NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

This would be such a dumb move on the government's part. "Lose the new space race" is ridiculous PR-brain. We are not racing to the same goal! China is trying to land on the moon, we are trying to establish a permanent presence. There is no value to merely returning to the moon to say we did it, and Starship is the only vehicle that can plausibly deliver huge quantities of cargo to the lunar surface.

What’s the main motivation for the moon? Is it a better location than the international space station? What’s the reasoning there?

I think the general idea is to set up a radio telescope there

I think its to prepare for mars (sort of), its the closest place where we can build a self-sustaining civilization.

The ISS served all political purposes it could, and microgavity research can be served by private entities these days. (Especially considering that a Starship has half the internal pressurized volume of the entire ISS, at approximately one thousandth the cost.)

A permanent Moon base would allow research opportunities that private LEO stations can't: ISRU, low gravity research, the far side of the Moon offers unique opportunities for astronomy (any spectrum), etc. pp. Long term, who knows what additional opportunities it opens up.

It's Mars but with training wheels, since if there are problems stuff can be sent to/from the earth at any time as opposed to waiting for a transit window to open. With water ice in Shackleton Crater at the South Pole a permanent base should be very feasible with today's technology plus an operational Starship.

because this civilization is not self-sutaining?

If you value complexity, life, diversity, and adventure, then two self sustaining civilizations are better than one.

in space travel there's a saying: once you're out of atmosphere you're halfway to anywhere. it takes tons of energy to get over the friction of air resistance. That's way we want a future where space-related things are built in space as much as possible. Once we can solve the idea of permanent installations on the moon it will have several advantages over an orbital station such as ease of additional construction, potential local resources that don't have to be shipped up and the ability to establish a base that can manufacture the things needed locally from imported or local resources rather than needing to manufacture things on earth and then launch them assembled.

Starship has yet to demonstrate that capability. They would need to show rapid re-usability for it to be viable. Not to mention docking and orbital re-fueling.

Falcon Heavy seems to have that capability though. I suspect that Starship will have similar cost to Falcon Heavy when they get done with it. Maybe marginally cheaper. The re-entry problem is really throwing a wrench into things.

I think it's more escaping the gravity well, as the energy consumed by air resistance is fairly negligible compared to gravity and is more of a stability issue. But yeah, once in LEO you're halfway to anywhere as long as you can bring enough mass up for what you need.

SpaceX has already successfully landed and reused a booster, which is the most expensive part of the rocket. As for the reentry problem, that seems to have been solved in the last couple of test flights. Still much more economically viable than SLS even if they can't reuse the upper stage.

Can we actually? And I mean in any reasonable time frame say 100 years? And by self-sustaining I take fully independent from Earth supply chain for absolutely everything. A civilization that could continue existing without single delivery for Earth.

Yeah, the atmosphere complicates things a bit during launch but much bigger issue is gravity - Earth having the highest gravity in the Solar System among solid surface bodies.

For landing hovever it makes things signifficantly easier! You can break full arrival speed from lunar or interplanetary space (successfully done by Apollo missions) with a relatively light passive heatshield & land on parachutes. You can even brek to orbit instead or use the atmosphere to change incliunation of your orbit and other tricks (there are proposals for air breathing ion engines, etc.).

Lack of sufficient atmosphere is what makes landing on Mercury (no atmosphere, need to break to zero using rcoket thrust) and Mars (enough atmosphere to break from arrival speed, not enough to use parashutes or gliders for a soft landing) so difficult .

that's fair, I was kinda just inferring as someone whose space travel experience is limited to Kerbal Space Program. The point still stands though: whether it's atmo or gravity the moon has a lot less of it than the earth, but still has a lot more local resources and space to put things semi-permanently. Long distance slower than light space travel has a Sahara problem and at least in the solar system the same sol'n could be used: leapfrogging from cache to cache. The ISS is a better cache than the nothing that was there before it, but a functioning moon base would be an amazing cache from which to launch ops into the deep solar system.

