NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

1. We’ve already beaten China to the moon by 56 years, 3 months, and some change. And counting.

2. Nothing based around SLS is remotely serious. The cost and timeline of doing anything with it are unreasonable. It is an absolute dead-end. The SpaceX Super Heavy has been more capable arguably as early as the second flight test and certainly now. They could have built a “dumb” second stage at any time, but aren’t that short-sighted.

3. Blue Origin? I’ve had high hopes for the guys for two decades now. Don’t hold your breath.

4. Anyone else? Really, really don’t hold your breath.

This whole “race to the moon, part II” is almost criminally stupid. Land on the moon when we can accomplish something there, not just to prove we haven’t lost our mojo since Apollo.

Mars is out of reach and not feasible.

the US may have gone to the Moon 50+ years ago but a lot has changed. There's no big enemy to rally behind as we manufactured in the Cold War. We don't have titans of industry anymore. We have titans of finance who coast on the inertia of early successes while raising prices, cutting costs and engaging in rent-seeking behavior.

There are serious design issues with Starship as a platform for going back to the Moon.

I'm not at all convinced the US can build anything anymore.

Mars is a total boondoggle - a colony would require constant supply runs from Earth to support a double-digit population - who is going to field the cost and what are they going to do there ?.

"The Martian" was work of fiction.

A lunar colony is cheaper and way more feasible.

But it has! Look at all of our private industry! That's the point!

> We don't have titans of industry anymore.

What?!

Of course, but there a few things to consider.

1. This is a new race. The olympics happen every four years to see which nation is the current best. It seems it’s time to find out again.

2. The last time the US was dominant was 56 years ago. That’s three generations. Based on SLS and the comments here, it seems extremely unlikely the US is still dominant. Let’s find out.

Semiconductors? Nope.

High speed rail? Nope.

Auto industry? Nope.

Major infrastructure projects like bridges, tunnels, airports, etc? Nope.

Electronics (phones/laptops/etc)? Nope.

?????

The US is not exactly a manufacturing powerhouse.

If the point is a colony, then we should just do it on the moon. If the point is for the advances in technology it will bring, we don’t have to go to Mars to explore those things. We could just keep practicing on the moon.

Obviously it’s not exactly the same but idk, most of why I’d be interested in our going to mars can be answered with “it’s easier, more feasible, and generally just as useful to do it on the moon instead.” It’s still low gravity, no oxygen/breathable atmosphere, a hostile desert essentially, etc. but far closer. We can respond to emergencies more easily. We know for a fact we are currently capable of getting there and back safely.

TL;DR: we will likely get a lot more out of dumping our resources into trips to and from the moon and building something there than trying to go to mars for a very long time.

Today’s America scores zero points for its accomplishments of the past. But I think one way it can be a good thing is the, “we’ve done it before, we can do it again” attitude. Which is somewhat opposite to “we already won!”

Funnelling a lot of government money into the pockets of the best candidate for the world's first trillionare.

Personally I hope no human lands on the moon again. I like telling my parents they are so old humans walked on the moon in their lifetime (last human left the moon December 1972 - before I was born). There is no value in this statement, but it is still fun.

At least for now.

The US is second in manufacturing and far ahead of numbers 3 and 4 (Germany and Japan IIRC).

SpaceX doesn't even have a timeline for Starship; they have no idea when it will be ready, but the one thing that is clear is it wont be ready to take humans to the moon in 2027.

There are second, third, etc order effects to things like a space race.

The Portuguese used to have the best sea-worthy ships throughout the 1400s. They were soon followed by the Spanish. It didn't matter, because by the 1600s the Dutch, and then the English, had transformed the world's big seas and oceans into their playground.

In other words, if you don't use it you lose it, and right now the Americans need to "use" it, they need to show that they're still capable of getting to the Moon and beyond.

The idea that we need to land on the moon once a generation just to say that we are as good at landing on the moon as our parents is absurd.

Realistically, the accomplishment will be a resource grab. It's not scientific. The moon will eventually be carved up by (disputed) territorial claims, like Antarctica. Countries will need to maintain bases to back their territorial claims. Eventually the claims will turn into mining rights. The resources are valuable for being in a reduced gravity zone. All those juicy water containing craters at the Lunar poles... [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_water

An open question as I really don’t have an answer either way: what’s the last mega project the U.S. succeeded in completing that wasn’t directly tied to a short term business plan? Something for future generations or a major environmental project or a transportation or infrastructure project, etc.

They produce 1.8M cars/year while GM and Ford produce 6M and 4M, respectively. (2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_manufacture...)

It’s kind of like a FIRST Robotics Challenge for nations. The specific goal really doesn’t matter and can just as well be different than the moon. That’s not the interesting part.

Literally every other nation is trying to catch up to Space-X and is nowhere close. An American company, based in American, primarily staffed by American engineers.

I don't know by what measure you'd say that the US isn's still far, far ahead but I don't know of any other country currently re-using rockets dozens of times. What did I miss?

Hasn’t that attempt at proof essentially already been lost?

I posit that software has no such supply chain dependency, literally anyone can do it, and thinking the US is unique in their ability to produce software isn't accurate.

We might even be better to have no one advancing space travel than to have only the billionaires doing it. At least then they can't find some way to use it to screw us over.

Mars sucks. The moon sucks too. We need rotating space habitats. With gravity and hookers.

