I think the thing I often see missed in these discussions is the cost and time burden imposed by regulation. It's nearly impossible to build power plants in the US today. Launching satellites while hard, solves this problem.
Even if it's more expensive, Spacex will be able to deploy hardware when no one else can because all the gas turbines and existing power plants have been exhausted and the lead time to build new ones is 5+ years out because of the bureaucratic overhead.
> It's nearly impossible to build power plants in the US today
If you're just building solar panels and using batteries you don't need grid approval to build it and connect it to your own datacenter. The same is true if you're wanting to just use natural gas to a large extent, although you'll have more regulations regarding environmental emissions. But you'll get that when you're trying to get a million space launches approved as well.
Do you have a source for that? I thought all of Tesla's "default" driver assistance was part of Autopilot, which is going away. I haven't seen any mention of decoupling various features from Autopilot (with some remaining free, just without the branding).
Its being reported elsewhere that future new teslas will not have basic autopilot (the name Tesla use for the standard lane keep assist they offer) at all, the only way to get any form of lane keep assist will be to subscribe to FSD. The wording in the ars article linked here does a terrible job of explaining the change. Existing Teslas which already have basic Autopilot will still continue to have the feature.
New Teslas will now only have "Traffic Aware Cruise Control" as standard without lane assist, i.e. keeps pace with traffic and can stop/start, but user still has to provide steering input.
Isn’t lane keeping pretty standard for most new cars?
It’s like an upside down freemium model - try out our basic self driving product, which is (now) the worst in the market, so you’ll convert to the premium FSD offering.
I don't see this mentioned in the configurator for a new model 3 on the tesla site right now. Under "Driver Assistance" it describes "Traffic-aware cruise control" only. Under "Active Safety" it includes "Lane Departure Avoidance" which is separate from the "Autosteer" feature described under the "Autopilot" section. It's possible they will choose to fold autosteer into the lane departure avoidance but there's been no announcement of that.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_il/GUID-ADA05DF...
Under the new 2026 pricing structure, Autosteer has been removed. *New vehicles will now only ship with Traffic-Aware Cruise Control*. Buyers who want the vehicle to steer itself on highways must now pay for the software that was once standard.
Believing that one should be able to consume raw milk is not anti-science. Yes pasteurization kills bacteria that can be present in milk which can cause serious harm and also it kills bacteria that can be positive and people should have the right to choose to consume it and sell it with proper disclosures.
The first moon landing? Kennedy wanted it done before the end of the decade and they landed in 1969. I guess you could argue that it was on schedule rather than ahead.
Kennedy's speech is hardly "a schedule". There were definitely delays in the Apollo project, like the Apollo 4 launch that was delayed by (almost?) a year.
Starship is more flight ready then SLS and new Glenn. It's just not fully reusable yet, so it's not ready by Spacex standards but far ahead of anyone else in the world. They could also use falcon heavy but might as well use Starship, unless they need dragon.
Artemis is a joke. You can tell this is politically motivated by their stance on SLS. If they were serious they would give Spacex the SLS contract for being years and years behind schedule.
If they were serious, they'd properly look into ending SLS after the ones that are being built are launched, cancel the upgrade, go after the company that spent the entire launch tower budget before even starting construction, open up bids for rockets to fly Orion (probably Vulcan or New Glenn IIRC), and sort out their space suit issues.
Maybe also seriously threaten Boeing with cancelations and restrictions for their constant failures and corruption. We've had the espionage scandal that forced the formation of ULA, SLS's extreme delays and overruns, supressing Vulcan's capabilities to prevent it from impinging on SLS's blank check, Starliner's inability to deliver (and at this point it seems unlikely the station will be around long enough for their 6 flights), and the scandal that caused their disqualification from the original HLS bid.
Starship is being painted as the sole blocker in Artemis, but I can't think of any component of Artemis that has any contractors delivering competently and on-time.
We still haven't heard anything about the status of the EVA suits, which the US has an even worse track record on than rockets. My understanding is that they haven't been able to build and bring a new suit into use, for 25+ years now, and not due to a lack of spending.
Pretty much. Starship is a source of delays - but not the source of delays. Even if Starship HLS was ready to go yesterday, I would still expect Artemis 3 to schedule slip all the way to ~2030.
Getting everyone involved in Artemis to deliver on time, let alone on budget, would require nothing short of divine intervention.
Payload capacities to trans-lunar injection (source wikipedia):
SLS Block 1: >27,000 kg (59,500 lb)
SLS Block 1B: 42,000 kg (92,500 lb)
SlS Block 2: >46,000 kg (101,400 lb)
Vulcan Centaur: 12,100 kg (26,700 lb)
New Glenn: 7,000 kg (15,000 lb)
Orion crew module by itself weighs 10,400 kg (22,900 lb), the service module is 15,461 kg (34,085 lb).
