I have to believe that at some point in the near future climate change is going to become the big issue for the human race. It will also become clear that it will be necessary to provide a western standard of living for a population of close to 10 billion. And the third step will be the determination that there is only one possible solution: Space Solar Power by way of Lunar Resources. When this happens, everything will suddenly be about Super Heavy Lift Vehicles sending payloads to the Moon. And we only have one. As for the other one, I also foresee Starlink failing which means Starship is not going to be around.
The boosters will be replaced with more powerful liquid reusables. The RS-25’s will be mounted on a module with a heat shield and be recovered for reuse. And since it will likely double its flight rate every couple years, that will drive costs down.
“A plant that employed 20,000 workers making auto glass, would employ barely 200 today. Thus, our economy rolled jobs over into services.”
Nice story but it does not explain why we do not have those factories with 200 people in them.
It is because those factories are not in America. Because, as I said, those companies chose profit over the American worker.
Your statement that “American manufacturing never shrank” is absurd except in a very limited and cherry-picked misleading sense. Exactly how Neoliberals con the population into making themselves poorer and the rich ever more fantastically and obscenely wealthy.
Directions change. As a matter of record, directions change to places like the Moon when such a destination was verboten for many years. Shouted from the highest rooftops that NewSpace was going to make Mars the second home of humankind with tourists, the F9, and depots.
And here we are…going to the Moon with a big rocket and government employees. It is not a shame at all. What is sad is the toxic ideology working directly against humankind expanding into the solar system and the deluded legion of fanboys actually cheering on the end of Human Space Flight while believing they are doing the opposite.
LEO stopped being space in 1968 when Apollo 8 “moved the goal posts” and flew around the Moon. LEO, like Mars, is a dead end. The cislunar ocean is the next step and bizarre space tourist “missions” like Polaris are simply obscene spending displays resulting in faux astronaut wings.
“-core stage production is impossible to ramp up-“
“-wouldn’t get production rate to any point close to that required to reduce the unit cost.”
“-not that there’s going to be any money forthcoming to do that-“
“Starship is already past the point where it can fail in comparison to SLS.”
“-SLS-Orion dead-enders may perhaps cause the SLS to be flown – briefly, one hopes-“
The shiny is being built to place tens of thousands of satellites into LEO and if that megaconstellation fails, which seems likely since there are not enough customers to support it, then there will be no shiny Starship. Just like there are no Shuttles anymore.
The SLS was specifically designed to go to the Moon without a fleet of Super Heavy Lift Tanker missions enabling it. All by itself. We had better make it work.
For finished goods like….all the stuff in Walmart? The Military Industrial Complex makes a tremendous profit for shareholders. The benefit to society in terms of “goods” is almost nil.
This cherry-picking and spinning of factoids are all well-known tricks that obfuscate, misdirect, mislead, and misinform. The truth is in wealth inequality, the debt Americans hold, medical bankruptcy, school loan debt, etc.
“For less than one SLS/Orion mission NASA will get the full development and two flights from lunar starship.”
“Will get” is not now. The battle cry of “cost plus” and the endless disparaging descriptors do not remove the SLS from the launch pad….now.
The fanboys screaming death-to-SLS are a happy fact to the many who want no NASA and no Human Space Flight. That makes the NewSpace movement, in effect, anti-space, because no “private enterprise” is going to pay for something with no ROI. I will keep saying this.
If someone is working for an organization and is opposed to the flagship program he or she is being paid to support and even spends an inordinate amount of time criticizing it anonymously on internet forums, ethical issues are definitely a problem. In the military we would occasionally have someone that, for whatever reason, did not want operations to go well and would sometimes actually make sure they did not go well. They usually ended up discharged. I can’t stand that kind of duplicity. It makes me sick to my stomach…especially when it involves national prestige and our future in space. I have on several occasions interacted with self-identified NASA employees on forums who were essentially double agents for a certain company. It is a feature of NewSpace ideology which is Neoliberal in nature and without any moral compass or integrity.
I will say this…. whether the many here commenting are NASA-bashing out of “patriotism” or in the interest of promoting a private company or are just projecting their anti-tax/anti-government worldview onto space exploration and actually want state-sponsored Human Space Flight to end, the result WILL be the end of Human Space Flight if their intentions are realized.
I don’t want that.
Those who believe space tourism or asteroid mining or retirement condos on Mars are going to expand humankind into the solar system are living in a fantasy world. That SLS is no fantasy.
Ice on the Moon 