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NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

(www.cnn.com)
404 points voxleone | 1 comments | 21 Oct 25 12:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.265s | source
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loourr ◴[21 Oct 25 13:35 UTC] No.45655638[source]▶
Artemis is a joke. You can tell this is politically motivated by their stance on SLS. If they were serious they would give Spacex the SLS contract for being years and years behind schedule.
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Arainach ◴[21 Oct 25 14:25 UTC] No.45656238[source]▶
You don't want to rely on a single supplier for critical infrastructure. Their management can extort you, their failures leave you with no backup plan, if they go bankrupt you're really screwed.

Keeping multiple companies capable of building it alive is essential.

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1. dotnet00 ◴[21 Oct 25 19:14 UTC] No.45660307[source]▶
Boeing has been pretty blatant about just not caring about performance on SLS, because, by being legally required to keep funding it, there isn't really anything NASA can actually do to hold Boeing responsible for underperforming.

IIRC they managed to extort additional money out of NASA for Starliner too (despite it being fixed price), for that exact reason.

SpaceX hasn't fallen to such tactics yet, but, agreed, it'll be too late to start on setting up competitors when SpaceX eventually does fall to that level (Boeing wasn't always so bad after all).