NASA literally had departments and budgets dedicated to miniaturization.

Unfortunately, I think that's the problem with some of the rhetoric like "the green revolution will be the next space race!" For better or worse, solar panels aren't as inspiring to most people as space is.

Well except with regard to astronaut travel: very different and controversial launch abort approach and no escape tower like apollo

There's also the fact that part of NASA's mission is to share their knowledge with the public.

There's a lot left to do before it's ready to launch: https://spaceflightnow.com/2025/10/17/orion-spacecraft-arriv...

Of course, compared to the decades-long SLS timeline, that's "ready to go".

Nah. You can argue that the goal "land on the moon" is artificial, but it being artificial doesn't make it fake or abstract. If you're the first to achieve it then you're the first, and that's it. What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new.

Now, if you're not able to repeat it at all, that does say something. But if it takes you a few years longer, well, so what? It's not a race anymore, because it's already been won, by the US of fifty years ago.

The winner of the race to Mars is still undecided, though.

They arguably footed the bill.

I’ve got to assume I’m misunderstanding the objection because it feels ridiculous to overstir the oxygen over semantics. Do we just need to call it Space Race 2?

I would love to see the kind of investment in NASA we had during the 60s. The scientific advancements were staggering. Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.

Also unlike sports, space races are massively expensive and it's untenable to forever go from one to the next.

How exactly are you making the distinction? Space-X wouldn't exist without governemnt funding. CATL sells launches to commercial entities as well as servicing the government.

Official ownership? Because China seems to think a lot of what Space-X is doing can only be accomplished by the commercial sector and is funding startups in China to do the same thing.

https://spacenews.com/chinas-landspace-secures-state-backed-...

If the same resources were put into popularizing advancements in energy, you'd see more excitement. As it is, there are kids growing up excited about environmentalism like there were kids growing up excited about space.

Much of society agrees with his points on crime

America does keep reinventing itself. It has few of the same parts as before, but it still resembles some concept of “America” in many ways. In that way it is the same ship.

But is it the same ship? Can it win a space race today that a previous manifestation of America could? Maybe it’s not the same ship and what it could do in the 60s it can no longer do today.

I certainly don’t think it’s a question that demands an answer. Perfectly valid to choose not to show up to the starting line. But having run that race under the same banner generations ago doesn’t tell us much about the America today.

Boeing and Lockheed will deliver on time and on budget.

You’re right that, if overdone, it can lead to complacency. But if you treat every generation as a blank slate, you abandon the valuable capital of experience.

We just gave $40 billion to Argentina for pretty much no reason whatsoever.

Now the US government has spent a whole lot more on SpaceX but they're buying services.

SpaceX is an incredible bargain compared to the alternatives like ULA.

The whole point of this article, and the NASA admin steps to open up the contract and all of Berger’s recent reporting is that it’s almost a certainty China will beat the US back to the moon.

Despite you throwing the word "obviously" at it, that is an extremely untrue claim. Even if we hadn't forgotten a lot of the details, we're solving new engineering challenges with modern material science and manufacturing, and learning a lot of new things about spacecraft design. There is a ton of invention in doing another landing after so long.

If the Chinese EV tariffs are dropped, or if BYD start manufacturing at scale in the US, all the old US auto manufacturers are dead.

In the sense that we don't need to do either, that's true. But if we want to claim we're still competent moon landers, we do need to repeat the task every once in a while to keep that capability. And there are good scientific benefits from continuing to do difficult space launches of many types.

Apollo at its height commanded 0.8% of the entire US economy.

True excellence in engineering is being able to do amazing things within a limited budget.

(And overall, sending some primates to the moon should come out of our entertainment budgets. Manned space flight has been one giant money sink without much too show for. If you want to do anything scientifically useful in space, go for unmanned.

> Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.

Huh? You remember the cold war? The US spends less of its total income on weapons and warfare than back then. Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.)

However I agree that manned space flight is a giant money pit with not much to show for. It should come out of our entertainment budget, not eat into our science budget.

If you want to do science in space, go unmanned.

This is sort of like saying Leif Erikson and the Icelandic Commonwealth won the "the new world race" in 1000AD. Whatever Columbus et al were up to would surely be of trifling concern to future generations.

You can do the same thing twice, and you can also lose the ability to do something.

The ability to do the thing is what is really being maintained and demonstrated.

Every country has the technology to go to the moon - it's well established now. But who can actually make it happen? That's a huge organizational, human, financial, industrial challenge. And people do notice when only one country can do it.

People appreciate German cars just fine, and no one seems to be particularly bothered that they are produced by workers in private sector companies instead of 'by society'. Whatever that even means.

Motorola was the first to create a handheld mobile phone, Apple just did not get that memo... :)

> I think it’s apt because the Ship of Theseus as a thought experiment is unanswerable.

It is answerable, you just need to go meta a little. You can argue that the Ship of Theseus doesn't exist (and didn't existed) because it is just a lot of wood. You can use reductionism further and say that wood doesn't exist, it is a bunch of atoms or quarks or whatever. The ship is just a leaky abstraction people are forced use because of their cognitive limitations. But if it is an abstraction, not a "real" thing, then I see no issues with the ship existing (in a limited sense) even after it changed all the atoms it consists of.

The other approach is to declare that a ship is not a thing, but a process. Like you do when talking about people, who change their atoms all the time, but they still keep they identity in a "magical" way. If you see people as a process, then it doesn't matter how often it replaces its matter with another matter. Like a tornado, which exists while exchanging matter with environment all the time and still being the same tornado. Or like a wave on a water surface, it doesn't have any atoms moving like a wave, but still a wave exists.

> It has few of the same parts as before, but it still resembles some concept of “America” in many ways.

It doesn't matter if there any old parts left, what matters is a continuous history.

> But is it the same ship?

It is the same ship, but its properties are changing over time. Like when people become older, some of them become wiser for example, some become physically weaker.

> But having run that race under the same banner generations ago doesn’t tell us much about the America today.

Yeah, with this I can fully agree. BTW we don't know was the Ship of Theseus becoming better or worse after repairs, but I'd bet that its maximum speed was changing due to repairs.

(Although I think the moon landing is ridiculous there is no scientific reason for it).

But even as stated, I don't think your argument holds up. "What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new."

Even if it was technically possible to not invent anything new, that path is not going to be taken. It would be even more expensive and worse in every way. Nobody is going to launch a rocket with just 60s/70s technology ever again. A new moon launch will have lots of invention and learning, and claiming we can still do it does need proof.

Note that if you attribute interest for military-related debt to military spending(roughly 40-50% of our interest payments) then it ends up climbing in the ranking. But it’s true that we have other major expenses as well.

>But who can actually make it happen? That's a huge organizational, human, financial, industrial challenge. And people do notice when only one country can do it.

On the other side of the coin, it's such a huge expense just for bragging rights, that for any country it's not worth undertaking. It's much more preferable to just give the appearance that you could totally do it if you wanted to, but you just don't feel like it. I'd argue that the US is currently failing at this, but until anyone else flies a manned mission to the moon, it doesn't say anything.

Like I said, you didn't have to invent anything new. In this case you put yourself in the awkward situation of having to reinvent the wheel by your own incompetence. So if you actually do do it, what have you proven?

>It would be even more expensive and worse in every way.

Worse and more expensive than what? The only rocket that has flown men to the moon is Saturn V. What exactly are you comparing it to?

Let's imagine that China puts people on the moon next year in a method similar to the way the US did it in 1969 (but probably better in some ways). They still are mostly doing something that has been done before by the USA.

In that same year, the USA will probably continue to launch 80% of the rockets to space. Maybe we don't do our next trip to the moon for another five years. But there's good chance by then we will be using much more advanced and reusable rockets. Does that really make the US behind?

I want to see us invest more into space exploration. I think its sad that NASA's plan has been dumb. But getting two or three people to the moon is more about showing that China is capable (which is a very reasonable goal for them) then showing they have some long term advantage.

Yes, you do.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-th...

The "you're certainly not learning anything new" argument only works if we do reuse old techniques. "You don't have to invent anything new" is not sufficient to support the argument.

> Worse and more expensive than what?

Trying to reinvent old techniques and rebuild a bunch of machines and factories that used those techniques would be worse than inventing new things. You'd have to deliberately choose to not learn anything and to waste extra money in pursuit of that choice.

> The only rocket that has flown men to the moon is Saturn V. What exactly are you comparing it to?

We don't have a time machine, so the contenders are "2020s rocket with techniques invented before 1970" or "2020s rocket with techniques invented before 2030".

> So if you actually do do it, what have you proven?

If you actually do it, in a reasonable way, then in addition to the inventions and learning and any proof to do with that, you prove you can go to the moon, because saying "oh of course we can, we could use the old method" is not a particularly strong claim as industries change and workers retire over the course of more than half a century.

And yes, it’s probably also about certain aspects of anxiety and probably some panic about the prospect of American decline after so many decades of squandering everything and letting itself both be bled dry and run off a cliff by a subversive element within.

The nations will will likely use "safety zones" to exclude others from their base of operations. We'll see the radius of these zones but expect 200m - 2km for a start.

There is a reason to think that there is a race. Without very advanced automation all of this is pointless, but I am willing to wager that many think that advanced automation will occur within a short timeframe.

Landing on the moon only become the end-all-be-all when the US achieved it and the USSR could not (for various reasons).

If we want to put people on Mars, we must prove we can put people on Moon, again.

Immigration of talent is historically an American asset. Look bo further than the moon landing itself for an example.

In terms of field geology alone, we deserve permanent human presence on The Moon. Apollo was an impressive first shot but it is completely unrealistic to act like we know anything more than one percent of one percent about Moon’s geology. They nailed the flat bits on the marine side, but you’d laugh at someone who claimed they knew Earth’s geology after a few weeks in Buenos Aires, Houston, and Miami:

https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/advice/skills/see-apollo-...

Who will be woken up by the first moonquake? Who will visit the first mooncaves? Who will find the first water-based anomaly — some kind of periodic waterfall maybe, in a heat trap that warms up one day a year? Who will see the first solar eclipse?

That's how China's been running their economy for decades. Every few years, the government sets a direction everyone should row in, and generally lets private firms figure out which one of them will get there fastest.

first satellite? all sputnik could do was beep, and it ran out of batteries in three weeks.

first animal? laika died.

first station? there were two attempts to crew it -- the first failed to dock and everyone on the second mission fucking died. the soyuz 11 crew remain the only human deaths in space.

first *naut? yuri gagarin didn't even have manual controls.

the n1 was catastrophic. need i go on?

