NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

Sending humans to the moon is just burning money though. It isn't useful at all.

What is the point of winning though? We could be doing other things in stead, and I'm going to submit that they are more valuable (you are of course welcome to disagree - this is an opinion).

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.

> 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?!

Mars is entirely within reach if we wanted to dedicate the resources to it. If we can get to the moon over 50 years ago, Mars is nothing today. I don't necessarily think it would be worth it given the cost, but it is totally possible if it was a priority.

In Russia, loyalty is the highest virtue. In the USA, it's the other way around!

⁽"ᵀʰᵉ ʰᶦᵍʰᵉˢᵗ ᵛᶦʳᵗᵘᵉ ᶦˢ ˡᵒʸᵃˡᵗʸ"⁾

He’s a lumberjack and he’s okay.

He sleeps all night and he works all day.

give him a little more credit than that, he was also on Real World: Boston

America has always been a silly place, especially when it comes to NASA. Jack Parsons was a legendary occultist and a follower of Aleister Crowley's Thelema. Wernher von Braun was a former Nazi rocket scientist whose father served in the cabinet of the Knights of Malta. Wernher was a member of Tau Beta Pi, which has its own initiation rites and rituals.

I am shocked, shocked to find that political patronage is going on here.

Don't be fooled by this pretense. MAGA republicans are already actively working towards getting him another term: https://www.thirdtermproject.com/third-term

This is a political deadline with no grounding in reality.

Deadlines, political pressure to ignore issues and get it done, is how you get astronauts dead. Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia. And of course Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 / Salyut 1; it's not just a problem for America.

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.

The (aero)space industry tends to do rather well out of it being acceptable to miss deadlines though...

The point you raise is implicit in the comment that you're replying to and your response seems to intentionally ignore the very valid point that a bad deadline in this context may kill people and have other very negative consequences for the program.

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?

The Moon directive was set by Donald Trump in 2017.

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.

I am sure the astronauts know and accept the risks, but does that really mean the public should be funding such reckless activities? They can go paragliding or base jumping on their own dime if they want an adrenaline rush.

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?

Sailboats were pretty well understood by then and in contrast to rockets there is much less potential for catastrophic failure.

> [if stainless works] it will be mostly due to the peculiarities of Starship's other design choices.

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?

Carbon fibre second stages that melt/burn up on re-entry.

So, the company gets things done but the CEO is unpopular with certain crowds. Seems better than Boeing, which is bad at getting things done. At least their CEO is inoffensive, and that’s what is important?

To this discussion, IMHO the important part is that he's fallen out of favor. He wasn't loyal.

> since the 1970s, NASA has not built anything

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.

You mean the 1970s as in Raegan when the space program stalled and became irrelevant and became mostly a way to funnel money to districts for certain congresspeople?

Unless he gets a lucrative mining contract

FWIW, I absolutely agree. I just wanted to stress that the helping with the Boeing situation was something that, in a way, one could be a bit grateful for. But yeah, its not necessary.

Pretty much. Starship is a source of delays - but not the source of delays. Even if Starship HLS was ready to go yesterday, I would still expect Artemis 3 to schedule slip all the way to ~2030.

Getting everyone involved in Artemis to deliver on time, let alone on budget, would require nothing short of divine intervention.

I wonder if we'll get a demonstration from China in the next few decades.

They should give the rights to Starliner IP to Blue Origin so the US can have a legitimate backup to the dragon capsule.

Boeing has been pretty blatant about just not caring about performance on SLS, because, by being legally required to keep funding it, there isn't really anything NASA can actually do to hold Boeing responsible for underperforming.

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 actually sure that having multiple suppliers reduces extortion? If you have a policy of "no single supplier", then supplier #2 can extort you just as much as supplier #1 does under a single-supplier policy, because you have no choice but to keep funding them.

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)

My understanding is extorting the government as the single-supplier contract winner is the standard aerospace business plan, apart from SpaceX. Seems to me that if they're going to re-open SpaceX's contract because it's late, there's a whole bunch of other contracts they should re-open. Cross-referencing Trump's golfing calendar with the aerospace industry "leadership" has a decent chance of producing some insight into the decision.

The industry is going through growing pains, New Glenn is almost ready for payloads, Neutron is a year or two away from flying, and other small launch companies are in the process of pivoting to either medium launch or space services.

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.

Of course not. But a system that's "affordable, fixed price, highly capable, delayed" beats one that's "too expensive, cost+, marginally capable, delayed".

Starship is not a drop-in replacement for SLS. But it sure casts a long shadow on the entire SLS project.

> Is starship on schedule?

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.

SLS was 6 years and like 10-20 billion $ over budget and nobody ever complainged, in fact they got consistantly more and more money. And that is for technology that is fundamentally from the 1970s.

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.

I have never seen even a software project on schedule, including all of mine and everything I encountered in the academia.

Building new things is genuinely hard.

But I have seen some serious, albeit delayed, successes.

SpaceX has already successfully landed and reused a booster, which is the most expensive part of the rocket. As for the reentry problem, that seems to have been solved in the last couple of test flights. Still much more economically viable than SLS even if they can't reuse the upper stage.

