NASA selects SpaceX as its sole provider for a lunar lander

[Aurabolt]

Or just not cutting the budget over and over and over and then just saying “let private handle it”

It's not just costs. It's also the beurocracy (reminder: NASA is a Government Agency).

As others said, NASA had to pay the RSA (Russian Space Agency) to send Astronauts to the ISS after the Space Shuttle Fleet was retired. Obviously that wasn't sustainable longterm though some politicians wanted to either cut NASA's funding entirely or disband it entirely. NASA subcontracting private companies like SpaceX to do the heavy lifting turned out to be a viable third option.

The ESA and China are both pushing to land on the Moon soon while NASA's busy using rovers to explore Mars. As a few people said already, the reason there is renewed interest in returning to the Moon is because it will help establish the foundation for manned trips to Mars. There is also the fact the Moon has huge deposits of metals and minerals that are rare on Earth. It's a matter of national security for many countries to get a mining operation going on the Moon and...yeah.

[Themius]

It's not just costs. It's also the beurocracy (reminder: NASA is a Government Agency).

As others said, NASA had to pay the RSA (Russian Space Agency) to send Astronauts to the ISS after the Space Shuttle Fleet was retired. Obviously that wasn't sustainable longterm though some politicians wanted to either cut NASA's funding entirely or disband it entirely. NASA subcontracting private companies like SpaceX to do the heavy lifting turned out to be a viable third option.

The ESA and China are both pushing to land on the Moon soon while NASA's busy using rovers to explore Mars. As a few people said already, the reason there is renewed interest in returning to the Moon is because it will help establish the foundation for manned trips to Mars. There is also the fact the Moon has huge deposits of metals and minerals that are rare on Earth. It's a matter of national security for many countries to get a mining operation going on the Moon and...yeah.

I don't subscribe to the:

"Private industry is more efficient" model.

I do not want the privatisation of space...

[PACOX]

It's not just costs. It's also the beurocracy (reminder: NASA is a Government Agency).

As others said, NASA had to pay the RSA (Russian Space Agency) to send Astronauts to the ISS after the Space Shuttle Fleet was retired. Obviously that wasn't sustainable longterm though some politicians wanted to either cut NASA's funding entirely or disband it entirely. NASA subcontracting private companies like SpaceX to do the heavy lifting turned out to be a viable third option.

The ESA and China are both pushing to land on the Moon soon while NASA's busy using rovers to explore Mars. As a few people said already, the reason there is renewed interest in returning to the Moon is because it will help establish the foundation for manned trips to Mars. There is also the fact the Moon has huge deposits of metals and minerals that are rare on Earth. It's a matter of national security for many countries to get a mining operation going on the Moon and...yeah.

You say this like NASA is not decades ahead of China and the ESA with its rovers and probes. Doesn't sound sexy but space exploration is in man-made robots and not man itself.

Going to the moon has nothing with potentially mining it, that would all be done with machines and AI. NASA is the only space agency that can reliability send heavy payloads, assembly, configure, and operate them for long durations - which is how any moon mining will be done. Any human involvement will be remote, closest being a space station around the moon where maybe an astronaut but boots on the ground for a few hours at a time. So what the ESA and China are doing is nothing that NASA hadn't done in 1960.

The only thing to gain from putting humans back on the moon is learning how to operate human missions in space that do not rely LEO failsafes. That's something that would need to be mastered to go to Mars. NASA has to get comfortable with astronauts being further out for a longer period of time than ISS missions.


The only thing worth a damn in the near optimistic future is helium-3. Anything else can't be brought back or not worth it if/when we can actually do it. Minerals are too heavy and there's just as much on Earth of anything we could get off the moon. If we figured out orbital fabrication then mining the moon would have actual benefits, but no one has reached that milestone.

[Mihalik]

You obviously have never worked with government contracts in the USA. Private enterprises generally can get the same job done faster and cheaper due to how horribly inefficient our bureaucracy is. Look at how much NASA was spending on the shuttle craft vs how much Space X is spending for the same payload size.

