Relevant Mitchell and Webb sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AeCo3AD1cM

Ah, yeah definitely! Tradition can be powerful in that way. “We’ve always done the hard things because they’re hard.”

Established on 176 years of lying cheating and graft. That’s definitely a legacy. Rail was AI and dot com of the 1800s.

> The idea that we need to land on the moon once a generation just to say that we are as good at landing on the moon as our parents is absurd.

We need to land on the moon once a generation just to prove that we are still capable of landing on the moon.

America cannot possibly win the space race again, because it has already been won.

This is sort of like saying Leif Erikson and the Icelandic Commonwealth won the "the new world race" in 1000AD. Whatever Columbus et al were up to would surely be of trifling concern to future generations.

> The idea that we need to land on the moon once a generation just to say that we are as good at landing on the moon as our parents is absurd.

In the sense that we don't need to do either, that's true. But if we want to claim we're still competent moon landers, we do need to repeat the task every once in a while to keep that capability. And there are good scientific benefits from continuing to do difficult space launches of many types.

It's not even clear the USA "won" the space race. America was first (and last) to land men on the moon, but arguably the USSR had far more space-related "firsts" than the US.

Landing on the moon only become the end-all-be-all when the US achieved it and the USSR could not (for various reasons).

The point is to avoid "China can do this feat but US is no longer capable"

> The first to get there has already happened.

Motorola was the first to create a handheld mobile phone, Apple just did not get that memo... :)

I say let's do it once a week

It’s just as absurd today as it was in the 60s. It’s an artificial challenge that focuses attention, with the goal of exercising government, industries, academics, etc. and maybe learn and invent a few things along the way. Yes, yes, Cold War and all those theories. But it had and can again have this greater effect.

It’s kind of like a FIRST Robotics Challenge for nations. The specific goal really doesn’t matter and can just as well be different than the moon. That’s not the interesting part.

It’s a new race and a new contender and the simple premise is, what once was the US is now China, the country capable of bringing men to the moon. That position is open at the moment

I mean it may not be a good reason but it would boost morale. I'd be happy about it

I really don't get this sentiment. 80% of orbital launches last year were Americans. The USA hasn't been this dominant in the space race since the 60s.

America of Theseus is a great phrase, quite apt for describing "the American Experiment" and the numerous ways America reinvents itself. but I don't see how this usage of it provides any discernable meaning. Ship of Theseus is more a question than an answer, so saying "America of Theseus, therefore 1969 or any connection to it is irrelevant" doesn't follow.

Are you suggesting people eg born after 1980 footed the bill for the Apollo programme?

> Literally every other nation is trying to catch up to Space-X and is nowhere close. An American company, based in American, primarily staffed by American engineers

The whole point of this article, and the NASA admin steps to open up the contract and all of Berger’s recent reporting is that it’s almost a certainty China will beat the US back to the moon.

Personally, I think it matters whether its achieved by a private company versus by society. That's especially the case when the private company is so closely tied to someone who hates and alienates so much of society. I don't think that I could view a win for Musk as a win for anything that looks like my chunk of the US.

There's also the fact that part of NASA's mission is to share their knowledge with the public.

By h1b engineers

To me, a significant part of the value presented by space exploration is the way that it inspires society. I think that whatever else we would do instead would need to be equally inspiring. Honestly, I can't really think of something comparable.

The electronics we're typing these comments on were only rapidly miniaturized originally to be small and light enough to shoot into space.

There are second, third, etc order effects to things like a space race.

That does seem to be the trend these days. See: AI proliferation, cryptocurrency.

National pride has long been tightly coupled to seafaring capabilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship) "Richly decorated as a symbol of the king's ambitions for Sweden and himself, upon completion she was one of the most powerfully armed vessels in the worl"

SpaceX and to a much lesser extent Tesla are good examples. Excluding those for a minute, what else does the US have world-leading manufacturing of?

Semiconductors? Nope.

High speed rail? Nope.

Auto industry? Nope.

Major infrastructure projects like bridges, tunnels, airports, etc? Nope.

