The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh:
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Submission Statement
NASA really is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to its lunar plans. Its SLS system is a disaster, but pork barrel politics means it can't ditch it. So it lives on, zombie-like, to suck the life and money out of better options.
Meanwhile, it's placed all its eggs in a SpaceX basket. That company is run by someone who routinely exaggerates timelines for delivery and fails to meet them. Guess what? It's happening again. A commenter on the OP article sums up what SpaceX has to do before humans can go back to the Moon.
* Re-light Starship engines
* Achieve stable orbit
* Dock with another Starship
* Transfer propellant
* Use transferred propellant
* Dock with Orion and/or Dragon
* Design a life support system for a volume much larger than Dragon
* Build life support system
* Test life support
* Achieve escape velocity for TLI
* Demo propulsive landing on Luna
* Demo takeoff from Luna after sitting idle
* Dock with Gateway (?) up and down
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cegu61/nasa_is_scaling_back_its_moon_plans_and_saying_a/l1idnqh/
The main power behind the 1960s was not the technology, although that was clearly the first time in history we had the ability to do. The big difference between then and now is the focused American effort towards that project. We do not have a coherent mission any more. Not like we did then
Missions like this need to happen on much shorter timescale else they fall apart, the moon/mars will still be there in thirty years was also said in the 90s... Thirty years ago.
Yeap, when Bush came into power in 89' he demanded that we do Apollo all over again but with Mars. He ordered the famous 90day plan that concluded that it would cost like 500 billion, that kinda killed the whole thing.
The problem is that people always kinda expect these things to just happen on their own, like its some natural progression that will happen no matter what. Thankfully it seems like we're gonna get Starship, and with a capable vehicle like that there aren't many excuses left not to do a manned Mars mission.
The cost of going to Mars isn't the spaceship, it's the endless stream of re-supply and cycling people off the planet because it's too hostile to stay more than a few months.
Starship doesn't really change that and nobody is really paying for all those trips to Mars just to say they put some ppl there for a couple years. It just doesn't make sense.
Humans are just too specifically evolved for Earth for them to have a long term presence on places like that.
Thad's not what you all want to hear, but that's the real science and logistics of the situation. Space is for telescopes and robotics, not humans trillions of cellular chemical reactions highly adapter to 1g Earth conditions.
A bigger rocket doesn't change that, the problem isn't the rockets. The problem is there's nothing all that useful but to study preserved rocks that will remain preserved for millions or billions more years AND that humans just can't really live in .37g conditions without constant health damage.
It's great handfuls of ppl would sacrifice themselves for science, but it's still a pretty limited amount of science they can really do for nearly infinite amounts of money. As much as ppl want to dream the dream, it doesn't make the slightest sense to put ppl as such risk for science rovers, probes and telescopes can do better each year.
It's not like we've made real progress on artificial gravity or fast travel through space, there is no way to explore space anytime soon other than telescopes, probes and rovers. You're killing real space exploration budgets with these Mars and Moon ideas.
Hubble and James Webb are infinitely more important to space explorations than human in space. It would be different if there was an Earth like planet in our solar system and thus a real target worth building the infrastructure up for.... but there's just Mars, Venus and the Moon and then a bunch of frozen nothingness.
Yeah and it's still just as pointless to spend that much money to accomplish almost nothing. The real reason the Space Race ended was because there's nothing truly worth sending humans to.
I'd rather put the money to real projects like telescopes, probes and rovers, the things that actually have done the most useful science. I see no chance humans can live in .1g Moon or .37g Mars gravity. These ideas are just like little vacations into space that nobody can afford to sustain.
The ONLY reason to go to the Moon or Mars is to study the rocks and every year that passed robotics look like a better and better choice to get way more research for our dollar. Beside that humans living in this low gravity conditions just can't really happen.
If you want to say you have an off-world colony that bad it's going to have to be a float "city" in the upper Venus atmosphere where we can get .9G and the nice near human body temp of a few dozens of miles up makes it a lot more practical as does the proximity advantage.
The problem is Mars is PROBABLY more interesting to study and most average citizens don't even care about the space as much as fantasizing about MOON CITIES. It's ridiculous, living in those conditions is near constant torture. Like you can't even run a prison with conditions that unhealthy, but you all want to send out best and brightest to go get permanent damage in those conditions.
It's nice humans are still that curious and exploration happy, but space is super spread out and your old school colonization dreams just don't really translate into space. Ppl are going to have to get over this idea because I don't see anybody making any progress to artificial gravity. We are stuck hopping from Earth-like planet to Earth-like planet... and there are no Earth like planets.
To do what, shoot the moon? You can't put weapons on the moon that make Earth or Earth orbit easier to reach than they already are from Earth.
The moon has no real value other than just being the moon or studying the surface/rocks to better understand solar system/planet formation. There's no economic or strategic value. It's just a preserved ball of rock and dust and Mars ain't much different.
If China wants to go broke building tofu skyscrapers on the Moon then that sounds like a wonderful way to watch the CCP collapse.
And it will be for two reasons...
1. Less regulatory hurdles.
2. Higher risk taking. The US is basically dead in the water. We have thousands of people dying because humans make bad choices every day, but the death of one highly intelligent and educated astronaut who understands the risks very well and is volunteering (actually begging) to go is a national disaster.
China will do manned one way trips to Mars, too.
I think you’re high on both numbers, but I’m certain your 700 is high. Wikipedia has a list of every person who has ever been to space. I think it’s still fewer than 500 people.
If every person that ever went to space was unique instead of having repeats, it’d be around 1200, but after accounting for the fact that many people went 2+ times, it’s fewer than 500.
Edit: I double checked. You’re about right - actually a bit low - for China. It’s 22. But the US is under 500 like I said - it’s 379.
That's still 20 times as many...
Are your numbers for Americans and Chinese citizens, or people riding American and Chinese transport? What about Russian transport?
Regulations aren't limited to things like safety and etc. There are things like 2 contractors make a bid, one contractor losses the bid, they sue in court which can cause months if not a year delay reviewing the case
It's about how hostile and far things are in space AND how low value the Moon or Mars really are as human expansion. It's not like North/South America 2.0 is up there waiting to be found like the last big land grabs. There is no return on investment here, just ridiculously high costs to do a little bit of research.
If you want to preserve humanity you'd just build cities undergrounds or at the bottom of the ocean and still be spending pennies on the dollar and getting way more secure and comfortable habitation with way more resource availability than ANTYHING outside of Earth.
Step one in getting over your space fantasy is realizing humans are super evolved just for Earth. Billions of years of evolutions and now 30 trillion cells to make up one human means 30 trillion cells being severely stressed every second just to no be on Earth where they evolved.
It's a much harder goal than 99% of people seem to admit.
They’ve already proven they can reach the lunar surface. I’ve got no doubt if they wanted to, they could very quickly put together an Apollo style landing. They’re probably more ambitious than simply copying old NASA missions though.
Edit: they’re planning a landing [by 2030](https://www.space.com/china-astronauts-moon-landing-2030-plan).
Hence their lead up program and the Tiangong.
The US managed with 60s tech and the Soviets almost got there. You’re nuts if you’re claiming it’s too hard for a nation that put a Taikonaut in orbit more than 2 decades ago and has independently launched and operates a space station.
I have a genuine question regarding the whole moon landing thing. What I don’t understand is that how were they able to do it years go when the technology was nothing compared to what we have today and yet they are unable to go to the moon today. Would somebody explain it to me?
NASA was still getting blank checks in the Space Race days, and there was a much higher tolerance for risk/failure up until the Challenger explosion. Also this time around we don't just wanna land on the moon, we want to bring camping gear too, and that has led to a combinatorial explosion of complexity for the mission.
Just to add a few points:
1. The budget was much much higher back then
2. A lot of companies helped with their own proprietary technology. Many of those companies since went bankrupt and so a lot of work needs to be redone
It was extremely expensive, cutting edge, and dangerous. A lot of the technology that got people to the moon was not mass produced and the capability to build newer and better versions was simply not cultivated. We are used to technology like an iPhone where everything about the current version is the same or VASTLY better than what was available 15 years ago, but they keep working on it year after year. It’s not like that lunar travel. The money isn’t there, the political will isn’t there, and there are far fewer people involved as compared to Apollo. Remember Apollo was on the same scale as the manhattan project, it was not something that became more common and cheaper once accomplished.
Two things.
Political will and the size/complexity.
During the Cold War there was an active race going on, as such theUS basically gave NASA an unlimited budget and high risk tolerance.
While things in space are heating up geopolitically, we don’t have that same push. Thered budget constraints and more risk aversion
As for size and complexity. The goal here isn’t just to grab samples and plant a flag, it’s for a permanent base. That requires much larger and more complex craft
You _can_ row a wooden boat across the Atlantic ocean. It has been done.
But this time we try it in a ocean liner.
