https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/

My understanding is that the “skip” was that the capsule came in somewhat low in the atmosphere, then went higher than it had been but never went above the “entry interface” altitude. After it reached that second high point, the capsule then went deeper and deeper into the atmosphere until parachute deployment and splashdown.

“China, for some reason, wants to copy Elon.”

Given that Elon’s company is literally launching 90% of all payload mass to orbit, globally, a majority of all humans to orbit, and now operates 7 out of 10 satellites active in Earth orbit, it’s not so hard to why the Chinese might see him as worthy of emulation.

pzatchok: They are not returning at higher speeds than Apollo. And they were always going to do the skip maneuver with Orion. They have just modified it somewhat to protect the heat shield.

The problem is simply they are using a questionable heat shield design with an untested flight profile and doing it with humans on board. The problem is the heat shield itself, not the speed of return.

The way they were talking was that anything coming back from the moon is coming is with no way to slow down and the vehicle could punch through the atmosphere so fast the parachutes might not work.

Its like they took everything from Apollo and tossed it out a window.

pzatchok: If I understand correctly what you mean by a “skip style entry,” all the Apollo missions returning from the Moon did this, hitting the top of the atmosphere once, skipping off, and then slipping back in to return to Earth. This was done to slow the vehicle down, since it was coming back at much higher speeds (25,000 mph) compared to orbital craft (17,000 mph).

Similarly aero-braking (using the atmosphere as a brake) has also been done by Mars Orbiters, as well as by the X-37B in Earth orbit.

The number of times to “hide” behind that argument is the number of times it takes to make the rocket operational, fully reusable with rapid turnaround time and more capacity than either New Glenn or SLS — or any other rocket ever made, for that matter.

We were also expecting New Glenn and SLS much earlier, too. For SLS it was a decade ago, before Starship was even announced, where SLS uses existing hardware and Starship started from scratch.

SLS’s turnaround time between first and second launches makes New Glenn’s turnaround time seem instantaneous. Weren’t we all expecting Artemis 2 much earlier? “NASA Time” makes Elon Time seem instantaneous, too.

Come to think of it, we don’t know whether Orion is ready for a crew, either, but NASA is planning to test it — uncertified and with a known-to-be faulty heat shield — with a real crew, not in low Earth orbit like Apollo 7 (or Crew Dragon, or Starliner, or Gemini, or even the Space Shuttle) but in cislunar orbit like the certified Apollo 8 spacecraft.

Some people have infinite patience for their favored yet obsolete rocket (obsolete by Saturn V standards, half a century ago) but no patience for the rocket that breaks the boundaries of what we considered to be reality a mere decade ago (when SLS was supposed to launch).

“Despite damages, New Glenn and SLS (real rockets I can them) are set to launch real missions.”

And how many decades have they been in development and what is their turnaround time for reuse?

“China, for some reason, wants to copy Elon.”

Imagine that! Someone wants to emulate amazing success. I wonder why they don’t what to copy SLS.

“As a concept, Kistler (the two-stage trash-can–not the bed-post design) seems much easier to implement. Parachutes and airbags–no hoverslams.”

Everything is much easier when it is expendable instead of reusable. e.g. Kleenex® vs. handkerchief: one-use then throw it away vs. use it, store it, wash it, iron it, fold it back into your pocket.

“But again, Starship is still deep in development. It’s not remotely ready to carry crew yet. No one pretends otherwise.”

There are only so many times Starship apologists can hide behind that argument—this is where “Elon Time” and over-promising things comes home to roost. This last outing was impressive–but weren’t we all expecting that much earlier?

Despite damages, New Glenn and SLS (real rockets I can them) are set to launch real missions.

China, for some reason, wants to copy Elon.

As a concept, Kistler (the two-stage trash-can–not the bed-post design) seems much easier to implement. Parachutes and airbags–no hoverslams.

But China always wants what we have–and so instead of having one SpaceX—they want several…thinking that one of the heads will have Elon’s gifts. They find that person…who knows?

Then again, there is an element of unreality to the whole thing simply given that it was a known premise that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos were going to be footing the bill for most of the cost of each of these landing systems ANYWAY. Indeed, it was a feature, because otherwise, NASA simply could not afford to obtain a lander with the funding Congress provided them (which was less than a third of what Bridenstine requested).

