You don't see the relevance of Artemis III launching in mid-2027 [1] or 2028 versus, say, after November 2028?
Assuming SpaceX can deliver it. They've failed to do a successful test flight with even a fraction of the officially planned capacity. Who knows how long it will take them, if they can even pull it off, to deliver it.
SpaceX's, on the other hand, has been.
There are 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.
> outside maybe PR and politics
It's still a bad idea, objectively.
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...
This work could revolutionise America's manufacturing/industrial base, if there was someone around who could direct the ship in that direction.
I could imagine, given a bit of funding bump, the van-lifers and the earthship folks could find themselves with a life-support-system revolution to participate in .. especially if it were oriented not just towards starship interiors, but life-on-the-streets/in-the-woods/on-mars solutions .. the good ol' USA has tons of test monkeys for that scenario.
SpaceX may not be stellar, but it is definitely out of this world ;)
Elon Musk is just a guy, a key figure for SpaceX, but there are 10000+ other people, including Gwynne Shotwell who most people say is really in charge. In fact, I am not sure if Elon Musk does any actual work at SpaceX and Tesla now.
A lot of institutional knowledge is locked behind corporate walls. We can assume a crew cabin will be partly designed by engineers poached from other companies who can leak some of the institutional knowledge. That said, some of the crew cabin will be designed whole-cloth. At some point SpaceX will need to build it's own knowledge base. I would be curious to see how other components were built, i.e. the parachutes. A parachute has a lot of built-in institutional knowledge, and I'd be curious to see behind the curtains where SpaceX got that knowledge. You can't exactly check out a library book.
The concept of boutique engineering shops tackling chunks of the design is an interesting premise. But I don't see how the financials work. The more realistic scenario is that SpaceX will build it's own machine shops under it's umbrella.
Winnebago is churning out Ekko campervans at $250,000 and somebody is buying those. But you look at the quality of the interior, it's same as everyone else, lots of particle board. The point is, the most expensive campervans built by the corporate world are using cheap throwaway materials, not space age innovation. I shudder to think of the cost of what a space age campervan costs.
The Apollo program was at the unique juncture in history where distributed companies with institutional knowledge were rapidly maturing their products concurrently with NASA's demand. In today's world, 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.
Or a fuckton of money for an administration priority.
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.
That alone overshadows everything NASA has done since the moon landing.
If you want to look long term, well, they're still stellar :) Considering everything they're achieving, and how they're so much better than everybody else in the field.
It's a failure only if you look at a rather small time range and criteria. Which I don't think was a surprise for anybody - Elon is famous for going for moon shots and failing, but still delivering better than anybody else.