Duffy’s shiny object worked
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
As expected, Elon Musk responded yesterday with anger and insults to the announcement by interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy that he will consider other manned lunar landers besides Starship for the first Artemis landing on the Moon.
And as expected, our brainless and generally uneducated propaganda press grabbed the shiny object that Duffy had put out with this announcement to focus entirely on the public spat. Here is just a sampling of the typical reports:
- Axios: Musk rages at Trump’s Transportation head on X: He “is trying to kill NASA!”
- CNBC: Musk blasts Duffy after Artemis contract spat: He ‘is trying to kill NASA!’
- The Hill: Elon Musk: Sean ‘Dummy’ shouldn’t run NASA
- Politico: ‘Sean Dummy’: Musk and Duffy brawl over the future of NASA
- Washington Examiner: Musk says Trump transportation chief ‘Sean Dummy’ trying to ‘kill’ NASA
- Bloomberg: Musk Lobs Insults as NASA Hopeful Isaacman Praises Leader Duffy
- Ars Technica: Elon Musk just declared war on NASA’s acting administrator, apparently
- NBC: Elon Musk goes on a tirade after NASA says it will seek moon landers from SpaceX rivals
Not one of these articles reported the fact that Duffy’s announcement also included an admission that NASA is now delaying this manned Moon mission until 2028. Not one went into any depth as to why this program is delayed, if they discussed it at all. And any articles that did discuss the program’s overall slow pace, the focus was always entirely on SpaceX, as if its Starship program was the sole cause of all the problems. Essentially, they picked up Duffy’s talking points and ran with them, blindly. In fact, for almost all of these articles, it appeared as if the reporter was writing about NASA’s Artemis program for the first time, and really knew nothing about it.
Only the Ars Technica story attempted some thoughtful analysis, but it focused on the office politics of choosing NASA’s next administrator, missing entirely the fundamentals of this story, that the Artemis program is and has always been a mess, and that Duffy’s decision will do nothing to fix the problem.
Musk of course foolishly played into Duffy’s hands by reacting so violently, with insults, helping Duffy distract from the real issues. At the same time, Musk also spoke truth with this one tweet:
SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry. Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.
Duffy has done nothing to fix the fundamental problems with the Artemis program. It still relies on SLS, a flawed rocket that is too expensive, too cumbersome, and lacks sufficient power for the job. It is still relies on the Orion capsule to ferry astronauts to lunar orbit, even though its heat shield is fundamentally flawed and no in-space test of its environmental system (which keeps the astronauts alive) has yet occurred. It is still focused on depending on the Lunar Gateway space station for its long term lunar exploration, even though that station will not be manned regularly, is behind schedule, and is in an orbit that makes it more expensive in fuel to get to the lunar surface.
The program has no coherence. Its management has been a mess from the start, with every component (except SpaceX’s) going significantly over budget and behind schedule.
Damage to Orion’s heat shield caused during re-entry in 2022,
including “cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks”.
Nor has this issue been fixed.
And worst of all, it has made the schedule as its primary focus for when things will happen, not good engineering. Both Trump and Duffy want that manned lunar landing to occur before Trump leaves office, and to do it they will put four astronauts in Orion to circle the Moon next spring, even though its heat shield is not trustworthy and its environmental systems are untested. The schedule demands it! Doing another unmanned mission with a fixed heat shield would require another year of development, and make a lunar landing by 2028 impossible.
Musk is hinting at these issues with his tweet above. If that mission kills the astronauts, a distinct possibility, then this whole house of cards will collapse, and the feds are going to have to find another alternative. And SpaceX is the only one around providing it.
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Spacex should continue full speed to Mars. Elon should IPO Starlink half as soon as they successfully launch the new satellites. Mars is nearly in reach.
SpaceX is offering Starship-based commercial transportation to the Moon starting 2028 (x Musk time factor). I think it’s planned as uncrewed cargo for the moment, but it does show SpaceX has an end-run play to mitigate political entanglements and shenanigans in development of the Moon and Mars.
Sad to watch this Duffy guy blow up in such a pufferfish-like manner. Still hoping against hope that Jared gets the nod.
(Aside, a “remember me” option would be most welcome for comments.)
You know, Orion ‘s heat shield no longer looks like that Mr. Z
Even Zubrin–who has a Mars hunger at least equal to Musk–thinks smaller, more manageable landers should come first.
Jeff Wright: You are being ridiculous again. No new heat shield looks like that. This is what happened to the Orion heat shield on its only return to Earth. It did not do well. In fact, it did far worse than expected, in a manner no one predicted.
NASA has recognized the problem, but decided to go with the exact same heat shield design for the next manned mission.
Even with a changed flight path to minimize stress, this is not what honest engineers do, when it comes to risking human life. It is very likely the heat shield on the next manned mission will look like this also after landing.
I fear worse however. And my fear is not unreasonable. It is based on looking hard at the facts, and a willingness to never deny reality.
Too bad you have a problem with that.
Rob Z’s fears are wholly justified. I know *I* would not step into the next Artemis mission. “Schedule over Safety” is absolutely correct.