What *would* a lunar lander procured on traditional cost-plus contracts have cost NASA, given the architecture requirements? There was an interesting exchange between Eric Berger and Robotbeat (good guy to follow) the other day about this very question — someone has worked up a calculus for that. $25-26 billion, which is not far off what I’ve been guessing . . . though of course, one should add on some margin for the inevitable schedule delays. Probably over $30 billion when all is said and done, I suspect.

https://x.com/Robotbeat/status/1980276393612100088

NASA is only paying a small fraction of that for TWO landing systems. And yet, here’s everyone inside the Beltway whining because these tremendously ambitious landing systems are running into some development delays, and by gosh we can’t let the Chinese get there first.

Richard M: Thank you. These numbers are incredible, and once again indicate the utter delusional nature of the people running things in DC.

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_80MSFC23CA014_8000_-NONE-_-NONE-

It appears that they have been paid $835 million in milestone payments so far.

Jack Kuhr of Payload has a nice summary of the payouts here on his X account yesterday, with an official statement from NASA he obtained:

https://x.com/JackKuhr/status/1981012949847151083

The last milestone payment of $75,000,000 was awarded on September 26th, with $2,666,641,458 outlayed of $4,036,835,541 total current award — at least, that is the last officially released. You can see that here on the official USA Spending contract page:

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_80MSFC20C0034_8000_-NONE-_-NONE-

You can see the accompanying graph that Kuhr notes in his X post, showing $2.7 billion paid out, out of $3.0 billion obligated under the initial NextStep-2 contract in 2021 (those are clearly rounded figures).

I know it seems hard to believe that so much has been paid out. But that was the way NASA structured it.

I agree that Elon is actually unlikely to walk away, But he sure does sound fed up right now. Some of his ultimate course of action may depend on who gets picked to fill the NASA job.

Richard M: Please provide a source concerning the milestone payments to SpaceX for its Starship lunar lander. It seems to me unlikely that SpaceX has “been paid most of the milestones.” All the work so far is unrelated directly with landing on the Moon (except for the development of the elevator to get the astronauts down to the ground).

Either way, I think Musk won’t walk away, but will use his considerable leverage to force NASA to back off from its stupidity. If he threatens to leave if they don’t, what can they do? Despite Duffy’s announcement this week NASA really has no other options besides SpaceX.

If it gets bad enough, he WILL take his bat and ball and go home.

I kinda feel like he’s getting close to that point. (I would be, too.)

And after all….SpaceX has already achieved and been paid on most of the milestones of the HLS contract, meaning they’ve already received most of that $2.9 billion. Because NASA decided to front-load the milestone payments. So….there is not much to lose by bailing out, is there?

From what I am hearing, this is a real problem with NASA management: most of them simply do not understand what it takes to close a business case on these fixed cost contracts. They think, “Yay, we’re doing it the commercial way!” without understanding what commercial vendors actually need to make it a viable proposition. It is a small miracle that Commercial LEO Destinations was finally restructured to actually reflect this on some real level. But it sounds like HLS and CLPS (or, I think, the EVA suit program) haven’t received that course correction yet.

I think McAlister (the guy who saved SpaceX;s Commercial Crew bid at the last minute in 2014) understood this. But you will note that he has been retired out now.

But it may be that what Phil McAlister is trying to say, as Casey has it, is that this sort of thing is happening at much greater scale with HLS and CLPS than it was with Commercial Crew or CRS.

Richard M: Musk won’t tolerate this kind of stupidity. If it gets bad enough, he WILL take his bat and ball and go home. As I and you and many others here have noted, he now has enough financing to build his own space program, without NASA. If NASA is going to cost him money, why work with it?

Since we’re on the subject of NASA’s lack of transparency, you might be interested in what Casey Handmer had to say today:

I don’t like to talk out of school but there’s one key way that HLS is being run differently to the original successful commercial cargo Dragon mission.

With Dragon, NASA specified operational requirements and let SpaceX and Boeing figure out the rest.

With HLS (and CLIPS by Phil McAllister’s account) NASA just will not stop adding bad requirements to the program late in the game. Literally hundreds of them.

Let SpaceX cook.

NASA’s current playbook seems to be:

“Congratulations on yet another Falcon flight/Dragon flight/Starship test/Starlink launch. We’re concerned that HLS is behind schedule, so we asked around the office and found a few hundred more system requirements to add, now that we’re several years into the design. We’re aware that several of them are internally contradictory, and many more will force expensive, time consuming, complex, and dangerous engineering choices, but we’re really struggling to adequately convey the level of contempt we have for your ability to do your own job. So we didn’t bother to check our own work. You’re welcome!”