You are selecting goalposts that suit your team, and being disrespectful of the USSR (presumably because you don't want to acknowledge their successes).

(And yes, the government can give labels to the debt, but that's more of a political exercise than fiscal reality.)

It was to prove that your economic system could muster the correct machinery to get to the moon. Once we got to the moon, nothing significantly changed scientifically, but politically it was a bombshell.

The act of getting the moon now is, once again, not a scientific endeavor. It is once again a holistic test of whether the country still can do it.

And from the looks at it, maybe not. America is not all aligned like we were during the Cold War. Then again, the stakes during the Cold War seems higher.

We need to land on the moon once a generation just to prove that we are still capable of landing on the moon.

The modern argument is that we spend less as a percent of the federal budget, but it's mostly nonsensical. The government having more money available has nothing to do with the amount of money being spent on NASA or any other program. It's precisely due to this luxury that we've been able to keep NASA's budget so high in spite of them achieving nothing remotely on the scale of the Apollo program in the 50+ years since it was ended.

The big problem is that after Nixon defacto ended the human space program (largely because he feared that an accident might imperil his reelection chances), NASA gradually just got turned into a giant pork project. They have a lot of money but it's mostly wasted on things that people know aren't going anywhere or are otherwise fundamentally flawed, exactly like Artemis and the SLS.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

I've seen no indication that they see it in these terms. They've been pretty low-key about their progress.

To me it looks like the US obsession with reframe everything in terms of a "new cold war". From the US perspective, in end you look stupid if you lose, and you look stupid if you just spend a ton of money to repeat what you did last time

I'm a tourist at the moment and everything looks like it is falling apart. The existing roading infrastructure is crumbling (apparently there's an Instagram about the worst examples). Everywhere I've driven, the roads are worse than earthquake hit Christchurch. Yet there is so much amazing old infrastructure that reeks of massive past investment.

Commonly I see power poles listing tipsily (or even broken); cable wires loose or hanging.

One bridge over the Mississippi has rust patches everywhere and needs a paint.

Is it just New Orleans, or a more general issue across the US?

This is inaccurate. Here [1] is a nice table showing US military spending over time, inflation adjusted. Up, up, and away! And it's made even more insane because what really matters is discretionary spending. Each year lots of things are automatically paid - interest on the debt, pensions, medicare, social security, and so on. What's left over is in those giant budgetary bills that Congress makes each year that cover all spending on education, infrastructure, and all of the other things people typically associate government spending with.

And military spending (outside of things like pension) is 100% discretionary, and it consumes about half of our entire discretionary budget! And this is again made even more insane by the fact that discretionary spending, as a percent of all spending, continues to decline. This is because we're an aging population with a terrible fertility rate. So costs for social security, medicare, and other such things are increasing sharply while new revenue from our children is barely trickling in. Notably this will never change unless fertility rates change. Even when the 'old people' die, they will be replaced by even more old people, and with even fewer children coming of age.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

Perhaps I wasn't quite clear when I said "spends less of its total income". I meant as as a proportion of GDP.

I agree that the US has some weird distinction between discretionary and mandatory spending. And I also agree that much of the 'mandatory' spending needs a reform, and should probably not be on the government's balance sheet at all. Eg a fully funded pension system that invests globally is both off the government's balance sheet, and doesn't care about domestic fertility.

(Of course, you still want to have a means tested welfare system to catch those people who couldn't earn enough for retirement and other poor people in general.)

SpaceX is majority owned by billionaires.

It’s like saying visiting the marianas trench and Everest are the same because they’re both on earth

China has always been insular, and they don't think about space glories that much at the moment. It would take a couple more generations for them to care about something like that.

Not as criminally stupid as resting on our laurels and frittering away all the technical knowledge which we are now relearning the hard way. 'I can't think of things to do on the moon, therefore it's a waste of time' is an asinine argument.

Edited to add that I have long thought this dismissive smug attitude about how we already ticked that box and there's no need to tick it again directly contributes to the rise is nonsensical conspiracy theories like the the moon landing (or indeed space) being fake. And that acceptance of social and scientific ignorance goes a long way to explaining why we're currently governed by malicious fools.

The motivations to send humans to other bodies at this time are political; to prove who is and isn't a superpower of the 21st century.

The matter of factness of the shuttle shows how good the program was, but we still had two explode completely.

"Glory" can exist without comparing yourself to others. When they built the three-gorges dam they probably weren't thinking "our dam is better than those American dams". It's just impressive in its own right

They can be working on going to space without constantly bringing out the proverbial measuring tape to compare themselves to the US.

I'm not totally in the loop with the Chinese zeitgeist, so my post was a genuine question. Maybe they are comparing, maybe not. Both seem sensible reactions

(Unless you borrow from foreigners, which taps resources from outside the country that later have to be paid back. But I'm not sure the Apollo programme was financed with foreign loans?)

Sovereign wealth funds of the sort you're alluding to have a problem - governments can't ever control their spending, so the funds always end up getting plundered. The Alaska Permanent Fund is a great example. It was created after massive oil reserves were discovered in Alaska resulting in a huge windfall of money to the government. The government proceeded to completely waste all of that money with nothing to show for it, which made people less than happy. So the idea of the APF was to create a fund that could provide social dividends in both the present and even after the oil eventually runs out.