1. That's a thorough misunderstanding of how government contracting works. Especially in the US that is obsessed with "private enterprises". As the government doesn't actually own, run or manage the supply chain/manufacturing base, the inflated costs are exclusively on the private sector's side. The government itself runs of skin tight budgets, the inflated costs are exclusively tied to our obsession of contracting out everything to the private sector, which is remotely not as efficient as people think it is. The heyday of American industrial, infrastructure etc development was the New Deal era, which was characterized not just by government spending, but direct government intervention into the markets through joint ventures, government run public companies and limited command economy measures.

2. SpaceX only exists because decades of government investment created the technological and industrial base that allows it to exist. A company like SpaceX literally cannot come into existence in a place like ....Australia, as Australia simply does not have the tech and industrial base for it, and creating it would be just as costly as it was for the US.

[Afrospinach]

You say this like NASA is not decades ahead of China and the ESA with its rovers and probes. Doesn't sound sexy but space exploration is in man-made robots and not man itself.

Interesting.

Russia is the only Space agency in the known universe to have landed a probe on Venus. China holds the record for lunar rover service life. Jaxa may have completed one of the most challenging space ventures ever with Hayabusa2. They are not as far behind as you seem to think.

[PACOX]

Interesting.

Russia is the only Space agency in the known universe to have landed a probe on Venus. China holds the record for lunar rover service life. Jaxa may have completed one of the most challenging space ventures ever with Hayabusa2. They are not as far behind as you seem to think.

Vensus landing isn't that hard. It has more than enough atmosphere to drop something down there. Mars on the other has almost no atmosphere, making landing extremely difficult. It's why a lot of countries have landers that never make it to the surface. China can't launch rockets without dropping stages on people.

How many countries have send probes to the outer solar system?


Not trying to have a pissing match, I like it when anyone doesn't something cool but moon landings are degrees of magnitude easier than Mars.

[Endus]

I don't subscribe to the:

"Private industry is more efficient" model.

I do not want the privatisation of space...

While I agree that private industry is practically by definition less efficient (profit is intentional inefficiency, after all), privatization of space isn't really a worse option than nationalization of the same. Which is really the only alternative. Since whatever gets built in space has to be built, in space, it isn't like normal frontierism; you can't just head off into the wilderness and hack out your own patch of land with a few simple tools you can fit in the back of a wagon. You'd have to develop your own orbital launch systems, develop your own orbital mining/refining systems, etc. Basically, you'd have to become Elon Musk, out of a desire to not put up with Elon Musk.

While I'm definitely not gonna support the idea of a corporation effectively creating a "company town" in space, we could, hypothetically, create a grand partnership of hundreds of corporations, at least, each taking care of their little bit of the puzzle, and all working together to achieve the same collective goal. Such a process could be regulated from the ground by some government(s).

And the nationalized alternative is one where one country, the USA for instance, builds that station and restricts access to non-Americans and rah-rahs to the residents and militarizes it because it's a military base in space even if there's room for supplemental citizen support measures alongside it. There's no way a nation investing in that kind of platform isn't going to militarize it to some degree, particularly the USA.

The idea of a multi-national cooperative effort to build a truly nation-agnostic living and working station in orbit I consider to basically just be delusionally fantastical. It's like saying "why don't we create an island in the mid-Atlantic where there are no rules and no governments but every government helps build it and WHEEEE".

I think we need more privatisation of space. To the point where access largely gets democratized through competition and volume. With regulatory efforts to keep it reined in. The alternatives just all seem like dystopian options.

[Themius]

While I agree that private industry is practically by definition less efficient (profit is intentional inefficiency, after all), privatization of space isn't really a worse option than nationalization of the same. Which is really the only alternative. Since whatever gets built in space has to be built, in space, it isn't like normal frontierism; you can't just head off into the wilderness and hack out your own patch of land with a few simple tools you can fit in the back of a wagon. You'd have to develop your own orbital launch systems, develop your own orbital mining/refining systems, etc. Basically, you'd have to become Elon Musk, out of a desire to not put up with Elon Musk.

While I'm definitely not gonna support the idea of a corporation effectively creating a "company town" in space, we could, hypothetically, create a grand partnership of hundreds of corporations, at least, each taking care of their little bit of the puzzle, and all working together to achieve the same collective goal. Such a process could be regulated from the ground by some government(s).

