Well ... Boeing got themselves into the perfect storm. They need this flight to work right, after the catastrophic first attempt. But the longer they wait to get things right, the more eyebrows will be raised. They need a good flight, now.
But they do not determine the schedule - it's determined by NASA, which has about a thousand problems of itself right now, and cannot afford to screw up either.
I do not envy anyone in that chain of delivery right now.
You just did. The counter reply is that true capitalism drove NASA. The original space programs were built with hundreds of contractors selected from thousands of bids. The entire purpose of NASA was to create a viable commercial space program.
Now we have two choices for some reason.
I beat this drum a lot.. but this is "monopoly" and "oligarchy."
Because its an insanely difficult problem when you have to be 99.9999% sure you won't kill an astronaut because we generally don't have the "if they die it sucks for them" attitude with space anymore.
> we generally don't have the "if they die it sucks for them" attitude with space anymore.
We kind of do though, although we strongly pretend we don't. Each time after Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia, NASA has made a show of reforming their safety culture but either not sticking to it ot not actually doing it beyond a superficial level. Most recently, there has been a developing issue with the Artemis program. The Artemis I mission, unmanned, was intended to validate all the design and modeling of the Orion spacecraft before people fly on it. It was subsequently discovered that the Orion heat shield suffered severe damage during reentry, partially falling apart in a way that wasn't expected.
At this point, a space program which actually takes the preservation of human life as seriously as NASA claims would postpone the manned Artemis II flight and fly more test missions until they get the Orion heat shield to perform as expected. But that's not what NASA is doing. They are instead proceeding with Artemis II, confident that this time their modeling is accurate. Instead of reentering with the trajectory they tested, they're going to send humans on a completely new reentry trajectory they have never tested before. Their modeling failed to predict the heat shield damage that occurred during Artemis I, but now they are trusting their modeling to keep people alive for Artemis II. It's totally wreckless.
And yeah yeah, it's mostly Congress's fault, NASA funding and all that, SLS costs too much and NASA doesn't have any more to spare for tests and they don't have time anyway with the politically imposed deadlines, etc etc.
Seems like letting the hand wringing pearl clutching public weigh in on these things was perhaps a mistake and we should be doing it the way we do every other dangerous or bleeding edge thing. There's a big enough pool of guys who'll jump off cliffs in wing suits or whatever that surely we can spare a few to put on rockets.
(Spare me the lecture about people who have no better choice feeling pressured to do so for money. Seems like every other navigable waterway in North America is named after someone who could've lived comfortably but continued sailing off into the unknown until he didn't come back. People do this stuff for glory more than money.)
when they'll finally manage to put it to orbit and come back without a dramatic issue, the space station will already be decommissioned, sad for Boeing
"Musk, who has been engaged in a high-profile feud with US President Donald Trump, on Thursday threatened to decommission the Dragon before later saying the spacecraft would stay in operation."
That was their excuse. But they probably knew it already upfront, and of course Trump himself has done so and obviously knows that rich people donate to both parties just to cover their bases and that it means relatively little.
I think it's more likely that Jared was pulled at the suggestion of some staffers that never liked him or Musk in the first place but weren't able to get their way with Trump as long as Musk was still around.
Nah thats bait and the simple answer. Nothing to do with musk it was all known before the relations. Space was not ready for Jared and it denied him. Wonder why? Well if you do a little digging you will see he has some really bad news about him. Like no person on Earth would want to work with him when they listen to what comes out of his mouth. I wonder if there are recordings of him there sure is a book of his actions.
Basically they pulled a fast one on Musk, who believed that with his giant (300$ million give or take) donation would be able to get his preferred candidate to NASA.
The fact that he was quite competent and generally liked doesn’t matter to Trump, who seems set on defunding NASA and having someone there who won’t complain.
NASA making their own rockets/spacecraft certainly wouldn't make the government leaner. NASA was always using contractors, but usually NASA was taking a bigger part in the development/operation of rockets/spacecraft. For human spaceflight, that changed with the Commercial Crew Program, with the contracts for the development of the crewed spacecraft that would be designed, produced and operated entirely by commercial companies. SpaceX received $2.6 billion for the development of Dragon, Boeing received $4.2 billion for Starliner. So SpaceX was the cheaper option, and they started operational crewed missions to ISS in 2020. Boeing got much more money, and in 2025 they still don't have an operational spacecraft.
