SpaceX is behind schedule, so NASA will open Artemis III contract to competition NASA's Acting Administrator has admitted that SpaceX is behind in plans to return astronauts to the Moon, has reopened lander contract competition, and pushed the deadline for a lunar landing to the end of the Trump administration in 2029. Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, fired back: "SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to …
Have they even put anything in orbit? I guess they sort of did with NG-1, although the landing part failed.
Rocket Labs is probably the 2nd to SpaceX in launch pace for orbital insertions, but they're stuff is (so far) smaller than a falcon. And I don't think they've reused a booster yet. However in August 2023, they launched an Electron with a pre-flown Rutherford engine...
When you say they haven't tested a fairing option... they have, they don't just have a disposable fairing.
At the moment the only version that has flown is the pez dispenser - but there is nothing stopping them from changing up the shape of the opening - and I don't expect a door to be significantly more structurally challenging than a wider slot.
Physics has a lot to say about what shape you can make that opening and how large you can make it. They had a lot of issues in earlier launches with the skin around the opening deforming and jamming the door. Iirc they went through like 5 different iterations of the door mechanism and door shape and they still rivetted on additional strengthening plates around the opening after assembly of the V2 airframes had already more or less finished (indicating they had figured out that whatever they had designed was not up to snuff)
AFAIK Blue Origin's record is pretty good but the pace, when compared with SpaceX, has been pedestrian which is why Big Jeff this year ordered it to pick up, but without following SpaceX's expensive approach.
Rocket Labs isn't in line for these lucrative government contracts. Both Bezos and Musk are hoping to use volume and network effects to justify commercial ventures through quasi-monopolies.
Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, fired back: "SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry. Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words."
"Never apologise, mister. It's a sign of weakness" [1]
[1] John Wayne in "She wore a yellow ribbon"
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There flat out isn't an option at all. The reality is the plan for Artemus 3 was based on the promised specs of Starship, and requires over a dozen launches at that... and it hasn't ever gotten close to those specs.
The reality is, Artemis 3 is a stillborn project.
Yes but the issue is the de-oorbit. SpaceX needs to demonstrate a reliable re-light of the engines on StarShip (really, really hate that name) to de-orbit it so it comes down where they need it to., Otherwise, yes fairly trivial to get into LEO, but, hypothetically it now has an uncontrolled re-enrty which,astonishingly results in an impact in central Manhattan, or Beijing or Moscow (either one of which might consider it an Act of War requiring a nuclear response against the US)!
I don’t think even Elon is quite that reckless.
"SpaceX needs to demonstrate a reliable re-light of the engines on StarShip (really, really hate that name) to de-orbit it so it comes down where they need it to., Otherwise, yes fairly trivial to get into LEO, but, hypothetically it now has an uncontrolled re-enrty which,astonishingly results in an impact in central Manhattan, or Beijing or Moscow"
Well, proof of reliable relights only comes with more flights, and so far they have successfully done a few re-lights as the testing process has advanced. As for the uncontrolled re-entry, that doesn't seem to be an issues. The booster has been caught, so we know they can do that accurately, including the "phantom tower landings" where they were just testing and chose do that off the coast. For the Ship part, they seem to be able to manage to put floating buoys with cameras out in the middle of the Indian Ocean and land accurately enough that we get great footage of the "landing". Getting the booster and ship to "land" where required seems to be the least of the potential problems. So far, all of the Ship flights have been intended to be destructive or near destructive, such as coming faster and steeper than "normal" to see what fails and what survives, including trying different heat shields tiles and leaving off tiles in critical areas, ie testing to destruction to find the safety limits they need to stay within. It feels a lot more "cowbot" than traditional design/iteration process, but it's is how they work. They mostly announce exactly what they are doing in advance, so apart from the stuff that blew up in flight (and on the test pad), the "successful failures" are exactly what they said they would be.so don't read too much into "Starship has never reached orbit" until they tell us they are aiming for orbit and THEN fail (assuming the do fail, I suspect they won't)
That happened because the launch was sub-orbital by design. If they do an orbital launch and the de-orbit burn fails then it becomes hard to predict when and where the ship will come down. When is likely to be after the propellant has boiled away and the batteries have gone flat. That means no attitude control to come in heat shield first and no adjusting the flaps to aim away from population centres.