Orion is a heavy spacecraft. SLS, like or not (I don't), it has a lot of lift. Unless you're sticking an Orion inside of a Starship (lol), Orion basically dies with SLS.
New Glenn at least claims to eventually be able to put 45,000kg to LEO. Once in orbit, refueling or docking boost stages can come into play. With Vulcan, I have mainly heard of proposals involving modifying Orion to dock the service module in orbit after separate launches.
I think it's pretty much guaranteed by now, assuming that they don't get ravaged by war/internal strife, that China will have landed people on the Moon by the 2040s, and, to be fair, I'd say the same for the US having landed people there again, assuming that they stay on path instead of constantly canceling and replacing programs as they have been doing.
2030 is just a little over 4 years away. They have a lot of hardware to develop and test. It takes time to develop good hardware, as the US is also realizing (again). It was about 7 years between the first flight test of any Apollo related vehicle and Apollo 11.
1. It still took nearly 7 years to after JFK's speech in the 60s.
2. The institutional knowledge of working directly on the Apollo program has largely been lost in the US, and certainly isn't present in China.
Those are the unimportant pieces. The real reason is:
3. The US was actively at war with Russia. While it was a cold war (except for the proxy wars), the Apollo program had a wartime budget (spent nearly half a trillion in today's dollars), and a wartime risk tolerance (Neil Armstrong thought they had a 10% chance of not making it back).
2. Uh huh. The knowledge for 1960s tech is limited, agreed, but the tech is so much more superior now, and China as a nation has a high understanding. What does China not have that would be of any relevance?
3. Cool, China is in an economic Cold War with the USA.
Blue seemed to be planning to use Boeing for their ISS-replacement proposal, but at this point I expect that they'd prefer to build on their New Shepard experience for a custom design. Starliner isn't really worth trying to fix (even the reliability issues aside, it's enough of a pain to do maintenance on that they couldn't just go in and replace valves on the ground).
You don't want to rely on a single supplier for critical infrastructure. Their management can extort you, their failures leave you with no backup plan, if they go bankrupt you're really screwed.
Keeping multiple companies capable of building it alive is essential.
I'm not actually sure that having multiple suppliers reduces extortion? If you have a policy of "no single supplier", then supplier #2 can extort you just as much as supplier #1 does under a single-supplier policy, because you have no choice but to keep funding them.
I'm pretty sure this is what's been happening with Blue Origin: in 25 years they've delivered close to nothing, but they keep getting contracts because "we need a SpaceX alternative". What is that if not extortion.
(EDIT: the sibling comment correctly points out that Boeing is an even more obvious case. Starliner is a money pit, but we have to keep throwing more money down it so that there's no single supplier)
My understanding is extorting the government as the single-supplier contract winner is the standard aerospace business plan, apart from SpaceX. Seems to me that if they're going to re-open SpaceX's contract because it's late, there's a whole bunch of other contracts they should re-open. Cross-referencing Trump's golfing calendar with the aerospace industry "leadership" has a decent chance of producing some insight into the decision.
> Keeping multiple companies capable of building it alive is essential.
Companies and the capability of building are two separate things. It is not at all a desirable thing to keep a company alive which refuses to develop and implement the capabilities to compete, in the process depriving resources from those that would develop those capabilities. If a company dies, its talent and equipment do not vanish into thin air, they get bought up by competitors who can put them to better use.
Unless you are actually duplicating efforts to have multiple firms produce the same things, a large number of potential suppliers does nothing to reduce your risk once you select one to move forward - especially if you still are required to use them after repeated failure. There are just a greater number of potential failure points as any of your suppliers, all of whom you rely on, might fail.
Further, in spreading contracts out among many firms, you reduce the economies of scale of any individual firm. They can not build out the additional capability that more work would afford them, all the while they are taking resources away from genuine productive capability by duplicating effort with excessive overhead.
Concentrated monopolies are bad for common consumers, who have no negotiating power and can be extorted. Governments don't have that weakness. On a purely economic level, the government is a single buyer - it's a heck of a lot easier for them to find a new rocket maker than it is for a rocket maker to find a new government that will buy from them. Beyond that, governments have a monopoly on violence, piss them off enough and bankruptcy is the least of your worries. If it really wanted to, the government could just do the work in house, either setting up new public firms or nationalizing existing ones. Excessively costly government contracts are graft, or at best pork; the government could easily get much more favorable terms if its leaders were so inclined.