As someone who is a tad skeptical of SpaceX duevto their side claims, I have to give it to them, that last launch of Starship proved they are making some real progress again. Wasnt looking good at the start of the year but now their re-entries are doing fairly well.

A stepping stone to Mars, iiuc. Look up NASA's cislunar plans, oriented around developing the many new technologies needed for humans visiting Mars.

One thing I don't understand about Musk and his Mars obsession is that he has had a rocket that can launch stuff to Mars for years now and he didn't even bother with the tiniest pilot project just for PR purposes. He is not sending rovers, satellites or living plants on a journey to Mars.

Even if by some miracle Starship carries people to Mars, there won't be anything for them to do there. They'll be stuck in their Starship and that would be the end of that mission, since there isn't even a plan to return.

We have to start at some point don't we?

Many including myself would say we do not have to. And even we really should not.

When humans get to Mars the infrastructure will already be there waiting for them. The plan is to send unmanned Starships to Mars basically as soon as it's flight proven.

"Close" means a different thing in Space than it does on Earth.

If the planets are aligned the Delta-V is not that different between the two (Mars is about twice as much Delta-V for 100x the distance). You can use aerobraking in the Mars atmosphere but can do no such thing on the Moon. And then the last problem is that on the Moon you need to budget for a round trip, but on Mars we could produce fuel on the surface for the return trip. When you start thinking about all that it's obvious that Mars makes more sense.

Why do you say that we "really should not"?

The ISS has (and has always had) a multi-year backlog of experiments, with no shortage of orgs willing to pay the 6 or 7 figure fee.

We should focus on simple problems here first.

Booster re-usability is only the first half of the problem. It's the second stage re-usability that makes Starship viable despite its massive second stage. The re-entry heating is trashing their second stages which would make the killer feature of Starship, fast turnaround, impractical.

Also, as far as I can tell from their last test video, they are still shredding their Flaperons at the joint.

I don't think there were any visible burn throughs this way around at the flaps.

If you’ve played KSP you should know how totally useless Mun bases are.

If there is water ice there, as suspected, it is the most realistic path to a self sustaining space economy. If you can earn money in space, there is a reason for people to work in space, and you can extend the economy into space.

Starship (the upper stage) can launch from Mars and bring humans back to Earth. The problem is that they need a lot of propellant to do this, and they can't bring that much from Earth. Their current plan is to generate it on Mars, which requires complex infrastructure built by unmanned missions. A simpler approach could be developing a smaller ascent vehicle:

https://spacenews.com/how-carrying-enough-water-to-make-retu...

https://spacenews.com/crewed-mars-missions-will-require-a-ne...

But I'm sure that approach also has drawbacks.

Who cares? Even if they never solve the flap issue, the cost of bolting on new flaps every flight is minimal.

That's like bolting new wings on a 777 after every flight. It's going to cost a LOT and you won't be able to just load up fuel/passengers and take off again.

I'm sure SpaceX will eventually fix the problem. They are well funded, the materials exist, and they have amazing engineers. They just haven't reached that point yet.

It's political. Mars is the obvious next step, but too far in the future.

When the current industry standard is that the whole 777 is replaced every flight, that's one hell of an improvement.

'Cost a LOT' is relative though.

Expensive compared to a 777 flight? Sure. Expensive compared to every other moon capable rocket? No.

Cool, then they can pool together and build a commercial station. There's now multiple companies capable of building them.

We definitely cannot build a self sustaining civilization on the moon.

But is it going to be cheaper than Falcon Heavy?

That isn't the industry standard anymore thanks to SpaceX. Starship isn't competing with Saturn 9 and the Space Shuttle, it is competing with Falcon Heavy. If the second stage cannot be re-used then you may as well launch a much cheaper second stage that isn't rated for re-entry like Dragon.

I agree, they are doing a great job with Starship so far. I think they were overly optimistic at first (Typical Engineering Management Thing), but their Raptor engines alone are a huge advancement. The rest of Starship is coming together great.

They have set a hard goal, but they definitely have the expertise to make it work. I look forward to seeing the first orbital re-fueling.