There might be enough confidence to launch a Version 2 orbital next time but Version 2 has many issues including almost useless payload to orbit. The next launch will be a Version 3 that is so different from Version 2 that going for orbit on the first attempt would be reckless.
"Yes but the issue is the de-oorbit. SpaceX needs to demonstrate a reliable re-light of the engines on StarShip (really, really hate that name) to de-orbit it so it comes down where they need it to."
They have already demonstrated that, on both the most recent test flights. It landed on target both times, next to the bouy with the cameras. The last one even used its fins to curve around and completely change direction during the descent.
SpaceX needed to demonstrate a re-lighting of the engine to get a license for an orbital flight. They've now done this so orbital flight is merely a checkbox to be ticked.
Starship development is occurring at a rapid pace. The only thing that worries me is that every new version of Starship could mean their testing program needs to start from scratch again.
I still have worries about safe Starship reentry as this is a tremendously difficult engineering problem that they still haven't got a handle on. The damage I've seen in the last two successful reentries has been fairly extensive although they seem to be making progress, slowly. I don't remember seeing anything about this, I should probably pay more attention, but are they intending to have the Lunar lander version attempt reentry or are they going to transfer to an Orion capsule for that? Reentry velocity after returning from the Moon is much greater than LEO velocity and I would be really worried about that.
"Reentry velocity after returning from the Moon is much greater than LEO velocity and I would be really worried about that."
There aren't any plans to return Starship from the moon. They will need to recover a couple of dozen tanker flights used to top up an orbital depot. The HLS variant can fly with no heatshield at all to save weight and will likely need to.
One of the reasons for the damage is that spacex having been removing tiles, testing tiles and generally messing about with the heat shield to see if starship can withstand events such as tile loss, they also checked out a different way of attatching the tiles on the last flight (it sort of worked.... some tiles stayed on.. others made their own way back).
And they checked out some rather aggressive flight manuvers , more so than need to be done on a regular re-entry.
So I'd say they've found out a whole bunch of stuff about the design and ready to move onto a sub-orbital test flight of block 2, followed by a full on orbital demo if the first flight goes ok.
But even I think muskrat has over promised.........
"One of the reasons for the damage is that spacex having been removing tiles, testing tiles and generally messing about with the heat shield to see if starship can withstand events such as tile loss"
Call me weird, but the first thing I'd want to do is get something that is known to work and then do that sort of testing. To be testing new tiles and seeing what happens when tiles aren't populated means that the heat shield is still very much a "science project". Really, it's an engineering project, but when I was in aerospace, the last thing the company where I worked wanted to see was the engineering staff developing new materials and systems. We did rework a bunch of COTS stuff to suit our needs, reducing mass mostly. Many times things such as valves and pressure regulators are built heavy as that's cheap and for most uses, a bit of extra mass makes no difference. We'd make the parts out of lighter (more expensive) metals to 'add lightness'. The non-obvious thing about small craft is that it's a battle of grams and with larger ones, it's a battle of kilos. The first lander I worked on used Nitrogen to pressurize the fuel and Helium for the LOX due to cost. When we needed more flight time, we stripped out the plumbing for the N2 and I seem to recall that just the difference in mass of the gasses was ~5kg. It might have been 6-7kg savings by deleting the plumbing. When we put the lander on a reducing diet, we made a list of mass savings/$$ and also listed where the biggest differences could be had at any cost. Going from stainless fasteners to Aluminum was more work than reward. Some things were left as is for time constraint issues since we came up with enough margin to be getting on with.
There is an image that might even be real from the inside of Starship as it's coming back through the atmosphere. It's very religious (holy).