On the other hand it wouldn’t surprise me if the astronauts were told they weren’t actually going to fly that mission….that the mission isn’t really going to fly.
As Musk says – SpaceX is entirely capable of planning and executing a manned moon landing without NASA input or hardware. And that’s what going to happen.
I always thought that Artemis was a joke and would never land anything on the moon.
SpaceX might be “behind” (I actually don’t think they are) but everyone else is so further behind that they aren’t even in the game. For Duffy to even mention Blue Origin – the company that produces lots of studies but little hardware and fewer flights – shows he’s either completely out of touch or completely un-serious.
P.S. SpaceX just successfully flew it’s 550th Falcon 9 mission. No one is anywhere near that record.
Get real Duffy.
In Eric’s defense, he’s run more articles over the last decade unpacking that problem than just about anyone not named Robert Zimmerman or Rand Simberg – which I suspect is what he’d say if he was pressed on this. And I think we should appreciate that he at least glanced at the gross inequities in the whole drama with his highlighting of the fact that SpaceX “has self-invested billions of dollars into Starship. By contrast, Lockheed has invested little or nothing in the Orion spacecraft, and Boeing also has little skin in the game with the Space Launch System rocket. Similarly, a ‘government option’ lunar lander would likely need to be cost-plus in order to attract Lockheed as a bidder.”
I fear, however, that the legacy hardware killing this program — SLS, Orion, Gateway, EUS, and all related ground and support systems (like ML-2 and the MCC) — have demonstrated this year that they remain so well politically protected that there’s a kind of collective exhaustion setting in on the effort to cancel them, at least outside of voiced frustration on social media and space blogs and substacks. The Trump NASA transition team, it is said, generally agreed that they should be axed immediately; Russ Vought felt forced to walk that back to cancellation post-Artemis III; and Congressional leadership wasn’t even having any of *that*. And maybe Eric is getting exhausted with it, too. Maybe helping nuke Sean Duffy’s candidacy looked like the only realistic goal.
It may well be that it’s just up to Elon and the Starship team to just go out and win this argument the hard way, as Elon already seems to be hinting now. And just pray that NASA doesn’t kill anyone in the meanwhile.
Charley Camarda waged this fight, and lost. And because of NASA’s utter lack of transparency in sharing any details of the heat shield problem and the process of mitigation that their engineers came up with, I can’t even evaluate whether Camarda was right or the Orion team is right, or somewhere in between. All I know is that once upon a time, NASA would have flight tested out this solution before putting human beings on it.
It may be that this altered reentry profile *will* work. I certainly hope it does. But we shouldn’t have to rest that hope on a bin empty of empirical data,
P.S. As a sidebar, the youtuber Eager Space, who I have referenced here before, was expressing his deep frustration with NASA’s opacity on the heat shield issue just yesterday: he wanted to do a video on it, but felt there wasn’t enough information to even attempt an analysis. What he *did* end up finding was the agency’s “Orion Heat Shield 25 00472 F JSC Final Determination Package” from last August, which was just posted on the Internet Archive yesterday. And if you go download it, what you will find is a document that is redacted to heck and back. So, basically, useless.
https://archive.org/details/orion-heat-shield-25-00472-f-jsc-final-determination-package/mode/2up
Richard M: That redacted document is a disgrace, and it also might be illegal. NASA is required by law to be open about everything it does. The redactions here have no justification under any condition. NASA certainly can’t claim national security.
The real reason this report is censored is because it likely reveals how little they understand what happened to the heat shield, and management decided this needed to be hidden or else the lid would blow off their idiocy.
I should add that this needs to be reported. Stand by for a full post later today.
”Not one went into any depth as to why this program is delayed…”
The program was delayed because SpaceX is four years behind schedule on Starship. Almost every article mentioned the Starship part — most in the headline — but not the four years part.
”…the focus was always entirely on SpaceX…”
The focus was on SpaceX because SPACEX IS THE CAUSE OF THE DELAY. Starship is four years behind schedule, and its schedule is moving to the right at the rate of one year per year.
”As expected, Elon Musk responded yesterday with anger and insults…”
And this is absolutely unhinged. The man is not well. For the CEO of a major company to attack its largest customer with childish insults, calling its head “dumb” and “gay”, is greatly concerning. If Musk didn’t own the company he would be having a day-long meeting with the board today that would conclude with the announcement of his departure. As it is, there will be long meetings at many of SpaceX’s customers to figure out what they can do about it.
Hi Bob,
I am sure that NASA will claim ITAR reasons.
And I agree, you wonder what the point is in releasing this if they are just going to black out what looks like 95% of the content. The fact that it took the OIG to reveal to the public what had happened in the first place doesn’t exactly dissuade us from assuming the worst reasons!
Eager Space also posted this: “Artemis I Post Flight Assessment Review 24 00817 F GSFC Final Determination Package.” Nothing is blacked out, and it hardly matters, because it’s just a 100 page PowerPoint presentation that actually doesn’t tell us much, either.
https://archive.org/details/24-00817-f-gsfc-final-determination-package_202510/page/2/mode/2up
:sigh: