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.

The Artemis plan was originally to return to moon by 2024, and the first crewed flight is still planned for next year, so it seems entirely reasonable for a President that's in office from 2024 and 2028 to want it to actually happen within that time frame. Since, you know, that's been the established and agreed upon plan for nearly a decade now.

2024 was never considered remotely realistic by anybody in the "industry"---it was a purely political deadline and the will/funding was not there to achieve it.

Today (AFAIK) 2028 is considered quite aggressive, mostly due to the lack of progress on Starship, and the facts driving that conclusion are not any more amenable to change via political pressure than they were last time.

There is no reason to consider anytime frame beyond what NASA did it in in the 60s "unreasonable". They were still using slide rules for goodness sake. We've got now 50+ years of space flight experience under our belt.

Bean counters make excuses. Put the right people in the right places and shit gets done.

Apollo was funded at a much higher fraction of the national budget, and I believe in inflation-adjusted dollars the cost is comparable but generally higher depending on how you measure it.

Funding makes it happen. Fund it, it will happen. Don't fund it, it won't happen. American space exploration has been chronically underfunded relative to its ambitions, which is why all we have to show for our manned exploration programs since STS (edit: or including it, if you like!) is a string of broken promises. I am hopeful that Artemis will get there, but I am simply telling you the shape of reality as it currently exists—a shape that doesn't care about your definition of "reasonable" in this context. I also don't think we will beat the Chinese unless something major changes.

> Apollo was funded at a much higher fraction of the national budget, and I believe in inflation-adjusted dollars the cost is comparable but generally higher depending on how you measure it.

The Apollo mission had to invent technology from scratch that did not exist in the 60s. We have all of that knowledge today and then some, plus computers that are millions of times more powerful.

There is no reason to believe that the 8th mission to the moon in the 2020s should cost just as much relative to the national budget as the original did in 1969. We don't expect each new nuclear warhead to cost as much as the Manhattan Project did relative to the national budget.

Funding doesn't make things happen. In some ways funding can be a curse, and bureaucracies will grow to waste whatever funds are allocated. People make things happen. Competent people make things happen. Strong leadership makes things happen. The current NASA has leadership and talent gaps galore. It is also saddled with bureaucratic cruft that has caked onto its gears in the last 5 decades. It is not the same ambitious upstart that it once was. Could it be reformed? Yes, but not without cleaning house.

For what its worth, I don't think we should exclude SpaceX, obviously, as they are clearly iterating at such a rapid rate relative to everyone else that it seems hard to believe anyone will catch up (and at the most efficient cost basis).

I'm not sure why you think the Chinese will win, as even their smaller rockets are regularly crashing back to earth, one just yesterday: https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/chinese-rocket-crash...

But sure, at least they are deploying, at least they're in the running, which is more than most nations can say.