NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

I don't know who else can, but I do seriously doubt SpaceX is going to be able to deliver within the next decade or so either.

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.

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

I wouldn't say "almost done" - orbital refueling is likely one of the hard parts, and it wasn't attempted yet.

when the Democrats wrestle back control of the federal government all things related to Trump, no matter how tangentially, are getting castrated. That includes SpaceX because of Elon Musk so they need to get it while the getting's good.

edit: the vindictive behavior of the current crop of politicians is just cutting off your nose to spite your face. All of it is going to come right back around when the parties swap places.

"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?

I expect it to take a long time because they seems to be a long way off from achieving it. Their track record so far isn't great. They've consistently blown every timeline they've put forth, and by a lot.

Remember, they said that they'd have a rapidly reusable launch system going by March 2013. In 2011, Musk said that he'd be sending humans to Mars sometime between 2021 and 2031, but it doesn't look like they're anywhere near being able to do that yet.

Also remember that they started working on all of this in 2008.

I mean, I could be wrong! But I don't think I am.

There is a saying that SpaceX turns the impossible into merely late.

They have blown a lot of deadlines, but they also produced a very reliable and relatively cheap launcher which now underpins the majority of human space activity, which we should, in fairness, consider a huge achievement.

And the Raptor engines look really good so far. Reliable engines are a huge must in space industry.

I don't think they are getting stymied by reentry problems forever. Already the latest IFT looked a lot better than the first one.

> orbital refueling is likely one of the hard parts

It's the most novel and riskiest. I wouldn't say it's hardest. That's launch, reëntry and reüse. They've substantially de-risked those components with IFT-11.

I'd put IFT-12 validating Block 3 as the actual hardest launch next year. If that goes smoothly, I'm betting they make orbit and propellant transfer before the end of the year. And if that happens, I'm betting they get at least one rocket off to Mars before year end.

> There is a saying that SpaceX turns the impossible into merely late.

That saying is in no way at odds with my assertion.

True, and I apologize.

Nevertheless, if we come back to the original assertion, I have one more argument against it.

If you look at Starbase, it has grown absolutely huge. It started off as a small group of tents and now it is a massive industrial area, plus SpaceX is expanding their presence at Cap Canaveral as well.

Which means that they have a strong incentive to turn Starship into something that makes money and can finance those structures. No one can subsidize such large scale efforts indefinitely, not even Musk. You can spend a lot of time at a drawing board, but once you cross into the industrial buildup phase, your expenses skyrocket (pun intended) and the schedule becomes tighter.

So they either deliver, or shut the shop within much less than a decade.

I don't expect democrats to be super vindictive to SpaceX, except if they think they can redirect that money to old-space companies like Boeing (which is less about being vindictive and more that most politicians are shamelessly corrupt).

> They are almost done with the hard parts of the Starship.

That's what Musk wants you to believe.

In reality, reusability was the Achilles heel of the space shuttle, due to the thermal insulator tiles that could be easily damaged during reentry, so they had to be rechecked rigorously before the next flight, and the damaged tiles replaced. We haven't seen any of that - so far only the booster was reused, somewhat, as in 2 were reused, with one failure and one success, but only much later.

And then there is the orbital refueling, but that is so far in the future that it's not even worth discussing.

Well that's just the empty booster; what they plan to do next with v3 is refueling in space, but what I haven't heard anything about yet is landing on the moon, crew compartiments, cargo, and launching again. Any one of those is years of development and testing.

I mean don't get me wrong, it's exciting and I'm grateful to be alive for these developments along with all access insight in the process and high definition video of the tests and I really hope they make it. But it won't be fast or cheap.

This is a good argument.

Something can be copied from Dragon, but not all of those.

Not just due to the tiles!

They had to take a lot of the back end of the shuttle apart after every landing, which was cumbersome because things weren't packed right for that. Also, they used hydrazine for the (many!) smaller rocket engines and that requires special protective suits and breathing equipment.

Starship doesn't use hydrazine and the big engines are pretty fast to remove/mount. We've seen them do that many times now.

Shuttle tiles were tested by having somebody going around and pinging them all with a special mallet and using a cart with a special computer that checked if they made the right sound.

Starship tiles can be inspected remotely and quickly with a camera.

Replacing a shuttle tile wasn't easy. Replacing a Starship tile is fairly easy. They have done it many, many times already. The question isn't whether they can do it fast (they can) or easily (they can) or whether they can detect bad tiles (they can). It's not even whether they can tolerate a few missing or defective tiles (they can). The only question there is whether enough fail so that the replacement time cuts too much into the recycling time budget for when they want to launch Starships really fast. We don't know that yet. They won't be needing really fast turnarounds for some time so there's plenty of opportunity to fix any issues with tile design/placement and with the underlying thermal blankets.

Don't argue by analogies. Especially not bad ones.

It's probably a lot easier than the raptors, the plumbing, the launch tower, the launch mount, the belly flop, staging, and the catching. It's probably easier than the pez dispenser.

Shuttle had the unfortunate combination of fragile indivudally unique (!) tiles glue to lightweight aluminum structure that would fail if heated to 175 C (!!) [0], even in a small area.

In comparison Starship is covered by mostly identical tiles attached to hull welded from milimeters thick (internet data indicates something between 4 and 2 mm thick & often multiplied in important places) steel plate.

The steel hull has demonstrated surviving missing tiles just fine - and during earlier flight even multiple burn throughs on the flaps with bits falling off and even back then Starship completed simulated landing to the ocean (including the flip manuever and landing burn!).

So even if SpaceX does not perfect rapid reusability of Starship immediately, they would still have hands down the best orbital launcher in the world, with the option of populating new Starship hulls with reused engines, acuators and avionics for the time being.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_thermal_protecti...

Good thing SpaceX learned from that mistake and built a much simpler heat shield out of identical tiles that can be cheaply and easily replaced.

I never claimed "hardest". And yes, block3 being as of right now still unproven is another reason to say "not almost done with the hard parts yet".