> planning to launch a hundred people into space
Starship will never launch anyone into space, not for NASA anyway.
Starship lacks any form of crew escape system - a required part of all human rated rockets for NASA - and there are no plans to add one. If something goes wrong on the pad, and it has before, then the passengers become toasty marshmallows. Starship can't be human rated for launch.
It is also unlikely to ever land people on Earth for similar reasons.
Didn't have one for Shuttle and lets not count that BS plan they had with crew parachuting out.
Anyway. no launch crew for starship, they are rendezvous with Orion in lunar orbit and the human rating is for lunar Lander and return back to Orion or Lunar gateway should that ever happen.
>Didn't have one for Shuttle
But the Shuttle was only going to be crewed by flinty-eyed square-jawed test pilots. It's not like they were going to let just anybody fly on such a risky project.
Starship might have to take celebrity influences to the moon
Wasn't there a Senator, too? And no, not John Glenn.
Not to mention all the Mission Specialists. Not pilots, but scientists, engineers, and researchers.
I once heard a talk by a Shuttle pilot. He said the flight crew jokingly called the specialists "talking ballast". In turn the specialists called the flight crew "bus drivers". Hopefully all in jest.
Two senators flew on Shuttle. The first was Jake Garn, ex navy pilot so not an awful choice.
The second was Bill Nelson (yes, that Bill Nelson who went on to become NASA administrator as did the pilot Charles Bolden, nothing fishy there). He flew as a payload specialist on Columbia STS-61 with no previous technical experience. The real scandal was that Bill bumped Gregory Jarvis who was due to fly on STS-61 but was reassigned to the ill fated STS-51 mission, the Challenger disaster.
Wishful thinking. If Musk were an AI investors would give him $1B. About the only people more daft are congress who really would give a $10B five year (*) cost plus contract for a third HLS if they were capable of agreeing a budget at all.
(* meaning $20B and ten years)
History flashback (Wikipedia): "Kennedy stood before Congress on May 25, 1961, and proposed that the US 'should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.'" That was a full eight (8) years before successful landing, even including a temporary pause after (and due to) the Apollo 1 tragedy.
Kennedy then gave his famous speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962 -- over a year later, but while NASA was still accomplishing things that helped understand the challenges.
This new goal is only 4 years out and has some unique things both going for it (including massive rocket already designed) and against it (funding).
Referencing the same article, JFK did not have much public support at the time, but it increased, especially after his assassination. I'm not suggesting anything against the current administration, but should the unspeakable happen, we could do it as a tribute to him... but maybe on a more relaxed, reasonable timescale.
"Apollo cost 2.5% of US GDP in the 60s, as a comparison the US military all together is about 3.25% of GDP today"
GDP can be a poor reference point. So many things that go into the calculation aren't useful data points. The cost of treating people for cancer is in there and I would view that as a negative/drain more than a measure of productivity.
I'd be amazed if the US military expenditure was only 3.25% of GDP. I'm all for taking a bunch of it away and letting NASA do something useful with the money. The Department of Energy could restart research into MSR's before China holds all of the patents.
> but it does show that the Apollo protect, and specifically the political deadline, cost a metric shit tonne
But what about the spin off benefits? I guess it boosted the US economy considerably and is said to have really kickstarted the road to the modern electronics we have today...
"Agreed, but it does show that the Apollo protect, and specifically the political deadline, cost a metric shit tonne"
I think it's more like -40deg where the scales cross in terms of shit tonnes. Just like two cars where one is $70k and the other $80k. I can't afford either so if they were 20% higher or lower, it would make no difference.
Given all of the technology that has flowed out of the early US space programs, I think it was money well spent.
"That was a full eight (8) years before successful landing, even including a temporary pause after (and due to) the Apollo 1 tragedy."
It was a very busy eight years and the research done then has built a foundation to work from today. It should be entirely possible to return humans to the moon in 4 years if there isn't a massive amount of overreach and mission creep. The next visit to the moon doesn't need to be a huge spectacular and it's better if it isn't. Just getting the next generation of astronauts there and back again with a reasonable amount of work done on the surface will be fancy enough.
