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:
Mkent,
<blockquoteThe 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.
Yes, SpaceX is behind….OK, looks like probably 4 years. But you know as well as I that 2024 was never a realistic deadline — not for a vehicle development program contract that was only signed in April 2021 and only freed from lawfare in November 20021! It took Grumman over 7 years to do the Lunar Module — on crash program funding!
But look, Starship is not the only component delayed. Artemis II is only happening in 1Q 2026, and *at best*, NASA will not have the SLS and Orion ready for Artemis III until well into 2027.
Meanwhile, Eric Berger informs us that Axiom is not going to be ready with the EVA suits by 2027, either.
So, there are multiple reasons why this is delayed. But the timeline was never realistic in the first place.
Elon is not just the owner of an outright majority (79% voting control) of stock; he is also the CEO, chairman, and CTO, too. He’s still indispensable to the company’s ability to raise capital. He isn’t going anywhere unless he dies. I think SpaceX’s stakeholders and customers have just priced behavior like this into their calculations, long ago. The usual rules and expectations just don’t apply to him.
To be fair, Soyuz-U flew 786 times, and that still holds the all-time launch record.
Of course, Soyuz-U also retired in 2017. (It also had 21 failures, which is way more than Falcon 9.)
Falcon 9 looks to be on track to take that record, too, by 2027. Meanwhile, it must content itself with the record for most total launches among *active* orbital class launch vehicles.
mkent: Hm, I seem to remember that the original target date for the first Orion/SLS lunar mission was going to be 2017. Then 2018. Then 2019. Then 2020. Then 2021. Then 2022, when NASA FINALLY did that first unmanned flight around the Moon.
The first manned mission was then supposed to be in 2024. Then 2025. Now 2026 is the date.
SpaceX didn’t get involved in this until 2021, when it was awarded the Starship lunar lander contract. To claim that “SPACEX IS THE CAUSE OF THE DELAY” (in CAPS as you wrote it) is absurd.
Moreover, a large percentage of the delay at SpaceX is because of the Biden administration’s effort to undermine Musk and his company with unnecessary red tape. The company would have probably completed about five to seven additional launches now if Biden hadn’t acted to slow things down.
mkent: When was the Orion contract first awarded to LM? When were the SLS contracts first awarded to Boeing and NG? How much taxpayer money has been spent on those items? How many Orion/SLS flights have taken place? When did those flights occur? When was the HLS contract awarded to SpaceX? How much taxpayer money has been spent on that contract? How much internal corporate funds have been spent by LM, Boeing, and NG on Orion SLS? How much internal corporate funds have been spent by SpaceX on Starship and HLS? What is the current percentage of mass to orbit among the world’s launch providers, by name? Which US launch provider has flown many NASA and private crewed missions to space since 2020? Which spacecraft contractor, despite 1.5x taxpayer funding, has in the same time period managed to NOT fly any successful crewed missions to ISS or anywhere else? Which launch providers have proven reusability for the last decade? When will you get a clue? These are all questions for which I’d like to hear your answers.
Robert Zimmerman wrote: “And worst of all, it has made the schedule as its primary focus for when things will happen, not good engineering.”
and
“Even with a changed flight path to minimize stress, this is not what honest engineers do, when it comes to risking human life.”
Good engineering would fully understand the problem and would perform at least one unmanned flight test in order to make sure that there was a good fix, not a hope and a prayer that a different trajectory would prevent the same problem from happening again. Not a reduction in the problem, but a prevention. This is yet another kluge in the project, and an especially dangerous one.
Richard M is right that they need empirical data, not some form of modeling. Modeling is what got them the problem in the first place. An incorrect model gave them confidence the first time, and some form of model has replaced testing for this “solution.” Do they really know and understand the temperatures and conditions that cause this problem, or are they possibly making it worse by guessing (to paraphrase Eugene Kranz in the Apollo 13 incident).
If the problem can occur and lower temperatures, the temperatures of the new trajectory, then how do they know that the longer dwell time at those temperatures will not result in additional pieces breaking off, possibly leaving the capsule shell exposed.
Artemis I was the only unmanned flight test of this heat shield, and it failed. The correct solution is to change to a better heat shield and test it, also unmanned.
“Both Trump and Duffy want that manned lunar landing to occur before Trump leaves office …”
Wouldn’t it be nice if the same president who chose to go to the Moon also got to talk to the astronauts on the Moon? “Congratulations on being the first woman and the first person of color to walk on the Moon.” Kennedy didn’t get to talk to the astronauts, but Nixon did, getting all the glory, but he had little to do with that success.
Of course, the president who chose to go to the Moon this time was Bush, but his project got cancelled by his envious successor, who chose to go to an asteroid with the hardware that was ill equipped to perform that job, either.
To be fair to Obama….yeah, Leroy Chiao is doubtless right that some of his motivation was partisan and personal. But the Augustine Committee had demonstrated that killing Constellation actually was good *policy*, too. And Obama had wanted to kill *all* of it. But by late spring he added Orion back in in a vaguely defined multi-purpose role as Senate opposition mounted; by September, he had been forced to accept salvaging a super heavy lift rocket (which became SLS in 2011) to the Senate leadership in exchange for funding for Commercial Crew, which he did not get much of until FY 2015, thanks to certain developments in Crimea….
After that he didn’t care what SLS or Orion did, they were just job programs he had been forced to accept. It was up to NASA to figure out some kind of missions for it, so long as they did not involve the Moon. Aside from cost-free #JourneyToMars hashtags and renders on social media, the various iterations of the Asteroid Retrieval Mission was the best they could come up with, and no one either at NASA or on the Hill was enthusiastic about ’em. (Lori Garver talks about this a little in her recent book.) But it hardly mattered since it had become obvious that SLS/Orion wouldn’t be flying until well after Obama was out of office, so it would end up being his successor’s problem.
Like millions of people, more than read those news sources, I saw the stuff real time on X. My guess is that the audience for the remarks Elon made are the SpaceX employees, all of whom are working hard and know what is going on. Yes and even stock holders. Anyone who can see what is really going on. That includes a lot of NASA people who must be in awe and/or satisfied in doing their part in helping the US recover from depending on Russia to get to ISS and for engines for ULA for our military needs. Really people, those were bad times. Absurd in retrospect. As for the Moon one can hope that China has or will discover proof of something actually valuable enough to be worth claiming and sending things as large as Starships to bring back.
Fuel depots in orbit obviously drive the next phase of exploration.
Richard M wrote: “… the various iterations of the Asteroid Retrieval Mission was the best they could come up with, and no one either at NASA or on the Hill was enthusiastic about ’em.”
Asteroid scientists were not enthusiastic, either. They thought that far more asteroids could be examined for far less expense with robotic probes. In this case, I agree. Often I believe that a man on the scene is the best scientist, but we are not yet ready for such personal relationships with asteroids.
______________
GeorgeC wrote: “That includes a lot of NASA people who must be in awe and/or satisfied in doing their part in helping the US recover from depending on Russia to get to ISS and for engines for ULA for our military needs. Really people, those were bad times. Absurd in retrospect.”
As I recall, the U.S. believed two things, that the ex-Soviet Russians were friendly, and that by keeping the Russians busy cooperating with the U.S. they would not be selling their technology to China, Iran, and North Korea, so those countries would not get rocket technology.
“Fuel depots in orbit obviously drive the next phase of exploration.”
They could help increase the mass for interplanetary missions. Had they been available three decades ago, for example, New Horizons may not have had to make nasty tradeoffs between instrumentation and communication speed, with a more massive spacecraft launching without propellant, then fueling up on orbit for the mission.
Manned missions to various planets can be made with more massive spacecraft and carry heavier payloads. It is the difference between Robert Zubrin’s Mars Direct proposal and Elon Musk’s Mars Colony proposal. Zubrin’s proposal would prove the concept and do a little preparation for colonization. Musk’s proposal colonizes the planet, and all because of refilling propellant tanks in orbit. What a difference a tiny concept makes.
