US space policy

[Kraken]

This got mentioned in the trump cabinet thread, but I thought it might get more traction here since it's not a cabinet position: Jared Isaacman will be NASA's next administrator.


Reactions I've seen in various Facebook groups have been generally positive. This fellow is passionate about space travel and has business experience. Chumminess with Musk is the #1 complaint, followed by lack of political experience. But NASA and SpaceX are deeply intertwined, like it or not, so maybe being a Muskman isn't all bad. I suspect that there might be more emphasis on manned spaceflight over robotic exploration.

Canceling the SLS rocket would require congressional approval, and the launch vehicle has the support of lawmakers in several key states, including Republicans in Alabama, where NASA placed the SLS program office. And NASA is currently stacking the second SLS rocket inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the Artemis II mission, which will carry four astronauts around the far side of the Moon on the first human voyage to deep space since 1972.

NASA has penciled in the first Moon landing for the Artemis III mission, which officially is slated for no earlier than 2026 but will likely be delayed to wait for the Starship lander and new commercial spacesuits to be ready.

For the Artemis II flight to happen in late 2025, or more likely in 2026, it will certainly need to use the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft. But there are other architectures that Isaacman and the Trump administration, which counts SpaceX chief Elon Musk as a key adviser, will be open to considering for later missions.

One low-hanging fruit for an early budget cut and change in approach might be the upgraded SLS Block 1B rocket, which NASA's inspector general estimates will cost $5.7 billion. This larger, more powerful SLS rocket is not required for the first Artemis lunar landing, or any Artemis lunar landing mission, for that matter. Another option might be to cancel the Gateway space station to be placed in lunar orbit.

Overall this seems to be a wise appointment, unlike nearly all of trump's cabinet. Nelson wasn't great and there's room for rethinking NASA's approach.

[msduncan]

This got mentioned in the trump cabinet thread, but I thought it might get more traction here since it's not a cabinet position: Jared Isaacman will be NASA's next administrator.


Reactions I've seen in various Facebook groups have been generally positive. This fellow is passionate about space travel and has business experience. Chumminess with Musk is the #1 complaint, followed by lack of political experience. But NASA and SpaceX are deeply intertwined, like it or not, so maybe being a Muskman isn't all bad. I suspect that there might be more emphasis on manned spaceflight over robotic exploration.

Canceling the SLS rocket would require congressional approval, and the launch vehicle has the support of lawmakers in several key states, including Republicans in Alabama, where NASA placed the SLS program office. And NASA is currently stacking the second SLS rocket inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the Artemis II mission, which will carry four astronauts around the far side of the Moon on the first human voyage to deep space since 1972.

NASA has penciled in the first Moon landing for the Artemis III mission, which officially is slated for no earlier than 2026 but will likely be delayed to wait for the Starship lander and new commercial spacesuits to be ready.

For the Artemis II flight to happen in late 2025, or more likely in 2026, it will certainly need to use the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft. But there are other architectures that Isaacman and the Trump administration, which counts SpaceX chief Elon Musk as a key adviser, will be open to considering for later missions.

One low-hanging fruit for an early budget cut and change in approach might be the upgraded SLS Block 1B rocket, which NASA's inspector general estimates will cost $5.7 billion. This larger, more powerful SLS rocket is not required for the first Artemis lunar landing, or any Artemis lunar landing mission, for that matter. Another option might be to cancel the Gateway space station to be placed in lunar orbit.

Overall this seems to be a wise appointment, unlike nearly all of trump's cabinet. Nelson wasn't great and there's room for rethinking NASA's approach.

My brother, who catalogs WAYYYY more technical information on the Apollo program than you'd ever care to read on his website, places a great deal of importance on the future of space exploration. He's been given behind the scenes tours of NASA and access to people and information there. His site was at one time (maybe still?) linked to by the Smithsonian for information on the Apollo Program, etc. Anyway.... I say all that to say this: Whatever you think of Musk, my brother is a massive proponent of Space X. It's where all the smartest and brightest rocket scientists, engineers, and creatives went, and they are very very good at what they do. He says he was rooting for Boeing to also have success, but what is left there is a bunch of old fashioned engineers that are stuck with old ideas and old processes and ways of doing things. That's why you continue to see them come in waaaaaay over budget and have so many failures.