Commercial Crew Program (and also commercial resupply flights to the ISS) started during Obama presidency, so we can thank Obama for commercializing space and making NASA leaner and saving taxpayer dollars.
That was a pretty dumb tweet as it gives Trump all the ammo to put SpaceX under close government scrutiny and/or make plans to nationalize it, or whatever whimsical thing he can think of to hurt Musk.
It's kind of crazy how he can get away with increasing taxes, increasing debt, cronyism, price controls, demolish law and order and convince his base he's doing the opposite. I wouldn't be surprised if he pulled off forced nationalization of industry.
It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor, most likely Boeing or Boeing's largest rival, Lockheed-Martin.
They’re in a pissing match. The relationship between SpaceX and the federal government is mutually beneficial. I would be surprised if either follows through on their threats.
It hasn’t. A former advisor, Steve Bannon, suggested it while also suggesting they deport Elon. It is clearly just a swipe at Elon and not “Trump admin” seriously suggesting this.
DoD has now and has always had ultimate authority when it comes to putting things into the space above our heads. Don’t listen to the idealistic millennials and their powerful downvote buttons. ;)
>It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor
I'm sorry but what? SpaceX is private, not public, and regardless the Pentagon has zero power to force any such thing. It's making gobs of money and growing pretty fast (around $12 billion revenue this year, prediction is/was ~$15.5 billion so something like a 30% YoY increase) with most of that from Starlink, then commercial launch and gov launch. It launches more mass to LEO then everyone else on the planet combined by a long shot, for far far less $/kg. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. There would be zero interest on either side in a merger, nor is there any particularly good national security argument for it.
The real plan is the same as it's always been: have a reasonably vibrant set of multiple motivated, competitive commercial launch providers. That'll take years more but is by far the better long term solution, and there are plenty of promising options, like Rocket Lab (their Neutron medium lift rocket is apparently close to maiden flight) and Blue Origin (who finally at last seem to have been shaken up and are actually launching rockets and making engines). Old Space wants out of the launch business, which is why ULA came to be at all.
People are also tossing around "nationalization" as if it's some quick fix too all of a sudden, but nationalization doesn't nullify the 5th Amendment (or 1st). The US government would have to come up with the arguably hundreds of billions of dollars present value of SpaceX, at a time of deep budget cuts, debt worries, and high interest rates. It would also have to win a set of massive lawsuits by an extremely well funded opposition about all aspects of the mess that would drag on for years. And a lot of the value of SpaceX is in its institutional knowledge, culture, key people etc etc. Nationalization could not prevent key people all bailing and destroying much of the capability. This would all be hugely disruptive, at a critical juncture, and a big political mess too. It's concerning how blasé folks can get about expensive, complicated big deal gordian knots.
What you need to know is that the Pentagon has ultimate authority in matters like this (regardless of the contractor’s equity structure) and it has wielded it time and time again throughout the Cold War. SpaceX cannot escape the command structure by “decommissioning” anything. If you use drugs and threaten US interests in jest, you are done. Those are hard rules. Perhaps Musk will wind up emaciated with footlong fingernails living on the top floor of a hotel in Las Vegas or Florida, but he will not still influence the assets at SpaceX in such a state, regardless of his wealth, passion, allegiance, intelligence, charisma, army of sycophants, children named after chemicals, etc. He can work out his relationship with personalities in the US government, but his arse is cooked in terms of command of dual-use orbital transit and communications systems. The people at SpaceX deserve so much better anyway.
Perhaps you'd care to elaborate on what you think this means? Title 2 of the DPA did indeed allow seizing of private property, but like 4, 5, and 6 expired and no longer exists under present law. AFAIK only provisions of 1, 3 and 7 are still in force, and they would at most allow forcing continued Dragon production. I haven't studied it enough to know whether there is caselaw regarding interaction with the Takings Clause but I'm hardly the first to question it, at-the-time BHUA Senate Committee chairman Phil Gramm lead with that on the review of Clinton's use of the DPA for the California energy crisis. And in general commandeering and so on all require just compensation. It's also 2025, not 1955, and I'm highly skeptical the current courts wouldn't be stricter.
