On top of that, this is about promoting investment into infrastructure and vehicles that may one day take us to Mars, you can't just encourage one company to develop that. There needs to be a whole ecosystem of competing companies, we don't want a SpaceX monopoly.

Gosh, I wish USA had access to potable tap water. Having less than 20 hours of electricity a day in winter is also a problem.

That's why you test the hell out of one good one before you ever put humans in one. We didn't have alternatives for the Apollo missions. Failure just wasn't an option.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/multimedia/images/08-09...

Sure, multiple vendors sounds like a nice idea, but rarely in real life does the 2nd vendor's product just act as a drop-in replacement. You might have 2 launch platforms with SpaceX and Blue Origin, but the payload meant for one will not just be able to be launched from the other. If you want that, then NASA needs to design the plans (or pick one set of plans) and then have multiple contractors building the agreed upon thing

Their doing option 2, I think, and I agree with that.

Sure if money was magic you would like to have 10 options. But in reality that money is now not available for lots of other-things that are useful and could improve the moon missions in various way.

why buy one when you have two at (more than) twice the price?

I don't think gov should act like a single consumer, instead they should err on the side of producing an ecosystem of solutions to spur an economy around the problem.

So, two is cheaper than one long term, I hope.

And it wasn't actually unsustainable, it just wasn't sustainable while at the same time building shuttle.

Hacker News becoming more like reddit every day with trash comments like this.

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz