NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

>NASA regresses so far that they are now unable to do anything by themselves...

I keep running across this perception and I don't understand where it comes from. Overwhelmingly, like since the 1970s, NASA has not built anything per it's appropriations from congress. Their job is to 1) Define mission requirements and objectives, 2) Oversee contracts to execute those missions, 3) Test and verify elements of those systems, and very distant 4) do some in-house research and development for cutting edge technology (still mostly contracted out). ~75% of their budget is contracts to private companies to execute missions.

NASA's job, as defined NASA directors over the years and by congress via appropriations, is to come up with ideas and fund private companies to execute them.

You mean the 1970s as in Raegan when the space program stalled and became irrelevant and became mostly a way to funnel money to districts for certain congresspeople?

Reagan took office in the 80s. The 70s was Nixon, Ford, and Carter.

The space program stalled because pouring national wealth into gigantic single-use rockets was unsustainable. They tried with Shuttle but the material science wasn't there yet (heck it might not be even now, it doesn't seem that they've really nailed down the heat shield on Starship yet).

> since the 1970s, NASA has not built anything

NASA JPL built all the Mars rovers, and Mars Helicopter. JPL is operated by Caltech, but it is a NASA-branded laboratory that builds and operates planetary exploration robots itself.

This pedantry just to honor the amazing work these people have done.

The issue with the shuttle wasn't the material science. It was designed around a mission profile of servicing spy satellites, which at the time had film which needed to be developed. The defense department gave NASA requirements which could only be satisfied by moving the orbiter to the side of the rocket, dramatically increasing potential damage to the thermal tiles and making crew escape basically impossible. This was all justified by the incredibly large number of flights that the shuttle would fly to service these satellites, and the money the defense department would pay for these missions. The shuttle was screwed late in production when digital camera technology allowed for spy satellites that didn't need regular servicing, eliminating most of the demand for the shuttle and rendering the infrastructure designed for it unsustainable.

I don't think Shuttle's issue was that the material science wasn't there. The issue was the way the design was constrained, and the general aerospace culture at the time (that only began to change with "New Space").

Shuttle's heatshield would've been much less dangerous if it wasn't facing a giant ice and insulation covered external tank (like, if it was mounted on top of a booster), but the Air Force's demand for crossrange forced giant wings, which forced the lower mounting position.

They could've iterated on heat shield designs, particularly with attachment mechanisms, but every mission had to carry people, so you couldn't risk it, and anyway, the industry culture was already set in the "even the simplest things must cost large amounts of money and time" stage.

One of the key points that I feel a lot of people miss is that Starship is pretty much the first program actually doing the flight testing needed to understand the engineering requirements for an efficient fully reusable heatshield. They don't have much prior art to look at for tile spacing, mounting mechanisms, metal tiles or transpiration cooling. The fundamental materials haven't changed a lot, but we can see over test flights that SpaceX are figuring things out.

In the early days they used to lose tiles all the time, even after just pressure testing IIRC. Nowadays they may barely lose any tiles on static fire tests. Similarly, tile loss on reentry has decreased greatly, and we've gone from seeing plasma leaving the fins barely attached, to the latest test, where the fins were pretty much fully intact.

Yes, this. And the reason why congressional appropriations plummeted was that no one saw any need to maintain such high expenditures. There hasn’t been an actually coherent vision of what NASA is supposed to be working towards since the Apollo Program. Everything after that is lurching from one project to another, justifying it based on short-term possibility rather than committing to a longer-term goal the agency is supposed to be achieving. Just look at Shuttle. It accomplished some nice things, but it was always a dead end. Everybody in NASA knew it. ISS: accomplished some nice things, dead end. Sure, you can talk about how these were steps along the way to learning about long-term human habitation in space, but we’ve never had a coherent vision for that that everyone is aligned with. What they really were: make-work projects that were at least short-term justifiable, executed in order to preserve NASA’s capacity to do anything at all.

> because pouring national wealth into gigantic single-use rockets was unsustainable

You mean what SpaceX does as a matter of course and proved you make it cheap just through scale and iteration?

Wait, TV signals weren't unknown in the '80s and '90s. Why were they using film instead of TV cameras?

Not sure if any of my anecdata when I was a contractor are relevant anymore given current circumstances, but among all the NASA facilities I worked with, JPL really seemed to be doing its own thing, mostly for better. They were a bit quirky to work with though, because they did seem to do so much more in-house than elsewhere. So I don't know if it's that independence or their zip code that has made them such a target, but I wonder if it has been that they have less political capital from moneyed interests keeping them off the chopping block. But any gutting of JPL is probably irreplaceable damage.

Well for starters, this was the 70s - the space shuttle's development started in 1968 and its maiden flight was in 1981. The last spy satellite program to use film ran from 1971 to 1986. Further, the issue wasn't a lack of knowledge of TV signals - the first wireless video transmission had been made in 1923. The issue was producing digital video cameras of sufficient quality for the task in an appropriate size, and then transmitting such large files to the ground. Nobody in 1968 foresaw the massive improvements in digital electronics miniaturization that would unfold over the coming decades.

I'd say material science since the only non-ablative material we can use is too brittle compared to a normal fuselage. I really hope they succeed but it's a pretty fundamental problem to have unanswered this deep into the program development (and gating Artemis no less). Also hard to judge their progress without the data their heat shield team is getting, see https://x.com/mcrs987/status/1978183753114505496 for example. It's great that they can tolerate loss of vehicle & have better margins due to the steel fuselage but for Artemis and Mars they need to solve it or they'll be burning up hardware fast, literally.

SpaceX uses flight proven boosters. The rockets aren't quite as gigantic nor as single-shot as the Saturn V. Also, they launch satellites into LEO for commercial reasons. It's quite a different beast from lobbing LEMs at the moon where the money is essentially lit on fire.

But it’s not like NASA had a mission change - they were just forced to carry on doing the same thing but contracting out the tech building.

Rather than "very late to use tv" they were "very early to use CCDs". Even so that only happened in the 1980s. Before that film had to be used, same as we all had to use film for our holiday snaps until 2000.

Au contraire, the space program stalled because pouring national wealth into gigantic space projects was _too_ sustainable. The idea that NASA has had a lack of funding is a myth. The problem has long been them spending it ineffectively.