That's assuming it even went through at all though and SpaceX wouldn't win an argument for obvious political retaliation or other forbidden reasoning, or wouldn't drag on the legal fight long enough for 47 to be gone and the next POTUS to reverse course.
>The US would have no problem coming up with hundreds of billions.
Have you like, opened a newspaper (physical or virtual) at all since last year? Growing debt is a huge deal, politicians are arguing over single digit billions or even millions. Hundreds of billions is not small potatoes even by American standards at this point, it's more then the entirety of veterans benefits & services, well over double all education, training, employment & social services, triple the entire transportation budget, etc. It'd be a big fucking line item to take on, and would require Congressional funding.
>A private space industry exists despite their plans not because of them.
No, this is completely opposite to reality. The current US private space industry was absolutely the result in large part of a rare modern spell of good policy decisions and sustained support (and absolutely yes, a certain amount of luck, but it's important to create conditions where luck can snowball). Support that has paid off in spades and now is self-sustaining sure, but that's a good thing and doesn't change the vital nature of the bootstrapping period. Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew were critical, as was opening up national security launches then actually embracing it. Multiple providers is now an explicit goal of the DOD and they have repeatedly acted to support it, from awarding NSSL launch contracts with an eye towards which player really needed them to stay in business to being willing to take on more risk for less critical payloads. It hasn't been a short road or one without bumps and conflicting interests, and it's almost a miracle it happened at all given Congress' general shortsightedness and desire to use space almost purely as a vehicle for pork regardless of efficiency, but happen it did (ironically thanks in significant part to Boeing [0]). The contrast with the slow, anemic and visionless efforts of the EU during the same time period is striking.
> Multiple providers is now an explicit goal of the DOD and they have repeatedly acted to support it
I agree with everything you said, but to be precise it was the DoD policy for a long time to have at least two providers. In the 90s it was Lockheed (with Atlas rocket) and Boeing (with Delta rocket). For complicated reasons they were forced to combine their rocket divisions, and they formed a joint company, ULA. But they still had these two rockets, so at least there was redundancy on the technological side, but no competition. After SpaceX entered the launch market, DoD and ULA weren't willing to allow SpaceX (not yet a part of the military-industrial complex) to compete for DoD launches, but SpaceX sued their way into these contracts. And after SpaceX became the cheapest, most reliable and fastest launch provider, the benefits of opening the market are obvious, so there's no coming back to the ULA monopoly (or any other monopoly, at least in launches).
But on the side of NASA resupply/crew programs, yeah, it was a great decision by NASA/government/congress that paid off massively, and allowed today's space boom to happen (and made SpaceX what it is today).
They say “the only US alternative”, which is true, but it’s not the only alternative - nasa paid for seats on Soyuz for many years, and I’m sure they could go back to doing the same. Perhaps China would be willing to sell seats on their launches. Maybe India will be in a position to offer human launches to the U.S. fairly soon - should be up and running by 2027, and they seem to hit their objectives most of the time.
Cooperation with roscosmos seems to have been largely unimpeded by Russia’s political and military actions over the years, so these all seem like realistic possibilities.
Yes, it will be a shame if the U.S. has no launch capability of their own, but short term partisan political thinking is much more important to the electorate than long term national strategic interest.
NASA still cooperates heavily with Roscosmos and American astronauts regularly fly in paid Soyuz seats. The latest one is Johnny Kim who launched in late April on Soyuz MS-27 from Baikonur and will stay on the ISS until december. And Christopher Williams is already scheduled for the next Soyuz mission.
China on the other hand will probably never happen because of the general political climate in the US and this administration in particular.
Also I believe that Russia isn't being paid for astronauts to fly on Soyuz. Instead, cosmonauts fly on Dragon. It's a like-for-like exchange which is mutually beneficial (both countries need the other's cooperation to keep the ISS operational, so these exchanges ensure that can continue if either Soyuz or Dragon are grounded for some reason.)
>nasa paid for seats on Soyuz for many years, and I’m sure they could go back to doing the same
No. Obviously not.
>Perhaps China would be willing to sell seats on their launches.
That would be an extreme humiliation of the US and NASA. Abandoning civil space programs entirely would be preferable.
>Maybe India will be in a position to offer human launches to the U.S. fairly soon - should be up and running by 2027, and they seem to hit their objectives most of the time.
India is nowhere close to the capabilities of the US, China or Russia.
