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NASA picks Eric Schmidt's rocket company for Mars mission
- Noaidi 4mo agoFolks, this is not a democracy, or a meritocracy, it is a corpocracy.
- t1234s 4mo agoNow that spacex is public we can expect more headlines like this to sway the price similar to what is done with tesla.
- doublerabbit 4mo agoI need to jump on this rocket company spacewagon. Claude, make me a space rocket. Using only lisp, if and regex statements.
- danielbln 4mo agoYou didn't add "make no mistakes" so that first test burn will probably blow up the pad, but now you know.
- bombcar 4mo agoThe first one has to blow up, or you'll never get off the ground.
- bluefirebrand 4mo agoIf you don't blow up a few rockets on the pad, are you even a real rocketry company? That's gotta be some kind of rite of passage
- jbverschoor 4mo ago/ultraboost
- close04 4mo ago> might just beat SpaceX to Mars. SpaceX/Musk can always spin it as “we have more ambitious goals than some lowly scientific instruments”.
- consumer451 4mo agoSince SpaceX now includes controlling the Twitter culture war narrative, yes... lots of other things to do for "SpaceX." I say this as a huge fan of the OG SpaceX, and a space nerd in general. I was thinking that I felt bad for the OG SpaceX folks working on rockets, and Starlink... with all the distractions. However, many of them just became millionaires. So, what do I know. Elon is a heck of an economic engineer. I would probably want to be along for the ride.
- 17383848 4mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- consumer451 4mo agoPathetic response, and even lazier a comment history. https://postimg.cc/JDyRWZJv/d3056008 https://postimg.cc/JDyRWZJv/d3056008
- beanjuiceII 4mo ago[flagged]
- consumer451 4mo agowhat does this even mean? You know what, neverminded.
- consumer451 4mo ago
- ajay-b 4mo agoThis mission is an orbital science mission studying Mars' atmosphere, not the same objective as SpaceX's long-term goal of sending large cargo and eventually humans to Mars. So I think the title might be taking the piss just a smidge.
- dundarious 4mo agoI don't assume "Mars mission" to necessarily mean cargo for settlement or humans. In fact, that all seems quite distant at this point, so I ignore it entirely unless specific concrete actions occur. So for many people like myself, the title is perfectly reasonable. The world does not revolve around SpaceX and its purported plans.
- mr_toad 4mo agoBy that logic the Russians won the space race pretty completely.
- eterm 4mo agoThey did. It was the Soviets winning the space race that caused the USA to sink everything into the Apollo mission, to prove they could go bigger. Russia were first to almost every other milestone, first orbit, first man in orbit, first woman in orbit, first EVA, first moon orbit, first (unmanned) moon landing, and many others. Edited "Russians" to Soviets because lot was done by non-Russian parts of the union, my original reply just mirrored the OP use of Russians.
- toast0 4mo agoThe Russians got to the Soyuz in the 1960s, so yeah, they won the race.
- sbuttgereit 4mo agoTo be fair to the original commenter though... the actual title of the TechCrunch article is: "NASA picks Eric Schmidt’s rocket company for Mars mission, setting up a race with SpaceX" That title establishes a context in which looking at their relative goals is completely valid.
- philipwhiuk 4mo agoFor context, Relativity gained Eric Schmidt as CEO in March last year. They built a 3D printed small sat launcher which failed it's first launch. They cancelled further work in favour of Terran R which has less 3D printing. First launch probably early next year. First successful launch, probably late next year. A Mars mission 2028 is not crazy but it's ambitious.
- josefritzishere 4mo agoUsing private rocket companies is highly concerning.
- ThrowawayTestr 4mo agoThen you know nothing of NASA and it's history
- Noaidi 4mo agoNASA hired private companies to engineer and design their early rockets? I thought Wernher von Braun engineered the Saturn V rocket after NASA borrowed him from thew Nazi's
- bvcp 4mo agoworse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
- Noaidi 4mo agoI would say same. ;) https://www.thewrap.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/trump-inauguration-elon-musk-nazi-salute.jpg https://www.thewrap.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/trump-ina...