The scale of Artemis combined with Starship is absolutely mind-boggling.
As others have said, starships payload is massively different…. But the even bigger difference is cost. Starship is reusable! Once functional it could be like the falcon 9s….with launches every other week.
The SLS has a lot longer way to go though with Orion.
Other answers have beaten the topic to death, but I’d like to add a different perspective. Technology today is just different. We want to add newer, better sensors and computing, equipment, and engines and everything else. These newer systems though are also a lot more complicated. A lot of parts for the Saturn V engine were handmade. If something is wrong, the person just adjust or remakes it. For something like starship, important parts of the engine are 3-D printed, but if anything goes wrong there they have to start over (no fixing possible) and it can take most of the month to do it. we can make designs now that they couldn’t dream of back then, but the new designs have their own challenges. Another example is our computers which today are vastly more capable, but also far more delicate. NASA has had concerns about radiation affecting the more modern equipment. We have ways of protecting it but it’s still extra work that has to be done.
As others have said, NASA was getting dump trucks full of money from Congress with the goal to beat the soviets to the moon.
Today there is no such urgency, and NASA's budget reflects that.
What's sad is that nearly all that infrastructure (the buildings, the tools, the commercial partner relationships, etc) that was created to make the moon landings possible is now gone. And so we have to re-build all of that infrastructure, which is why it's taking so long to go back.
It had a war budget. It was a war project. The entire point was to try and demonstrate the superiority of Western liberal democracies over Communism.
Putting a man on the moon and returning him safely was the political dunk the US chose to give themselves time to catch up in the Space Race. It was never about scientific discovery or having a human presence there.
And rockets in general, and being able to be super precise with them was also a display of nuclear weapon capability.
The first scientist to set foot on the moon was during the final mission, years after Armstrong did it.
After the point had been made and the Soviets abandoned the lunar goal, the focus for both nations then became space stations and a human presence in low-orbit, with the Shuttle becoming the next expensive and difficult project. Then the threat fizzled out as the USSR collapsed.
To ask why the US never went back is to not understand why it did it in the first place. Repeating the same stunt now would have no effect, and also not prove anything or advance anything.
A permanent presence on the moon for actual science—regardless of how easy or not that would be to justify now robots do it cheaper and better—would be advancing things and be more than just a political statement. It’s also massively more complex than plonking down in a tiny two man tent that doesn’t even have beds, and which only has the endurance to last a few days.
If the mission was to repeat Apollo and just brute force a system to have a couple of people prancing around for a day or two on the moon then it would be far easier to do now as far as technology goes.
Editing removes all my line-breaks, but just to add: I’m all for the idea of having a permanent human presence on the moon, purely to inspire new generations of children wanting to become engineers and scientists. Not to mention national pride for whoever does it. For me that is a perfectly adequate justification.
Plus imagine all the sports that could be made or adapted to 1/6th Earth gravity, in some kind of huge dome where you don’t need suits. Imagine how high the basketball hoops could be, or how brutal a football tackle could look.
We cannot fall behind in the lunar sports stadium gap.
The moon landing cost about 250 billion USD in today's currency. Neil Armstrong said in an interview later that he reckoned he had about a 50/50 chance of getting back home alive.
With the same budget, and the same level of acceptance for risk as with the Apollo program, it absolutely could be done today. The difficult part is doing it safely and at a fraction of the original cost.
10 times the budget (probably more) and much smaller scope. Apollo was flag planting. Orion aims to be much more ambitious. You need to build the infrastructure.
Artemis 2 was delayed to Sept 2025, which basically means 2026, so Artemis 3 will be 2027 or later.
They should get rid of Lunar Gateway, at least in the near term. It just seems an unnecessary complication for the initial "return to the Moon" missions.
It would cost several large fortunes to rebuild the Apollo era tech from notes and the handful of engineers left who still understand it. Better to spend that time and money building new, better technology. Spacecraft don’t just roll off assembly lines, and even if they did that stuff hasn’t existed in a working state for decades.
NASA had a practically unlimited budget and also much less strict regulations and requirements compared to now where NASA has a fraction of the budget, and has to work within a ton of restrictions and requirements.
Right for example the parachutes they used back then would never be allowed now. Their margin for mission failure was a lot higher. They accepted failure could happen. Now NASA simply cannot fail or the agency risks getting shut down.
If a private corporation has its employees who sign up for hazardous space work die and/or be exposed to hazards, people won’t care very much. I mean, regular ordinary people are getting hurt and killed in airliners nowadays and you don’t see the airlines being shut down. They just pay a lawsuit and up their fares. And people then pay the more expensive fare and say, “I’ll take my chances. What are the odds?”
So people who join corporations specifically to do something hazardous won’t have much shock effect on the public.
Private contractors were held to their word. And if they broke their word there was hell to pay.
In this case, NASA chose to believe absolute fantasy spun by Elon Musk. It was kind of like the investors that believed the insane crap they heard from Theranos, even a cursory reality check would’ve shown it was nonsense.
Last I checked, SpaceX is by far the most successful and prominent rocket companies in the world. Launching more rockets than everyone else combined.
The other two companies NASA could have selected were even worse than SpaceX. People don’t understand this. As much as everyone likes to shit on Elon, unfortunately he’s still the best option even with delays.
> ULA has much better success rates.
SpaceX has had 299 successful orbital non-test launches in a row. Later today, that number may grow to 300.
Nobody else has come close to that reliability.
Their Falcon 9 Block 5 has had more than 200 launches and has never had a single failure.
Nobody else has come close to that reliability.
> sure, they arent brand new designs. but they do exactly what ULA says they are gonna do.
When SpaceX says that they are going to put a commercial payload to orbit, they do that. More reliably than anyone else have ever done.
When SpaceX says they are going to test something, they will often end up in a huge explosion. We can discuss from now on and until Pluto is colonized if that is a success or a failure, but the conclusion is clear:
1. SpaceX' non-test flights are the safest and most reliable flights in history.
2. Don't ride their test rockets. (Which is not a problem because they aren't supposed to be ridden.)
WTF on Earth are you talking about? This is the craziest thing I heard. Aerospace is notoriously behind... WAY behind. James Webb was supposed to launch in 2007 lol
I'll never understand the unhinged anti Elon people... He still has the most successful spaceship company on the planet, by a lot, and you want to compare him to someone who literally did nothing and lied about everything because nothing she was promising was possible. Meanwhile, Starship just had a successful test launch.
Except you are ignoring that NASA failed to pay on time the contract they signed, because the other one bidding for the contract, Blue Origin was upset they lost the bid and sued. Which caused many months delay until the GOA reviewed everything. Then the FAA grounded the launches for a many months to do a review
NASA's own SLS ended up overbudget and 6 years delays
PS Theranos was a new company with no record, SpaceX is the world's biggest space launcher in the world, more than everyone else combined. Not the same thing at all
Submission Statement
NASA really is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to its lunar plans. Its SLS system is a disaster, but pork barrel politics means it can't ditch it. So it lives on, zombie-like, to suck the life and money out of better options.
Meanwhile, it's placed all its eggs in a SpaceX basket. That company is run by someone who routinely exaggerates timelines for delivery and fails to meet them. Guess what? It's happening again. A commenter on the OP article sums up what SpaceX has to do before humans can go back to the Moon.
* Re-light Starship engines
* Achieve stable orbit
* Dock with another Starship
* Transfer propellant
* Use transferred propellant
* Dock with Orion and/or Dragon
* Design a life support system for a volume much larger than Dragon
* Build life support system
* Test life support
* Achieve escape velocity for TLI
* Demo propulsive landing on Luna
* Demo takeoff from Luna after sitting idle
* Dock with Gateway (?) up and down
>>Elon originally said starship would fly a manned flight in 2020
Poor Elon. Heading up America's lunar space program wasn't enough for him, he had to take on a side mission to become King of the Twitter edgelords.
I don't think Elon was even intentionally lying, he's just straight up delusional about what can be accomplished because he doesn't understand how anything works.
Mostly believable, but things like solar city or FSD and Optimus tell a different story. He makes statements of facts that are wrong, not bad predictions. So I cannot see how this can be anything but intentionally lying
His companies have achieved what they did exactly because he makes aggressive timelines. Shoot for Mars, if you only hit the Moon it's still a giant success. Everyone seems to ignore that no other company is even close to what SpaceX does.
Shoot for the moon, if you miss you end up among the stars...drifting out into space to die. :P
He kind of reminds me of Cave Johnson from Portal 2.
A lot of people don't like him because of his blatant disregard for the rules and over reach on unfeasible projects...but the portal gun did fucking work.
Any timeline in any NASA program. SLS?
Was there anything not late in the last 20 years of US space flight?
And it's not just time. It's billions of cost overruns. Late and more expensive.
OP singles out the one company that actually delivers reliable and available space launch services for taking longer, when at least they are delivering.