"That was a full eight (8) years before successful landing, even including a temporary pause after (and due to) the Apollo 1 tragedy."
So, 8 years from "let's do this" to actually doing it. The Artemis landing may be only 4 years away, but the planning started for it long, long ago, announced in Dec 2017. And they started with existing technology.
Lots of different start dates. The Starship HLS contract was awarded 2021-04-16. Blue got their HLS contract in May 2023. Pick any start date you like for SLS as it is scaled down Constellation. That was selected for being quick and cheap because it recycled shuttle components and was cancelled for being very late and over budget.
"And they started with existing technology."
And then they proposed the most complicated mission they could get away with and a flight plan with the acronym WTF. The Apollo landings were a trade between picking the safest sites they could find that were easy to get to and had some feature to inflict some science on. Mission success was very important. Finding water at the South pole would be nice, but it's a tough spot to get to and there's no guarantee that any water they find will be in a useful condition or quantity. ISRU is way down the possibilities at this point and will be until some sort of outpost can be set up using things sent from Earth.
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I believe it's Duffy who's caught up in the "reality distortion field" if he believes Blue Origin or anyone else can do better than SpaceX. He'll only end up delaying SpaceX's progress even further and jeopardizing the entire prospect of landing astronauts on the Moon before the Chinese do.
Next there will be rumblings about money being siphoned off Starship development to pay for Blue Origin's boondoggle, further complicating things and wasting valuable time. Worst case Musk will simply abandon a Moon landing altogether and focusing on Mars instead.
The "Good" news is that SpaceX already have the bulk of the HLS contract money. More "good" news: the purpose of this distraction is to draw attention away from the Trump regime's inability to agree a budget. Normally congress would be salivating at the prospect of wasting an extra $10B. Now is probably not the best time to threaten tax payers with that.
The actual good news: Musk is on the defensive and is unlikely to get tax payer funding for Mars any time soon.
"The actual good news: Musk is on the defensive and is unlikely to get tax payer funding for Mars any time soon."
There should be no money going to Elon for a Mars mission. Elon wants to start an empire with him as exalted leader. Let him pay for it after he's handed another $1tn in Tesla stock.
This is 110% political BS from Sean Duffy who is now making a play for being permanent NASA admin, probably easier than being transport secretary and politically more visible.
Isaacman said after his review that the current plan with Starship HLS is still the fastest option and I assume he probably had access to more detailed updates from Gwynne that SpaceX have released publicly which I would say to SpaceX, release more data, are you really behind or just not releasing info.
For alternatives, I don't know if BO are working flat out or they can go faster. Plus they are tied to New Glenn as the launch system which has its own challenges. And shock horror, perennial government cronies Lockheed Martin stated that they have been working on a lander and can have it ready in 30 months, no mention of cost but speculation is around $20bn to meet the deadline.
Also no mention as to how long it will take to retrain crew, build systems, Orion integration or anything else that will be required.
The other option is to rescope the mission. If its just to get there and plant a flag and forget any science then there are cheaper and faster options. NASA's original requirement was for 5t of payload for the lander and then they go and chose a solution that can deliver 100t.
And in all this, its been widely reported that Musk really doesn't care about lunar mission. Yes, its a nice to have and good test of systems but priority has been and still is the Moon. But one interpretation of Mucks post is that SpaceX will go it alone if NASA gives the contract somebody else. Of course he could just sell HLS seats to the Chinese, lol
"For alternatives, I don't know if BO are working flat out or they can go faster. Plus they are tied to New Glenn as the launch system which has its own challenges. "
New Glenn has done an orbital launch while SpaceX is still fiddling about doing sub-orbital hops and their next is the maiden voyage of a redesign. NG-2 is expected to launch a payload in the next month.
Blue Origin has also delivered a mock up of their proposed moon lander so NASA can work with them on refining the design.
