Re:NASA Artemis I Launch
by jussion_zoonist on Monday August 29, 2022 @09:12AM
(#32637774)
That's all well and good but how many congressional districts have jobs working on Starship?
Surely someone as smart as Elon will find a way to distribute starship production to please the wonderful members of US Congress - he does plan on building a lot of them.
> Surely someone as smart as Elon will find a way to distribute starship production to please the wonderful members of US Congress - he does plan on building a lot of them.
All indications point towards the opposite - that he considers low cost and high performance to be more important, and that vertical integration is an important part of achieving both of those goals.
While it's true that SpaceX is doing work in CA, FL, and TX, there's not much indication that they'll be farming out subcomponent work to high-40s number of states ala the Shuttle/SLS.
I don't think there's any way to do that without drastically increasing costs and, more importantly, slowing down SpaceX's ability to iterate on their designs.
Re:NASA Artemis I Launch
by bottlepalm on Monday August 29, 2022 @08:55AM
(#32637581)
It’s funny how they rationalized SLS for the longest time because Falcon Heavy and Dragon 2 hadn’t flown yet.
Re:NASA Artemis I Launch
by saalweachter on Monday August 29, 2022 @09:04AM
(#32637682)
"Oh no we're a civilization with multiple vehicles capable of taking a person to space/the moon."
Re:NASA Artemis I Launch
by bottlepalm on Monday August 29, 2022 @11:40AM
(#32639553)
More like oh no we’re 50 years behind on manned space flight because we decided to pour billions into defense contractors instead of actual progress.
SLS is a worse system than Apollo, if anything we have regressed.
I think this will be a much more pressing question (if?) after Starship starts flying regularly and finishes its demo mission to the moon as part of its Artemis obligations. It's easy to rationalize SLS with whataboutism while Starship is in development - particularly since SpaceX favors a hardware rich style. I'm not saying that this is good decision making, just that the arguments are plausible - the fig leaf is dense enough to do its job.
But if Starship is able to achieve and/or surpass the flight rate and safety record of Falcon 9, it'll be much more difficult to criticize; and consequently, it'll be much more difficult to support continued SLS development.
> I ... would have like to see NASAs stop shovelling good money after bad.
I too would like to see that. But I'm not particularly optimistic.