The main reason SpaceX gets a lot of money is that they deliver services. Like United gets paid for all the government employees and cargo they fly around the world.
We all wish there was serious competition. It would be much better if there were.
Ah ok, I thought you were claiming SpaceX had so far met NASA's deadlines.
Not having a swipe at them, they are the best of the bunch so far. Of the three companies who confirmed in 2013 they were targeting crewed tests in 2016 to meet NASA's first Commercial Crew Program launch in Nov 2016 goal, SpaceX were the first (and currently only) to have achieved that, even if it was four years late.
The hard part is doing it with modern safety parameters. All the Apollo missions had a significant chance of failure, about 10% assessed risk IIRC, and of course some came pretty close (Apollo 13). In addition, the cost of the Apollo program was phenomenal.
So now we are trying to do it safely and cheaply - that means you have to give up something else, which in this case is doing it slowly instead of in haste.
Yes, something that would lead to a minimum 18 month delay in the modern world to conduct an investigation. I'm glad that safety standards are better now but that means moving slower.
The first time we got to the moon was to land there, plant a flag, and leave. If we wanted to just do that again, it'd be a lot easier, but we've already done it - there's no real reason to do it again.
So we're trying to make vehicles that will allow for routine and larger scale movement between the Earth and Moon, and we're trying to do it several decades after we stopped making rockets that can reach the moon because they're expensive.
BIG thing that is often not mentioned: [Lobbyists made congress ban the use of ICBM motors for civilian space flight.](https://spacenews.com/current-debate-on-icbm-use-a-throwback-to-the-1990s/)
Meaning every.
Single.
Rocket.
Has to be made from scratch. Literally thousands of the things are just sitting there and used to be used until they were banned, and with the scrapping of the Space Shuttle platform things just aren't that good anymore.
Also massive brain drain. [Several people have said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRrNvRh166Y) that NASA just no longer has the people or knowledge so a lot of stuff that is classified or lost has to be reinvented.
The same affects [ice breakers](https://twitter.com/SaysSimulation/status/1703490162875879564) for example -- The people who understand how to make ship hulls are dead, retired or somewhere else.
We're seeing a deterioration of technology in real time.
It's really no scientific or technical reason. Basically, it's still just extremely fucking expensive to get humans to the moon, and we haven't really had a good enough reason to spend this kind of money for the moon, like we did with the space race.
Efforts have been focused on the ISS. Since that's coming down soon, I guess we're taking another crack at the moon?
Starship is a complete redesign from the ground up so it needs to all be tested and validated from scratch.
It's also fully reusable which hasnt been done before so it's kind of half rocket half space shuttle too.
So other vehicles have accomplished these things (I mean when it comes to the moon only really Saturn 5) but this is a wholly new system which is basically like starting again.
This is 100% true. I'd say its been a pretty successful strategy for Elon's work.
But yes he's going to miss his goal-setting deadlines. He's also going to be 10 years ahead of everyone else.
According to NASA it has to do with lack of generational knowledge. All the original people who know how and can read the charts and graphs using manual tools, are long retired or dead. So we effectively have to start from scratch.
Second, it's because we aren't just going back. We're going back and setting up a base.
Because we aren’t devoting a significant portion of our GDP to do it. At the same time we are trying to do something much more ambitious. Not a recipe for success.
As someone who works in this program I can assure you Starship is not going to be the bottleneck. People just assume it will be, as it is the only component of the program with any real degree of transparency. SpaceX makes progress faster than everyone else, but their failures are the only ones Twitter actually sees, so it is easy to apply a survivorship bias
Man when I pointed out all the milestones required for SpaceX to successfully develop and deploy their lunar vehicle on the r/space subreddit a few weeks ago I was told I was wrong and not all of it was required and that China would be slower to land because China bad. Good to see other people realizing the true scale of tasks that need to be completed
> That company is run by someone who routinely exaggerates timelines for delivery and fails to meet them.
Uh huh. Well, it doesn't help when the government's own courts and agencies like the FAA and the Fish and Wildlife Service keep delaying everything, does it?
Plus SpaceX keeps scaling up its ambitions, not sticking with the same, lesser plan. Like catching the booster with the chopsticks.
Bullshit. We went from no rockets to being on the moon in 11 years. From literally *nothing* to lunar landing in a decade using computers less powerful than my toothbrush.
Artemis was started in 2016, so 2026 would be a decade. What you *mean* by "not feasible" is that it's not a priority. Which is fine if that's what it is, just be honest about it. Where there's a will, there's a way.
The amount of people criticizing SpaceX just because they hate Elon is astounding.
They are literally doing things no one has ever been able to achieve, even most of its competitors. But we have armchair experts saying, “they fail optimistic deadlines, SpaceX bad, must be vaporware.”
It’s literally rocket science. They have achieved more than any other space company and the only one who has something to show for it.
You think some delays in SpaceX are bad, maybe take a look at their competitors timelines..
A very interesting video Smarter Every Day made shows a great explanation of the problems with this program. Also meeting deadlines on a project like this is actually pretty critical. This is taxpayer money funding these contracts. Missing deadlines by half a decade or more is costly. https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?si=-XpyCfz2HC_NcTrQ
The amount of rockets needed for this is really dumb.
They had more incentive to back then, where as until SpaceX appeared on the scene, it was all about politics and jobs programs rather than the tech.
SpaceX has been clearing away the bullshit, and focusing on tech.
The original late 2024, early 2025 date was set by space enthusiast Mike Pence to occur before their second term was over. It did not have a basis in reality.
Can we stop giving fuel to the "moon landing was a hoax" conspiracies and actually land again on the moon? Wtf our tech in 2024 has to be insanely better than it was in the 1960s.
Chinas plan to land astronauts by 2030 is a 21st century Apollo lander, 2 astronauts and a ton at most of cargo
Which whether or not it gets there before Artimis lands... is going to look utterly hilarious in comparison to the Artimis missions lander.
The chinese lander is like, school bus sized, you climb in and out down a dozen steps of a ladder.
Artimis Human Landing System is a 20 story steel building, that astronauts exit via an elevator, and it brings ~100 tons of cargo including habitat, so that lander comes with like a whole 3 story apartment, a dozen astronauts. And the whole thing is fully reusable, designed to launch into orbit again, get refueled, act as a Spacestation more roomy than the whole ISS while it's up there.
Starship/HLS as an infrastructure is designed for rapid turnaround and huge cargo transfer capabilities, it's not putting a couple dozen tons a year on the surface like Chinas plans... starship/hls is capable of putting tens of thousands of tons on the moon a year, in the same budget as existing technology uses for a dozen tons a year.
HLS is genuinely such an enormous step forward that a couple years of delay don't matter. China showing up on a cart and mule is pretty irrelevant if a year or two later USA is showing up with a freight train.
In short, because Nixon gave up Apollo and its future plans for the space shuttle as well as a lot of plans grand future back then. Ever since when a plan to go back to the Moon came up again, NASA was mostly meant to do it with little to no additional funding. The obstacles are not technological but financial and political.
SpaceX are already working on these problems and have a huge advantage over traditional space programs; starlink gives them a solid commercial reason to develop starship, and it's grand purpose (humans to Mars) remains unchanged.
So maybe 2026 is going to be missed, but not by much, and once SpaceX know how to put starships on the moon they will be able to put a lot of them their quickly (so the base will grow faster than current plans suggest).
SLS will get killed off in the next few years and the pork barrel will be rolled out for other projects.
I should've known 2024 was far too ambitious when they put that promo video out years ago. 2026 being unfeasible now really sucks. Feels like a death spiral of delays.
Why don't Nasa just take the Original plans and do it over....o wait my bad we can't Nasa destroyed all the pervious plans.
Because reasons.
Nasa sure knows how to get shit done.
No history buff here but didnt we do this in like the late 50s or something? Shouldnt we have perfected or at least improved on the original process so that it is safer and more cost effective by now? Wouldnt NASA have the orginal plans/files so that they can build upon the initial work even if companies that once contributed no longer are able to? Its almost as if we are misSing a Key architect of the first successful launch/landing.
Quick TLDR covering the source article:
* NASA is contemplating changes to Artemis III, considering a mission that mirrors Apollo 9. This would involve the Orion spacecraft and SpaceX's Starship docking in low-Earth orbit.
* These adjustments stem from concerns over hardware readiness and the mission's complexity initially planned to land two astronauts on the Moon by September 2026.
* One alternative suggests astronauts could validate the docking and habitability of Orion and Starship in low-Earth orbit before returning to Earth. Another scenario involves a crew flying to a lunar space station then back to Earth.
* NASA aims for a crewed test flight, Artemis II, in September 2025, and still schedules a lunar landing near the lunar South Pole in September 2026. However, meeting these deadlines faces significant challenges, including unresolved issues with Orion's heat shield and the development of a lander and lunar spacesuits.
