If anything I expect Harris to embrace space–you have to be pro-something.

The gender/race thing is getting old with voters.

Honestly, whilst they obviously hate and loathe Elon Musk now, I don’t think anyone at the White House cares much about Artemis either way (though they seem to moderately appreciate the diplomatic leverages of the Artemis Accords, as they interpret them). But if NASA does not swing much stick in the administration, the Defense Department certainly does. And DoD sees at least as much value in Starship as NASA does, if not more! Odds are, in fact, that the DoD will end up spending *a lot* more on Starship operations than NASA will over the next ten years. Heaven knows, DoD and NRO would be completely up the creek sans paddles if it weren’t for Falcon 9 right now!

So this leaves Biden’s team (and if she is elected, God help us, Harris’s) in a sticky jam. They get hard pushback from across the river and at Fort Meade if they get too obvious throwing spanners into SpaceX’s gears. The result seems to be opting for more indirect forms of lawfare, with various employment enforcement actions or selective leaks to friendly media that could slowly bleed SpaceX or even intimidate Elon while, they hope, other more docile launch providers eventually emerge to supply enough of the deficit for DoD’s needs. Even this might be crediting them with more actual planning or cleverness than they deserve, though.

They’ve been saying that consistently about the EIS’s for the two locations at the Cape all along, actually.

Which, yes, is very disappointing. But it’s no worse than the norm for an EIS timeline like this, and better than some (which says something about how the FAA and these other agencies work). It is clear, at any rate, that a lot of work will be done nonetheless by SpaceX at the LC-39A location, where the launch tower is already largely complete, and work has recently resumed on ground infrastructure. That may at least accelerate *its* timeline when the EIS is finally granted, if not for the SLC-37/SLC-50 locations. Until then, all Starship launch tests are going to have to be done from Boca Chica, which is no doubt why SpaceX is working double tides to get the second orbital launch pad into operation as quickly as possible.

Elon didn’t pay the 10% for the Big Guy.

As Robert observes, “[t]he impact on the schedule of NASA’s Artemis program will thus be significant. This almost certainly pushes back that manned lunar landing several years, possibly into the 2030s (something I have long been predicting).” And, [w]ithout doubt its main consequence will be to delay development of Superheavy and Starship, with grave consequences for both NASA and SpaceX.”

Exactly. Can we now just state what is becoming increasingly obvious? This administration, for whatever reasons, does not really *want / intend* to go back to the moon, and they have adopted this passive aggressive methodology to insure that it doesn’t happen.

Meanwhile, the Chinese comrades apparently *are* very serious about establishing bases / colonies on the moon, and that seems perfectly fine with the lovely people behind the Harris-Biden Administration. What conclusions might be drawn from this?