Well ... Boeing got themselves into the perfect storm. They need this flight to work right, after the catastrophic first attempt. But the longer they wait to get things right, the more eyebrows will be raised. They need a good flight, now.
But they do not determine the schedule - it's determined by NASA, which has about a thousand problems of itself right now, and cannot afford to screw up either.
I do not envy anyone in that chain of delivery right now.
[flagged]
You just did. The counter reply is that true capitalism drove NASA. The original space programs were built with hundreds of contractors selected from thousands of bids. The entire purpose of NASA was to create a viable commercial space program.
Now we have two choices for some reason.
I beat this drum a lot.. but this is "monopoly" and "oligarchy."
> Now we have two choices for some reason.
Because its an insanely difficult problem when you have to be 99.9999% sure you won't kill an astronaut because we generally don't have the "if they die it sucks for them" attitude with space anymore.
> we generally don't have the "if they die it sucks for them" attitude with space anymore.
We kind of do though, although we strongly pretend we don't. Each time after Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia, NASA has made a show of reforming their safety culture but either not sticking to it ot not actually doing it beyond a superficial level. Most recently, there has been a developing issue with the Artemis program. The Artemis I mission, unmanned, was intended to validate all the design and modeling of the Orion spacecraft before people fly on it. It was subsequently discovered that the Orion heat shield suffered severe damage during reentry, partially falling apart in a way that wasn't expected.
At this point, a space program which actually takes the preservation of human life as seriously as NASA claims would postpone the manned Artemis II flight and fly more test missions until they get the Orion heat shield to perform as expected. But that's not what NASA is doing. They are instead proceeding with Artemis II, confident that this time their modeling is accurate. Instead of reentering with the trajectory they tested, they're going to send humans on a completely new reentry trajectory they have never tested before. Their modeling failed to predict the heat shield damage that occurred during Artemis I, but now they are trusting their modeling to keep people alive for Artemis II. It's totally wreckless.
And yeah yeah, it's mostly Congress's fault, NASA funding and all that, SLS costs too much and NASA doesn't have any more to spare for tests and they don't have time anyway with the politically imposed deadlines, etc etc.
Seems like letting the hand wringing pearl clutching public weigh in on these things was perhaps a mistake and we should be doing it the way we do every other dangerous or bleeding edge thing. There's a big enough pool of guys who'll jump off cliffs in wing suits or whatever that surely we can spare a few to put on rockets.
(Spare me the lecture about people who have no better choice feeling pressured to do so for money. Seems like every other navigable waterway in North America is named after someone who could've lived comfortably but continued sailing off into the unknown until he didn't come back. People do this stuff for glory more than money.)
And corruption!
when they'll finally manage to put it to orbit and come back without a dramatic issue, the space station will already be decommissioned, sad for Boeing
"Musk, who has been engaged in a high-profile feud with US President Donald Trump, on Thursday threatened to decommission the Dragon before later saying the spacecraft would stay in operation."
Interesting timing.
I'm usually not one to defend Elmo, but it was a response to P47 threatening to defund SpaceX. It's like watching children. Poor USA, poor us.
One thing I wanted to ask somewhere, Jared Isaacman was NOT a Musk pick, or am I not right?
They pulled Jared Isaacman because it was revealed he had donated to Democrats.
That was their excuse. But they probably knew it already upfront, and of course Trump himself has done so and obviously knows that rich people donate to both parties just to cover their bases and that it means relatively little.
I think it's more likely that Jared was pulled at the suggestion of some staffers that never liked him or Musk in the first place but weren't able to get their way with Trump as long as Musk was still around.
Nah thats bait and the simple answer. Nothing to do with musk it was all known before the relations. Space was not ready for Jared and it denied him. Wonder why? Well if you do a little digging you will see he has some really bad news about him. Like no person on Earth would want to work with him when they listen to what comes out of his mouth. I wonder if there are recordings of him there sure is a book of his actions.
Basically they pulled a fast one on Musk, who believed that with his giant (300$ million give or take) donation would be able to get his preferred candidate to NASA.
The fact that he was quite competent and generally liked doesn’t matter to Trump, who seems set on defunding NASA and having someone there who won’t complain.
They knew that from the start. He pretty much said himself it was a retaliation in the Musk/Trump situation.
That's pretty amusing, considering Trump spent decades as a NY Democrat.
