And back in 2022 we were told the unscrewed flight lasting 25 days or so was a “complete success…”
Now they find the air conditioning did not work? Or worse, the toilets blow instead of suck? (Toilets are a life support system…)
They have been designing and building the thing since the early 2,000s (remember them), flying bits of it since 2009, and have published a crewed flight schedule all the way to March 2032.
Forgive me for being cynical but it almost seems as though the longer it remains a “reach for Mars” programme without actually flying people into space the more money there is for everyone involved in it on earth.
Hmmm… Is it just me or do others think the likelihood of NASA’s rocket-building activities surviving the attentions of the DOGE is very remote?
Not like there’s any conflict of interest…! Actually, there really isn’t. SpaceX has clearly demonstrated that it is decades ahead of NASA in terms of getting ‘stuff’ into space at a cost that is an order of magnitude cheaper than NASA… and reliably, too. Is it honestly likely that Artemis will get back to the Moon first?
Only if it uses SPaceX’s rockets would be my thoughts and probably not even then. NASA is an absolute classic example of government bloat… I fear it - or at least significant bits of it - will not be around much longer.
SpaceX has clearly demonstrated that it is decades ahead of NASA in terms of getting ‘stuff’ into space at a cost that is an order of magnitude cheaper than NASA… and reliably, too."
You forgot to mention one “minor” detail: with the benefit of literally decades of pioneering fundamental space R&D by NASA without which today’s space venturers would still be discovering things like, oh, weightlessness for example.
Oh, come on!! How much of what we need to know about putting man back on the Moon has been learnt in the last 55 years (you know, since Nasa first did it?)? Please!!
A number of commenters here are woefully ignorant of the technical issues of a crewed lunar mission. Sure, we have made great strides in pulling off more-or-less (lately, more “less”) regular supply missions to the ISS, but it’s still hardly a milk-run.
You seem to be saying, “Hey, <pant! pant!> I just jogged around the block two days in a row! I should be able to run to work on Monday. It’s only thirty miles down the Interstate. What could possibly go wrong?”
All that SpaceX has “clearly demonstrated” is that you can take decades of carefully collected NASA data, throw a lot of “private” money at a problem that NASA solved long ago, and achieve comparable results with newer technology AND a lot of federal funding. As long as you don’t define “Human Beings” as “stuff”.
The original moon missions were a 100% cold war political endeavor; beat the Russians and damn the cost.
There is no real reason to send manned missions these days. Electronics have advanced enough that unmanned eVTOL, cars, planes, trucks are the future. Heck, even the cold war has switched to unmanned vehicles as the future.
You are missing the point entirely. Getting man back to the Moon is just the first necessary step in colonizing Mars, both in terms of testing technology and as a staging post. Whether you agree that this is relevant or not, it is going to happen and if we humans carry on the way we are at the moment, if we do not succeed in becoming a multiplanetary species, we are doomed.
Of course we should appreciate the “past efforts” of NASA, but the taxpayers will have to cough up many billions if there is to be a manned Mars mission. The great people who achieved so much in the great days of NASA, the 60s and 70s, are long gone. NASA decided that it had to be in the manned space flight business in order to continue to get big bucks from Congress, so, it concocted its “return to the Moon” program to compete with SpaceX, apparently believing that it could not handle a Mars mission. The practical value of going back to the Moon has not been demonstrated and doing two different manned projects at the same time places a heavy burden on the taxpayers. NASA has had great success in partnership with other agencies and companies in unmanned projects like the Mars rovers and the amazing Webb Space Telescope, which took 20 years to develop but resulted in a flawless launch and deployment of an instrument which may allow us to see to the edge of the Universe. Perhaps NASA should get out of the manned spaceflight business which has not gone well for it recently and concentrate on the unmanned missions which it has carried out so well. SpaceX is now developing and launching the hardware for the Mars mission and has had great success. How about saving the taxpayers some money by creating cooperation between SpaceX and NASA rather than competition? Nostalgia for past NASA accomplishments will not get us to Mars in this decade.
Colonizing Mars is insane.
The only way mankind is doomed is by us acting on fantasies rather than changing ourselves. Unless we change ourselves first then exporting us to another planet solves nothing; we just die out on 2 planets.
Agreed, Mars should be out for settlements.
The slope is slippery between fantasy and noble ambition though, yet the point of how and where change begins is well taken. As in the effort to lose weight, stay with a new year resolution, change a relationship, or to learn to fly, consciousness is the only state worth consideration. It can make any so-called fantasy real.
Mars colonization is a long sought after dream. Doing it is going to be expensive and difficult. If we succeed it will stand as a milestone of human desire and ability. When we succeed we’ll say either “well, we did it” or “imagine what we have found and now know”. The philosophical and social significance will be staggering. However you look at it is a grand achievement. 1st step is a self sustaining Lunar colony where we can “get our feet wet” and begin to understand what living off Terra demands and means. With a Lunar base coming and going should be simpler as we’re already in “space”. When we begin to colonize extraterrestial places we may learn just how valuable our home world really is. How many more generations will we dream about this?
Magellan, Drake, Cook, da Gama, Columbus all sailed to make money
and to make maps for other to make money. Mars is a “money pit” and, like going to the moon, will be too expensive to keep funneling trillions of dollars into with no chance of financial gain. The choice is between housing a billion people on earth Vs housing one person in a trillion dollar bunk on Mars.
As far as the “mind-numbingly stupid religious”, they were the ones that kept records, created books, started modern biology, explained how infinite energy could create the matter in the universe and also studied the stars. What has mwinlow.co.uk done?
Am I the only one that is totally NOT surprised about this announcement? To me, the whole schedule for Artemis launches was way too optimistic from the get-go. And, like most NASA projects, slippage in the schedule is pretty much the norm. What I find most frustrating is that the problem is not with the launch rocket, which seems to be working well, but with the Orion space capsule. NASA and its contractors had pretty well worked out the design kinks of a space capsule over 50 years ago, and Orion is basically a scaled-up Apollo capsule to carry more people.
For those of you that heap praise on Elon Musk and SpaceX, and I agree they have made huge strides in the Starship program, they face the same challenges as Orion at this point. So far, no Starship has launched so much as a few lab rats or monkeys to demonstrate their environmental support systems (if they even exist at this point) are functional. I suspect they are not. Starship has come a long way, but surviving reentry from an earth orbit is totally different than surviving the fiery inferno of a return from the moon at seven miles per second. Both programs (Artemis and Starship) still have a long way to go.
NASA is like having a 200 pound jockey riding your race horse and trying to figure why you’re always in last place. NASA is a seriously over bloated bureaucracy. NASA had a good reason to exist until 2011, the last shuttle flight should have been the end of NASA. Government should now be contracting all of this work through private industry. In the early days of space Discovery NASA made sense, no other organizations could fund such an Endeavor.