And the nationalized alternative is one where one country, the USA for instance, builds that station and restricts access to non-Americans and rah-rahs to the residents and militarizes it because it's a military base in space even if there's room for supplemental citizen support measures alongside it. There's no way a nation investing in that kind of platform isn't going to militarize it to some degree, particularly the USA.

The idea of a multi-national cooperative effort to build a truly nation-agnostic living and working station in orbit I consider to basically just be delusionally fantastical. It's like saying "why don't we create an island in the mid-Atlantic where there are no rules and no governments but every government helps build it and WHEEEE".

I think we need more privatisation of space. To the point where access largely gets democratized through competition and volume. With regulatory efforts to keep it reined in. The alternatives just all seem like dystopian options.

I think it all seems dystopian. I can't imagine space improving on our current issues when they're not even addressed now. The multi-national method would be better if it would work which I don't think is likely either. You could end up with multiple multi-nationals though made up of smaller groups.

Privatisation in space could work I think if the companies that were doing the work were owned by people. Regulatory efforts idk... then again I guess you don't want to kill people in space so perhaps they'd actually try to follow them.

[Afrospinach]

Vensus landing isn't that hard. It has more than enough atmosphere to drop something down there. Mars on the other has almost no atmosphere, making landing extremely difficult. It's why a lot of countries have landers that never make it to the surface. China can't launch rockets without dropping stages on people.

How many countries have send probes to the outer solar system?


Not trying to have a pissing match, I like it when anyone doesn't something cool but moon landings are degrees of magnitude easier than Mars.

It is not a pissing contest, it is just that the competition is serious. Right now the only lead the US has by a wide margin is reuseable rockets thanks to spacex(the only one operational in the world). They may indeed be a decade or so in front of everyone else in that regard but as far as other aspects, not so sure.

While I'm definitely not gonna support the idea of a corporation effectively creating a "company town" in space,

Pretty sure that is the backdrop of doom 3 lol.

[Edge-]

I can't imagine space improving on our current issues when they're not even addressed now.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money...tion/39580591/

There are a huge number of benefits that come from this, just not directly. Technologies discovered or created to solve problems in space have tons of every-day applications for us down on earth.

"Science for the sake of science." is pretty fuckin great, actually.

[Themius]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money...tion/39580591/

There are a huge number of benefits that come from this, just not directly. Technologies discovered or created to solve problems in space have tons of every-day applications for us down on earth.

"Science for the sake of science." is pretty fuckin great, actually.

And many great inventions came from nasa and literally every medication that’s been approved is in part always paid for by government funded research.

[Orange Joe]

It's not just costs. It's also the beurocracy (reminder: NASA is a Government Agency).

As others said, NASA had to pay the RSA (Russian Space Agency) to send Astronauts to the ISS after the Space Shuttle Fleet was retired. Obviously that wasn't sustainable longterm though some politicians wanted to either cut NASA's funding entirely or disband it entirely. NASA subcontracting private companies like SpaceX to do the heavy lifting turned out to be a viable third option.

The ESA and China are both pushing to land on the Moon soon while NASA's busy using rovers to explore Mars. As a few people said already, the reason there is renewed interest in returning to the Moon is because it will help establish the foundation for manned trips to Mars. There is also the fact the Moon has huge deposits of metals and minerals that are rare on Earth. It's a matter of national security for many countries to get a mining operation going on the Moon and...yeah.

Isn't there treaties atm blocking any country from doing this?

[PACOX]

Isn't there treaties atm blocking any country from doing this?

Actually now as of the Artemis Accords

Countries can't directly but you could through a proxy like SpaceX and clever technicalities.

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

[PACOX]

Doesn’t the Outer Space treaty make the host country ultimately responsible for those companies and their actions?

That's why I said a country can control resources via proxy. Xyz company makes a claim, in which it's host country may or may not actually call the shots according to the countries politics.

[Kallisto]

Interesting.

Russia is the only Space agency in the known universe to have landed a probe on Venus. China holds the record for lunar rover service life. Jaxa may have completed one of the most challenging space ventures ever with Hayabusa2. They are not as far behind as you seem to think.

