal). I cite that as an example and not one of many reasons I have to despise the current incarnation of the man.
Just because NASA is his cash cow, doesn't mean they should trust him as far as they could throw him. Alternatives are required.
The man has done incredible things, supported by an incredible team, but looking on from the outside ... he's just one blood sugar spike from screwing the whole thing up.
It all depends on how you do the selection and how you value the selection.
SpaceX will have a huge payload capability that NASA didn't bid for. And therefore SpaceX gets no money for it.
This is just how NASA choose to do this. They could have instead award contracts sized based on the capability both long and short term a projects add to NASA plans.
So the pricing may actually make sense for all parties involved. It is interesting that BO plans to launch this on New Glenn but aren't going the Starship route of just landing New Glenn's upper stage on the Moon directly (even though with Jarvis it's intended to land on Earth?). But for NASA's purposes hedging on a more traditional lander might be preferable anyway.
They don't say 'in 30 years we want to be able to do X, what are the steps we need to take'.
SpaceX has that approach luckily they can get some money from NASA to further that program.
They did finally deliver some BE-4 engines to ULA though.
Seems like the NASA award is only is only paying for some minority of the total cost.
NASA needs multiple lander options; putting all their cards on a lunar Starship landing was always a bit ridiculous, even if it seems reasonably likely to happen. So if you want the Artemis program to actually succeed, this is likely a good thing. However, with Congress in a deadlock around the debt ceiling, and SLS costing $4B per launch, this is only going to add to Artemis's serious funding challenges.
If you're interested in the space industry in general, I'll cover this more next week in the weekly Orbital Index newsletter (https://orbitalindex.com) which I co-author with blach.
On top of that, this is about promoting investment into infrastructure and vehicles that may one day take us to Mars, you can't just encourage one company to develop that. There needs to be a whole ecosystem of competing companies, we don't want a SpaceX monopoly.
Gosh, I wish USA had access to potable tap water. Having less than 20 hours of electricity a day in winter is also a problem.
That's why you test the hell out of one good one before you ever put humans in one. We didn't have alternatives for the Apollo missions. Failure just wasn't an option.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/multimedia/images/08-09...
Sure, multiple vendors sounds like a nice idea, but rarely in real life does the 2nd vendor's product just act as a drop-in replacement. You might have 2 launch platforms with SpaceX and Blue Origin, but the payload meant for one will not just be able to be launched from the other. If you want that, then NASA needs to design the plans (or pick one set of plans) and then have multiple contractors building the agreed upon thing
Their doing option 2, I think, and I agree with that.
Sure if money was magic you would like to have 10 options. But in reality that money is now not available for lots of other-things that are useful and could improve the moon missions in various way.
why buy one when you have two at (more than) twice the price?
I don't think gov should act like a single consumer, instead they should err on the side of producing an ecosystem of solutions to spur an economy around the problem.
So, two is cheaper than one long term, I hope.
Hacker News becoming more like reddit every day with trash comments like this.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz
I'm guessing none. Unless NASA has a creative definition for advance payments.
https://www.nasa.gov/nextstep/humanlander4
Is this bait? Public funding of space flight lead to spaceflight and landing on the moon.
That's the problem with publicly funded spaceflight: it's subject to the whims of both politicians and public favor, meaning that if it doesn't happen within the span of a single favorable administration it's probably not going to happen. That's extremely limiting, because spaceflight (especially the crewed variety) is extremely difficult and operates on decadal timelines.
So for example in the case of SpaceX, a good chunk of their revenue comes from selling their launch services to other companies and selling Starlink, and it's an explicit goal to keep R&D cheap. This lets them start projects even without NASA's interest (as they've done with Starship+Superheavy). If NASA expresses interest somewhere down the line that's great, but the project's going to happen anyway. It's not living or dying by the whims of congressmen.
This in turn allows them to have a grander focus that they continue to work towards over the course of decades since they aren't having their direction jerked around constantly.
That last part needs fixed.
Grumman (now Northrop Grumman) made the Apollo lunar lander paid for by public tax dollars.
Private entities making money off public initiatives is a big reason why we're having the economic troubles we've been having the past few decades.
Did space history begin when Elon Musk launched his first rocket...?
The comment that started this chain didn't say "we should do it like we used to", rather it said "we shouldn't do it like this". The fact that that "this" happens to describe how we've always done it doesn't change the meaning of the comment. People are allowed to suggest doing new thing that haven't been done before.