[jztemple2]

My brother, who catalogs WAYYYY more technical information on the Apollo program than you'd ever care to read on his website...

Somewhat off topic, but whatever

Back in the late sixties when I was going to high school in Cocoa Beach, FL, I had a girlfriend who's dad was in middle management for North American Rockwell. And he had this neat news reference for Apollo which was just for executives and the media (or the press as they were called back then). And somehow I ended up with it. Very cool.



Years later I was working as an engineer on the Space Shuttle program and we were moving to new offices in the VAB. So I was scouting out the new office location and there was this large garbage bin and it was full of old Apollo era documentation. I rescued a few items from the bin, including two Saturn flight manuals. SA 506 was the Apollo 11 flight, SA 508 the Apollo 13 flight. Also very cool

[Kraken]

Musk says let's end the ISS ASAP.

"It is time to begin preparations for deorbiting the @Space_Station. It has served its purpose. There is very little incremental utility. Let’s go to Mars," Musk wrote at midday on Thursday.

This original statement was somewhat ambiguous. Last July, NASA awarded Space X an $843 million contract to modify a Dragon spacecraft to serve as a propulsive vehicle to safely guide the aging space station into the Pacific Ocean in 2030. So in some sense, preparations are already underway to shut down the laboratory.

I asked Musk if he meant that NASA and the US government should commit to the 2030 end-of-life date, or if he wanted to accelerate the timeline for the station's demise.

"The decision is up to the President, but my recommendation is as soon as possible. I recommend 2 years from now," Musk replied.

This surprised me because "NASA's annual budget for the International Space Station is a little more than $3 billion. Of this more than half is spent on "transportation," which is cargo and crew supply missions. In 2023, for example, NASA spent $1.76 billion on transportation to the station, the majority of which went to SpaceX for its Dragon cargo and crew flights."

No more ISS, no more taxi money. But Musk obviously intends to hoover up all of that $3B...and then some; SLS/Artemis is also in his sights.

The linked article gets into the nitty gritty of who the other stakeholders are and what influence they might wield. But as long as trump's clueless butt is parked in the Oval Office, Musk is setting space policy and SpaceX will soon receive most of NASA's budget.

[Kraken]

If Mump are still together in a couple of years, SpaceX will have absorbed NASA. That's where this is headed.

[raydude]

My brother, who catalogs WAYYYY more technical information on the Apollo program than you'd ever care to read on his website, places a great deal of importance on the future of space exploration. He's been given behind the scenes tours of NASA and access to people and information there. His site was at one time (maybe still?) linked to by the Smithsonian for information on the Apollo Program, etc. Anyway.... I say all that to say this: Whatever you think of Musk, my brother is a massive proponent of Space X. It's where all the smartest and brightest rocket scientists, engineers, and creatives went, and they are very very good at what they do. He says he was rooting for Boeing to also have success, but what is left there is a bunch of old fashioned engineers that are stuck with old ideas and old processes and ways of doing things. That's why you continue to see them come in waaaaaay over budget and have so many failures.

Actual rocket scientist here, and I have worked on the MESSENGER, OSIRIS-Rex, DART, and two NASA balloon missions and am currently working with the Psyche, Europa Clipper, Dragonfly, and the Japanese MMX missions. I am a huge fan of SpaceX but they are not where the smartest and brightest rocket scientists, engineers, and creatives went. It just looks like that because SpaceX has a limited scope. It is a space taxi. I say that with utmost respect, because they are very good at what they do, but at the end of the day that's what they are. They are the best space taxi company in terms of cost per pound of payload.

But the payload is what matters. SpaceX would never survive doing planetary missions on the budget that NASA has because planetary missions do not play to their strengths - which is reusability and repetition. Each planetary mission is proposed to answer a set of questions, and the spacecraft and instruments are built to answer those questions. Once those questions are answered the instruments are no longer needed for future missions. Can you make modular spacecraft? Sure, sometimes. But the radioactive environment around Europa is different from the thermal environment around Mercury, and both have a different gravitational environment from the Bennu asteroid (i.e. you don't orbit an asteroid, you kind of float next to it). So there are limits to modularity.

But do the instruments vary that much you ask? Certainly for imaging instruments - advancements in CMOS detectors let us do all kinds of crazy things with imagers but sometimes you don't need the crazy fancy imagers and maybe you want an imager that can easily fead into autonomous navigation (as on DART). Gamma-Ray spectrometers on the other hand don't vary in design too much but you still have to design the instrument based on where it sits on the spacecraft, what the thermal and radioactive environments will be, and how sensitive you need it to be for detecting metals.