Going to Venus was nothing more than a "got there before you" dick waiving contest from Soviets/Russia.

The fact is that Venus just isn't worth landing on at all right now. What Moscow got was a couple images before the air pressure and temperature destroyed the probe.

[Voidwielder]

I don't subscribe to the:

"Private industry is more efficient" model.

I do not want the privatisation of space...

No one is ''privatising space''. Private companies are moving in to LEO and has-been-done operations. NASA should handle cutting edge technology development and programs - as it currently does with Mars rovers, telescopes and so on.

- - - Updated - - -

While I'm definitely not gonna support the idea of a corporation effectively creating a "company town" in space, we could, hypothetically, create a grand partnership of hundreds of corporations, at least, each taking care of their little bit of the puzzle, and all working together to achieve the same collective goal. Such a process could be regulated from the ground by some government(s).

You just described SLS. This is how it became a nightmare of a program.
All you'd get is a compromised design with the sole purpose of placating partners and their national interests to the tune of dozens of gigagolirion dollars.

No, the old space method has to go and die in a corner, never to be seen again.

[Aurabolt]

Isn't there treaties atm blocking any country from doing this?

The Lunar Treaty works basically the same as the one for Antarctica: No country can claim the Moon or parts of the Moon.

The Artemis Accord drafted by the Trump Administration basically allows companies like SpaceX to act as proxies for countries and the rules are a bit different for them. Russia was the first country to publicly criticize the accord because it basically forces countries to sign onto the accord if they want to do anything on the Moon or Mars and that would effectively make the U.S. the de facto gatekeeper to both celestial bodies, not the UN. 7 other countries have signed it so far with another having declared the intent to sign in the future. Biden will probably either have it modified or turn it over to the UN if he does anything about it.

[Orange Joe]

The Lunar Treaty works basically the same as the one for Antarctica: No country can claim the Moon or parts of the Moon.

The Artemis Accord drafted by the Trump Administration basically allows companies like SpaceX to act as proxies for countries and the rules are a bit different for them. Russia was the first country to publicly criticize the accord because it basically forces countries to sign onto the accord if they want to do anything on the Moon or Mars and that would effectively make the U.S. the de facto gatekeeper to both celestial bodies, not the UN. 7 other countries have signed it so far with another having declared the intent to sign in the future. Biden will probably either have it modified or turn it over to the UN if he does anything about it.

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

Parties 9 plus Brazil statement of intent

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

Parties 111^[1][2][3][4]

Something tells me one still "trumps" the other

[PACOX]

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


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



Something tells me one still "trumps" the other

Eh one is made up of a bunch of countries without independent space agencies that really can't enforce any thing is say, the US chooses not to honor it. The other is drafted by nations who have first on the ground capabilities or very strong ties to nations with strong independent space agencies (the US). It's like the UN. The US is part of the UN but doesn't actually listen to the UN, with the UN being powerless to make the US listen.

The Artemis Accords purposely ignores the US's advantage when it comes to space exploration while giving room for the US to exploit it. The only entity that could actually make the US honor either treaty no longer exists (the USSR). That's just reality. The only thing keeping SpaceX from privatizing parts of the moon is the US, which can privatize parts of the moon through SpaceX. What will 100 of those countries say? They are going to stop using American rockets and trading with the US? No chance of that happening.

[Orange Joe]

Eh one is made up of a bunch of countries without independent space agencies that really can't enforce any thing is say, the US chooses not to honor it. The other is drafted by nations who have first on the ground capabilities or very strong ties to nations with strong independent space agencies (the US). It's like the UN. The US is part of the UN but doesn't actually listen to the UN, with the UN being powerless to make the US listen.

The Artemis Accords purposely ignores the US's advantage when it comes to space exploration while giving room for the US to exploit it. The only entity that could actually make the US honor either treaty no longer exists (the USSR). That's just reality. The only thing keeping SpaceX from privatizing parts of the moon is the US, which can privatize parts of the moon through SpaceX. What will 100 of those countries say? They are going to stop using American rockets and trading with the US? No chance of that happening.

Sanction tesla, block their sales in those 100's of countries would be a quick and easy start. Something tells me Elon wouldn't want his revenue cut by at least half