Summary
Elon Musk and his advisers are pressuring Trump to cancel NASA’s $24 billion Space Launch System (SLS), citing high costs and outdated technology.
GOP lawmakers from Alabama and Texas oppose the move due to job losses and national security concerns.
Critics favor SpaceX’s cheaper, reusable Starship, but supporters argue SLS has already flown successfully and is more powerful.
Former NASA administrator Bill Nelson believes SLS will survive, as Trump likely wants to be the president who oversees the next moon landing.
“Critics favor SpaceX’s cheaper, reusable Starship”
…yeah these critics definitely aren’t just Musk with a fake mustache and spacex investors or anything…
If they buy the moon, there’s def going to be a secret Nazi base on it.
NASA’s budget is less than 1% of the entire federal budget. We can do both.
Ah yes, Elon Musk deciding who gets government contracts to build spaceships. Move along, no conflicts of interest to be seen here.
I don’t think this is a meaningful test because actually creating stuff for the money you get isn’t required when you have the power to devalue USD and your own companies’ stocks. This is literally the only reason he surpassed the other tech bros in wealth accumulation: market manipulation.
Trump likely wants to be the president who oversees the next moon landing.
Like this MF would last the 10 years that would take.
Ugh I can just imagine the brain dead boomers now, “nobody else has been able to do it for 60 years, but Trump did it!”
Bruh, just let him believe it. Trying to argue against keeping NASA isn’t the best angle, atm.
Right? That’s like #273,836 on the list of shit to scrutinize.
I also don’t see how President Musk would ever allow Trump to oversee it.
Yeah, Starship is definitely not ready for primetime. Maybe cancel SLS after SpaceX has flown a Starship mission around the moon.
It’s not the correct architecture for making it to the moon. Starship/SuperHeavy is an absolute beast for LEO but they are nowhere close to being able to make it to the moon with that system. I wish Super Heavy all the luck and success but it’s frustrating when they keep pushing it for other roles without acknowledging the major issues that come with staging so low in the atmosphere
Agreed, though I’m still interested in some “assemble in orbit” lunar architectures. No need to lug the whole Starship out there, but it can put significant mass into orbit. You could build an Apollo style lander out of three or four launched components, I suspect.
https://medium.com/@ToryBrunoULA/the-secrets-of-rocket-design-revealed-e2c7fc89694c
This is a pretty good article that gets into the nitty gritty of some of the issues. Disclaimer: it’s written by the CEO of SpaceX’s main competition but he’s well regarded in the industry.
$24 billion Space Launch System (SLS), citing high costs and outdated technology.
Fuck Musk, but they ain’t wrong. It’s just rearranged space shuttle parts designed to funnel pork barrel money to the same old contractors (except now we even gotta throw away all the RS-25 engines instead of reusing them). There’s nothing fundamentally new there that they didn’t already do in the 60s. It kind of is a step backward in terms of aerospace tech.
Going to the moon should use technology that is tried and tested.
Another “Apollo 13” happening because the new strategy is “move fast and break things” won’t have the same happy ending.
You shouldn’t throw out all your hammers just because they were designed a “too long” ago. Some tools are fit for purpose.
It’s not sustainable. The reason the Apollo missions never were further developed after the landings was because the entire program was designed to get to the moon as fast as possible, where money was no object, in order to beat the Soviets. We don’t need anything like that now. If we are to build bases and establish a permanent presence, we can’t be using a vehicle that takes billions per launch.
Something like the Space Shuttle program. Not cheap, but also not with an Apollo price tag, where it can fly for decades without some politician seeing a giant wad of cash going out and getting ideas about cutting it. That’s what Starship is supposed to be. A Space Shuttle 2.0. It’s just unfortunate that the world’s richest Nazi has control of it.
Switching to Starship, which is designed to get to space as fast as possible to beat their competition, is not better. Even if there weren’t a conflict of interest the size of Jupiter.
The NASA moonshot has been choosing hardware that will do what is asked of it every time and has known failure modes and fixes. Not the shiny new thing. That’s a good thing.
Starship or it’s successors may in the future be a good option. For the first experimental mission(s) it’s a ship designed for LEO and should not be pointed at the moon just because it is also rocket shaped.
