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Artemis is a joke. You can tell this is politically motivated by their stance on SLS. If they were serious they would give Spacex the SLS contract for being ye
by loourr 1y ago
Artemis is a joke. You can tell this is politically motivated by their stance on SLS. If they were serious they would give Spacex the SLS contract for being years and years behind schedule.
- jordanb 1y agoIs starship on schedule?
- ACCount37 1y agoOf 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.
- wat10000 1y agoAt $2.5 billion per launch, the worst thing that could happen with SLS is that it starts being used.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> 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.
- verzali 1y agoYes, but in the original schedule on HLS Starship was supposed to have done the prop transfer in Q4 2022, an uncrewed lunar landing in Q1 2024, and the actual thing in Q1 2025. 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).
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> in the original schedule on HLS Starship was supposed to have done the prop transfer in Q4 2022, an uncrewed lunar landing in Q1 2024, and the actual thing in Q1 2025 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.
- verzali 1y agoWhy? The question is whether Starship is on schedule or not. Orion or ML2 aren't holding back Starship. Waiting until the end of 2026 does nothing with regards to the initial schedule.
- mmooss 1y ago> Difficult to say 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.)
- electriclove 1y agoIt would be great for there to be more competition. But the reality is that SpaceX is in a different league - why focus on knocking them when there isn’t another alternative ??
- mmooss 1y ago> the reality is that SpaceX is in a different league They aren't delivering, so maybe not. People on HN state the SpaceX talking points like they are reality. It's an Internet mob; there is no room for any serious examination of the issue.
- BHSPitMonkey 1y agoEven if the bet on Starship fails to pay off, the existing Falcon 9 program is both (1) the dominant launch vehicle in terms of sheer quantity, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of missions and (2) the only system with a reusable first stage. Dragon routinely ferries humans to and from the ISS (and other trajectories) and no one blinks an eye. How do you square that with "not delivering"? I don't doubt that China could surpass them in the next 5 years, but nobody else is realistically close to doing so.
- panick21 1y agoSLS 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.
- logifail 1y ago> SLS was 6 years and like 10-20 billion $ over budget and nobody ever complainged, in fact they got consistantly more and more money Ah, but SLS were the right kind of people. Allegedly. /s SpaceX, less so. Allegedly.
- mmooss 1y ago> 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?
- panick21 1y agoI'm not sure what are talking about. I don't like giving contracts to SpaceX because they are the right kind of people, I like it because they tend to deliver faster and at less cost with something more modern and more future looking. While on the contrary Boieng and friends try to use old tech they have in their archive to slap togetehr a minimal viable product to meet the requirment. But the contract structure changes is not about giving contract to SpaceX only. Its about developing a space industry. And this has worked extremely well. Commercial cargo resulted in Falcon 9, Antares rockets. Antares team is now working with the Firefly startup for a next generation rocket. Clearly not as successful as Falcon, but without Falcon on the market it might have delivered differently. It also produce Cargo Dragon and Cygnus. Both have seen a lot of further development since then and have all kinds of uses. You can also look at CLIPS for moon landers, where some companies at small budgets have managed to build landers. And even those that weren't successful, training a lot of people on deep space probes. If you comapre the explosion of the space industry since Commercial Cargo to the stgantion in the Shuttle/Constellation area you will see why many space fans are so in favor of the new model. And the amazing thing is, that a tiny fraction of the money was spent on the non-Shuttle/Constellation/SLS part. In fact, I did the math and the total spend on just development of Constellation/SLS/Orion is going toward 200 billion $ over the last 25 years. And that is without actually delivering anything meaningful. In comparison the complete development budget of Commercial Cargo was a few billion $ at most, and it has revolutionized the US space industry. The complete spend on all Commerical Cargo, Commercial Crew and Lunar development more like 20 billion $. And the impact is just hilariously larger. Seems fairly obious what the way forward is, its just politically not feasable. As long as 50% of NASA discretionary budget is spent on ISS and Shuttle-derived stuff that will never be forward looking, you are playing the game with a hand tied behind your back and cement shoes.
- inglor_cz 1y agoI 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.
- IAmBroom 1y agoOn budget is also rare. 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.
- markus_zhang 1y agoFrom my previous reading, Excel 3 was one of the rare cases that the team pushed out the product only one week late.
- mortarion 1y agoNo, and even if the first HLS lander was built and launched tomorrow, it still needs to be filled up in orbit a dozen times, something that has never been done before and SpaceX doesn't have the capability for and won't have for another decade.
- dotnet00 1y agoIf they were serious, they'd properly look into ending SLS after the ones that are being built are launched, cancel the upgrade, go after the company that spent the entire launch tower budget before even starting construction, open up bids for rockets to fly Orion (probably Vulcan or New Glenn IIRC), and sort out their space suit issues. 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.
- ACCount37 1y agoPretty 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.
- the__alchemist 1y agoI wonder if we'll get a demonstration from China in the next few decades.
- philistine 1y agoChina wants to put the first woman on the Moon before 2030.
- dotnet00 1y agoI think it's pretty much guaranteed by now, assuming that they don't get ravaged by war/internal strife, that China will have landed people on the Moon by the 2040s, and, to be fair, I'd say the same for the US having landed people there again, assuming that they stay on path instead of constantly canceling and replacing programs as they have been doing.
- black6 1y agoCan't give up on the Senate Launch System. That'd be political suicide .
- Arainach 1y agoYou don't want to rely on a single supplier for critical infrastructure. Their management can extort you, their failures leave you with no backup plan, if they go bankrupt you're really screwed. Keeping multiple companies capable of building it alive is essential.
- prewett 1y agoMy 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.
- Analemma_ 1y agoI'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)
- IAmBroom 1y agoExtortion requires applied force from the vendor to the customer. You're simply describing failure to deliver goods. Words have meaning.
- dotnet00 1y agoBoeing 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).
- caycep 1y agothe whole space industry is a joke; if it were healthy, there would be an ecosystem of multiple launch providers vs one finicky government-funded-Elon-company
- dotnet00 1y agoThe 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.
- dmvdoug 1y ago> * I'm not seeing what makes SpaceX government funded beyond just that it provides services to the government* Take away all of SpaceX‘s government contracts. You imagine SpaceX would still be in business? As you said, every launch provider is basically dependent on government contracts to stay in business because the government is the only entity that has a legitimate need for launch capability such that it’s willing to pay for its development. There are no sufficiently profitable private contracts out there to sustain a launch provider.