Electronics (phones/laptops/etc)? Nope.

?????

The US is not exactly a manufacturing powerhouse.

This is a vastly oversimplified take; Mars will be a monumental effort, far beyond what it takes to get to/from the moon.

To what end ?.

Mars is a total boondoggle - a colony would require constant supply runs from Earth to support a double-digit population - who is going to field the cost and what are they going to do there ?.

"The Martian" was work of fiction.

A lunar colony is cheaper and way more feasible.

Space and the moon were so important that we famously put black female mathematicians on the job in the waning years of Jim Crow. The current admin is dismantling not just so-called DEI, but decades of civil rights protections that ultimately allowed things like SGI's 3D rendering pipeline to exist. This is just one of the myriad ways that America is not in any way serious about a task as monumental as reaching Mars with actual, human astronauts. It would require an intense and extreme dedication to facing factual reality, which we do not seem currently capable of. Rockets do not run on truthiness, they explode on it.

Mars is out of the gravity well only to fall into another, albert slightly shallower. It's just dumb.

It would have made them a laughing stock and the prospect of future cooperation would have been slammed shut. It would have made the USSR seem like sore losers. They were already public enemy number one thanks to the media PR machine. The Russians have been cooperating with the USA and ESA for many years on LEO missions, culminating in the successful ISS project.

burden of truth is on you. not them

You know what else has real world economic consequences? Dead astronauts.

I'm all for reinvigorating the global economy with a resurgence in scientific investment, but it only works if we do it patiently. China understands that, the CCP is quite capable of national planning that transcends administrations. You can't force a moon landing like it's a political OKR, if you do then you better have a pretty solid Plan B considering the amount of risk it represents.

Somewhat ironically a sketch ending in gender blending.

JFK proposed we go to the Moon in 1962. We did it in 1969, 7 years later.

Most deadlines are completely made up to create a false scarcity of time. While I agree this one is pretty meaningless and we'll forget about it in a few days... it's not unlike any other silly deadline.

This is preferable to "we'll go back again maybe one day 5 decades from now, if we get around to it"

Hey, it worked when JFK did it!

So just like every other deadline I'm given, then.

The entire Apollo program was a political stunt to upstage the USSR.

I feel like that attitude has kept us on earth all this time.

We let people do stupid shit and kill themselves all the time. Driving 80+ MPH, driving motorcycles, recreational drugs, alcohol, climbing Everest, etc.

I think it's fine. If I were in the position, I'd sign up to do this.

The moon is meaningful.

Precisely. Trump wants to put his name on things for the history books.

Charles Lindbergh knew his chances of dying crossing the Atlantic were pretty high. After all, previous attempts resulted in many deaths.

Armstrong's personal estimate of his odds getting back alive were about 50%.

Apollo 13 came within a hair of killing its crew.

I fly across the North Atlantic at 30,000 feet, death in seconds if the hull is breached, in a comfortable chair, watching a movie and sipping a drink. Isn't that incredible? I still find it amazing.

But I know that was achieved through the loss of many, many lives.

To play devil's advocate, the only purpose astronauts serve is PR. Anything that can be done is space could be done cheaper and better with automation/rovers. So it seems that having those astronauts risk their lives for a short term political win is just table stakes, because the alternative for them is to stay on Earth and maybe pay $100K for just an hour in orbit with any of the commercial space tourism companies.

With Trump, assume there will be massive kickbacks and corruption, most likely nothing useful will happen.

Any project even a quarter as complex as a manned lunar mission going to run into problems and failures and unforeseen complications (just ask anyone who's ever done any home renovation). Things go over budget, deadlines are missed, stuff doesn't work out the way you'd envisioned. This isn't always somebody's fault or the result of poor planning (though they can be).

Yeah, we've been there already, but it's been many decades and we haven't exactly kept all the tech and procedures up to date in the intervening years. And that first go-round itself missed it's intended deadline by about 7-8 years.

Testing rockets that fail is still progress. Deadlines that get pushed isn't an argument against deadlines.

No risk, no gain.