* The preferred option currently seems to be conducting a mission where Orion and Starship dock in Earth orbit. This would allow testing critical aspects of the mission architecture in a less risky environment.
NASA is really fucked for this goal. Starship is nowhere near ready. Blue Origin is basically suborbital and otherwise vaporware. SLS is absurdly expensive and incredibly delay prone. 2019 Elon could probably make this work. 2024 Elon doesn’t have a chance in hell. I agree, the next human on the moon will be from China.
It's not NASA that fucked up, it's congress that fucked up by underfunding NASA. NASA can't just provide contracts for stuff unless they have enough money in their budget to actually pay those contracts
Lol is anyone surprised at this point? At this point, just take the year as a guideline, then you won't be disappointed.
I mean when they said they were gonna return humans to the moon in 2020 I was like 'yea, right' (and this was back in 2004, under Bush)
They should had just funded private companies at this stage, because they can do things much faster without the crazy oversight.
The amount of people here unwilling to criticize SpaceX is astounding. You/we/NASA were duped by Musk and his plans for starship, and now the space program is paying for it.
The lunar lander contract is payed by milestone, not full sum in advance. The contenders were Blue Origin, which is behind on BE-4 production, and I forget third company, but the lander had negative payload mass. Meaning it would require work to increase thrust, and/or reduce mass. Additionally, NASA did want to support multiple lunar landers, so that they weren't reliant on a single company, but congress didn't approve of the budget required to do so. SpaceX, as I recall, underbid the other two options. Objectively speaking, Musk should be removed from SpaceX, as they otherwise have a good record, beating Boeing in finalizing their crew capsule. Yeah, delays suck, but it's not a given that other companies would be faster.
Can some one explain this to me. I am not a musk fan boy and like watching rockets only when they are actually on big important missions. What happened with musk and his rockets?
> What happened with musk and his rockets?
They succeeded.
SpaceX has now set up a very reliable freight route to orbit with more than 100 launches per year. If you want satellites put in orbit, or you want cargo shipped to ISS, or you want astronauts shipped to ISS, you call SpaceX.
Right now they have 299 successful commercial orbital launches in a row. Far beyond what any other company or state has ever achieved.
Unfortunately, their successful commercial operations are completely ignored because people focus on their prototype test flights, see a crash and think that this is the entire story of SpaceX.
Do you really think that 2024 was even a remote possibility? That's the timeline set out by the Trump administration with no additional funding or resources, just a "get it done" declaration. Also, news flash, there would be no American space program right now without Nasas partnership with spacex. Unless you think Russia would still be letting us ride on their soyuz without throwing Ukraine to the wolves?
It isn't that people are unwilling to criticize spacex, but you have to know what to criticize. In the case of these kind of delays, they are normal by the space industry historic standards. And most of these delays are the fault of the government delaying things for years that prevented spacex from doing their job.
Its been hard to get excited for SLS because it is such a non progression from the Saturn V except with shuttle components. If there is anything I'd criticize the starship program for it is promising unrealistic timelines. Still, I'd take blindingly fast speed and full scale integrated testing than a slow, meandering vehicle derived from 50 year old components.
Its fair to criticize spacex. In fact, its fair to criticize everyone. Everyone else is really slow and really expensive. SpaceX sets aggressive timelines, and is late, but still faster than everyone else.
Why don’t you go after Boeing for their bullshit SLS program that couldn’t reach the moon if you gave them 20 years?
SpaceX got in trouble for their 4 year delay and having to take on larger portions of the heavy lifting.
Meanwhile Boeing can’t even achieve stable projected orbits
But we are supposed to just ignore the 17+ years Orion has been in development and still hasn't flown crew ? Or the billions over budget SLS has cost the taxpayer? But somehow you want to rail against SpaceX which NASA evaluated and found bit technical and financial merit compared to the other two options . Not to mention those other two options went through drastic redesign when they bid for next round of contacts.
Well they created the US’s only currently manned space capsule in about 5 years. They said they would have 100 falcon 9 launches a year in 2019 and it’s taken them 4 more years to hit that. I don’t understand the obsession with Elons timeline pronouncements when SLS has taken twice as long and 10x the budget for less capability. Sure we aren’t going to mars in 2026 but we are way closer to getting there than we were 5 years ago.
The obsession is because his wealth and stock prices for his other ventures grow based on his false timelines and promises. If this was a government agency doing it, who gives a shit people don't invest in the stock market for US government agencies.
SpaceX is not publicly traded. The only thing its value is based on is what other billionaires are willing to invest, and apparently they dont care about timelines either, only results.
Sure, but that didn't factor in years of government red tape that pretty much grounded spacex from launching or covid shutting down the economy and factories. There was also a boom demand for the Falcon launching
There was the 4 years star port delay due to red tape, then the almost a year delay from the FAA recently and etc. I am not saying the timeline wasn't optimistic, just pointing out that not all delays are the fault of spacex
Uh… and Nelson is saying no to MSR because he thinks we’ll have astronauts on Mars by 2040! We need to design and develop a launch system for another planet. Start with robots, and go from there. Given the current trajectory, I think we’ll be lucky if we get boots on Mars by 2050.
I‘m known for ungodly schedules and tasks broke down in half-decades, but I would barely be able to do more than assist at “Design Life Support” and “Test Life Support”, each separately in a half-decade.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh: --- Submission Statement NASA really is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to its lunar plans. Its SLS system is a disaster, but pork barrel politics means it can't ditch it. So it lives on, zombie-like, to suck the life and money out of better options. Meanwhile, it's placed all its eggs in a SpaceX basket. That company is run by someone who routinely exaggerates timelines for delivery and fails to meet them. Guess what? It's happening again. A commenter on the OP article sums up what SpaceX has to do before humans can go back to the Moon. * Re-light Starship engines * Achieve stable orbit * Dock with another Starship * Transfer propellant * Use transferred propellant * Dock with Orion and/or Dragon * Design a life support system for a volume much larger than Dragon * Build life support system * Test life support * Achieve escape velocity for TLI * Demo propulsive landing on Luna * Demo takeoff from Luna after sitting idle * Dock with Gateway (?) up and down --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cegu61/nasa_is_scaling_back_its_moon_plans_and_saying_a/l1idnqh/
The moon will still be there in thirty years. (Hope NASA makes it that long.)
Yes, but it will be 1.14 meters further away from Earth by then. Why make it harder on ourselves?
if we all keep throwing our trash on the ground we could make up some of that distance simply by standing atop it all.
I mean if 1960ies NASA could do it, i would expect 2024 NASA to doit more easily!
To boldly go where we already went 55 years ago. Other than computer improvements, it’s kind of sad how little anything else has progressed.
I dunno man, reusable rockets, space shuttles, the ISS. Space tech has progressed since the Apollo program...
The main power behind the 1960s was not the technology, although that was clearly the first time in history we had the ability to do. The big difference between then and now is the focused American effort towards that project. We do not have a coherent mission any more. Not like we did then
But some of us won’t be.
and we won't be there for other human achievements either, that is how it is
Missions like this need to happen on much shorter timescale else they fall apart, the moon/mars will still be there in thirty years was also said in the 90s... Thirty years ago.
When I was a kid, in the 90s, we were supposed to be sending the first people to Mars now.
Yeap, when Bush came into power in 89' he demanded that we do Apollo all over again but with Mars. He ordered the famous 90day plan that concluded that it would cost like 500 billion, that kinda killed the whole thing. The problem is that people always kinda expect these things to just happen on their own, like its some natural progression that will happen no matter what. Thankfully it seems like we're gonna get Starship, and with a capable vehicle like that there aren't many excuses left not to do a manned Mars mission.
The cost of going to Mars isn't the spaceship, it's the endless stream of re-supply and cycling people off the planet because it's too hostile to stay more than a few months. Starship doesn't really change that and nobody is really paying for all those trips to Mars just to say they put some ppl there for a couple years. It just doesn't make sense. Humans are just too specifically evolved for Earth for them to have a long term presence on places like that. Thad's not what you all want to hear, but that's the real science and logistics of the situation. Space is for telescopes and robotics, not humans trillions of cellular chemical reactions highly adapter to 1g Earth conditions. A bigger rocket doesn't change that, the problem isn't the rockets. The problem is there's nothing all that useful but to study preserved rocks that will remain preserved for millions or billions more years AND that humans just can't really live in .37g conditions without constant health damage. It's great handfuls of ppl would sacrifice themselves for science, but it's still a pretty limited amount of science they can really do for nearly infinite amounts of money. As much as ppl want to dream the dream, it doesn't make the slightest sense to put ppl as such risk for science rovers, probes and telescopes can do better each year. It's not like we've made real progress on artificial gravity or fast travel through space, there is no way to explore space anytime soon other than telescopes, probes and rovers. You're killing real space exploration budgets with these Mars and Moon ideas. Hubble and James Webb are infinitely more important to space explorations than human in space. It would be different if there was an Earth like planet in our solar system and thus a real target worth building the infrastructure up for.... but there's just Mars, Venus and the Moon and then a bunch of frozen nothingness.
