NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

There is just so much wrong with this from start to finish. Here are a few things, by no means inclusive:

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.

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

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.

What is the point of winning though? We could be doing other things in stead, and I'm going to submit that they are more valuable (you are of course welcome to disagree - this is an opinion).

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.

The electronics we're typing these comments on were only rapidly miniaturized originally to be small and light enough to shoot into space.

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

Sure. So let’s do something useful and new. We know how to go to the moon - it’s just a matter of money (and political will). If there’s something else to do on the moon, let’s be clear that is the objective.

I do agree with this. If we are returning to the moon just to say we did, as a space lover, I do have an issue with this and can't really get on board. I am hoping we have some other larger goal in mind, like maybe are back to the idea of a permanent moon base and a potential jump off point for other projects or we have a list of long term moon experiments to do. But yea, it just isn't exciting if we are going there to take a couple pictures and just to rub it in the face of China or India or some other nation. We've already done that.

The goal could be simply to learn how to do it again, since almost everyone who actually has done it--on any level, be it engineering, management, manufacturing, flight crew, ground crew, etc--is dead. That's a totally worthwhile exercise if it's actually a serious goal to explore further.

We have plenty of people working on space - we go to Mars with robots all the time which is harder than the moon. We have a space station (though it is nearing end of life). We have all the needed knowledge it is just applied elsewhere. There will be some things to learn about the moon that are different but not much.