Quote:
Originally Posted by xsturmn8_BLx
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starship is a sad boondoggle. That guy from SpaceX is lucky he never lost control of the narrative with respect to him being unable to deliver us to the Moon on time as promised. I admittedly don't know a huge amount about the program's progress, and I have heard the Artemis timeline was bungled in more than 1 way, but fact is the rocket does not exist after 10 years and it was supposed to be fully ready for NASA use when, 2 years ago? That's what the taxpayer paid the guy for, anyhow. Where's the beef?
Btw, that guy's been going 'round lately saying we should skip the Moon return and Artemis (for which purpose he was already paid to deliver a rocket.) because it's too easy. We should just aim for Mars instead and cut him even bigger checks into his personal bank account for even more ephemeral deliverables 3-5 years off. Seems legit as always.
Oh, a future where NASA is rebloated and renationalized. I work with old scientific equipment and it's all so hardy & wonderful thanks to those monster contracts up through the Space Shuttle era. Requirements for repairability, statistical analysis by the customer on failure rates of bulk purchases, etc. It was nice. It's funny how this little market & industry mirror the beauty of the space program and provide me material benefits thanks to it.
This had a fair amount to do with Bell / AT&T as a monster negotiator and consumer too. I understand Bell-AT&T was like 50% of all revenues at Hewlett Packard during the peak of their test equipment era. HP in that era is my Apple. The stuff is SO GOOD.
Anyway, a good 20% of surplus gear I see in some domains has NASA tags. And it ALL works 30, 40, 50 years hence. Then it falls off fast in the mid-2000s. Now they don't even make the damn stuff anymore! Do it all with an oscilloscope. Call it petulant, I know manufacturing changed, everything's in the box etc, but for the sake of this post's rhetoric I choose to blame it all on NASA privatization. It's emblematic, at least.
Oops, I went on a little long. OP is right: space is cool. I got inspired. Here's wishing my kids can witness American flags painted on rockets completing fantastic feats some year soon. Pretty rockets with white paint, dignified colorful paint jobs, and so forth. Rockets that are 100% disconnected from any individual's ego and bring light to the world from every American. You know what I mean.
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The purpose of hiring the guy who's hopped up on goofballs was to find ways to make space lift less expensive per ton, not reach the moon, which is not only pointless but also has already been done. That's the deliverable.
Has he done so?
Private sector is usually pretty good at making products more efficiently so they can squeeze a maximum profit out of each unit.