NASA & World Space Exploration...News, Views, Photos & videos
- Thread starter bd popeye
- Start date
That's actually a great idea. Why waste billions just to lose another space race to the moon with the Chinese. Even if the US wins now, it wouldn't mean much since they were already on the moon in 1969.
Scrap the return to moon program and focus on Mars program can preserve America's space dominance image for another decade at least.
No, the new administrator said that NASA will focus on moon first. And I doubt Trump will want further delays caused by cancellation of SLS. He will want a moon landing under his term.
Scrap it now and save some face, the later NASA scrap the return the moon program, the more face they will lose when China beats them to the moon.
Based on the way Elon is cancelling things right now, there could be some programmatic changes but the moon is too vital to cede to China. Congress will not let him. There's also the simple fact that gutting SLS is gutting jobs in mostly red states.
Mars has always been a distant dream, whereas the moon and near-earth is an actual strategic national space priority for both countries.
Wow. I knew NASA's expectations of orbital propellant transfer this Spring were unrealistic, but I still expected it to happen before year-end in 2025. Pushing that out to >2026 means even an unmanned HLS landing demo can't really happen before 2027 at the earliest, and 2028 more likely (as there's also the intermediate step involved of developing, testing, and deploying the orbital propellant depot). Then, Artemis 3 is really NET 2029 - and that's assuming the first-ever unmanned demo of HLS lunar landing, loiter, and liftoff completes without any major problems and achieves all test objectives. Perhaps Artemis 3 realistically isn't likely to fly until 2030... This is 'Elon Time' we're talking about
@iewgnem @Xiongmao @taxiya good call