Deaths are always terrible. But unless we have a reason to only care about astronauts specifically, once we zoom out to the entire massive endeavor and how much everyone sacrifices for any big project, three particular deaths aren't a big factor and don't do much to say if we went too fast or too slow.

Sure, I just don't think people reacted the way GP did when JFK said it.

It is not even "if" they should be funding these activities.... it is whether the public would "support" funding these activities, if there was a trail of deaths.

There is no reason to consider anytime frame beyond what NASA did it in in the 60s "unreasonable". They were still using slide rules for goodness sake. We've got now 50+ years of space flight experience under our belt.

Bean counters make excuses. Put the right people in the right places and shit gets done.

Peter Beck says that "we like the black."

The tiny Electron is entirely carbon, isn't it?

Their new Neutron has a fully reusable first stage, also out of carbon fiber. For Neutron, they have the largest automated fiber placement machine known to exist:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zmJdJIlPOr4

And? We still have yet to see whether full re-usability of the second stage is the best approach. The Neutron approach is really interesting, they can make the second stage incredibly light and cheap. Blue Origin claims the economics of a super-cheap disposable second stage, even for as one as large as theirs, is pretty much equal to a more expensive and heavier reusable second stage. (they're developing both in parallel to see where the chips land).

“Unpopular” is a weird way to frame “is a Nazi”.

And they abandoned it to try to eliminate the need for a heat shield. This plan did not pan out.

The whole point of a reusable launch system is the cost of the vehicle is amortized over many launches, so you can use expensive, high performance materials.

Well in the drawing analogy, they picked stainless steel while they were still trying to draw a sparrow.

Stainless steel was specifically chosen so that starship wouldn't need a heat shield and would survive re-entry with transpiration cooling. This would save substantial weight and make rapid reusability easy. The problem is that after designing starship around the stainless steel construction, they found that the transpiration cooling system wasn't workable, so now they have a stainless steel hull and a heat shield.

Further, I do not believe the drawbacks of stainless steel were fully appreciated at the time. Stainless steel on paper looks like it has better strength to weight ratio than aluminum, especially at the cryogenic temperatures of starship's fuel tanks. However a steel tank wall with the same strength as an aluminum wall is much thinner and so you wind up with different failure modes, namely buckling. In practice, a rocket made from steel is heavier than a rocket made from aluminum. This was why the Atlas rockets used stainless steel but subsequent rockets switched to aluminum in the first place.

Additionally, at the time much hooplah was made about stainless steel being cheaper and more formable which would reduce production costs. This is just nonsense. Stainless steel is expensive and tough to work with, which is why we don't use it for creating large structures despite its desirable material properties. It may be favorable compared to titanium, which was likely the only other option when transpiration cooling was the game plan, but for the current design aluminum would be far cheaper in addition to being lighter.

Now I'm sure SpaceX did some analysis after the transpiration cooling didn't work out and asked whether it made sense to start the design over and retool everything instead of continuing on with the stainless steel, and they decided at the time no. Since then they have had several further setbacks. The increased weight required them to reduce safety features, which may have contributed to some of its earlier losses. Starship has had to grow considerably and increase thrust to accommodate for these shortcomings. Would SpaceX have made the same decision to continue with the stainless with the benefit of hindsight? I can't say. But with the exception of a few chinese startups trying to carbon copy starship, other rocket manufacturers have not adopted stainless steel, likely with good reason.

Not sure if any of my anecdata when I was a contractor are relevant anymore given current circumstances, but among all the NASA facilities I worked with, JPL really seemed to be doing its own thing, mostly for better. They were a bit quirky to work with though, because they did seem to do so much more in-house than elsewhere. So I don't know if it's that independence or their zip code that has made them such a target, but I wonder if it has been that they have less political capital from moneyed interests keeping them off the chopping block. But any gutting of JPL is probably irreplaceable damage.

The space program stalled because pouring national wealth into gigantic single-use rockets was unsustainable. They tried with Shuttle but the material science wasn't there yet (heck it might not be even now, it doesn't seem that they've really nailed down the heat shield on Starship yet).