But as the government started, again, blowing money, they started dipping into the fund and eventually changed the law to normalize it and it's gradually turning into a joke. This years dividend was $1000, compared to $3300 (inflation adjusted) at its peak in 1999. The problem with 'well just make it where you can't do that' is that the same people that make that law, are the exact same that can unmake that law and give themselves lots of other people's money, which they will do, sooner or later.

Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space, first to orbit the earth.

To minimize these achievements is like saying the Wright Brothers test was meaningless because it only lasted 12 seconds. In truth each "first" represents a milestone, each required substantial effort.

In more recent times Russia alone was capable of manned space flight (2011 to 2020).

To return to your question, the USSR was critical to the space race. You cannot gave a race with 1 entrant. Without USSR constantly being in the news doing things first, there would not have been a space race at all.

Indeed, by the time of JFK's speech there was not much to race for except the moon. Once the Soviets stopped the US stopped as well. It's taken the talk of a Chinese mission for the US to even bother.

Earth satellites are an enormously valuable use of space. But very unsexy. Trips to the moon have pretty much no value. But they make for good PR.

Mars would need water, air, energy, raw materials, fuel and everything else for (basically) ever.

There is zero to be gained (here) from a Mars colony. Mars lacks a magnetic field, air to breath, water to drink or cultivate crops, a temperature suitable for plant or animal life, fuel sources to build industry, supply chains for the construction or maintainence of the simplest electrical systems.

Talk of Mars is purely a PR play. Someone will be first. Yay. But Mars will play no part in Earth's future.

Do you have any others? I guess not flat earth - I mean, those guys are crazy, right?

The US comparatively does boast a lot more that it's a bit of a meme on chinese social media.

but we have satellites for that

High resolution photographs of the entire earth (as opposed to tiny pieces of it) would have a massive positive emotional effect on people. The Earthrise photo's enduring popularity is proof of this. There's water on the Moon; we could have bases there by now, even if they were limited in functionality and size, like the ISS. We could have remote-control or autonomous moon rovers and bipedal robots exploring there 24-7.

Instead we have Moon landing denialists one one hand and jaded 'it's just a rock, who cares' nay-sayers on the other.

Modern moon exploration isn’t about repeating Apollo but progressing toward resource extraction and establishing humanity’s long-term presence in space. These missions are designed to achieve goals that were previously impossible and lay the foundation for humanity’s future beyond Earth.

Yes but why?

It's cool that we can learn about what's around us, but in practice we're light years away from being interplanetary, we just can't afford it and our energy sources are laughable.

Realistically speaking, how far are we really from "moon travel" that is both remotely affordable and worth the trip?

After everything is all said and done, I wonder if it would be possible to build out a data project tracking the people and the decisions that led to the outcome and also where all the wealth went. I guess this is impossible because too many people are unnamed figures just doing their part succumbing to inertia.

Are you in manufacturing? Because when following perfectly mature process, defect still happens.

Then, how do you even "do the same steps for the first one"? After 50y, lots have lost.

it has nothing to do with how you treat each generation. it's whether or not you have a continuous shared work experience from the elders to the youngsters over and over.

if your company abandoned big projects for small local stuff and then a few generations later suddenly decided to go big again, you'd suck at it.

if you're good at it, it's because the people right before you were doing it already and passed on their experience.

(this doesn't mean something can't be done the first time - it just means if you don't have institutional knowledge, you have to suck at it first and then get better).

This approach was always going to have holes in it and sure enough we're now facing a difficult and uncertain endeavor, for example, to ever be able to make the best chips in the world on American soil again. (Or as in the headlines today, to source and process rare earths for all manner of production.) It turns out that, surprise surprise, there was tons of process knowledge and tons of capacity for innovation in the people who were closest to the actual work of production, now those people are no longer American and couldn't care less what America can and cannot do. So we're in a bind. Americans keep claiming they can build all the things but they haven't actually done so in many years.

There's no way to solve the problem other than to try, and that entails clawing back as much of the people, processes and materiel as you can by whatever means you can until you start cobbling together some genuine innovation. My gut tells me enough of the political class supports the idea that the financiers will just have to get used to capitalizing a lot of production on domestic soil again, politicians will of course be happy to print billions more dollars of free money and hand it to them for this.

"We’re light-years away from being interplanetary; it’s too costly and our energy is laughable." If people doubted the Wright brothers or mocked the idea of landing on the Moon, should we have stopped trying?

"How far are we from affordable Moon travel that’s worth it?" Humanity thrives when it takes risks and embraces exploration. Space is where the next wave of innovation and opportunity lies, and waiting for "perfect timing" ensures we stay stagnant while others move ahead. Why choose doubt over progress?

I can't wait for the time when "we" is we-humans/humanity/the planet Earth and not some inter-country trade bs.

Claiming that the new mission to the moon is a waste of time because "we already won the space race" is backward. Withholding an entire generation (multiple actually) from the awe and wonder that is associated with such an endeavour just because "it's been done before" is borderline criminal imo.

And frankly, the fact that the US is struggling to get it's rocket in the air, let alone get a human on the moon, even after they did so already and literally wrote the tutorial on how to do it, is very embarrassing.

