NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

Back then you'd get two legs of the Correct - Fast - Cheap triangle. It just required shoveling boatloads of money at the defense contractors.

Now you can give Boeing twice as much money as SpaceX and they still fail to deliver a working product in twice the time.

Can you name a rocket program that was delivered ahead of schedule? I'm not aware of one that exists.

The public feud sounded a lot more like cocaine.

> there was a time when either Boeing or the military industrial complex would handle these things with precision and delivered ahead of time.

Is this a joke? Boeing or similar delivering ahead of time?

> when either Boeing or the military industrial complex would handle these things with precision

There is a good chance Artemis II and potentially (albeit with long odds) even III are delayed due to Lockheed fucking up a legacy heat shield on Orion.

> Boeing or the military industrial complex would handle these things with precision and delivered ahead of time

that's fantasy. I've never heard of either entity delivering on time or on budget let alone ahead of time.

The first moon landing? Kennedy wanted it done before the end of the decade and they landed in 1969. I guess you could argue that it was on schedule rather than ahead.

The relabeling of existing ICBM designs as space rockets is much easier when you have up to date ICBM designs.

Isn't SpaceX now part of the military industrial complex?

lol, nasa was delayed over and over and over. Even getting to the moon was pretty recent after explosions to where many didn’t think it was safe. Some revisionist history going on here

Yes I remember (I worked in that industry), but a few important caveats that you haven't mentioned:

* The cost was exorbitant

* The delivery estimates were hugely long and massively padded

* The precision was ensured through QA and acceptance testing processes that would easily be 10x the amount of cost/effort as the actual development was

* The amount of waste around the programs was incredible

Maybe you can score contractors on "legs out of three".

>that's fantasy. I've never heard of either entity delivering on time or on budget let alone ahead of time.

We went from not having a manned space program to landing men on the moon in 8 years. This country used to be able to do things.

The ketamine addiction rumors are unproven, and Musk denies them.

He says he takes it as prescribed against occasional depression.

That's because Boeing followed the leadership failure curve when McDonnell-Douglas took them over: Engineer -> Accountant (they are here) -> Lawyer.

A-4? F-117? B-21?

History suggests the US is pretty good at acting when it perceives existential threat.

I suspect that is a truism the current administration is attempting to leverage. Unfortunately / inconveniently for them, instead of focusing on actual existential threats (climate change), they've tried to rally people behind a pretend existential threat (immigration). The people smell the rat and it seems to be back-firing.

Why they don't do the obvious thing and co-opt the green energy initiative, get into a space-race equivalent with China on solar panels and wind turbines, is a mystery to me.

Their actual internal deadlines were significantly missed

Kennedy's speech is hardly "a schedule". There were definitely delays in the Apollo project, like the Apollo 4 launch that was delayed by (almost?) a year.

TBH, I believe him on this one.

Knowing some folks who are working with their psychiatrists on their mental health and using ketamine under supervision: it seems ketamine is starting to prove effective for depressive issues.

The challenge is it's extremely potent and the dose is extremely patient-dependent. Miss a dose, mis-dose, or fail to realize you don't have the calibration right yet, and the risk for side-effects is high. Depression itself can also mask other conditions (like, counter-intuitively, mania; when you're too depressed to be manic you don't show the mania symptoms) that only surface for potential treatment when the depression is treated.

Most importantly: Musk can afford the kind of calibre of psychiatrist (and the time for observation) necessary for the therapy to be maximally effective. So if he's working with someone and serious about being treated, I wouldn't doubt ketamine therapy would be on the table.

(All of that having been said: mixing marijuana and ketamine is risky as hell; if Musk smoking on Rogan wasn't a one-off, he's doing his psychiatrist no favors introducing a second drug to his system that interacts with the same neural pathways and can create overshoot and bounce-back effects).

Also add to that cost the cost of human lives that were expendable on the altar of the cutting edge of technology. The entire Apollo and Shuttle programs were a complete shit show when it comes to the safety of the crews. The acceptable safety margins are not even remotely comparable to today.

The A-4 from 1954? F-117 from 1981? B-21 that's been in development since 2015 and has had only 3 delivered so far? These are 10 year development program, the Starship still has some years to go and I'd argue a reusable moon rocket is a bit more involved than a bomber plane.