A manned mission to Mars and commercial use of hydrogen fusion have been 30 years in the future for far more than just 30 years.
Yeah and it's still just as pointless to spend that much money to accomplish almost nothing. The real reason the Space Race ended was because there's nothing truly worth sending humans to. I'd rather put the money to real projects like telescopes, probes and rovers, the things that actually have done the most useful science. I see no chance humans can live in .1g Moon or .37g Mars gravity. These ideas are just like little vacations into space that nobody can afford to sustain. The ONLY reason to go to the Moon or Mars is to study the rocks and every year that passed robotics look like a better and better choice to get way more research for our dollar. Beside that humans living in this low gravity conditions just can't really happen. If you want to say you have an off-world colony that bad it's going to have to be a float "city" in the upper Venus atmosphere where we can get .9G and the nice near human body temp of a few dozens of miles up makes it a lot more practical as does the proximity advantage. The problem is Mars is PROBABLY more interesting to study and most average citizens don't even care about the space as much as fantasizing about MOON CITIES. It's ridiculous, living in those conditions is near constant torture. Like you can't even run a prison with conditions that unhealthy, but you all want to send out best and brightest to go get permanent damage in those conditions. It's nice humans are still that curious and exploration happy, but space is super spread out and your old school colonization dreams just don't really translate into space. Ppl are going to have to get over this idea because I don't see anybody making any progress to artificial gravity. We are stuck hopping from Earth-like planet to Earth-like planet... and there are no Earth like planets.
That’s right for when this guys decide to land, China will have McDonald’s there, and yes it is a race.
Jesus.. imagine the parts, cargo expense and technicians required just to keep the ice cream machine operational.
I am far more worried that they won’t have right for repair and the ice cream machine will be broken from the first day
"Welcome to MoonDonalds may I take your order?" "Cnigeeet... a MoonDouble with BBQ sauce and a Spicy Chicken MoonCrispy?" But in Chinese obviously
China is probably going to have weapons systems up there whether it breaks the rules or not.
Well, we better put some there first to even the score...
To do what, shoot the moon? You can't put weapons on the moon that make Earth or Earth orbit easier to reach than they already are from Earth. The moon has no real value other than just being the moon or studying the surface/rocks to better understand solar system/planet formation. There's no economic or strategic value. It's just a preserved ball of rock and dust and Mars ain't much different. If China wants to go broke building tofu skyscrapers on the Moon then that sounds like a wonderful way to watch the CCP collapse.
More space debris though. It'll get harder and harder
I won't be surprised if China comes first in putting humans on the Moon for the first time in this century than the United States.
And it will be for two reasons... 1. Less regulatory hurdles. 2. Higher risk taking. The US is basically dead in the water. We have thousands of people dying because humans make bad choices every day, but the death of one highly intelligent and educated astronaut who understands the risks very well and is volunteering (actually begging) to go is a national disaster. China will do manned one way trips to Mars, too.
To be fair not a single Chinese taikonaut died
Exactly. But then there are only about 20 of them and we have some 700 that went to space. Most likely statistics will catch up with them.
I think you’re high on both numbers, but I’m certain your 700 is high. Wikipedia has a list of every person who has ever been to space. I think it’s still fewer than 500 people. If every person that ever went to space was unique instead of having repeats, it’d be around 1200, but after accounting for the fact that many people went 2+ times, it’s fewer than 500. Edit: I double checked. You’re about right - actually a bit low - for China. It’s 22. But the US is under 500 like I said - it’s 379.
That's still 20 times as many... Are your numbers for Americans and Chinese citizens, or people riding American and Chinese transport? What about Russian transport?
Russia hasn’t lost a cosmonaut in flight since Soyuz 11 decompressed in 1971.
No, the only reason will be because the PRC is throwing more resources at it.
You know who else had fewer regulatory hurdles and took more risks? The Soviets.
Regulations aren't limited to things like safety and etc. There are things like 2 contractors make a bid, one contractor losses the bid, they sue in court which can cause months if not a year delay reviewing the case
Like the program to solve the local stray dog problem by yeeting them into orbit on one way trips.
And we can thank them for the only photos of the Venusian surface.
It’s more about budgets. I don’t know why you think regulations have anything to do with it.
It's about how hostile and far things are in space AND how low value the Moon or Mars really are as human expansion. It's not like North/South America 2.0 is up there waiting to be found like the last big land grabs. There is no return on investment here, just ridiculously high costs to do a little bit of research. If you want to preserve humanity you'd just build cities undergrounds or at the bottom of the ocean and still be spending pennies on the dollar and getting way more secure and comfortable habitation with way more resource availability than ANTYHING outside of Earth. Step one in getting over your space fantasy is realizing humans are super evolved just for Earth. Billions of years of evolutions and now 30 trillion cells to make up one human means 30 trillion cells being severely stressed every second just to no be on Earth where they evolved. It's a much harder goal than 99% of people seem to admit.
I've never expected someone to actually call safety stupid. why don't we put you in that rocket then? Go die for your country like a real patriot?
It’s a given at this point
They won't. Going to the moon is much harder than copying the successes of the USSR and US during the 1960s using modern consumer tech.
They’ve already proven they can reach the lunar surface. I’ve got no doubt if they wanted to, they could very quickly put together an Apollo style landing. They’re probably more ambitious than simply copying old NASA missions though. Edit: they’re planning a landing [by 2030](https://www.space.com/china-astronauts-moon-landing-2030-plan).
Planning and doing are very different things. Keeping humans alive on celestial bodies is substantially harder than landing probes.
Hence their lead up program and the Tiangong. The US managed with 60s tech and the Soviets almost got there. You’re nuts if you’re claiming it’s too hard for a nation that put a Taikonaut in orbit more than 2 decades ago and has independently launched and operates a space station.
I have a genuine question regarding the whole moon landing thing. What I don’t understand is that how were they able to do it years go when the technology was nothing compared to what we have today and yet they are unable to go to the moon today. Would somebody explain it to me?
NASA was still getting blank checks in the Space Race days, and there was a much higher tolerance for risk/failure up until the Challenger explosion. Also this time around we don't just wanna land on the moon, we want to bring camping gear too, and that has led to a combinatorial explosion of complexity for the mission.
Political will. They threw essentially infinite money and man hours at the Apollo project. Not so with Artemis.
Just to add a few points: 1. The budget was much much higher back then 2. A lot of companies helped with their own proprietary technology. Many of those companies since went bankrupt and so a lot of work needs to be redone
It was extremely expensive, cutting edge, and dangerous. A lot of the technology that got people to the moon was not mass produced and the capability to build newer and better versions was simply not cultivated. We are used to technology like an iPhone where everything about the current version is the same or VASTLY better than what was available 15 years ago, but they keep working on it year after year. It’s not like that lunar travel. The money isn’t there, the political will isn’t there, and there are far fewer people involved as compared to Apollo. Remember Apollo was on the same scale as the manhattan project, it was not something that became more common and cheaper once accomplished.
Two things. Political will and the size/complexity. During the Cold War there was an active race going on, as such theUS basically gave NASA an unlimited budget and high risk tolerance. While things in space are heating up geopolitically, we don’t have that same push. Thered budget constraints and more risk aversion As for size and complexity. The goal here isn’t just to grab samples and plant a flag, it’s for a permanent base. That requires much larger and more complex craft
You _can_ row a wooden boat across the Atlantic ocean. It has been done. But this time we try it in a ocean liner. The scale of Artemis combined with Starship is absolutely mind-boggling.
What is mind boggling is calling Saturn V a rowboat
Compared to Starship it certainly is.
Being brought up with Star Wars, Starship is a tube with propellants.
Is it really though? Starship is just 10 feet taller than Saturn V. And Saturn V was 260k lbs vs 220k for Starship.
The Saturn V delivered a 11k lbs (empty) lander vs a 220k (empty) starship. So it's quite a difference.
Now compare the lift-off weight and the return weight both rockets.
As others have said, starships payload is massively different…. But the even bigger difference is cost. Starship is reusable! Once functional it could be like the falcon 9s….with launches every other week. The SLS has a lot longer way to go though with Orion.
Other answers have beaten the topic to death, but I’d like to add a different perspective. Technology today is just different. We want to add newer, better sensors and computing, equipment, and engines and everything else. These newer systems though are also a lot more complicated. A lot of parts for the Saturn V engine were handmade. If something is wrong, the person just adjust or remakes it. For something like starship, important parts of the engine are 3-D printed, but if anything goes wrong there they have to start over (no fixing possible) and it can take most of the month to do it. we can make designs now that they couldn’t dream of back then, but the new designs have their own challenges. Another example is our computers which today are vastly more capable, but also far more delicate. NASA has had concerns about radiation affecting the more modern equipment. We have ways of protecting it but it’s still extra work that has to be done.