Rules for thee, not for me.
Elon too, until 2022.
He was.
[dead]
Wasn't it Musk that was calling for a smaller and leaner government?
By my estimate, SpaceX has saved the US government 10s of billions by reducing launch costs with Falcon 9, developing Dragon, Starlink, etc.
DragonX is the smaller and leaner government.
No, it’s a private for profit corporation.
NASA making their own rockets/spacecraft certainly wouldn't make the government leaner. NASA was always using contractors, but usually NASA was taking a bigger part in the development/operation of rockets/spacecraft. For human spaceflight, that changed with the Commercial Crew Program, with the contracts for the development of the crewed spacecraft that would be designed, produced and operated entirely by commercial companies. SpaceX received $2.6 billion for the development of Dragon, Boeing received $4.2 billion for Starliner. So SpaceX was the cheaper option, and they started operational crewed missions to ISS in 2020. Boeing got much more money, and in 2025 they still don't have an operational spacecraft.
Commercial Crew Program (and also commercial resupply flights to the ISS) started during Obama presidency, so we can thank Obama for commercializing space and making NASA leaner and saving taxpayer dollars.
he got himself on gov watch list after that tweet for sure
Yeah I heard they're gonna start live-tracking his private jet flights
That was a pretty dumb tweet as it gives Trump all the ammo to put SpaceX under close government scrutiny and/or make plans to nationalize it, or whatever whimsical thing he can think of to hurt Musk.
It's kind of crazy how he can get away with increasing taxes, increasing debt, cronyism, price controls, demolish law and order and convince his base he's doing the opposite. I wouldn't be surprised if he pulled off forced nationalization of industry.
Kayfabe
I'm hoping Melon loses his SpaceX security clearances. He routinely commits federal crimes. Everyone else would have lost theirs long ago.
He was never going to decommission Dragon. That was just playground petulance.
There's nothing Putin enjoys more than watching two senior underlings fighting like rats in a sack.
The US space and science programmes are useful collateral damage in this.
It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor, most likely Boeing or Boeing's largest rival, Lockheed-Martin.
Putting SpaceX under the CEO of Boeing would make SpaceX as bad as Boeing, not Boeing as good as SpaceX.
Also, it's still America. Good luck to anyone trying to "force" SpaceX, a private company, to do anything they don't want.
They may try to fix Boeing with SpaceX because they must take every effort to fix what went wrong there. They do have several other options though.
Trump admin has suggested using wartime powers to nationalize SpaceX. They're already using those powers for deportations.
I don't know if they seriously want to do it, but whether they can do it is up to a highly sympathetic SCOTUS.
They’re in a pissing match. The relationship between SpaceX and the federal government is mutually beneficial. I would be surprised if either follows through on their threats.
It hasn’t. A former advisor, Steve Bannon, suggested it while also suggesting they deport Elon. It is clearly just a swipe at Elon and not “Trump admin” seriously suggesting this.
DoD has now and has always had ultimate authority when it comes to putting things into the space above our heads. Don’t listen to the idealistic millennials and their powerful downvote buttons. ;)
"it's still America"
Is it?
What would be the goal?
>It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor
I'm sorry but what? SpaceX is private, not public, and regardless the Pentagon has zero power to force any such thing. It's making gobs of money and growing pretty fast (around $12 billion revenue this year, prediction is/was ~$15.5 billion so something like a 30% YoY increase) with most of that from Starlink, then commercial launch and gov launch. It launches more mass to LEO then everyone else on the planet combined by a long shot, for far far less $/kg. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. There would be zero interest on either side in a merger, nor is there any particularly good national security argument for it.
The real plan is the same as it's always been: have a reasonably vibrant set of multiple motivated, competitive commercial launch providers. That'll take years more but is by far the better long term solution, and there are plenty of promising options, like Rocket Lab (their Neutron medium lift rocket is apparently close to maiden flight) and Blue Origin (who finally at last seem to have been shaken up and are actually launching rockets and making engines). Old Space wants out of the launch business, which is why ULA came to be at all.