If SpaceX does absorb NASA it may spell the end of planetary exploration as we know it, because designing spacecraft and instruments to answer one-off questions is hard. It's much easier to make reusable space taxis to send humans to answer the questions; which is fine if you then accept that the mooon and Mars are probably your only destinations. Which would be a sad destiny for NASA.

[The Meal]

Well said, raydude.

I'm *not* a rocket scientist, but I'm rocket scientist adjacent as I test products to survive the process of getting launched into space. Space X dictates a lot of what affects me every day, as they are the most frequent ride. There are sharp minds there, but there's also capriciousness.

I was spurred to post here relating to Kraken's recent message about f-Elon wanting to eliminate the ISS. One of the stupidest gentlest vibe tests I did was for a product which was to be deployed out of the ISS. (I have this mental image of one of the crewmembers kicking it out the pod doors like the kids getting kicked back down the slide in Ralphie's vision of visiting Santa in A Christmas Story.) It was catching a ride in one of the resupply vehicles, so it basically got launched into space in the equivalent of a pelican case. To mimic the launch loads, I wrapped the space vehicle in bubble wrap and strapped it to my shaker with come-along straps and put it through the most gentle vibe profiles I've ever encountered. I joked that it would've been much easier to stick it in the back seat of my car and drive it around the parking lot for a few minutes (we both would've had a good time). But rules are rules and it went through its simulation of maximum predicted launch environment (plus some margin) in my vibe lab at less force than you'd use for making margaritas.

[Isgrimnur]

Mmm, stargaritas....

[Punisher]

Mmm, stargaritas....

Plot twist.
The item he tested was a Margherita machine for the ISS.

[Isgrimnur]

Space pizzas, then?

[Holman]

NASA talk always reminds me of my dad.

He finished graduate school at LSU with a Physics degree in 1962 or 63, and he was recruited by two companies. He opted to go with AT&T, where he had a long career.

The offer he turned down was NASA's. Just a few weeks after JFK's announcement of the Apollo Program. I've kind of never forgiven him for that.

[Kraken]

If SpaceX does absorb NASA it may spell the end of planetary exploration as we know it, because designing spacecraft and instruments to answer one-off questions is hard. It's much easier to make reusable space taxis to send humans to answer the questions; which is fine if you then accept that the mooon and Mars are probably your only destinations. Which would be a sad destiny for NASA.

Musk has zero interest in scientific exploration. I think he'll move all of NASA's manned spaceflight to SpaceX and leave robotics to the government. It's possible that the moon/Mars money will be funneled through NASA just to keep up appearances...but Mump doesn't seem to care about appearances. They aren't having any consequences so far.

The medium-term question (to me) is whether he reorients toward Mars so totally and abruptly that he concedes the moon race to China. I *think* he'll allow Artemis to proceed to one landing. After that? IDK. I don't think SpaceX has any economic interest in exploiting the moon.

[Holman]

Science doesn't enter into it. Musk is fixated on Mars because he wants to be the father of interplanetary humanity.

The thing to notice is that he cares infinitely more about the "interplanetary" part than "humanity."

[Kraken]

I don't doubt Musk's ability to land a Starship on Mars, possibly even before this decade is out. Bringing it back is harder. Doing it with a crew is harder still. Keeping that crew alive is exponentially harder. Transportation, while far from trivial, is the easiest part of going to Mars, and SpaceX ain't going to solve all those harder parts. So to contradict my previous argument, Musk is going to need NASA's support even if Mump changes the objective.

[GreenGoo]

Degrasse Tyson has choice words about the pursuit of Mars. I'm not a huge fan of his but it's hard to argue with reality.

[jztemple2]

Degrasse Tyson has choice words about the pursuit of Mars. I'm not a huge fan of his but it's hard to argue with reality.

Do you have a link?

[GreenGoo]

Do you have a link?

No, but he says it all the time, I'm sure google could find multiple instances.

[Unagi]

here is a sample


with some chilling things to think about given what's going on...

or - here is a 42 second clip

[WYBaugh]

Went looking for information that jz asked for and found that Musk and Trump are politicizing Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore being left in space for political reasons. The pieces of shit just continue to increase in courics.