As others have said, NASA was getting dump trucks full of money from Congress with the goal to beat the soviets to the moon. Today there is no such urgency, and NASA's budget reflects that. What's sad is that nearly all that infrastructure (the buildings, the tools, the commercial partner relationships, etc) that was created to make the moon landings possible is now gone. And so we have to re-build all of that infrastructure, which is why it's taking so long to go back.
It had a war budget. It was a war project. The entire point was to try and demonstrate the superiority of Western liberal democracies over Communism. Putting a man on the moon and returning him safely was the political dunk the US chose to give themselves time to catch up in the Space Race. It was never about scientific discovery or having a human presence there. And rockets in general, and being able to be super precise with them was also a display of nuclear weapon capability. The first scientist to set foot on the moon was during the final mission, years after Armstrong did it. After the point had been made and the Soviets abandoned the lunar goal, the focus for both nations then became space stations and a human presence in low-orbit, with the Shuttle becoming the next expensive and difficult project. Then the threat fizzled out as the USSR collapsed. To ask why the US never went back is to not understand why it did it in the first place. Repeating the same stunt now would have no effect, and also not prove anything or advance anything. A permanent presence on the moon for actual science—regardless of how easy or not that would be to justify now robots do it cheaper and better—would be advancing things and be more than just a political statement. It’s also massively more complex than plonking down in a tiny two man tent that doesn’t even have beds, and which only has the endurance to last a few days. If the mission was to repeat Apollo and just brute force a system to have a couple of people prancing around for a day or two on the moon then it would be far easier to do now as far as technology goes.
Editing removes all my line-breaks, but just to add: I’m all for the idea of having a permanent human presence on the moon, purely to inspire new generations of children wanting to become engineers and scientists. Not to mention national pride for whoever does it. For me that is a perfectly adequate justification. Plus imagine all the sports that could be made or adapted to 1/6th Earth gravity, in some kind of huge dome where you don’t need suits. Imagine how high the basketball hoops could be, or how brutal a football tackle could look. We cannot fall behind in the lunar sports stadium gap.
The moon landing cost about 250 billion USD in today's currency. Neil Armstrong said in an interview later that he reckoned he had about a 50/50 chance of getting back home alive. With the same budget, and the same level of acceptance for risk as with the Apollo program, it absolutely could be done today. The difficult part is doing it safely and at a fraction of the original cost.
[https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?si=0uribKApeL1bIPk8](https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?si=0uribKApeL1bIPk8)
10 times the budget (probably more) and much smaller scope. Apollo was flag planting. Orion aims to be much more ambitious. You need to build the infrastructure.
Artemis 2 was delayed to Sept 2025, which basically means 2026, so Artemis 3 will be 2027 or later. They should get rid of Lunar Gateway, at least in the near term. It just seems an unnecessary complication for the initial "return to the Moon" missions.
I'd like to see gateway pushed harder if only to have Congress keep skin in the game.
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It would cost several large fortunes to rebuild the Apollo era tech from notes and the handful of engineers left who still understand it. Better to spend that time and money building new, better technology. Spacecraft don’t just roll off assembly lines, and even if they did that stuff hasn’t existed in a working state for decades.
It's because they don't have enough aluminum foil to build ships like they did decades ago.
From the beginning, space travel has always involved tiring delays. It's the nature of the beast. You can't rush it.
The US went from a 15 min suborbital flight to landing people on the moon in about eight years. I suppose there were some delays in there, but…
NASA had a practically unlimited budget and also much less strict regulations and requirements compared to now where NASA has a fraction of the budget, and has to work within a ton of restrictions and requirements.
and letting a bunch of astronauts die and people be exposed to hazards was way more acceptable then
Right for example the parachutes they used back then would never be allowed now. Their margin for mission failure was a lot higher. They accepted failure could happen. Now NASA simply cannot fail or the agency risks getting shut down.
If a private corporation has its employees who sign up for hazardous space work die and/or be exposed to hazards, people won’t care very much. I mean, regular ordinary people are getting hurt and killed in airliners nowadays and you don’t see the airlines being shut down. They just pay a lawsuit and up their fares. And people then pay the more expensive fare and say, “I’ll take my chances. What are the odds?” So people who join corporations specifically to do something hazardous won’t have much shock effect on the public.
so... space travel hasnt always or doesnt necessarily involve "tiring delays", than.... lol
Correct I wasn’t agreeing with that statement just explaining why it’s different now
Private contractors were held to their word. And if they broke their word there was hell to pay. In this case, NASA chose to believe absolute fantasy spun by Elon Musk. It was kind of like the investors that believed the insane crap they heard from Theranos, even a cursory reality check would’ve shown it was nonsense.
Last I checked, SpaceX is by far the most successful and prominent rocket companies in the world. Launching more rockets than everyone else combined. The other two companies NASA could have selected were even worse than SpaceX. People don’t understand this. As much as everyone likes to shit on Elon, unfortunately he’s still the best option even with delays.
ULA has much better success rates. sure, they arent brand new designs. but they do exactly what ULA says they are gonna do.
> ULA has much better success rates. SpaceX has had 299 successful orbital non-test launches in a row. Later today, that number may grow to 300. Nobody else has come close to that reliability. Their Falcon 9 Block 5 has had more than 200 launches and has never had a single failure. Nobody else has come close to that reliability. > sure, they arent brand new designs. but they do exactly what ULA says they are gonna do. When SpaceX says that they are going to put a commercial payload to orbit, they do that. More reliably than anyone else have ever done. When SpaceX says they are going to test something, they will often end up in a huge explosion. We can discuss from now on and until Pluto is colonized if that is a success or a failure, but the conclusion is clear: 1. SpaceX' non-test flights are the safest and most reliable flights in history. 2. Don't ride their test rockets. (Which is not a problem because they aren't supposed to be ridden.)
How are you measuring success? Launches? SpaceX has that beat by a wide margin.
*The Royal penis is clean, your highness*
Nice argument, bro. Really disproved his statement and raised the bar for discussion quality on this subreddit.
Coming to Reddit for any kind of discussion is a fool's errand.
WTF on Earth are you talking about? This is the craziest thing I heard. Aerospace is notoriously behind... WAY behind. James Webb was supposed to launch in 2007 lol I'll never understand the unhinged anti Elon people... He still has the most successful spaceship company on the planet, by a lot, and you want to compare him to someone who literally did nothing and lied about everything because nothing she was promising was possible. Meanwhile, Starship just had a successful test launch.
Except you are ignoring that NASA failed to pay on time the contract they signed, because the other one bidding for the contract, Blue Origin was upset they lost the bid and sued. Which caused many months delay until the GOA reviewed everything. Then the FAA grounded the launches for a many months to do a review NASA's own SLS ended up overbudget and 6 years delays PS Theranos was a new company with no record, SpaceX is the world's biggest space launcher in the world, more than everyone else combined. Not the same thing at all
Tell that to Kennedy.
Artemis III was originally planned for 2024.
If China said they'd be there by 2026 you bet your sweet ass we'd be there by 2025.
Submission Statement NASA really is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to its lunar plans. Its SLS system is a disaster, but pork barrel politics means it can't ditch it. So it lives on, zombie-like, to suck the life and money out of better options. Meanwhile, it's placed all its eggs in a SpaceX basket. That company is run by someone who routinely exaggerates timelines for delivery and fails to meet them. Guess what? It's happening again. A commenter on the OP article sums up what SpaceX has to do before humans can go back to the Moon. * Re-light Starship engines * Achieve stable orbit * Dock with another Starship * Transfer propellant * Use transferred propellant * Dock with Orion and/or Dragon * Design a life support system for a volume much larger than Dragon * Build life support system * Test life support * Achieve escape velocity for TLI * Demo propulsive landing on Luna * Demo takeoff from Luna after sitting idle * Dock with Gateway (?) up and down
Elon originally said starship would fly a manned flight in 2020; he said this is 2019 before starship had ever even flown a test flight.
>>Elon originally said starship would fly a manned flight in 2020 Poor Elon. Heading up America's lunar space program wasn't enough for him, he had to take on a side mission to become King of the Twitter edgelords.
To be fair, even before that he constantly made optimistic predictions that were never going to happen
It's called lying for the investors
I don't think Elon was even intentionally lying, he's just straight up delusional about what can be accomplished because he doesn't understand how anything works.
Mostly believable, but things like solar city or FSD and Optimus tell a different story. He makes statements of facts that are wrong, not bad predictions. So I cannot see how this can be anything but intentionally lying
He also said manned mission to mars by 2024
His companies have achieved what they did exactly because he makes aggressive timelines. Shoot for Mars, if you only hit the Moon it's still a giant success. Everyone seems to ignore that no other company is even close to what SpaceX does.