A rocket stack going to the moon with enough mass capability for a manned mission is outside of normal capabilities for rockets so a Blue Origin lander is likely to only work on top of a New Glenn rocket for the time being. Trying to pare it down to go on top of a F9H would likely lead to too many compromises. A Vulcan-Centaur with a full set of solid fuel boosters could get 11t to the moon according to the manual (2023). I didn't see what the maximum fairing dimensions are for that.
"And what use is a mockup lander model on a sound stage?
You can do it in CGI these days"
Yes, I get the conspiracy theory reference, but a mock up is important. It can be walked through, walked through in a spacesuit. Controls can be Velcro'd to the walls to sort out where they should go and how easy/hard they might be to access.
"Ues a physical mockup is important but it pretty incredible what you can do with VR these days."
Yes, very useful to get to the point where it makes sense to build the tangible mock up.
I design plenty of stuff in Solidworks and then go on to my other CAD program, Cardboard Aided Engineering. How hard is it to get a tool inside of something to turn a screw? I've designed lots of stuff that can't be built with the tools I own. I love any reason I can come up with to buy more tools (guy here), but I often don't have the budget for that thing I'll only use once that has to be special ordered.
> it is perhaps now more likely that China could be the first nation to go back to the Moon.
Would they bother ?
Unless they can do something really impressive like a permanent manned base, which is expensive to resupply, all they would be doing is spending billions to say to the world "China, only 60 years behind America!"
"China are going to the Moon, but on their own schedule. "
It's not a race so there's no need to rush. China has been working towards putting Taikonauts in space and the moon for some time by methodically ticking all of the boxes. I don't think they are worried that the US will be back first, but that they will be first in putting up long term infrastructure and doing real science.
What I find fascinating is that Musk is still working on developing a rocket, when the US military have known, since at the least the 1950's, that we have aliens regularly visiting our planet since before settlers arrived in Nevada, who demonstrate total control over gravity, even to the point where their "local" equipment is manufactured using materials bought from our own material supplies.
What we have now is a series of books, published since 2003, (that I had only discovered earlier this year), that relate to Charles James Hall, in 1965, 20 years old and fresh out of university signing up for the USAF being assigned to AFB in Nevada to train become a meteorologist. That he spent 2 years there and then did his service in Vietnam, became an academic, got married and had children and his wife would find him on his computer but not telling her what he was working on. Later she persuaded him to print out some of his writings and she has now published six volumes titled: Millennial Hospitality. My advice is read the opening chapter of Volume IV, and then read the rest from the start.
What you will all discover are his descriptions of their vehicles, and their clothes, show the ability to fully control gravity with effects that I am sure, are very real, such as shutting down all electricity up to 4,000 feet from the object under control. Or again, describing one that rises ~20 - 30 feet from the surface and then moving 7 miles in 3 seconds and coming to a complete stop. Elsewhere he describes no seat belts inside. yes, call me a fool if you like, but then why does he constantly describe US Generals in direct contact with the aliens?
Go read the books and you will also learn that there are three alien races on the planet; Tall whites, Greys, and what are described as NW 24T, Norwegians with 24 teeth. That the Truman administration spent millions of $US on building better facilities for them, including a hanger 300 feet wide, 600 feet deep and ~90 feet tall to hold their interplanetary ship that regularly arrives from elsewhere in the surrounding universe. Yes, call me nuts if you like, but my opinion is, Hall is telling the truth.
Trust me, there are people who are lots worse than he is. There is, for example, the gentleman who insists that there are 678 aliens living in the solar system right how. They're refugees from the Antares system; Antares is a red supergiant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antares Any life on any planet in the Antares system would be... special. Antares is also about 550 light years away. The only way to get here from there would be the Dray Prescot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dray_Prescot_series method. And, in any case, 678 is an awfully precise number. M'man posts on USENET, notably in talk.origins and rec.arts.sf.written, and he's not the kookiest poster in either newsgroup. (And, yes, he's quite serious.)
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