Boeing has been pretty blatant about just not caring about performance on SLS, because, by being legally required to keep funding it, there isn't really anything NASA can actually do to hold Boeing responsible for underperforming.
IIRC they managed to extort additional money out of NASA for Starliner too (despite it being fixed price), for that exact reason.
SpaceX hasn't fallen to such tactics yet, but, agreed, it'll be too late to start on setting up competitors when SpaceX eventually does fall to that level (Boeing wasn't always so bad after all).
Of course not. But a system that's "affordable, fixed price, highly capable, delayed" beats one that's "too expensive, cost+, marginally capable, delayed".
Starship is not a drop-in replacement for SLS. But it sure casts a long shadow on the entire SLS project.
Difficult to say relative to current Artemis timelines, which have to date been mainly delayed by Orion. They're currently looking on schedule to perform an orbital propellant transfer in 2026. That likely means a commercial launch before the end of next year, which is crazy.
How that relates to HLS is up in the air, and probably will be until the end of next year.
Yes, but in the original schedule on HLS Starship was supposed to have done the prop transfer in Q4 2022, an uncrewed lunar landing in Q1 2024, and the actual thing in Q1 2025.
Of course that was always wishful thinking. I'm sure SpaceX has their "real" schedule somewhere, and maybe NASA has one too (at least from what I've heard, it is likely they have an unofficial idea of it somewhere).
> in the original schedule on HLS Starship was supposed to have done the prop transfer in Q4 2022, an uncrewed lunar landing in Q1 2024, and the actual thing in Q1 2025
Now do Orion and ML2.
Artemis is behind schedule. Nobody debates that. Currently, the bottleneck is with Orion. SpaceX just massively de-risked the Starship platform with IFT-11. If IFT-12 validates Block 3, we should wait until the end of 2026 before trying to revëvaluate.
Why? The question is whether Starship is on schedule or not. Orion or ML2 aren't holding back Starship. Waiting until the end of 2026 does nothing with regards to the initial schedule.
It's not difficult to say. They are behind schedule and everyone, not just Duffy, is talking about it and have been for awhile.
I don't care - beyond how getting to the moon will help future space exploration - and risk is high when developing new tech, but I also don't care about SpaceX. It's very possible Starship won't work out; that's risk and I'm sure SpaceX and NASA people understand that. Why must people on HN defend SpaceX at every turn, like a PR agency. Does anyone point out a genuine, significant, negative about Starship? Why might it not work? What are the risks?
I think more competition is great and hope they reopen the contract. Private industry competing on what is now prosaic space technology, such as orbit and even the moon, is great. Let NASA do the cutting edge stuff like flying to Europa or looking back to the beginning of time or investigating climate change. (Notice that private industry still can't land on the moon reliably - 56 years after NASA demonstrated it.)
It would be great for there to be more competition. But the reality is that SpaceX is in a different league - why focus on knocking them when there isn’t another alternative ??
> the reality is that SpaceX is in a different league
They aren't delivering, so maybe not. People on HN state the SpaceX talking points like they are reality. It's an Internet mob; there is no room for any serious examination of the issue.
Even if the bet on Starship fails to pay off, the existing Falcon 9 program is both (1) the dominant launch vehicle in terms of sheer quantity, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of missions and (2) the only system with a reusable first stage. Dragon routinely ferries humans to and from the ISS (and other trajectories) and no one blinks an eye.
How do you square that with "not delivering"? I don't doubt that China could surpass them in the next 5 years, but nobody else is realistically close to doing so.
I'm all for anyone making progress. Is another company doing similar things more quickly? Dig into what Starship is and you will see how ambitious their goals are.
Humans are relentlessly overoptimistic in their planning, and that's likely because if we weren't we often wouldn't even start... plus, the future is really, really hard to predict.
SLS was 6 years and like 10-20 billion $ over budget and nobody ever complainged, in fact they got consistantly more and more money. And that is for technology that is fundamentally from the 1970s.
Starship is trying to do the hardest thing in the history of space flight. And of course its not on schedule, its schedule was always insane.
The way of approching things as 'is X on schedule' is a fundamentally false way of approching the problem. The question is who makes the schedules and why. Who decides the budget and why. Who planes for the architecture and why.
Just thrwing around and accusing different groups about who is 'delayed' is kind of counter-productive.
The fact is, the schedule is something Trump made up to sound cool in his first term, and has since been revised for multible reasons. And the demand for a lander was equally rushed. So the schedule is mostly just whatever politics at the moment wants to project.
I'm not sure what are talking about. I don't like giving contracts to SpaceX because they are the right kind of people, I like it because they tend to deliver faster and at less cost with something more modern and more future looking.