Reagan took office in the 80s. The 70s was Nixon, Ford, and Carter.

I think it's pretty much guaranteed by now, assuming that they don't get ravaged by war/internal strife, that China will have landed people on the Moon by the 2040s, and, to be fair, I'd say the same for the US having landed people there again, assuming that they stay on path instead of constantly canceling and replacing programs as they have been doing.

China's stated goal is to get people on the moon by 2030. This may slip by a year or two, but probably not much more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog...

The main hurdle is the CZ-10 rocket, which has not flown yet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_10

But they have plenty of rocketry experience and the YF-100K engine they'll use for CZ-10 has successfully flown on the CZ-12:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YF-100

(Yes, Chinese rocket numbering is weird, and CZ = Changzheng = Long March)

China wants to put the first woman on the Moon before 2030.

Blue seemed to be planning to use Boeing for their ISS-replacement proposal, but at this point I expect that they'd prefer to build on their New Shepard experience for a custom design. Starliner isn't really worth trying to fix (even the reliability issues aside, it's enough of a pain to do maintenance on that they couldn't just go in and replace valves on the ground).

Extortion requires applied force from the vendor to the customer. You're simply describing failure to deliver goods.

Words have meaning.

At $2.5 billion per launch, the worst thing that could happen with SLS is that it starts being used.

> Difficult to say

It's not difficult to say. They are behind schedule and everyone, not just Duffy, is talking about it and have been for awhile.

I don't care - beyond how getting to the moon will help future space exploration - and risk is high when developing new tech, but I also don't care about SpaceX. It's very possible Starship won't work out; that's risk and I'm sure SpaceX and NASA people understand that. Why must people on HN defend SpaceX at every turn, like a PR agency. Does anyone point out a genuine, significant, negative about Starship? Why might it not work? What are the risks?

I think more competition is great and hope they reopen the contract. Private industry competing on what is now prosaic space technology, such as orbit and even the moon, is great. Let NASA do the cutting edge stuff like flying to Europa or looking back to the beginning of time or investigating climate change. (Notice that private industry still can't land on the moon reliably - 56 years after NASA demonstrated it.)

Yes, but in the original schedule on HLS Starship was supposed to have done the prop transfer in Q4 2022, an uncrewed lunar landing in Q1 2024, and the actual thing in Q1 2025.

Of course that was always wishful thinking. I'm sure SpaceX has their "real" schedule somewhere, and maybe NASA has one too (at least from what I've heard, it is likely they have an unofficial idea of it somewhere).

> SLS was 6 years and like 10-20 billion $ over budget and nobody ever complainged, in fact they got consistantly more and more money

Ah, but SLS were the right kind of people. Allegedly. /s

SpaceX, less so. Allegedly.

From my previous reading, Excel 3 was one of the rare cases that the team pushed out the product only one week late.

On budget is also rare.

Humans are relentlessly overoptimistic in their planning, and that's likely because if we weren't we often wouldn't even start... plus, the future is really, really hard to predict.

> * I'm not seeing what makes SpaceX government funded beyond just that it provides services to the government*

Take away all of SpaceX‘s government contracts. You imagine SpaceX would still be in business?

As you said, every launch provider is basically dependent on government contracts to stay in business because the government is the only entity that has a legitimate need for launch capability such that it’s willing to pay for its development. There are no sufficiently profitable private contracts out there to sustain a launch provider.

As someone who is a tad skeptical of SpaceX duevto their side claims, I have to give it to them, that last launch of Starship proved they are making some real progress again. Wasnt looking good at the start of the year but now their re-entries are doing fairly well.

Booster re-usability is only the first half of the problem. It's the second stage re-usability that makes Starship viable despite its massive second stage. The re-entry heating is trashing their second stages which would make the killer feature of Starship, fast turnaround, impractical.

Also, as far as I can tell from their last test video, they are still shredding their Flaperons at the joint.

When humans get to Mars the infrastructure will already be there waiting for them. The plan is to send unmanned Starships to Mars basically as soon as it's flight proven.

