Comments on: Senate passes NASA authorization that calls for second lunar lander contract

By: Jeff Wright

Jeff Wright — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 03:34:52 +0000

I think a fall-back option is wise….cut everything but NASA-the eternal whipping boy of Randians who ought to pave their own private roads to and from work.
A lunar starship should carry heavy rovers and be kept as a base. Come back with Orion as starship proves itself in this new environment over time. Two modes of ascent. This allows a mission to succeed even if starship crashes. We beat China either way.

By: Tom Billings

Tom Billings — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 18:00:59 +0000

“It looks like some/ many senators want to spend ten billion of taxpayer dollars to ensure good press from the Bezos’s Washington Post. ”

That’s the smaller end of things. What Senator Cantwell has done is to rally Senate colleges to a defense of the status quo they created for the aerospace industry by at least 1987. The Aerospace contractors are vassals of those who provide them funding to employ workers in “the right districts”, who will know just whose tenure in the Senate they want, to protect their own jobs. The power is wielded by the source of the funding, not the funnels that pass it through to aerospace workers/voters. The Senate apparently agrees with Cantwell.

They want their vassals employed, to keep sending them back to their center of power on the Senate floor.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 17:36:53 +0000

It looks like some/ many senators want to spend ten billion of taxpayer dollars to ensure good press from the Bezos’s Washington Post. If true, that’s just pathetic and another data point in the story of the decline of the Globalist American Empire. The success of SpaceX in contrast to SLS has embarrassed the elites of this Empire, so they have to throw support and dollars at SpaceX’s competitors.

By: Trent Castanaveras

Trent Castanaveras — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 17:07:16 +0000

This contract would barely affect Spacex’s pace in the slightest, whether it was won, shared or lost. Lunar Starship is a unique, almost one-off craft sharing some commonality with production Starship, which is already on track to be privately fully funded with clear milestones to the final product.

The only value SpaceX garners from doing it at all is the ability to directly tap into NASA’s deep space long-term human support technologies. That’s a requirement for Martian flights, and so this may shave some time from developing it on their own.