I really think the best way to do it is to get a better public service. Well this is all talk though, I don't know how to achieve that, whatever.
My best example is the AX-5 hard shell spacesuit. Public funding research done at NASA Ames, not commercialised, not brought up to flight readiness so it’s hardly going to justify some secrecy, and all the documentation is basically nonexistent other than some thin on the ground engineering documentation in non-public access engineering journals. Amazing engineering work and basically none of it is published in and open way.
Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a good read if you're into SciFi.
Blue Origin press release: https://www.blueorigin.com/news/nasa-selects-blue-origin-for...
Of all four submissions, it's the one from the Daily Mail that we vote to the homepage, how?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=fals...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36002808
The chief goal of the Artemis program is to solve difficult bureaucratic problems at NASA. As an engineering or exploration program it makes no sense on the merits, and the sooner it dies the better.
Starship is also about 50 times more capable than the Apollo LM.
Artemis is also supposed to be preparing for Mars, which Apollo didn’t do.
Artemis is also less well funded than Apollo.
I’m not sure why Starship HLS gets the hate it does. It’s by far the best choice NASA could’ve made, and it’s cheap enough that NASA can select a second lander provider, allowing redundancy.
Starship gets hated on because it's vaporware being promoted by someone with a long track record of creative promise making across multiple fields of endeavor.
They knew in the 60's that the Apollo architecture was sub-optimal. The reason they chose the one giant stack architecture of Apollo was because it had a better chance of making Kennedy's 1969 deadline than a refueling deadline than a multi-launch structure which would have been both cheaper and more useful for non-lunar missions.
The reason SpaceX was chosen for Artemis 3 probably had only to do with their very low price. NASA has no problem spending ungodly amounts of money on their own projects (Orion, SLS, their now cancelled spacesuits) but when they switch to private companies they try to save as much money as possible. It is likely that NASA could have funded all three Artemis launchers while still staying below what they would have spent on Altair.
SpaceX does transfers a lot more complicated than fuel (including human beings) all the time and it's fine.
> land a tall rocket vertically on lunar terrain
is the real hurdle here, along with differences in gravity. Though lack of said gravity does make the landing part a lot easier.
That it could get 2 people to the moon for a few days. While Starhip can get 5-10 people to the moon for a few months including lots research capabilities, showers, ground artifacts and much more.
You are basically comparing a scooter to a truck. How does that make sense?
There is a reason that non of the contractors went with that kind of architecture when the original contract was bid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill#Space_colo...
https://apollo11space.com/apollo-program-and-private-compani...
Generally the competition and the bid takes place before the awarding of the government contract, doesn't it? This is rather like having two companies build competing bridges and then deciding which one to use after both are built, or am I missing something?
I suspect the Bezos lobbying machine had a hand in this decision:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/king-hill-how...
> "There are a lot of opportunities for influence once you get your own people insinuated into the elite clubs, schools, and other social venues in D.C."
not exactly an endorsement for NASA considering how little they've accomplished in recent decades. To me it makes sense to focus on funding the R/D "primitives" for space technology rather than funding essentially duplicate projects reinventing the wheel. That's what worked for Apollo, the new strategy has been a colossal failure and SpaceX alone has hiding a lot of NASA's flaws
If the bridges have a high chance of multi-year delays (ahem Starliner), that's exactly what you should do.
Small thinkers are satisfied keeping their imagination on Earth alone, but small thinkers don't lead massive leaps of prosperity.
Bezos: Space will be industrialized and earth will remain some kind of national park
Richard Branson: He doesn't give a shit other then to self aggrandize himself further as far as I can tell.
They already do? SpaceX has been flying NASA astronauts for awhile already...
It's so common, it's not even newsworthy anymore.
In the 80s standards declined and astronauts ended up dying. Afterwards NASA tightened up again.
What you go a long time without accidents you forget the benefit of being meticulous with safety. I believe there's a name for this.
You'll see, SpaceX is gonna get people killed, NASA is gonna commission an investigation, and find that NASA was sloppy by accepting SpaceX's sloppiness.
And then when somebody gave the most basic information you instantly jump to 'i know all about this and why it is bad'.
Given that you didn't know SpaceX flew astronauts, it clearly you don't have the slightest clue about the standard for safety applied by NASA, how and why they work with SpaceX. You heard 'Musk' and jump to 'oh NASA is bad'.