- mr_toad 4mo agoNot to design them, but definitely to engineer and build them. These days NASA doesn’t even build the payloads.
- ceejayoz 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V Manufacturer: Boeing (S-IC), North American (S-II), Douglas (S-IVB)
- Noaidi 4mo ago
- PunchyHamster 4mo agoPicking company that haven't launched anything at the size and range your need where there are competitors that do is ... interesting move.
- 0x59 4mo ago"trust me bro"
- BiteCode_dev 4mo agoMaybe ES' companies gave they a contract stating they assume all the risks and take not a cent unless they succeed, including reparation on failure, just to win the market.
- bpodgursky 4mo agoDon't read too much into this. The way these always work is they pick a low-stakes mission to give a new competitor a chance to build the market. If they're on track to miss the deadline badly they'll switch vendors to SpaceX who they know can pick up the slack on a short timeline. And if they do manage to deliver, great.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- 1970-01-01 4mo ago[flagged]
- andrewflnr 4mo agoNot crewed. > a spacecraft to house a suite of scientific instruments Second sentence of the article.
- 1970-01-01 4mo agoLink doesn't fit but the argument stands. No billionaire-funded misison to Mars has ever succeeded. Not even SpaceX. You need at minimum an entire space program. Here's a better link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One
- andrewflnr 4mo agoYou didn't make an argument. You still haven't. Every new thing goes through a long stage where it hasn't happened yet. You haven't even begun to argue, with evidence, that this thing can't happen. Even your line about "an entire space program" is incoherent in this context because the rocket in question is literally being used as a component in "an entire space program".
- 1970-01-01 4mo agoI fully disagree. Is that good enough to discuss? Name a private company that has landed on private devices on another planet. Here's the picture of where the argument stands: Venus Rocket Lab / MIT: Venus Life Finder: Late (Missed original 2023/2025 windows; now targeted for late 2026/2028) Mars One: Conceptual Failure Inspiration Mars Foundation: Cancelled SpaceX: very, very, very late (timeline pushed to 2028+) Relativity Space: Aeolus <-- you are here
- andrewflnr 4mo agoThere's still nothing here worth debunking. But as long as we're trying to extrapolate from history and vibes, I'll just point out that your timeline is at least as plausibly interpretable as the early stages of a progression that eventually leads to a privately built rocket going to mars.
- smrtinsert 4mo ago"Don't read to much into this. It's just a key talent, stable and productive, forming relationships with a key partner, gathering experience that you would think would be critical information to another companies valuation."
- zitterbewegung 4mo agoNASA always needs more competition to keep launch costs low and encouraging innovation and it seems like he hasn't been CEO for a long time. This is indicative of funding competition which is a good thing.
- mrweasel 4mo agoIt's so weird that space launches is one of the businesses where the free market appear to be working.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- nielsbot 4mo agowhy couldn’t NASA have internal design competitions that vie on cost? Third parties will always build in profit to their services which is wasteful.
- slowmovintarget 4mo agoRelativity Space had a really interesting idea even before Eric Schmidt bought it. The key ideas were new technologies in 3d printing of designs for rapid iteration of design-to-implementation on what was previously extremely difficult (rocket engines, rocket bodies). They even called their printers "Pylons" if recall (a nod to StarCraft's Protoss). The manufacturing tech has far broader implications than the application they were putting it toward. My worry is that Eric bought them solely to get launch-for-compute in his pocket. Given his track record of "steal and when you get caught just have the lawyers 'clean all that up'" and "we didn't intend to unleash evil on the world, 'but it happened'" aren't encouraging. I always hope the golden goose doesn't get carved to pieces, but it usually happens.
- zelias 4mo agoSounds like they must construct additional pylons...
- ChrisArchitect 4mo agoSource: https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-announces-public-private-partnership-to-advance-mars-science/ https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-announces-public-priv...