SpaceX has been steadily improving the Starship manufacturing process, and this is visible in Ship 39's nose cone, which is basically perfect, with virtually no weld gaps or minor surface damage.
NASA & World Space Exploration...News, Views, Photos & videos
- Thread starter bd popeye
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welp. NASA space exploration might just get trashed. China may be the source of future deep space discoveries. This has happened before: during the 1980s, Reagan massively cut back the space probes and whatnot. Galileo was placed in storage for a long time and it caused the mission a lot of problems as a result. We will see.
The Roman telescope...hurts. As does DaVinci and the sample return. Even with China likely to return a sampler sooner, more samples from different locales is a good idea.
The Roman telescope...hurts. As does DaVinci and the sample return. Even with China likely to return a sampler sooner, more samples from different locales is a good idea.
That's a lot of effort sunk into stainless steel upper stage.
And everyone knows sunk cost is sacred.
No injuries reported.
They cut Mars Sample Return? That's huge. Besides Artemis, MSR is the 2nd most wellknown (by general public) space program and having political profile as high as Artemis due to the you know why. Although not mentioned in the article, I think it is certain now that Orion will not get an extra flight test for its heatshield due to the finacial situation.
![[twitter] jeff_foust—2025.05.02—1918318800807620954—Gp88rwZXYAEFkMf.jpg](https://www.sinodefenceforum.com/data/attachments/144/144701-22d8c49e4685dca9a6227a490151c69d.jpg "[twitter] jeff_foust—2025.05.02—1918318800807620954—Gp88rwZXYAEFkMf.jpg")
Americans optimizing for worst possible outcome once again. Artemis 3 will be canceled too because at some point they will inevitably admit they cant fly real people on the first combined lander + Orion mission, and with no Artemis 4 theres also no point in flying mock mission either.
Until then they will continue to spend money on this known dead end in a perverse display of sunk cost fallacy, because why should only Artemis fail when you can also fail everything else too.
Of course when China land on the moon and launch Tianwen 3 Mars Sample Return, Americans will then abandon their moon idea altogether and claim they always wanted to be first to land humans on Mars. Throwing away whatever they replace Artemis with in a few years.