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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: 0s | source
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reactordev ◴[21 Oct 25 13:21 UTC] No.45655443[source]▶
Posture, no one can compete, not even NASA.
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raverbashing ◴[21 Oct 25 13:28 UTC] No.45655530[source]▶
Yeah who is going to deliver faster and more reliable than SpaceX? Boeing? LM?

Doubt

replies(2): >>45655624 #>>45655892 #
JohnFen ◴[21 Oct 25 13:34 UTC] No.45655624[source]▶
I don't know who else can, but I do seriously doubt SpaceX is going to be able to deliver within the next decade or so either.
replies(3): >>45655721 #>>45655732 #>>45655895 #
peterfirefly ◴[21 Oct 25 13:44 UTC] No.45655732[source]▶
They have a pretty good chance, actually. They are almost done with the hard parts of the Starship.
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haspok ◴[21 Oct 25 14:33 UTC] No.45656338[source]▶
> They are almost done with the hard parts of the Starship.

That's what Musk wants you to believe.

In reality, reusability was the Achilles heel of the space shuttle, due to the thermal insulator tiles that could be easily damaged during reentry, so they had to be rechecked rigorously before the next flight, and the damaged tiles replaced. We haven't seen any of that - so far only the booster was reused, somewhat, as in 2 were reused, with one failure and one success, but only much later.

And then there is the orbital refueling, but that is so far in the future that it's not even worth discussing.

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1. terminalshort ◴[22 Oct 25 00:13 UTC] No.45663451{3}[source]▶
Good thing SpaceX learned from that mistake and built a much simpler heat shield out of identical tiles that can be cheaply and easily replaced.