Edward noted: “Kennedy didn’t get to talk to the astronauts, but Nixon did, getting all the glory, but he had little to do with that success.”‘
I don’t know that Nixon got any glory out of it. Short-term, maybe, but everyone knows Kennedy’s 1962 Rice University speech; Nixon’s phone call is a historical footnote. Watergate put paid to Nixon’s legacy.
mkent,
“Starship is four years behind schedule, and its schedule is moving to the right at the rate of one year per year.”
I don’t think a reasonable case can be made that Starship is more than three years behind schedule – 2025 accounting for about six months of that. The idea that Starship is in some sort of open-ended slide rightward is simply risible – which will be readily apparent in a matter of months.
“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.”
It’s splenetic, but hardly “unhinged.” The man is fine. If these remarks had come out of the blue, you would have a far better case. But Duffy threw the first punch.
I don’t think Duffy is “unhinged” either, but – if he is not running a psyop on Elon – I think it is also fair to question the wisdom of dumping on one’s largest contractor when there is no plausible alternative that will get one the results one alleges to want. Absent some 4-D chess motivation here, the move has the smell of unwarranted panic about it.
I doubt any of SpaceX’s current or prospective customers will concern themselves much with this broughaha. Results will trump occasional departures from decorum for anyone with sense. I would be more inclined to think other NASA contractors – outside of the OldSpace stalwarts and Blue – might be the ones more inclined toward having meetings to discuss Duffy’s behavior.
Edward,
Zubrin, unfortunately, has spent far too much of his life concocting MacGyver-esque schemes to do barely more than flags and footprints on Mars on starvation-level funding. In fairness, that was pretty much a necessity for a long time. But somewhere along the way, Zubrin seems to have convinced himself that minginess is a virtue for its own sake. His criticisms of Musk’s Mars plans pretty much boil down to their being way too big to suit his tastes. Time and events, I think, are – sad to say – passing Zubrin by.
This is a bit of kabuki theater by Musk and Duffy. Duffy cannot directly challenge the hodgepodge SLS-based moon mission, due to the need to keep AL senators on board. But as Starship development and deployment ramp up, and Starlink profits toll in, Musk can simply send a mission to the Moon and late 2028 isn’t necessarily off the table, at least not for an unmanned test mission. Once Musk presents a fait accompli to Trump & NASA, we can Lance the SLS boil by canceling the program, with 5-10 years’ wages paid to employees, up to $120k/year.
David C Herr: Your predictions are very likely right, but there is an additional concern that no one wants to face. In the interim NASA intends to fly four astronauts around the Moon next spring in a capsule that has a questionable heat shield and an untested environmental system. While playing this kabuki theater game, NASA is risking the lives of these astronauts, and that is unconscionable.
Dick Eagleson,
The original schedule was Starship taking people around the Moon in 2023, so the 2017 schedule has slipped a bit. Plus, many months or even years were added to SpaceX’s schedule by multi-months-long delays of the FAA in accepting corrective action reports for several development flights, where the FAA seemed to treat development as operations.
But you are very much correct that SpaceX has made tremendous progress this year alone. The loss of this year’s first two flights gave lessons implemented that are far better learned now than later. There have been many lessons learned about thermal protections as well as the lack thereof. It is possible that in an area where they had intentionally left off four tiles, that there was burn-through into the fuel tank. If so, then that gives a huge amount of information about the safety of the craft as well as an idea for future protection requirements in the event of burn-through. The vehicle may not be serviceable after such an event, but a crew is able to land safely.
I agree that Zubrin’s ideas are now far out of date. They were inspiring at the time, but engineers at SpaceX saw a greater challenge than mere boots and footprints on Mars, with a little exploration rounding out the project. SpaceX is now working on meeting the colonization challenge using methods and hardware that were unthinkable a mere ten years ago, when Falcon Heavy seemed impressive for its development cost and reusability was still a dream trying to come true.