Comment by pfdietz
2 days ago
Even if Starship completely fails, SLS is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. Terminating it is the only logical thing to do.
2 days ago
Even if Starship completely fails, SLS is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. Terminating it is the only logical thing to do.
The whole moon thing is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. But if one wants to do it, one should choose between the working approaches.
Orion is actually pointless, I don't understand why the mission goals are valuable. Partial success would be meaningless. Success is meaningless.
Starship in contrast has a variety of meaningful objectives. Even if Starship only achieves proving that cryogenic fuel transfer in LEO is possible that's a valuable mission goal in and of itself.
If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.
> If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.
There's more to NASA than Artemis! NASA's robotic spaceflight programs generate extremely high science return at relatively low cost. Missions like Psyche, Europa Clipper, and Dragonfly are humanity's real explorers.
And their aeronautics work is valuable as well. Low-boom, etc.
NASA does not seem to be constituted to be able to engage in a coherent manned space program of actual value. It's a long standing systemic issue.
They are great at pretending to deliver value, but there's no "there" there.
Might as well get some ROI out of it though.
IMO the Blue Origin hate was overhyped. They're clearly the only ones who know what they're doing. NASA and SpaceX both are way in over their heads.
The Blue Origin skepticism is based in how many decades they spent in making buildings instead of rockets and how long it has taken them to get anything to orbit.
The Blue Origin hate is mostly how opaque the program is compared to SpaceX.
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