A moon program requires a super heavy booster or on orbit rendezvous, not both. The reports from the sixties determined that on orbit rendezvous would be easier and cheaper, but take longer, making it more likely to miss their deadline of 1969.
How about a robotic moon program? An all-robot base, with lots of rovers exploring and digging. They could work for years, rather than short visits by humans.
The moon is close enough that you can teleoperate robots, although the 2.5 second lag means you have to have autonomy for at least balance. That's where Tesla's robots are now.
Tank on the Moon (2007) is a French documentary film about the development, launch, and operation of the Soviet Moon exploration rovers, Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2 in the period from 1970 to 1973.
Those are very old aerospace companies. They predate NASA.
Aerojet was von Kármán's rocket company, founded in 1936.
Rocketdyne was founded in 1955. Both are now owned by L3Harris.
I have to admit that while this stuff has absolutely fascinated me for 40+ years, I have zero interest in seeing these vehicles succeed. I remember writing to NASA in the early days of the shuttle and getting back packets and packets of information. Not only is that interest missing, but part of me hopes they either fail miserably or stop getting government funding altogether.
That’s a great way to never expand the frontier of knowledge. We don’t know the returns on the investment of a Moon program ahead of time, but exploration drives human knowledge forward. If we only ever funded things that had a clear economically viable reason, we would have never progressed past steam technology.
Think of space exploration as basic research. It’s fundamental to moving human knowledge forward and that should be worth any price.
Private enterprise doesn’t advance advanced technology because they are constrained by profit requirement. It’s impossible for private enterprise to do so because of that. That’s why we rely on government to advance literal moonshot programs.
Space-X can’t even do this without government funding.
It is important to remember that the Space Race was a front of the Cold War, the "Why do we need a Moon program?" question was squarely answered by "Because we are at war."
Today we are not at war, at least not one that concerns space or the Moon. China is in a fierce self-imposed race to land on the Moon and Do The Other Things because it (probably correctly) views the West as an enemy to overcome. The US has not reciprocated that sentient, we've just shut them out of our space programs and then left them be.
For the US government to fund another Moon program we definitely need an answer to the question of Why. So far we don't have one other than THE PRESTIGE and OUR SCIENCE GRANTS as evidenced by many other threads on similar subject matter here. That's not going to convince the taxpayers.
It's important to remember that USA cannot fly men to the Moon.
USA had that ability some 50 years ago. Since then companies changed, technologies were replaced, knowledge transformed and people got interested with other things, not to mention that risk threshold grew a lot. As a result, right now USA can't fly men to the Moon.
US government, however, doesn't want to give China the ability to say "yes, we're on the Moon - and we're the only nation which can do it today". And because of that, we have a rather similar conditions today as we had some 60 years ago - US government can't really allow China to fly men to the Moon without showing that Americans are also doing that, at the very same time.
Taxpayers, of course, are and were different - somebody doesn't care, somebody else cares a lot. I doubt US government want to assume those who care aren't that important.
So far the American system has been for the government to fund basic research and private industry to commercialize it. This has worked stupendously well. We should be very cautious about moving away from this arrangement.
>So far the American system has been for the government to fund basic research and private industry to commercialize it.
In that case SLS definitely needs to be cancelled.
We are well beyond "basic research" into how a Moon program could be executed, private companies are already doing it and the only question left is how to commercialize it.
Sure, I agree, but the person I was responding to was not talking about SLS specifically. They said that a moon program should be strictly up to commercial interests to pursue and that the government shouldn't purse one at all.
I agree with that assessment, neither NASA nor the country has the money nor time to waste on another public Moon program. There is no justifiable reason for another Apollo.
Leave it to the commercial world, and if they can't figure out a sustainable business model then it simply isn't meant to be (yet?).
You not agreeing with the reasons is not the same as there being "no justifiable reason" for another moon program. There absolutely are justifiable reasons and those reasons have worked out very well for the U.S. in the past. And as to whether we have the money for it, the U.S. is the wealthiest it has ever been and certainly much wealthier than we were in the 60s.
>There absolutely are justifiable reasons and those reasons have worked out very well for the U.S. in the past.
Apollo quickly lost funding and popular support once the Cold War in space was effectively over. Space Shuttle ran on its fumes, and it had to be designed partially as a warplane in order to get additional funds from USAF that NASA couldn't get otherwise. SLS is an extension of that.