NASA is a publicly funded civilian agency. Release the full set of HLS requirements.

https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1981144777648423076

If we can’t force this out of NASA by FOIA, I wonder if pressure on the White House to lean on the agency might work?

There were some brief glimpses on the Flight 10 Livestream that I recall seeing.

But again, Starship is still deep in development. It’s not remotely ready to carry crew yet. No one pretends otherwise.

If all goes well, the currently designated Artemis 2 crew can then fly Artemis 3 using the same heat shield as Artemis 1 & 2. Their recompense for having to wait longer to fly is that two, and possibly three, of them get to walk on the Moon.

I can’t argue with making Artemis II an uncrewed test, but keeping Artemis III as the first landing attempt means, literally, trying to do a landing attempt on the very first crewed flight of Orion. That will inevitably add risk to the mission.

We haven’t seen any photos of the interior of Starship on re-entry.
If you were to look at the interior of Orion, what would you see?

That is what counts.

I would gladly volunteer to ride Arty 2.

On Starship’s role to outer planets:
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-starship-uranus.html
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11068722

That might wind up being the best use.

In terms of my willingness to ride ANY iteration of Starship?

I’d feel safer playing Russian Roulette with a magazine-fed.

What I think we need is a total rethink leading to perhaps a new direction and follow through. We’ve done the race to the lunar surface trick before. It is NOT worth risking 4 lives in Artemis II. The Orion capsule feels like a cobbled together, slightly improved Apollo that has intentionally included all sorts of vendors (including ESA) more to make everyone happy then as a reasonable design. None of this inspires confidence, We lost three good men rushing with Apollo 1 and nearly another 3 in Apollo 13. The shuttle killed 14 in a large part due to rushing and NASA management not wanting to admit there were issues.

Current Dragon Crew/Falcon9 is likely not up to the task as I don’t think a straight up Falcon 9 could get a Dragon Crew into a lunar orbit. Maybe a Falcon 9 heavy (although that is NOT officially man rated). Dragon Crew has a 10-day free flying upper limit currently I think Polaris Dawn is its longest untethered flight at 5 days. I don’t think Crew Dragon’s heat shield would be up to a direct or even skip reentry from lunar orbit. And there is still the matter of a descent vehicle. Lunar Starship seems best bet but that is still a ways off and needs things (eg on orbit refuel and Starship Tankers) that haven’t even been done at test levels let alone full fuel transfers. Honestly something Starship based with perhaps an Earth orbit transfer to a dedicated lunar vehicle? ISS would be a nice waypoint to use but that is kind of falling apart and has the issue of arguing with Russians, ESA and JAXA over timing. There are the commercial station designs but most of those are sadly, well moonshine.

Honestly, we need to figure out what the PURPOSE of this would be. Just to say we beat the Chinese? Seems a dumb way to waste 5-10 billion dollars (or more with Artemis perhaps 60 million). If we want more permanent or semi permanent access then there is infrastructure that needs to be made. And what the heck do we want that for? He3 experiments? Far side observatories? Future Mars Work? There is some value in learning to live in that hostile an environment (Witness Antarctica). I’m certain we’d learn more selenology and related stuff; we only looked at a few spots in our 6 landings. As much as part of me longs for Luna City, the rational part of me says, what value does it get us?

If all does not go well, then we will have dodged a bullet. The only hope of Beating the Chinese[tm] then becomes whether or not SpaceX can produce both a working and tested HLS and a working and tested SLS-Orion replacement by, say, 2028 or 2029. I’m thinking the answer to that question is yes.

I will be crossing everything I can both on launch and especially re-entry. As Bob says, if everything goes swimmingly it will be as much luck as due diligence.

No one with enough knowledge to even have an opinion on this matter wishes harm on the astronauts.

To even suggest that there are folks that do ( with zero evidence ) is disingenuous at best… Using one of the tactics “the left” are regularly accused of on this forum.

A little more faith in humanity is called for here, especially regarding those of us with more than 3 functional braincells.

How about “New Duffy”?

The current conversation between Right and Left:

“I don’t murder [people],”

“I do, if I have to”

Or, ask Ryan Routh.

Because if they fail…if astronauts die because of the heat shield…it’s not a surprise, to all of us, like Challenger. They were amply warned.

NASA will cease to exist as anything but a paper management organization if that flight kills astronauts..