One thing I don't understand about Musk and his Mars obsession is that he has had a rocket that can launch stuff to Mars for years now and he didn't even bother with the tiniest pilot project just for PR purposes. He is not sending rovers, satellites or living plants on a journey to Mars.

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.

A stepping stone to Mars, iiuc. Look up NASA's cislunar plans, oriented around developing the many new technologies needed for humans visiting Mars.

The ISS served all political purposes it could, and microgavity research can be served by private entities these days. (Especially considering that a Starship has half the internal pressurized volume of the entire ISS, at approximately one thousandth the cost.)

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.

I think its to prepare for mars (sort of), its the closest place where we can build a self-sustaining civilization.

I think the general idea is to set up a radio telescope there

in space travel there's a saying: once you're out of atmosphere you're halfway to anywhere. it takes tons of energy to get over the friction of air resistance. That's way we want a future where space-related things are built in space as much as possible. Once we can solve the idea of permanent installations on the moon it will have several advantages over an orbital station such as ease of additional construction, potential local resources that don't have to be shipped up and the ability to establish a base that can manufacture the things needed locally from imported or local resources rather than needing to manufacture things on earth and then launch them assembled.

It's Mars but with training wheels, since if there are problems stuff can be sent to/from the earth at any time as opposed to waiting for a transit window to open. With water ice in Shackleton Crater at the South Pole a permanent base should be very feasible with today's technology plus an operational Starship.

> Blue Moon HLS is considerably less complex than Starship HLS

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.

New Glen was meant to fly something around 6 times this year. At this point the best they will do is one additional launch to go with their first launch in January. Hard to see them doing any better timeline wise than SpaceX.

SpaceX is years behind schedule. Blue Origin is decades behind schedule.

I was about to post that Blue Origin is the only possible candidate for a competitor to SpaceX and they're not even close. More competition is needed but it's like saying more competition is needed for the hyperscalers, going from zero to on par is very hard and even with the time and money you still need the talent.

Which highlights how unserious this whole thing is. SLS hardly works and is way behind schedule.

Elon just said starship will do the entire moon mission:

“Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.”

To address your question, what is the incentive for going to Mars

SpaceX's lander bid was in large part so competitive because they were already planning on developing 90% of the technology anyways. Low earth orbit service was developed for NASA, but has found other paying customers. The moon has to have more people who would be interested in paying. Also the moon remains a good stepping stone for technological development for getting people to Mars, the stated main goal of the company. Also it's almost certainly not happening in the next few years anyways so they may only need to wait for the next administration.

SpaceX advert on the moon, giant and bright for the world to see every night for the next 50 years.

Now recall what the incentive to put the first man on the Moon was...

Imagine hurt egos with deep pockets and it ain’t that hard.

They’d probably launch from a sea platform on behalf of some random country just to spite NASA at that point.

Look at that, Morocco beats NASA to the moon!

Yeah they would say he is going to damage the environment or something, and suggest an eco friendly Russian rocket is used instead

Last years SpaceX revenue was 15 Billions, of which 1.1 came from NASA. Their revenues is higher than entire NASA budget.

https://deepnewz.com/company-earnings/spacex-2025-revenue-to...

Seeing some sort of van-life/starship-crew-cabin crossover would be interesting. But i'm not confident that your aspiration makes sense.

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.

I do, which is why I specifically said:

> outside maybe PR and politics

It's still a bad idea, objectively.

I don't see any real possibility of Artemis 3 launching before 2030, frankly. That "mid-2027" timeline is a joke said with a straight face.

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.

Does anyone vote for a president based on their ability to land on the moon?

They could have delivered today if they weren't concerned about reusability.

> Elon's track record hasn't exactly been stellar as of late

SpaceX's, on the other hand, has been.

Falcon 9 is a massive success. Raptor is currently the best engine for a first stage (unless there is something I am not aware of), and at least a very good one for an upper stage. The Starship itself is almost operational, being able to deliver dummy payloads into orbit, though it does require some reliability improvement.

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.

Funny thing is, even Starship's failure (to make a reusable upper stage) would be hailed as a spectacular success by any other company (since now that any other company would have at least a cheap, partially reusable superheavy launcher of unprecedented capability).

Musk got SpaceX to build a reusable rocket booster. It launches spacecraft and then flies back to Earth in a controlled manner, landing safely without blowing itself up as well as everything else around it.

That alone overshadows everything NASA has done since the moon landing.

stellar :)

Except it kinda was stellar? When the test pad blew up I was absolutely sure we won't be seeing a V3 this year, but they recovered amazingly, with the last V2 test checking pretty much every goal they set for it.

Wasn't Elon kind of treated like a child to be distracted and kept at arms length at Spacex? He is apparently really really good at fundraising, marketing and publicity (well he used to be anyways). But the stories that have come out of Tesla, and Paypal and SpaceX seem to me like the people actually running the show have tried to distract him as much as possible, and any of his actual decisions have been awful. I recall a story from PayPal's early days where he wanted to swap the servers to windows, and then he got canned as the CEO.