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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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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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phkahler ◴[21 Oct 25 19:51 UTC] No.45660814[source]▶
Not only that, he wanted to go to the moon before the end of the decade. They made it within that time.
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jjk166 ◴[21 Oct 25 21:14 UTC] No.45661806[source]▶
Which is kind of the key point - Kennedy's deadline was a realistic one based on the technical difficulty of the challenge.
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WalterBright ◴[21 Oct 25 23:05 UTC] No.45662885[source]▶
It was never realistic. It turned out be possible, though.

Also, corners were cut in the testing. (Full stack testing.)

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jjk166 ◴[21 Oct 25 23:42 UTC] No.45663188[source]▶
I don't know how you can claim a deadline that was achieved was not realistic.

Full stack testing was not cutting corners. After ground testing it was deemed that incremental testing would not be beneficial. Doing tasks in parallel instead of in series can introduce project risks, but that's not the same thing as cutting corners, which is where something necessary is not done at all.

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ramblenode ◴[22 Oct 25 19:13 UTC] No.45673775[source]▶
The parent is correct. JFK famously didn't consult with engineers when picking the timeline. It was just lucky that it all worked out.
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1. jjk166 ◴[22 Oct 25 21:26 UTC] No.45675371[source]▶
No, JFK consulted extensively with the engineers beforehand. The end of the decade timeframe first came from a NASA study published February 7, 1961. Kennedy's budget had actually rejected the initial proposal from Webb to fund the moon program for an end of the decade moon mission just a few weeks prior to Gagarin's flight. A new proposal was put together and presented May 8, 1961 for Johnson by James Webb, Abe Hyatt, and Robert Seaman which pushed for a moon landing by end of decade. Von Braun was even more aggressive, telling Kennedy that it could be done by 1968.