"The president and I want to get to the moon in this president's term" - Sean Duffy NASA administrator.
A scary way to set a schedule on a complex project with lives at stake. They don't care though.
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What part of the comment you're replying to lead you to believe that the person you're replying to does not understand the value of deadlines?
This is just the same deadline being pushed another year because of failures. Deadlines that get constantly pushed aren't deadlines at all.
As I recall, SpaceX and Artemis project was supposed to be Moon by 2024. At least originally. But then SpaceX blew up all the rockets (successfully testing them or something) and now we've wasted damn near a decade.
Today (AFAIK) 2028 is considered quite aggressive, mostly due to the lack of progress on Starship, and the facts driving that conclusion are not any more amenable to change via political pressure than they were last time.
We let people do stupid shit and kill themselves all the time. Driving 80+ MPH, driving motorcycles, recreational drugs, alcohol, climbing Everest, etc.
I think it's fine. If I were in the position, I'd sign up to do this.
The moon is meaningful.
Yeah, we've been there already, but it's been many decades and we haven't exactly kept all the tech and procedures up to date in the intervening years. And that first go-round itself missed it's intended deadline by about 7-8 years.
Bean counters make excuses. Put the right people in the right places and shit gets done.
I fear it's going to happen again; Orion isn't safe and hasn't been successfully tested. The heat shield started to disintegrate the last time they tested it and instead of testing it again with their changes they're going to put people in it next time.
The risk of people dying is sometimes an acceptable risk. We accept it every time a firefighter goes into a burning building. Is a national vanity project like Moon missions worth the risk? Maybe then, when it was novel and inspirational, but now, when it's a retro throwback and the only reason we're doing it is to avoid losing face to the communist Chinese?
Let's be serious, please. When has Trump ever stuck his name or face on anything nationally meaningful?
The public has spend billions of dollars on this program, if the end result is astronauts getting cooked during reentry then how could that possibly be an outcome worth the expense?
Funding makes it happen. Fund it, it will happen. Don't fund it, it won't happen. American space exploration has been chronically underfunded relative to its ambitions, which is why all we have to show for our manned exploration programs since STS (edit: or including it, if you like!) is a string of broken promises. I am hopeful that Artemis will get there, but I am simply telling you the shape of reality as it currently exists—a shape that doesn't care about your definition of "reasonable" in this context. I also don't think we will beat the Chinese unless something major changes.
Im not sure the current admin is prepared for the risk that entails, unlike the last time we did this:
https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events...
https://www.discovermagazine.com/if-the-apollo-11-astronauts...
Yes, he's in such excellent health, I can definitely see him living (and non-comatose!) long enough for that.
Which extended also how exactly those rockets were produced... and by whom.
EDIT: Yeah, I get it, the Zwangsarbeiter from the camps building the rockets are not very conductive to the carefully whitewashed "hero technocrat" image certain "hackers" just love to invest in. :T
He was a brilliant designer, engineer, and project leader but he is an extremely problematic person for the methods he was comfortable using to achieve his goals.
Nominating a VP as President isn’t dynastic, it’s been common practice for centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vice_presidents_of_the...
I think the US is lacking the organization, culture, and on-a-mission mentality today, not money. I believe the money is the easiest part of the equation, the rest can't be faked or supplied at the click of a button. The US is no longer a serious nation hell-bent on accomplishing great/difficult things. Congress knows if they supply the $30 billion per year, what we'll get in the end is a broken program that won't achieve the set aims, and it'll just take 15 years at $40 billion per year instead, without a single Moon landing. They know full well how dysfunctional the US is, everybody is just acting when the cameras are on.
⁽"ᵀʰᵉ ʰᶦᵍʰᵉˢᵗ ᵛᶦʳᵗᵘᵉ ᶦˢ ˡᵒʸᵃˡᵗʸ"⁾
Von Braun used literal concentration camp slave labor. You should reconsider your use of “slave-driving” here because it is a very bad look.
My real question, if/when that happens, who is pulling the strings with the most sway?
Any number of emergent events may create an emergency preventing the congress from gathering. The congress are collaborators and the Supreme Court is compromised.
I mean that's how we did it last time.
For instance if hundreds of people are rioting and breaking into the capitol building.
That's what they were trying to do on Jan 6.
RFK Jr: "Measles ain't that bad, try this potion my friend came up with."
Armstrong's personal estimate of his odds getting back alive were about 50%.
Apollo 13 came within a hair of killing its crew.
I fly across the North Atlantic at 30,000 feet, death in seconds if the hull is breached, in a comfortable chair, watching a movie and sipping a drink. Isn't that incredible? I still find it amazing.
But I know that was achieved through the loss of many, many lives.
Also, corners were cut in the testing. (Full stack testing.)
an apt comparison I saw elsewhere is that the left side of the aisle is acting like the opposing team from Air Bud: "hey, a dog can't play basketball, it's against the rules!!" meanwhile, the dog is making shots over and over again.
We're currently seeing people being denied due process as a matter of federal policy all over the US.
Not entirely sure where you see murky and undefined situations...
Full stack testing was not cutting corners. After ground testing it was deemed that incremental testing would not be beneficial. Doing tasks in parallel instead of in series can introduce project risks, but that's not the same thing as cutting corners, which is where something necessary is not done at all.
“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”
The idea that rocket X not exploding in a single launch makes it man-rated is cutting corners.
Full stack testing was testing the entire rocket at the same time instead of using dummy stages to test parts of the rocket separately. There was opposition to it because if the rocket failed it might be difficult to diagnose why exactly it failed, which would slow the project down in the long run. Based on the ground testing and advances in instrumentation, the risk of a project delay from a failure was considered acceptable. It still took multiple launches to man rate the rockets. There's a reason the first manned launch of the Saturn V was Apollo 8.