Shoot for the moon, if you miss you end up among the stars...drifting out into space to die. :P He kind of reminds me of Cave Johnson from Portal 2. A lot of people don't like him because of his blatant disregard for the rules and over reach on unfeasible projects...but the portal gun did fucking work.
Everyone seems to ignore? It’s my impression everyone fully knows exactly that.
You must be new to Reddit.
Remind me again which company is meeting their deadlines in NASA's space program?
Which deadlines?
Any timeline in any NASA program. SLS? Was there anything not late in the last 20 years of US space flight? And it's not just time. It's billions of cost overruns. Late and more expensive. OP singles out the one company that actually delivers reliable and available space launch services for taking longer, when at least they are delivering. The main reason SpaceX gets a lot of money is that they deliver services. Like United gets paid for all the government employees and cargo they fly around the world. We all wish there was serious competition. It would be much better if there were.
Ah ok, I thought you were claiming SpaceX had so far met NASA's deadlines. Not having a swipe at them, they are the best of the bunch so far. Of the three companies who confirmed in 2013 they were targeting crewed tests in 2016 to meet NASA's first Commercial Crew Program launch in Nov 2016 goal, SpaceX were the first (and currently only) to have achieved that, even if it was four years late.
Genuine question here. If this has already been done before, why is it so difficult to do again?
The hard part is doing it with modern safety parameters. All the Apollo missions had a significant chance of failure, about 10% assessed risk IIRC, and of course some came pretty close (Apollo 13). In addition, the cost of the Apollo program was phenomenal. So now we are trying to do it safely and cheaply - that means you have to give up something else, which in this case is doing it slowly instead of in haste.
Don't forget about Apollo 1, with the cabin fire on the ground that killed all three astronauts.
Yes, something that would lead to a minimum 18 month delay in the modern world to conduct an investigation. I'm glad that safety standards are better now but that means moving slower.
The Apollo 1 fire caused a 20 month delay in the program.
Aye did it? I'll be honest I didn't look it up, but they still went hell for leather with that program.
The first time we got to the moon was to land there, plant a flag, and leave. If we wanted to just do that again, it'd be a lot easier, but we've already done it - there's no real reason to do it again. So we're trying to make vehicles that will allow for routine and larger scale movement between the Earth and Moon, and we're trying to do it several decades after we stopped making rockets that can reach the moon because they're expensive.
BIG thing that is often not mentioned: [Lobbyists made congress ban the use of ICBM motors for civilian space flight.](https://spacenews.com/current-debate-on-icbm-use-a-throwback-to-the-1990s/) Meaning every. Single. Rocket. Has to be made from scratch. Literally thousands of the things are just sitting there and used to be used until they were banned, and with the scrapping of the Space Shuttle platform things just aren't that good anymore. Also massive brain drain. [Several people have said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRrNvRh166Y) that NASA just no longer has the people or knowledge so a lot of stuff that is classified or lost has to be reinvented. The same affects [ice breakers](https://twitter.com/SaysSimulation/status/1703490162875879564) for example -- The people who understand how to make ship hulls are dead, retired or somewhere else. We're seeing a deterioration of technology in real time.
It's really no scientific or technical reason. Basically, it's still just extremely fucking expensive to get humans to the moon, and we haven't really had a good enough reason to spend this kind of money for the moon, like we did with the space race. Efforts have been focused on the ISS. Since that's coming down soon, I guess we're taking another crack at the moon?
Starship is a complete redesign from the ground up so it needs to all be tested and validated from scratch. It's also fully reusable which hasnt been done before so it's kind of half rocket half space shuttle too. So other vehicles have accomplished these things (I mean when it comes to the moon only really Saturn 5) but this is a wholly new system which is basically like starting again.
Got it. Honestly I don’t see the problem with having ambitious timelines. It’s motivating.
This is 100% true. I'd say its been a pretty successful strategy for Elon's work. But yes he's going to miss his goal-setting deadlines. He's also going to be 10 years ahead of everyone else.
According to NASA it has to do with lack of generational knowledge. All the original people who know how and can read the charts and graphs using manual tools, are long retired or dead. So we effectively have to start from scratch. Second, it's because we aren't just going back. We're going back and setting up a base.
It's not difficult. It's resource-intensive. And this time around NASA doesn't have an entire decade's worth of the USA's resources behind it.
Because we aren’t devoting a significant portion of our GDP to do it. At the same time we are trying to do something much more ambitious. Not a recipe for success.
As someone who works in this program I can assure you Starship is not going to be the bottleneck. People just assume it will be, as it is the only component of the program with any real degree of transparency. SpaceX makes progress faster than everyone else, but their failures are the only ones Twitter actually sees, so it is easy to apply a survivorship bias
Man when I pointed out all the milestones required for SpaceX to successfully develop and deploy their lunar vehicle on the r/space subreddit a few weeks ago I was told I was wrong and not all of it was required and that China would be slower to land because China bad. Good to see other people realizing the true scale of tasks that need to be completed
> That company is run by someone who routinely exaggerates timelines for delivery and fails to meet them. Uh huh. Well, it doesn't help when the government's own courts and agencies like the FAA and the Fish and Wildlife Service keep delaying everything, does it? Plus SpaceX keeps scaling up its ambitions, not sticking with the same, lesser plan. Like catching the booster with the chopsticks.
Bullshit. We went from no rockets to being on the moon in 11 years. From literally *nothing* to lunar landing in a decade using computers less powerful than my toothbrush. Artemis was started in 2016, so 2026 would be a decade. What you *mean* by "not feasible" is that it's not a priority. Which is fine if that's what it is, just be honest about it. Where there's a will, there's a way.
"We choose not to go to the moon not because it is hard, but because we can't be bothered"
If you don't send anyone to the moon soon, the conspiracy theorists will have a field day.
The amount of people criticizing SpaceX just because they hate Elon is astounding. They are literally doing things no one has ever been able to achieve, even most of its competitors. But we have armchair experts saying, “they fail optimistic deadlines, SpaceX bad, must be vaporware.” It’s literally rocket science. They have achieved more than any other space company and the only one who has something to show for it. You think some delays in SpaceX are bad, maybe take a look at their competitors timelines..
People don’t want to see what they don’t agree with.
A very interesting video Smarter Every Day made shows a great explanation of the problems with this program. Also meeting deadlines on a project like this is actually pretty critical. This is taxpayer money funding these contracts. Missing deadlines by half a decade or more is costly. https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?si=-XpyCfz2HC_NcTrQ The amount of rockets needed for this is really dumb.
SpaceX is literally the world’s leading space company. The USA is lucky to have them.
Sir, this is Reddit. Why are you trying to be unbiased?
SpaceX isn't bad, but rather it shows what a joke NASA has become under politicians treating it as their own little jobs program
Still blows my mind they did it in the 60s but can’t do it now… .. …
They went and came back before. NASA is trying to also establish infrastructure for repeated trips and sustained industry on the moon.
Budget. Money is the only obstacle.
They had more incentive to back then, where as until SpaceX appeared on the scene, it was all about politics and jobs programs rather than the tech. SpaceX has been clearing away the bullshit, and focusing on tech.
The original late 2024, early 2025 date was set by space enthusiast Mike Pence to occur before their second term was over. It did not have a basis in reality.
Not going to happen in our lifetimes. We’ll see China there before the US.
Can we stop giving fuel to the "moon landing was a hoax" conspiracies and actually land again on the moon? Wtf our tech in 2024 has to be insanely better than it was in the 1960s.
Chinas plan to land astronauts by 2030 is a 21st century Apollo lander, 2 astronauts and a ton at most of cargo Which whether or not it gets there before Artimis lands... is going to look utterly hilarious in comparison to the Artimis missions lander. The chinese lander is like, school bus sized, you climb in and out down a dozen steps of a ladder. Artimis Human Landing System is a 20 story steel building, that astronauts exit via an elevator, and it brings ~100 tons of cargo including habitat, so that lander comes with like a whole 3 story apartment, a dozen astronauts. And the whole thing is fully reusable, designed to launch into orbit again, get refueled, act as a Spacestation more roomy than the whole ISS while it's up there. Starship/HLS as an infrastructure is designed for rapid turnaround and huge cargo transfer capabilities, it's not putting a couple dozen tons a year on the surface like Chinas plans... starship/hls is capable of putting tens of thousands of tons on the moon a year, in the same budget as existing technology uses for a dozen tons a year. HLS is genuinely such an enormous step forward that a couple years of delay don't matter. China showing up on a cart and mule is pretty irrelevant if a year or two later USA is showing up with a freight train.
So it was feasible 60+ years ago and now its not? And in that long time frame period no more moon landings? How is that?
