NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

"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.

Having a deadline is how things get done. With no deadline, nothing gets accomplished.

This is a political deadline with no grounding in reality.

JFK proposed we go to the Moon in 1962. We did it in 1969, 7 years later.

They also killed three astronauts in the process and had to stop the program and reevaluate their whole approach to safety.

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?

>and the only reason we're doing it is to avoid losing face to the communist

Totally unlike the first time.

Unlike the first time, it isn't new and isn't a technological flex. The payoff from the first time was marginal, measured mainly in the children it inspired to pursue STEM. This time, does anybody even care?