NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

Anyone know the details of the scheduling situation here?

Is this a "SpaceX spread itself too thin and wasn't able to keep its own pre-agreed deadlines" situation or a "The government-specified contract was unrealistically aggressive / so vaguely-specified that it could not be realized within its original timetable" situation?

Its an incredibly complex ever evolving situation.

Basically, originally Starship has entered development for SpaceX had nothing todo with any of this. SpaceX started to spend on Starship for their own reasons.

Then in Trump 1, he simply inveded a super agressive 'get to the moon' goal. 'Moon 2024'. This was mostly a fantasy goal but it sounded good politically. NASA for various reasons, had aboslutly no money to fund a moon lander. But if the president asked, they have to do it. So they threw out very opened ended ask for a moon lander, and a single moon landing.

There wasn't the kind of question asked like, what kind of system should we use for moon exploration in the next 2 decades. Or anything like that. It was more like 'how can we land on the moon once in 2024 and then we do new contracts after that'.

SpaceX, naturally justed adopted their existing Starship platform. But to make that work, they would need to figure out many things beyond just a 'lander'. And SpaceX bid was wildly to ambitious. It in many cases provided far, far more then NASA asked for. But NASA doesn't care about the capability, only if the bid can do the minium they asked for.

SpaceX won because they were willing to pay for almost all of it themselves, only asking for 2.3 billion $. And that included a test moon landing before the real one.

This is of course only a fraction of the cost for the whole Starship program.

So Space didn't spread themselves to thin, they are all in on Starship, but the simple reality is, its an incredibly difficult wide reaching program. And the moon lander part is just a little add on to that larger project. And that's the only reason 2.3 billion $ would be acceptable to SpaceX.

The simple reality is, nobody on the planet knows how to do a moon lander for 2.3 billion $, literally nobody.

So the time table way always fantasy and literally everybody knew that as soon as it was announced. Nobody was to public about it because offending Trump is bad, so lets all just collectivly pretend its real.

The government contract was unfocused and short term focused, without a larger strategy for moon exploration.

The real issue however isn't with this one contract, but the how the whole NASA Human Spaceflight program is organized.

I think the situation here from NASAs perspective is that these were the choices:

1. Back a low risk moon mission that is basically a repeat of Apollo using proven, but extremely expensive tech that has a very low probability of failure.

2. Back a high risk strategy that relies on the development of new technology that can potentially deliver hundreds of tons of cargo to the lunar surface for a fraction of the cost of Apollo and support a sustained human presence on the lunar surface. This of course comes with a near 100% chance of significant delays and cost overruns, and also a high probability of total failure.

IMO NASA made the obviously correct choice here and it's not close. This is exactly the kind of thing that I want my tax money spent on.

I'm not sure what your "obviously correct choice" here is, given the musk hate, but to me:

Option one basically lights a huge pile of money on fire, for a vanity goal.

Option two uses a much smaller pile of money to do something useful long term.

This is the objective reality, but NASA choices was simply based on money.

You can read the technical selection paper. Both Blue and SpaceX proposal met the minimal requirments, and SpaceX was cheaper by at least 50%. So they won the selection.