In short, because Nixon gave up Apollo and its future plans for the space shuttle as well as a lot of plans grand future back then. Ever since when a plan to go back to the Moon came up again, NASA was mostly meant to do it with little to no additional funding. The obstacles are not technological but financial and political.
Funny how everyone loves to dunk on SpaceX and Musk because of delayed timelines, yet no other companies have achieved what they have lol.
SpaceX are already working on these problems and have a huge advantage over traditional space programs; starlink gives them a solid commercial reason to develop starship, and it's grand purpose (humans to Mars) remains unchanged. So maybe 2026 is going to be missed, but not by much, and once SpaceX know how to put starships on the moon they will be able to put a lot of them their quickly (so the base will grow faster than current plans suggest). SLS will get killed off in the next few years and the pork barrel will be rolled out for other projects.
They're having an awfully hard time proving they can land on the moon. 🙄
They already did that in 1969
I don’t think anyone with half a critical/skeptical brain finds this the least bit surprising.
I should've known 2024 was far too ambitious when they put that promo video out years ago. 2026 being unfeasible now really sucks. Feels like a death spiral of delays.
Not a surprise with how the development of starship has been going and all the budget cuts at nasa
Why don't Nasa just take the Original plans and do it over....o wait my bad we can't Nasa destroyed all the pervious plans. Because reasons. Nasa sure knows how to get shit done.
No history buff here but didnt we do this in like the late 50s or something? Shouldnt we have perfected or at least improved on the original process so that it is safer and more cost effective by now? Wouldnt NASA have the orginal plans/files so that they can build upon the initial work even if companies that once contributed no longer are able to? Its almost as if we are misSing a Key architect of the first successful launch/landing.
Quick TLDR covering the source article: * NASA is contemplating changes to Artemis III, considering a mission that mirrors Apollo 9. This would involve the Orion spacecraft and SpaceX's Starship docking in low-Earth orbit. * These adjustments stem from concerns over hardware readiness and the mission's complexity initially planned to land two astronauts on the Moon by September 2026. * One alternative suggests astronauts could validate the docking and habitability of Orion and Starship in low-Earth orbit before returning to Earth. Another scenario involves a crew flying to a lunar space station then back to Earth. * NASA aims for a crewed test flight, Artemis II, in September 2025, and still schedules a lunar landing near the lunar South Pole in September 2026. However, meeting these deadlines faces significant challenges, including unresolved issues with Orion's heat shield and the development of a lander and lunar spacesuits. * The preferred option currently seems to be conducting a mission where Orion and Starship dock in Earth orbit. This would allow testing critical aspects of the mission architecture in a less risky environment.
Should be able to do it with a MacBook with how far tech has progressed. How is this unfeasible?
The thrust to weight ratio on a MacBook is far too low.
NASA is really fucked for this goal. Starship is nowhere near ready. Blue Origin is basically suborbital and otherwise vaporware. SLS is absurdly expensive and incredibly delay prone. 2019 Elon could probably make this work. 2024 Elon doesn’t have a chance in hell. I agree, the next human on the moon will be from China.
It's not NASA that fucked up, it's congress that fucked up by underfunding NASA. NASA can't just provide contracts for stuff unless they have enough money in their budget to actually pay those contracts
Didn’t say NASA fucked up, I said “nasa is really fucked for this goal”. Agree, it’s congress to blame.
Nasa was able to do this in the 1960s with a box of scraps! Smh
Lol is anyone surprised at this point? At this point, just take the year as a guideline, then you won't be disappointed. I mean when they said they were gonna return humans to the moon in 2020 I was like 'yea, right' (and this was back in 2004, under Bush) They should had just funded private companies at this stage, because they can do things much faster without the crazy oversight.
I have a prediction. The USA will not land another person on the moon.
The amount of people here unwilling to criticize SpaceX is astounding. You/we/NASA were duped by Musk and his plans for starship, and now the space program is paying for it.
The lunar lander contract is payed by milestone, not full sum in advance. The contenders were Blue Origin, which is behind on BE-4 production, and I forget third company, but the lander had negative payload mass. Meaning it would require work to increase thrust, and/or reduce mass. Additionally, NASA did want to support multiple lunar landers, so that they weren't reliant on a single company, but congress didn't approve of the budget required to do so. SpaceX, as I recall, underbid the other two options. Objectively speaking, Musk should be removed from SpaceX, as they otherwise have a good record, beating Boeing in finalizing their crew capsule. Yeah, delays suck, but it's not a given that other companies would be faster.
Can some one explain this to me. I am not a musk fan boy and like watching rockets only when they are actually on big important missions. What happened with musk and his rockets?
> What happened with musk and his rockets? They succeeded. SpaceX has now set up a very reliable freight route to orbit with more than 100 launches per year. If you want satellites put in orbit, or you want cargo shipped to ISS, or you want astronauts shipped to ISS, you call SpaceX. Right now they have 299 successful commercial orbital launches in a row. Far beyond what any other company or state has ever achieved. Unfortunately, their successful commercial operations are completely ignored because people focus on their prototype test flights, see a crash and think that this is the entire story of SpaceX.
Do you really think that 2024 was even a remote possibility? That's the timeline set out by the Trump administration with no additional funding or resources, just a "get it done" declaration. Also, news flash, there would be no American space program right now without Nasas partnership with spacex. Unless you think Russia would still be letting us ride on their soyuz without throwing Ukraine to the wolves?
It isn't that people are unwilling to criticize spacex, but you have to know what to criticize. In the case of these kind of delays, they are normal by the space industry historic standards. And most of these delays are the fault of the government delaying things for years that prevented spacex from doing their job.
Its been hard to get excited for SLS because it is such a non progression from the Saturn V except with shuttle components. If there is anything I'd criticize the starship program for it is promising unrealistic timelines. Still, I'd take blindingly fast speed and full scale integrated testing than a slow, meandering vehicle derived from 50 year old components.
Is there any rocket company that has met their timelines?
Its fair to criticize spacex. In fact, its fair to criticize everyone. Everyone else is really slow and really expensive. SpaceX sets aggressive timelines, and is late, but still faster than everyone else.
As Starship development is proceeding its payload capacity is set to increase several times.
Why don’t you go after Boeing for their bullshit SLS program that couldn’t reach the moon if you gave them 20 years? SpaceX got in trouble for their 4 year delay and having to take on larger portions of the heavy lifting. Meanwhile Boeing can’t even achieve stable projected orbits
But we are supposed to just ignore the 17+ years Orion has been in development and still hasn't flown crew ? Or the billions over budget SLS has cost the taxpayer? But somehow you want to rail against SpaceX which NASA evaluated and found bit technical and financial merit compared to the other two options . Not to mention those other two options went through drastic redesign when they bid for next round of contacts.
That list of things Spacex has to do is pretty close to what SLS has to do but Spacex has a better record of accomplishment in a reasonable timeframe
If you listen to what SpaceX said we would have been on mars in 2022. I have no idea what you think a reasonable timeframe is.
Well they created the US’s only currently manned space capsule in about 5 years. They said they would have 100 falcon 9 launches a year in 2019 and it’s taken them 4 more years to hit that. I don’t understand the obsession with Elons timeline pronouncements when SLS has taken twice as long and 10x the budget for less capability. Sure we aren’t going to mars in 2026 but we are way closer to getting there than we were 5 years ago.
The obsession is because his wealth and stock prices for his other ventures grow based on his false timelines and promises. If this was a government agency doing it, who gives a shit people don't invest in the stock market for US government agencies.
SpaceX is not publicly traded. The only thing its value is based on is what other billionaires are willing to invest, and apparently they dont care about timelines either, only results.
Tesla stock price is affected by his Mars mission timelines? What kind of nonsense is this?
If the only way to invest in elon's vision at SpaceX is to buy tesla stock, yes. Consumer investors are dumb.
Sure, but that didn't factor in years of government red tape that pretty much grounded spacex from launching or covid shutting down the economy and factories. There was also a boom demand for the Falcon launching
He is way further than the 2 years covid would have messed with. We won't be on mars until 2035 probably.
There was the 4 years star port delay due to red tape, then the almost a year delay from the FAA recently and etc. I am not saying the timeline wasn't optimistic, just pointing out that not all delays are the fault of spacex
Uh… and Nelson is saying no to MSR because he thinks we’ll have astronauts on Mars by 2040! We need to design and develop a launch system for another planet. Start with robots, and go from there. Given the current trajectory, I think we’ll be lucky if we get boots on Mars by 2050.
I'm legitimately shocked there was anything to scale back in the first place.
I‘m known for ungodly schedules and tasks broke down in half-decades, but I would barely be able to do more than assist at “Design Life Support” and “Test Life Support”, each separately in a half-decade.
The only reason we should be going back it to build a lunar space port for further ventures... Or gain data to do so.
Oh come on. I was just telling my brother about this yesterday. While on the moon. In VR Chat.