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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: 0.207s | source
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bahmboo ◴[21 Oct 25 19:15 UTC] No.45660320[source]▶
"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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WalterBright ◴[21 Oct 25 19:23 UTC] No.45660416[source]▶
Having a deadline is how things get done. With no deadline, nothing gets accomplished.
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bahmboo ◴[21 Oct 25 19:26 UTC] No.45660462[source]▶
This is a political deadline with no grounding in reality.
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oceanplexian ◴[21 Oct 25 19:37 UTC] No.45660629[source]▶
JFK proposed we go to the Moon in 1962. We did it in 1969, 7 years later.
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ambicapter ◴[21 Oct 25 19:57 UTC] No.45660904[source]▶
Crucially, not during his term (or his life, but that's irrelevant).
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leoc ◴[21 Oct 25 20:12 UTC] No.45661059[source]▶
Also at the cost of a really stupendous amount of money.
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1. adventured ◴[21 Oct 25 20:57 UTC] No.45661609[source]▶
~$260 billion in today's dollar for the whole Apollo program. Cut out what we don't need to figure out in the present. Maybe a $100-$150 billion cost spread over five years. Trivial sum against a $40 trillion economy. If the only thing we needed to get back to the moon was $30 billion per year in expenditures for five years, Congress would sign off on that instantly.

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.