I imagine there might be a few people who would in the case of the ancient goddess...
After the fact, it always looks inevitable.
Would you have gone up on that first manned Saturn launch? Not me. Recall how the space shuttle was safe, until it blew up. And then it was safe again, and broke up on reentry.
More and more it looks like that is what he wants.
It's also entirely reasonable as an American to discount Polio / Ebola and a lot of other stuff that' aren't an issue for them. It doesn't mean that worldwide they aren't a problem. But historically, we've had systems to ensure these things aren't problems so when they become problems its newsworthy.
The constitution says he can’t be elected president, but on an extremely pedantic reading, it doesn’t say he can’t be elected vice president.
The Apollo mission had to invent technology from scratch that did not exist in the 60s. We have all of that knowledge today and then some, plus computers that are millions of times more powerful.
There is no reason to believe that the 8th mission to the moon in the 2020s should cost just as much relative to the national budget as the original did in 1969. We don't expect each new nuclear warhead to cost as much as the Manhattan Project did relative to the national budget.
Funding doesn't make things happen. In some ways funding can be a curse, and bureaucracies will grow to waste whatever funds are allocated. People make things happen. Competent people make things happen. Strong leadership makes things happen. The current NASA has leadership and talent gaps galore. It is also saddled with bureaucratic cruft that has caked onto its gears in the last 5 decades. It is not the same ambitious upstart that it once was. Could it be reformed? Yes, but not without cleaning house.
For what its worth, I don't think we should exclude SpaceX, obviously, as they are clearly iterating at such a rapid rate relative to everyone else that it seems hard to believe anyone will catch up (and at the most efficient cost basis).
I'm not sure why you think the Chinese will win, as even their smaller rockets are regularly crashing back to earth, one just yesterday: https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/chinese-rocket-crash...
But sure, at least they are deploying, at least they're in the running, which is more than most nations can say.
We don't expect each new nuclear warhead to cost as much as the Manhattan Project did relative to the national budget. Likewise, after 60 years of technological development beyond what we had in the 60s, there is no reason to expect a modern day lunar mission to cost the same relatively.
1. The lumberjack song (I'm a lumberjack and that's ok) is a Monty Python sketch [0]
2. The song goes from the singer being proud he's a lumberjack to being proud that he puts on women's clothing and hangs around in bars, and wishes he were a girlie (just like his dear papa)
3. Trump and his administration is famously anti-trans and anti-drag
4. The current secretary of transportation was a lumberjack before
So, overall, the joke is that the secretary of transportation was a lumberjack, which has this comedic queer association because of the Monty Python sketch, that Trump would hate.
So, I imagine if he hadn't been assassinated, they probably would've landed on the moon around the same time, which would be after a possible 2nd term (unless he lost re-election and then won again).
>The public has spend billions of dollars on this program, if the end result is astronauts getting cooked during reentry then how could that possibly be an outcome worth the expense?
The public has spent [tons of 15th century money] on earth exploration. If the end result is sailors drowning, then then how could global exploration be an outcome worth the expense?
A 50% death rate from scurvy alone was assumed.
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-age-of-s...
Trump was shot while the slide showing the illegal border crossing chart under the Biden admin and talking about how much work it was going to be to send everyone back.
https://nypost.com/2025/08/28/us-news/trump-supporters-troll...
The most optimistic scenario would be an open and overwhelming revolt at all levels of government and forcing him to leave simply because there's nobody left who will obey. After that, we would need to return to some semblance of sanity and amend the constitution to prevent anything like this from happening again. It requires a competent Congress with principles and conviction. Furthermore, it requires massive public support. Unfortunately, about 30% of the population is eager to support the orange bastard and watch the world burn.
The country will be dealing with the fallout of this POS for the next 150 years, assuming the country even lasts that long.
Everyone on the first manned Saturn test died. Do you know why people got into the second manned test? It was not that they knew with certainty it would be safe, but because they thought it was realistic that they could accomplish their goal.
People die in car accidents every day, that does not make my plan to drive to work tomorrow unrealistic.
> so I take it it probably would've still happened
I'm talking about the Apollo 1 fire.
By some rough math, the cost of the Artemis program as a fraction of national budget is on the order of 1/10 that of Apollo in its day (comparing entire program costs to national budgets in representative years). So no, I'm not sure anyone would expect (or accept) that, and indeed it does not seem to be the case. It would be even cheaper if Congress had not mandated that SLS be built from repurposed STS parts (and later that Artemis fly on SLS), and if Congress and the executive branch had generally maintained a realistic and consistent vision for the program since work on it began (arguably with Constellation in the 2000s).
I think it's evident that no one is in firm control. The Elon Musk fallout was that... Musk overreached or miscalculated, and one of the other contenders saw the opportunity to oust him. But I don't think that contender has consolidated his hold yet, Trump's too flighty. The answer could be changing day to day, depending on which asshat manages to ambush him first (or best) as they walk to the meeting room.
There were a lot of jokes around things that will never happen, like a 3rd term.
Still, they are iterating. That may be crazy and they may not care about things like blowing up neighborhoods, but they are iterating, and I am not so naive as to think that their capabilities will remain static.
In the 1960s it cost as much as $100,000/kilogram to send a payload to outer space. Today Falcon Heavy does it for $1500/kilogram.
SpaceX has a fraction of NASA's budget, and certainly in its early days as they proved out the Falcon design, were running on less than $2 billion in funding.
That's because the right people were placed in the right positions.