NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

"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.

> 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.

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.