Elon Musk is beefing with a former commander of the International Space Station on his social media platform X, in a quarrel over the two NASA astronauts that have been at the station for months.

The spat escalated with Musk on Thursday calling to decommission the ISS, which has been in orbit for over two decades and is scheduled to be deorbited in 2030. Musk claims “it has served its purpose.”

The call could drive NASA, the historically bipartisan space agency, further into political warfare — particularly because Musk’s SpaceX is a major contractor for the agency.

Two American astronauts — Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore — arrived at the ISS last June for what was supposed to be a 10-day mission, but have been at the station since due to technical issues with their craft.

Andreas Mogensen, a Danish astronaut who previously was the ISS commander until March of last year, called out Musk over his comments during his interview with Sean Hannity this week, where Musk said they were accelerating the return of the two astronauts, and claimed they were left in the ISS “for political reasons.”

“What a lie,” Mogensen wrote, implying Musk was a hypocrite for complaining about lack of honesty in the media. Hours later, Musk hit back, calling the Dane an “idiot” and a slur for a person with an intellectual disability, before defending his claim that the situation was politically motivated, adding SpaceX had offered to rescue the astronauts before and were rejected.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/2 ... t-00205268

And now the baby billionaire wants to move up the timeframe on deorbiting the ISS 'cuz he got insulted

[jztemple2]

here is a sample

Thanks for those clips!

I don't doubt Musk's ability to land a Starship on Mars, possibly even before this decade is out. Bringing it back is harder. Doing it with a crew is harder still. Keeping that crew alive is exponentially harder. Transportation, while far from trivial, is the easiest part of going to Mars, and SpaceX ain't going to solve all those harder parts.

Excellently put, thanks for that.

[Unagi]

Bringing it back is harder. Doing it with a crew is harder still. Keeping that crew alive is exponentially harder.

I just need to say that doing it with a crew is generally thought of as also keeping the crew alive. The two achievements are mostly baked into one another. Your point stands, but no double-dipping.

[Kraken]

Bringing it back is harder. Doing it with a crew is harder still. Keeping that crew alive is exponentially harder.

I just need to say that doing it with a crew is generally thought of as also keeping the crew alive. The two achievements are mostly baked into one another. Your point stands, but no double-dipping.

I was thinking like Musk, who's said that people are going to die.

[Isgrimnur]

As he's not an official, I expect he will eventually sued for wrongful death.

[raydude]

Bringing it back is harder. Doing it with a crew is harder still. Keeping that crew alive is exponentially harder.

I just need to say that doing it with a crew is generally thought of as also keeping the crew alive. The two achievements are mostly baked into one another. Your point stands, but no double-dipping.

Think about the interior of the Dragon crew capsule. Yes, it's all sleek, smooth and shiny - which if fine when things work as they should. But do you want that or do you want access panels that are easily removable and things that can be repaired or bypassed during a 2-3 year journey to Mars? In this case I think it's not double-dipping as one could either design as if everything will go smoothly, or design as if things will fail and need to be repaired.

[Unagi]

Bringing it back is harder. Doing it with a crew is harder still. Keeping that crew alive is exponentially harder.

I just need to say that doing it with a crew is generally thought of as also keeping the crew alive. The two achievements are mostly baked into one another. Your point stands, but no double-dipping.

Think about the interior of the Dragon crew capsule. Yes, it's all sleek, smooth and shiny - which if fine when things work as they should. But do you want that or do you want access panels that are easily removable and things that can be repaired or bypassed during a 2-3 year journey to Mars? In this case I think it's not double-dipping as one could either design as if everything will go smoothly, or design as if things will fail and need to be repaired.

Not sure if that's what I was getting at though. My point is that most people will hear about a goal of "doing a manned mission to ______" and assume the goal is to bring that crew back alive. I'm not speaking to the point that a poor design or even a suicide-type mission is a thing.

** But I will take your point - it's easier to do, and it's not double-dipping really.

[Holman]

You've probably all encountered the message Nixon was prepared to deliver if Apollo 11 had resulted in astronaut deaths:

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice."

I feel pretty sure that the best we would get from Musk is "LOL [shrug emoji]."

[The Meal]

Am I dreaming up a SpaceX-related Mars mission signup application which stipulated it was a one-way trip?