Precision and ahead of schedule doesn’t accurately describe these projects once they reached a certain level of cost and complexity over a half century ago. I recommend reading Prophets of War Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex to get a sense of how remarkably efficient spacex has been in comparison.

We were willing to spend money doing things. The whole moon landing program cost something like $300 billion adjusted for inflation. Artemis is on a relative shoestring.

Musk says a lot of things. Most of them aren't true, a number of them criminally so.

No one should trust a thing he says after his baseless libel against the rescue divers in Thailand. ABSOLUTELY no one trust should anything he says after the "funding secured" BS, and if you got that far, saw the obvious lies and fakes he posted to Twitter even before he bought the place, I don't know what else to tell you.

At this point it's safer to assume that if Musk says something it's wrong.

It sure looks like the Rogan thing was a one-off, though. I believe that the bit was that Musk hadn't done it before, and I don't see much evidence he's used marijuana since.

The richest man in the world, a proven liar and baseless accuser of others, runs a social media platform he uses specifically to alter the political views of others for his financial benefit, doesn't deserve any level of benefit of the doubt or gracious fact-checking as he does not hold himself to that standard.

No one with his level of wealth should exist as a basic concept.

I submit the policy proposal that anyone who over $1 billion in net worth should lose all constitutional rights. If you are willing to hoard that much wealth for yourself without using it to help others you deserve nothing. You don't even need rights at that point.

Elon Musk's current net worth is about $500 billion. It only costs $40 billion/year to end world hunger. For the entire world. [1]

That's only 8% of his net worth.

He paid more to buy Twitter as a hobby than it would have cost him to end world hunger for a year.

In other words, Elon Musk could single-handedly end world hunger by liquidating his assets and it would be probably not even empty his portfolio, possibly ever if it were well-managed.

You only need $10 million to never work again and live a very generous lifestyle withdrawing at least 5x the US median income for yourself forever until you die, and Elon has hoarded that amount of wealth FIFTY THOUSAND TIMES.

[1] https://www.wfpusa.org/news/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-wo...

War fighting technology like aircraft is a different thing than orbital rockets and spacecraft. I'm not trying to downplay those achievements, especially the F-117, but it's apples to oranges.

Moving the goalposts. They hit the deadline that mattered.

The US federal government spends $20B per day. It could end world hunger without even noticing the expense if it really only cost $40B/year. But of course, that number is complete nonsense.

Here is your intellectual mistake: Wealth isn't fixed. Musk didn't take his fortune from anyone else. He has been part of creating a huge amount of new wealth in his companies.

Tesla didn't use to exist. Now it's worth $1500B. That's new wealth, and Musk owns a part of it.

I knew I’d draw a Musk cult member out of the weeds. The cult’s defense of their dear leader is an irresistible biological impulse.

It’s ironic that you’re accusing the government of not doing enough because the US government used to spend a lot of money helping people by fighting diseases and other poverty issues around the world (USAID) before Elon Musk himself illegally joined the federal government and cut that program.

So really Elon Musk has had a direct negative effect on world hunger and poverty including US government policy on the matter.

Maybe you think $40 billion to solve world hunger a year is unrealistic and maybe the US government isn’t doing enough, but Elon Musk is literally having a negative impact on the exact issue. At least the US government is/was doing a non-zero amount.

Finally, you claim Tesla has created new wealth. I would submit that Tesla has stolen wealth from the people in terms of its main business of transportation. Remember when Elon Musk fought against multiple public transit projects? Remember the lie that was hyperloop and the boring company which diverted public attention away from more viable and realistic public transit projects?

Every car company CEO is out to derail public transit projects that aim to reduce car dependency and make our world more equitable to traverse, and Elon Musk is an especially bad actor in that regard. He is an ideological proponent of a wealth-divided transportation system, where have-nots sit in traffic paying off car debt and haves skip traffic through his private tunnels.

Every vehicle we are forced to buy from mega corporations is a wealth siphon. It’s the biggest thing that the average person buys that depreciates into nothing rather than appreciating or holding value like a home.