Starship (the upper stage) can launch from Mars and bring humans back to Earth. The problem is that they need a lot of propellant to do this, and they can't bring that much from Earth. Their current plan is to generate it on Mars, which requires complex infrastructure built by unmanned missions. A simpler approach could be developing a smaller ascent vehicle:

https://spacenews.com/how-carrying-enough-water-to-make-retu...

https://spacenews.com/crewed-mars-missions-will-require-a-ne...

But I'm sure that approach also has drawbacks.

The ISS has (and has always had) a multi-year backlog of experiments, with no shortage of orgs willing to pay the 6 or 7 figure fee.

"Close" means a different thing in Space than it does on Earth.

If the planets are aligned the Delta-V is not that different between the two (Mars is about twice as much Delta-V for 100x the distance). You can use aerobraking in the Mars atmosphere but can do no such thing on the Moon. And then the last problem is that on the Moon you need to budget for a round trip, but on Mars we could produce fuel on the surface for the return trip. When you start thinking about all that it's obvious that Mars makes more sense.

Can we actually? And I mean in any reasonable time frame say 100 years? And by self-sustaining I take fully independent from Earth supply chain for absolutely everything. A civilization that could continue existing without single delivery for Earth.

because this civilization is not self-sutaining?

I think it's more escaping the gravity well, as the energy consumed by air resistance is fairly negligible compared to gravity and is more of a stability issue. But yeah, once in LEO you're halfway to anywhere as long as you can bring enough mass up for what you need.

I do think that Blue Origin HLS is less complex overall, but I agree that they aren't dealing with the same kind of complexity. Both companies are playing to their strengths there.

A major weakness of SpaceX's HLS approach is that it requires them to launch a lot of the same vehicle in a fairly short succession. But SpaceX are the kings of high volume aerospace manufacturing, and they are the driving force behind US launch cadence going up. Even if Starship reusability isn't truly perfected in time for Artemis HLS, they are already building those Starships pretty fast, and can eat some refueling vehicle losses.

Blue Origin doesn't have the raw performance figures of Starship, or SpaceX's unmatched manufacturing and launch cadence. So their HLS architecture is lighter and less launch hungry. That comes at an engineering cost of having to use more specialized vehicles. And they are using LH2 fuel - which delivers more of a punch per weight, but is even harder to stay on top of than CH4. More engineering effort would be required to store and transfer that in orbit, dealing with boil-off and all - but Blue Origin has used liquid hydrogen extensively already, so they have experience with it.

>you will not see the same number of companies spooling up assembly lines without massive costs.

It's true, but I think this subject will scale throughout the entire survival category.

Cheap throwaway materials is one thing .. in situ 3D replication, another thing entirely.

The cottage industries can do a lot of the innovation. I think the sailboat/winnebago/portable-living engineering is going to come to a head, eventually .. and we will see new technologies, perhaps, springing up around the subject of human/biosphere construction.

If you're suggesting that we won't have winnebago's on Mars, I don't wanna go there.

> enough contractors involved and enough delay potential on the table that getting all the ducks in the row in time for the 2027 date would require nothing short of divine intervention

Or a fuckton of money for an administration priority.

Probably; the moon landings had the US' popularity skyrocket, firmly landing them in every history book worldwide. If they lose this second space race to China it won't undo that achievement, but it'll be embarrassing to the ego-driven people at the top right now (notably Trump and Musk himself).

Recently I saw someone claiming they voted for Trump because he hugged a flag once, and plenty of Americans proudly claim they voted for Trump so that he would "troll" their opposition.

Holy crap yes. Millions of Americans vote for a president based on exceedingly dumber reasons too.

Reusability is not a bonus like Falcon 9. The whole concept assumes reusability to refuel the lunar lander in Earth orbit since it cannot get to the Moon on its own. It must be refuelled between 10 and 20 times. They won't even say exactly how many times yet. You cannot just yeet that many Starships to get to the Moon once. You must reuse.

Probably not for the price they offered though.