Also, we're living in 2025, not 1965. The reasons of the past do not translate perfectly to today.
>And as to whether we have the money for it, the U.S. is the wealthiest it has ever been and certainly much wealthier than we were in the 60s.
We are also literally many trillions in debt. There are many things we should be doing and arguably none of that involves another Moon program just for the sake of it. Been there, done that; we don't have the money.
In 2024 we spent $1.5T via Social Security so that 70 million people could be economically unproductive. We're a wealthy country that can afford many little dalliances to expand our understanding of the natural world (which so far has been a prerequisite to human flourishing).
This is just a variation on the broken window fallacy. There are any number of engineering projects one could embark on that would stimulate R&D and provide a productive output in their own right.
I agree, but there’s no way to divorce this from Musk’s hand controlling our government. It should have been cancelled years ago, but the motive matters.
This is such a cliche, not to mention inevitable pattern, for any ambitious research or development project if any date is mentioned.
But we all want to talk about dates anyway, so we get “delays” that are not delays at all because the dates are never, could never, be real.
A better way is to look at ambitious date projections as targets. If we don’t talk about dates, we feel less pressure and go even slower. But if we talk about dates, we get some urgency even when we miss them.
“Target date” is a good phrase that communicates we know we can’t beat that date, but if absolutely everything went to plan, we might hit it, so we are going to try for it. Knowing that as long as we keep having to learn anything whatsoever, we are going to have a moving target.
I think Jared Isaacman's closeness to Musk gives him added motivation to award contracts to non-SpaceX vendors (once he's confirmed), because he'll seek to disprove claims he's biased in favor of SpaceX
You're getting downvotes, but I agree that Isaacman isn't likely to favor SpaceX. The space community in general is very supportive of him, and he's shown a great interest in spaceflight regardless of who's launching the rockets.
Also keep in mind that his previous missions realistically were only possible via SpaceX whether he liked them or not. Starliner was not (and is still not) ready, Orion isn't ready and is for NASA only anyway, and Russia/China aren't going to work well for geopolitical reasons. SpaceX is the only company left who has the capability to lob you into orbit.
You're confusing things. The mission you are referring to was flown using the Boeing Starliner capsule, launched atop a Atlas V N22 rocket. Not the SLS or Orion.
Oops, that's Starliner. Still...It would be perhaps better for Boeing to get out of rockets entirely and focus on fixing their commercial airline business.
Oh no, not that! Don’t cancel contracts for a useless, broken, overpriced launch system built by a company that famously forgot how to build airplanes with doors that stay attached while the autopilot forces it into a crash. The US needs more of that, for national insecurity!
I don't like to have all the work that went into Starliner to be in vain. Similarly I wouldn't like to have all the work that went into Orion to produce nothing tangible in the short term. We don't really have enough man-rated spacecraft, and won't be for some time.
I'm not sure Starliner can't be salvaged. A good analysis of its problems would go a long way towards a weighted, reasoned decision. That is, the technical architecture, the design and implementation decisions should be available to reviewers, and as a result they would know if it's easier to start building a spacecraft from scratch - or better to fix some specific problems with existing system which at least managed to bring people to ISS and return itself back to Earth.
Who will do the review? Maybe it's Boeing, as part of the project analysis in the wake of events. Maybe it's another company which would buy the branch the Boeing would like to sell. Maybe it's even external government agency - NASA - or company - Blue Origin? - who'd have expertise and enough impartiality in the results.
Seems completely right. We should let the unelected technocrat and wealthiest human award himself every tax dollar. What even is government for, if not redistribution of wealth to the already wealthy?
I wholeheartedly approve of the (potential) termination. The Senate Launch System has overstayed its welcome even by pork standards, and with DOGE going into the budget to slash it down to size there is no excuse for this program to survive.
The funding / design was mandated by Richard Shelby in the senate to preserve the jobs related to space shuttle tech. SLS is the definition of pork barrel spending
Well now China will definitely have people on the moon, while at the same time SpaceX will have an excuse not to make the existing time frame because of scope changes.
SpaceX can be motivated by maniacal desire to colonize Mars, and removing one of 3 competitors in the rocket launch space (by Elon Musk's unconstitutional moves, no less!) can be bad. How do you think Boeing got so crusty? I allege lack of competition is a key part of that.