A lot of things have changed in the past 56.25 years. New people, new technology, hell I'd argue that the America of the 60's is not the same America as today. For all intents and purposes this "space race" is a completely separate and new thing, where two completely separate and new countries are competing for the crown.

China winning this will only further cement the perception that America is being leapfrogged technologically and left behind.

No, it wasn't "you". It was a generation that is mostly dead. As of now, Boeing cannot deliver a reasonably safe spaceship for mere travel to Low Earth Orbit.

Things change and without SpaceX, the US space industry would be slightly better than Roskosmos.

The eastern half of Europe took the first opportunity to run away from its grip, including my nation.

Happy (and naive) are the people who never lived under Moscow's rule.

Why not? I think it's close to the only useful metric across time.

> The distinction between mandatory and discretionary isn't weird - mandatory is payments that the government is legally required to make, discretionary is what they have the choice of spending.

Laws aren't god given. They can be changed. The political processes are slightly different, but if the voters want it, they can get it.

> Sovereign wealth funds of the sort you're alluding to have a problem - [...]

I'm not alluding to any sovereign wealth funds. What makes you think so?

I suggested to get pension systems out of the hands of government, not into them.

It must be fun, but it’s a shame to see it trickle in here.

A lot of commercial tech was spun off from Apollo, and generated a bit of GDP a for a good while.

The entire mindset of separating the world into "winners" and "losers" in the first place seems unhealthy to me.

Incremental progress via building up infrastructure, including space station in Earth and Moon orbit, paving way to a lunar surface base. Also ways to make this affordable were explored, including reusable first stages, etc.

Then all focus switch to racing the Soviets and and anything that did not contribute flags and footprints on the lunar surface ASAP was skipped, opting for the fastest possible solution at all costs.

So no wonder that after the race was won, it was hard to do a meaningful followup with the architecture chosen.

One might even argue we would be further along space infra wise if the race did not happen or involved other objectives (possibly even including in space military buildup by both sides).

  > Land on the moon when we can accomplish something there, not just to prove we haven’t lost our mojo since Apollo.

That's why I have been following the Artemis program since the beginning. And with all the funding changes, and all the mission profiles that have changed in accordance, two things have stood out as the primary goals. First, the cost. That space station double docking in the way down is not only unnecessary, it is also fraught with risk. The only possibly explanation for that component is to spend money. Second, the actual started goals have changed three or four times, but one goal has been consistent. Go look at NASA's Artemis webpage. It's the first words up there: "NASA's Artemis missions aim to land the first woman and first person of colour on the Moon ...". Really? That is the first, primary objective? And it is such a shame, because of you look at Glover's career and accomplishments, he is amazing. He should be flying that mission on his own personal merits, not because NASA was mandated to find some black guy. Frankly it is insulting to even see mention of that as a goal, much less the absolute first stated goal in the official materials, and the only consistent goal throughout the program.

Sure, for quite a while ISS depended on Russia for crew access, but China has been capable of human spaceflight since 1999, running many missions since & their own space station.

But this isn't the 1960s and the US has burned through its goodwill and ruined its credibility. I think the rest of the world would rather have a Chinese base on the moon than an American one.

Want to impress the world? End poverty. Advance cancer treatment. Build a viable nuclear fusion power plant. Make an HIV vaccine and sell it affordably across the world. We could be done with the Cold War-era rocket-waving.

Atlas V can leave the pad it sits on because of the Russian RD-180 engine it uses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

Everything is so car oriented and spread out, that there isn't enough value to tax to pay for the maintenance on all the spread out infrastructure. So states and cities are always on the brink of default, scrambling to maintain all this stuff.

How so? Because you decided that reaching the Moon equals winning? Why not Mars?

Same way we can say that USSR won the race because they were the first ones to put man into space and bring him back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy_H2BeE_Nk Neil deGrasse Tyson on topic.

because they has so much resource they can spend an multi billions effort on intangible things like this

>first animal? laika died.

Yes, but Belka and Strelka lived. They were the first to go to orbit and back. USSR too.

>first *naut? yuri gagarin didn't even have manual controls.

And Alan Shepard didn't even had a bath. I say this one doesn't count too.

In fact - nothing counts until your nation\program can't deliver a human to Alpha Centauri and black alive and well. Ideally in less than a year.

Have you worked for a company where they never win at anything? Been in meetings where people want to hear about 'wins'?

Maybe you don't, but I do. I like to work for a winning team.

After all, what have the Romans ever done for us?

Not one dollar was spent in space during the first space race.

Isn't that what the next goal is, but we're so far away from it now?

Now try again, except imagine everyone is a horse.

An alternative perspective on both space races, companies and life in general would be a collaborative one. I like to work on a productive, effective, successful teams, but I don't view that in terms of "winning" and "losing".

It's a dumb system invented due to the whims of a madman who should listen to his engineers instead of trying to cosplay as a rocket scientist.

Well, when US is not running out of money.

For spaxe infrastructure however - sure, stuff mined and manufactured on the Moon can definitely help any planetary missions.

5. The owner of SpaceX threatens to cancel projects when he gets into social media spats with the president he thought he'd bought, or his NASA chief

I don't understand why anyone tolerates a man like Musk having material control over state projects.

Oh boy we're already there

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Ceres

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_the_asteroid_b...

I submit that a good candidate is: Space. It's in the name. It's not "the Moon race".