Could they? The Apollo program took 9 years from conception to landing the first person on the moon, and cost $257 billion adjusted for 2020 dollars ($25.4B at the time). For comparison, the Artemis program was budgeted for $86B [0], with less to spend due to NASA budget cuts. The SpaceX Artemis contract is "only" worth $2.9B. Finally, the Starship program has cost an estimated $5-8B so far [1].

Some conclusions / opinions: Starship so far is relatively cheap compared to the previous program that took Americans to the moon. Developing a moon capable rocket takes a long time, especially if they don't just copy the existing designs from 60 years ago. And a single purpose rocket will long-term be more expensive than a more generalised / reusable platform, but that's more capitalist objectives than political (e.g. beating the commies).

[0] https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/nasa-ig-artemis-will-cost...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship

The point of the OP is that SpaceX is not performing; we don't need to infer or speculate.

But only if you are looking at the revised goals, if you look back at the original goals, things look different. It was supposed to fly around the moon with people on board two years ago.

If believing these things makes you feel better, great.

When something goes wrong a one of Elon Musk's companies, it's clearly his fault. When something goes right, it's because he isn't actually running the company. Schrodinger's CEO!

But let's pretend for a minute that you're right and all Elon Musk does is hire great people that then do all the work building the company for him and keep him at arms length doing nothing. The skill to hire like that alone still puts him in the top 0.01% of CEOs.

sounds like fairy tales

And he is super well known for making accurate predictions of the future.

I do mark his words. He also said he would revolutionize travel in LA (by reinventing the metro). He also said rocket travel would replace air travel. He also said we'd have a martian colony by now.

There's a website dedicated to the empty promises Elon has made. Can't find it though, anyone remember?

Edit: https://elonmusk.today/

>To address your question, what is the incentive for going to Mars

To occupy it. Just look at Musk's t-shirt. Isn't the entire point of SpaceX to go to Mars? Everything else they do is just steps in achieving the occupation of Mars.

He's also said we'd have humans on Mars in 2022...

Look into the history of Elon's promises around Mars. While I wish his promises meant something, they do not.

if I had a dollar for every time Elon said mark my words and nothing was “marked” I’d be richer than him

The incentive to talk about going to Mars is that it's great propaganda for nerds. It gets people interested in the company and willing to work hard for below market pay. Actually going to Mars doesn't make any sense in the foreseeable future. The idea that we're going to setup a colony on the planet in a few years is a fun fantasy, not a serious plan.

This reminds me of in The Tick series. A villain named Chairface Chippendale, a sophisticated criminal mastermind with a distinctive chair for a head. Chairface decided to leave his mark on history - literally - by carving his entire name into the surface of the moon. Using incredibly powerful Geissman Lenses that could focus candlelight into an intense heat ray, he managed to carve out "CHA" before being stopped by The Tick and his allies. Musk is a comic book personality.

Cheaper for them to just whine to the orange painted king, at least right now

The Mouse That Roared?

As much as I would enjoy watching Elon personally annex Somalia, that's not a thing.

According to your link those numbers are for this year, not last one. Also they are predictions by Musk, not real numbers.

NASA Budget is 25 Billion

As evident in Challenger and Columbia…

You’re absolutely right. Astronauts sign a last will and testament before every flight. We think it’s routine because we’ve nailed down orbital science but in reality, we lack the quality assurance that space flight demands. It’s one thing to send up robots and satellites, it’s another to send up humans. The ISS is crawling with bacteria. We lack the physical protection for long space travel for a mars mission much less visiting anything past the Kuiper belt.

I debated exactly that before posting, I appreciate your comment.

I do think there are some novel challenges left for the Artemis project however that do require a lot of research and development before they are put before the boring engineering happens.

Several times (if we keep disingenuous "wheeeel akchually" technical gotchas out of this). The fact that they keep safety in mind is a good thing. Any starship that got to space could have easily reached orbit, but it didn't because spacex cares more about NOT uncontrollably deorbiting a giant hunk of steel than impressing a "redditor" who doesn't understand how orbital mechanics work.

> Not sure if you're being sarcastic. Have they managed to get to orbit anything bigger than a banana?