While on the contrary Boieng and friends try to use old tech they have in their archive to slap togetehr a minimal viable product to meet the requirment.
But the contract structure changes is not about giving contract to SpaceX only. Its about developing a space industry. And this has worked extremely well. Commercial cargo resulted in Falcon 9, Antares rockets. Antares team is now working with the Firefly startup for a next generation rocket. Clearly not as successful as Falcon, but without Falcon on the market it might have delivered differently.
It also produce Cargo Dragon and Cygnus. Both have seen a lot of further development since then and have all kinds of uses.
You can also look at CLIPS for moon landers, where some companies at small budgets have managed to build landers. And even those that weren't successful, training a lot of people on deep space probes.
If you comapre the explosion of the space industry since Commercial Cargo to the stgantion in the Shuttle/Constellation area you will see why many space fans are so in favor of the new model. And the amazing thing is, that a tiny fraction of the money was spent on the non-Shuttle/Constellation/SLS part.
In fact, I did the math and the total spend on just development of Constellation/SLS/Orion is going toward 200 billion $ over the last 25 years. And that is without actually delivering anything meaningful.
In comparison the complete development budget of Commercial Cargo was a few billion $ at most, and it has revolutionized the US space industry. The complete spend on all Commerical Cargo, Commercial Crew and Lunar development more like 20 billion $. And the impact is just hilariously larger.
Seems fairly obious what the way forward is, its just politically not feasable. As long as 50% of NASA discretionary budget is spent on ISS and Shuttle-derived stuff that will never be forward looking, you are playing the game with a hand tied behind your back and cement shoes.
You don't see that, on HN, a large number of people support and defend everything SpaceX does and demonize any possible competition, critic, or criticism?
IOW, it doesn't matter what SpaceX or the others are doing, SpaceX is the 'right kind of people' to them.
I have read most of this threads and most threads about space on HN. There are occational full on Musk shills but I would argue its very much not the norm.
And those comments are usually not long or detailed. Almost everybody that actually engadges in the discussion doesn't seem to defend that position.
The shills write the longest comments, IME. They can't contain themselves. Look at your comment - contract structures, clips, ... who would care that much about SpaceX?
I care about spaceflight and technology, not that crazy in a forum focused on technology. Why are you here in a thread about NASA and SpaceX if you don't care? Just to a snarky troll? I can talk about many NASA contracts, not just those to SpaceX, but crazy me, I thought in a thread about SpaceX contracts talking about SpaceX contracts is reasonable.
Sorry that complex government contracts valued at 100s of billions of $ can't be discussed in snarky one-liners and throwing around random judgments based on nothing. You seem like somebody that should be on tiktok, not HN.
No, and even if the first HLS lander was built and launched tomorrow, it still needs to be filled up in orbit a dozen times, something that has never been done before and SpaceX doesn't have the capability for and won't have for another decade.
the whole space industry is a joke; if it were healthy, there would be an ecosystem of multiple launch providers vs one finicky government-funded-Elon-company
The industry is going through growing pains, New Glenn is almost ready for payloads, Neutron is a year or two away from flying, and other small launch companies are in the process of pivoting to either medium launch or space services.
I'm not seeing what makes SpaceX government funded beyond just that it provides services to the government? The same as any other launch provider would be doing? At this point the vast majority of SpaceX's activity, and likely cashflow, is from its mostly self-funded Starlink.
SpaceX won the original HLS contract because their design actually had hardware in testing, actually met NASA's payload, landing area and testing requirements, had a clear path to commercialization and was willing to cover most of the cost themselves, as otherwise NASA wouldn't have been able to choose anyone given the limited funding allocated by Congress.
> * I'm not seeing what makes SpaceX government funded beyond just that it provides services to the government*
Take away all of SpaceX‘s government contracts. You imagine SpaceX would still be in business?
As you said, every launch provider is basically dependent on government contracts to stay in business because the government is the only entity that has a legitimate need for launch capability such that it’s willing to pay for its development. There are no sufficiently profitable private contracts out there to sustain a launch provider.
> the whole space industry is a joke; if it were healthy, there would be an ecosystem of multiple launch providers vs one finicky government-funded-Elon-company
ULA has been operating for many, many years (Atlas/Delta, now Vulcan Centaur), RocketLab has been putting up small payloads for the last few (with Electron, someday Neutron perhaps), and BO seems close to having New Glenn flying real missions this season. But yes, one hopes that the others can become competitive on price eventually.
Even if it's more expensive, Spacex will be able to deploy hardware when no one else can because all the gas turbines and existing power plants have been exhausted and the lead time to build new ones is 5+ years out because of the bureaucratic overhead.
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