You know, getting a person to space and back. Yuri Gagarin, USSR, first successful crewed spaceflight, 1961.

Or, first artificial satellite in space. Sputnik, USSR 1957

I respect the USA's contributions to the space race too, but also I am amused by the USA under JFK picking something left undone, declaring that that as the only victory condition, doing it and then claiming total victory and celebrating it ever since. Got to salvage national pride somehow. Does that "steelman" it?

By the same logic, also no moral burden for its transgressions?

(Not making a claim one way or the other, just noting an asymmetry.)

JWST is actually a good example. The (slow) unfolding of the telescope was a long-term nail-biting experience, because even very trivial problems that could have been easily fixed with a screwdriver or a finger poke on Earth could doom one of the most sophisticated pieces of scientific equipment ever produced.

We were lucky in the end, but if anything went wrong, the result would be immense frustration and the most expensive piece of space junk per unit of weight.

But in general, you probably don't need human bodies for such maintenance on the Moon, "just" very sophisticated and versatile robot mechanics. IDK what is easier.

China wasn't trying to land people on the moon 56 years ago. You "beat" someone when both are competing to do it.

I learnt Python, Rust and Go in my twenties and Trump is like twice my age and can't code in any of these languages. I didn't "beat him" at it though, because he's not even trying.

Sure, this would likely have happend anyway, but possibly later with all related knock off effects.

I was really hoping someone could come up with an idea along a completely different line.

  >neither Super Heavy or any future Starship tanker will be rapidly reusable that much is clear by now

What insurmountable problem(s) do you expect?

Most historical progress was driven and motivated by incremental gains; exploration as an end in itself was not even enough to get Columbus funded, and big space projects are much more ressource intensive than that.

> Space is where the next wave of innovation and opportunity lies.

That's just, like, your opinion. I consider this extremely unlikely; to me, the most promising fields short and mid-term are AI and synthetic biology. Space exploration does not even come close-- even if we magically gained the capability to build large scale, self-sufficient cities on Mars and populated them with millions of people (which is extremely unlikely to happen in the next decades)-- what does that do for us? What progress do we gain? If you want to build habitats in unlivable, hostile environments, you can just as well do this in Antarctica, some desert or the deep sea, and I'd consider that likewise mostly an exercise in futility.

edit: To make my position a bit clearer: I think its fine to invest "reasonably" in space exploration; the current moon project I'd consider mostly a waste, but still somehwat justifiable. But spending twice or more of what NASA currently costs on Moon or Mars base projects would be a non justifiable waste in my eyes.

We already have this, it doesn't require being on the moon.

> There's water on the Moon; we could have bases there by now, even if they were limited in functionality and size, like the ISS.

The scale of going to the ISS versus the moon is massively different. Most of the research we'd be doing on the moon that isn't just for robots to do like digging in the dirt could still be done on an orbiting space station (like, how to mitigate effects of microgravity on the human body, how to cultivate plants in low gravity, studying microorganisms and chemistry in space, etc.)

> We could have remote-control or autonomous moon rovers and bipedal robots exploring there 24-7.

This doesn't require a human presence on the moon. We've had nearly uninterrupted robots on Mars for decades and haven't had a human on it.

> Instead we have Moon landing denialists one one hand

You had moon landing denialists even right after we landed. Us continuing to be on the moon isn't going to get rid of these naysayers. People are arguing the earth is flat, that anthropogenic climate change can't be possible, that the earth is 40,000 years old, and vaccines are mind control agents.

I get it would be cool and there probably is some science that could only be done with humans on the moon that I don't know about (I don't know everything, for sure). I think it would do a lot to push our engineering forward to have this kind of constant investment towards operating in space. But outside of being a means to funnel public funds to engineering firms to essentially find cooler ways to burn money I'm not sure it's all worth it.

Not saying we shouldn't have a space program! There's still lots we don't know about the universe and lots of cool science to learn. But do we need actual humans on the moon to achieve these goals?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidcoursey/2012/03/31/more-th...

What are we missing because they did that though? Or what came latter? There is no way to answer this. It is easy to see what happened because of effort, but not what you didn't get (or got latter) because to focused on something else.

Maybe you can save a lot on the equipment itself (because it does not have to be 99,99999% reliable - those extra nines cost a lot) and thus can also deploy more equipment, and instead of a single telescope you can have several farms thereof.

Ditto. I’m in New Zealand.

Like, the whole story of the Industrial Revolution is that we invested continually in technology, training, process and plant, and the cost of producing things as measured by both dollars and labor decreased by orders of magnitude. It never stopped. It kept on working right up until we stopped trying and shipped production overseas. In fact even though they have cheaper labor and don't care as much in some of these overseas locations, usually it STILL happens. Technology, training, process, machinery, all get better, per unit cost of production just keeps on falling. Bring it back to America and focus on these four things and it will happen in America again too.

The failure to see this comes from putting the bean counters in charge. A bean counter can't model innovation. They don't know if and when a 10x cost reduction is going to happen somewhere in the industry and then spread. It's not their job to know, and they don't care. They see they can slash a cost by 20% right now by sending those jobs and factories offshore so that's what they do.

In most industries in America today the cost of production is still getting cheaper, but what's ballooning is management and administrative costs. They've grown so much that consumer prices are actually going up even as the cost of the essential process of producing the thing has gone down. That's the bean counters replicating.