Yes, about 4,000 metric tons. My IP packets are traveling through part of it now.

They have a pretty good chance, actually. They are almost done with the hard parts of the Starship.

They're by far the ones with the most relevant experience and actually flying hardware (human spaceflight, propulsive landing, flight testing hardware for HLS), in the US.

I don't think it's going to take them a decade, but they probably won't be ready within Trump's term, and I think that's the real reason for this latest push.

"Not within the next decade" (e.g. not until 2041) is a long time.

The first prototype of Starship only did its first hop in July 2019, so 6 years ago. The first flight integrated test only happened 2,5 years ago.

Nowadays they can return to Earth already and catch the booster. Why would you expect the rest of the development to drag until 2041?

Perhaps. I am doing my best to stay emotionally detached from this topic and maintain a balanced view, and very open to reasoned arguments and being wrong.

Hacker News is one of the last places I feel comfortable engaging in this way, and not always (sometimes I step on a land mine and get surprised), but if it's not here, I don't know where else to go, and that feels like a shame.

I don't care much about the points, so long as I can keep engaging. So I do my best to follow the guidelines and have faith in the moderation to keep me and others in check, even if sometimes I slip up or encounter what seems like an unfair reaction.

To censor myself from being inquisitive or rationally explore a sensitive topic in a place like this just feels too dystopian for me to accept.

A conspiracy assumes secret cooperation, and I am not making any claim like that. I am merely pointing out that Elon has position himself as a rival against a lot of rich and powerful people. Rather than speculate on the specific arbitrary political reason, it might be mostly because of the underlying pressure or general anti-Elon baseline effect (and to attribute it to something more specific is a form of baseline or base rate neglect).

And to your point about him spending more money then the rest combined, maybe, he did spend a lot on twitter, but I don't think any of us can actually know how much all those people are spending. It might be closer than you think. Also the anti-Elon media brigade started long before he bought twitter, it just wasn't focused on the general public, it was focused on amateur investors.

> Considering their contract just went back up for grabs I’m not sure how true that statement is.

TBH, with this administration, I wouldn't trust whatever either NASA or SpaceX say or do as a sign of anything.

He has often said things that are true, provided you ignore the ten to twenty times he said something else about the same subject with equal confidence. He is a master of goalpost relocation. Ask any Cybertruck owner. He shipped it, but was it the Cybertruck he promised?

What questions do you have following the results of Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, etc?

I've got a HW4 Tesla Model 3 right now and the FSD experience is so good I use it constantly...and I was one of those "I will never trust self driving cars" people for years.

Catching of a booster which everyone else thought was the stupidest craziest thing ever and they did it on first try.

Well, NASA tried that originally but didn't have the budget, and in that sense it's better late than never to fund something different. The reasoning as presented just doesn't reflect reality.

They did. They held a bidding process. SpaceX won the bid. As Americans you didn't vote for a government that wanted to fund multiple bids.

Armadillo Aerospace did a mediocre job at best with its funding.

Too bad Orion can't get to Lunar Orbit to meet the lander.

Building the fuel refinery is a high upfront cost which will quickly disappear. The delta-V required to exit Earth's surface is nearly an order of magnitude higher than what's required to exit the Moon's surface, and the moon is full of fuel.

That feels like a bit of rewriting the past. How could someone plan on stealing valuables from somewhere across the ocean... before they know there even is an "across the ocean" to get to?

It also feels quite off to reduce all of human curiosity to a means of getting one over on someone.

Wasn't it to discover alternative trade routes and also to show physically that the world is round? I think they didn't know that there were usable land to grow tobacco when they started.

> but manned missions are dictated by vanity

We were last on the moon in 1972. We haven't been back since. That's nothing even remotely like "vanity." I think there's a vanity involved in making this type of comment.

> and congressional pork

If the public wants it then it's not pork.

> more than scientific needs.

"Scientific needs" is not a well defined category. Those who proclaim to represent it while expecting it to hold a higher value than the will of the voters are misanthropic bullies.

Yea, it was an insane achievement in 1969, but today the technology exists, it's really just the money that's missing.