It's all smoke and mirrors and lies. The forces that drove industrialization never stopped working. End the IP regimes, actually make stuff again, fire the bean counters, create competition for the consumer dollar in places where it was all acquired and consolidated into oblivion. The innovators will step in, deploy the next generation of plant, train the next generation of workers, stuff will get cheaper, and wages will actually be decent to boot because new and better processes create demand for new and scarcer skills.

Healthcare, worker's rights, voting rights, infrastructure, etc, are all more important (so I agree with you there), but also all have way more consequences that are wider-ranging and longer-term (which I'd say contributes do the political dysfunction around those topics).

This should be an "easy win" by comparison, and the "PR" impact of success (or failure) will be significant.

Edit: that said, if you gave me a magic wand to pick any one of these topics for the US to succeed at, it wouldn't be going to the moon.

Even at the time people suspected that - but at least there was a chance of finding something unexpected.

As to the knowledge is has been done, and therefore could be done again - sure that's valuable, but that knowledge belongs to the whole world not just to America.

And in terms of national prestige or uniting goal - wouldn't it be better to have a goal to create a long term sustainable energy economy for example. I think that has more strategic value than putting a man back ( or women for the first time ) on the moon.

Though "zero points" is also probably a bit too harsh. I think Americans should be proud of their peoples' past accomplishments, but should recognize that they're distinct from their own accomplishments and kind of irrelevant to the current race.

The current space race is really just about the US trying to show that it isn't in decline, that it's still more capable than a rising China. So, "my grandfather was alive when America set foot on the Moon, so we've already won!" is kind of a sad statement.

the point is to exemplify how over-generalized and stupid it is to mention the universal human feelings of xenophobia and paranoia that occur when people witness an adversary during a war-action, land expansion, or anything near those concepts as if it was somehow a uniquely American/Chinese phenomena.

But -- the question asked was 'what will the world-wide discussion look like', not 'How will the Americans respond and feel?'

So, with that in mind, how about an answer to the question asked?

My personal opinion is that there will be a frenzy to remove the groups in power at the moment without much thought of who will fill the vacuum, and then about 40 years of bellyaching from the globe after the cards fall where they may.

As for money vs GDP, our discussion on mandatory vs discretionary spending is already one reason why $$$ is far more informative. Dollars can, after inflation, be compared and paint a relatively clear picture. Percent of some other metric, which has often changed wildly over time, is instead more likely just to mislead.

So for instance we now spend hundreds of billions of dollars more on the war machine than we did during the Cold War when we were facing a very viable threat of nuclear annihilation. That's an extremely valuable metric that does mean a lot. Why are we spending so much on war?

The fantasy about it creating some sort of unstoppable war machine has clearly been clearly shattered. It's not even clear that would have been desirable if true. One thing this administration got completely right was renaming the Department of Defense to its old moniker of Depart of War, because that is what it really is.

This reality is completely muddled if you start trying to frame things as percent of some other metric, be that budget, GDP, or whatever else.

Happy to meet anyone else too.

Background: I'm a geeky type open to everybody; I don't like being judgemental. Travelling because I retired as soon as I had the minimum necessary to have a basic house plus a small retirement fund (as soon as the SaaS company I helped found could meet that goal). I picked LA to travel to because I liked the sarcasm and honesty I received here previously. To avoid disappointment: I have an awesome girlfriend so I'm not fishing for a date.

Cheers

Could we get the same ends via something more useful? In theory, sure, but it seems pretty evident that the answer in practice is no, since our congress has mostly been gridlocked for the past 16 years.

It's rich seeing all this unearned bluster about having the lead due to SpaceX, when SpaceX had to drag America kicking and screaming into that position.

For what it's worth, it's not quite so bad everywhere. In New England infrastructure decays faster due to the weather, so most of our infrastructure is more frequently maintained or replaced. There's definitely some blighted areas, but the image of quaint New England towns with covered bridges is not a lie, and gentrification has caused local governments in our richer cities to invest more in infrastructure. This leads to a dramatic difference in appearance between e.g. New Orleans and Boston.

So not only do we still need to have an incredibly high degree of reliability for core critical parts of the mission, that mission is now massively larger, and it's now human lives on the line if things go wrong.

Can't we still have farms of telescopes if we wanted even if a few of them don't deploy perfectly?

Can't we just have a humanoid robot go and turn the screws for us?

The only reason NASA hadn't already been investigating the relevant technologies is that politicians threatened to outright cancel space science funding if NASA so much as mentioned depots (the word was actually censored in documents from NASA about HLS until the relevant senator finally retired).

These days? The space race was 50 years ago.

Mars is infinitely more viable than anywhere in Venus for the simple fact that you are on solid ground with resources all around you.

* two big totalitarian systems, the USSR and the Reich, start the war together by dismembering Poland, then divide the region according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, very nice,

* the USSR spends two years providing the Nazi war machine with necessary resources, thus indirectly aiding our local subjugation,

* then, as usual with bandits, one turns on the other,

* four years later, one loses, the other occupies half of Europe and introduces their own dystopian totalitarian systems there.

The Soviet rule was better in the sense that they didn't consider us racial subhumans, but "liberation" contains the word "liberty", and personal liberty was an extremely scarce good in the Stalinist era.