People are also tossing around "nationalization" as if it's some quick fix too all of a sudden, but nationalization doesn't nullify the 5th Amendment (or 1st). The US government would have to come up with the arguably hundreds of billions of dollars present value of SpaceX, at a time of deep budget cuts, debt worries, and high interest rates. It would also have to win a set of massive lawsuits by an extremely well funded opposition about all aspects of the mess that would drag on for years. And a lot of the value of SpaceX is in its institutional knowledge, culture, key people etc etc. Nationalization could not prevent key people all bailing and destroying much of the capability. This would all be hugely disruptive, at a critical juncture, and a big political mess too. It's concerning how blasé folks can get about expensive, complicated big deal gordian knots.
What you need to know is that the Pentagon has ultimate authority in matters like this (regardless of the contractor’s equity structure) and it has wielded it time and time again throughout the Cold War. SpaceX cannot escape the command structure by “decommissioning” anything. If you use drugs and threaten US interests in jest, you are done. Those are hard rules. Perhaps Musk will wind up emaciated with footlong fingernails living on the top floor of a hotel in Las Vegas or Florida, but he will not still influence the assets at SpaceX in such a state, regardless of his wealth, passion, allegiance, intelligence, charisma, army of sycophants, children named after chemicals, etc. He can work out his relationship with personalities in the US government, but his arse is cooked in terms of command of dual-use orbital transit and communications systems. The people at SpaceX deserve so much better anyway.
https://youtu.be/65_FeMUuCl0 https://youtu.be/0kpNkEdB1o0
The Defense Production Act exists.
The US would have no problem coming up with hundreds of billions. They wouldn’t need to, though.
>The Defense Production Act exists.
Perhaps you'd care to elaborate on what you think this means? Title 2 of the DPA did indeed allow seizing of private property, but like 4, 5, and 6 expired and no longer exists under present law. AFAIK only provisions of 1, 3 and 7 are still in force, and they would at most allow forcing continued Dragon production. I haven't studied it enough to know whether there is caselaw regarding interaction with the Takings Clause but I'm hardly the first to question it, at-the-time BHUA Senate Committee chairman Phil Gramm lead with that on the review of Clinton's use of the DPA for the California energy crisis. And in general commandeering and so on all require just compensation. It's also 2025, not 1955, and I'm highly skeptical the current courts wouldn't be stricter.
That's assuming it even went through at all though and SpaceX wouldn't win an argument for obvious political retaliation or other forbidden reasoning, or wouldn't drag on the legal fight long enough for 47 to be gone and the next POTUS to reverse course.
>The US would have no problem coming up with hundreds of billions.
Have you like, opened a newspaper (physical or virtual) at all since last year? Growing debt is a huge deal, politicians are arguing over single digit billions or even millions. Hundreds of billions is not small potatoes even by American standards at this point, it's more then the entirety of veterans benefits & services, well over double all education, training, employment & social services, triple the entire transportation budget, etc. It'd be a big fucking line item to take on, and would require Congressional funding.
>They wouldn’t need to, though.
Yeah, they would.
> The real plan
Ugh that is being way too generous. A private space industry exists despite their plans not because of them.
>A private space industry exists despite their plans not because of them.
No, this is completely opposite to reality. The current US private space industry was absolutely the result in large part of a rare modern spell of good policy decisions and sustained support (and absolutely yes, a certain amount of luck, but it's important to create conditions where luck can snowball). Support that has paid off in spades and now is self-sustaining sure, but that's a good thing and doesn't change the vital nature of the bootstrapping period. Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew were critical, as was opening up national security launches then actually embracing it. Multiple providers is now an explicit goal of the DOD and they have repeatedly acted to support it, from awarding NSSL launch contracts with an eye towards which player really needed them to stay in business to being willing to take on more risk for less critical payloads. It hasn't been a short road or one without bumps and conflicting interests, and it's almost a miracle it happened at all given Congress' general shortsightedness and desire to use space almost purely as a vehicle for pork regardless of efficiency, but happen it did (ironically thanks in significant part to Boeing [0]). The contrast with the slow, anemic and visionless efforts of the EU during the same time period is striking.
----
0: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/actually-boeing-is-p...
> Multiple providers is now an explicit goal of the DOD and they have repeatedly acted to support it
I agree with everything you said, but to be precise it was the DoD policy for a long time to have at least two providers. In the 90s it was Lockheed (with Atlas rocket) and Boeing (with Delta rocket). For complicated reasons they were forced to combine their rocket divisions, and they formed a joint company, ULA. But they still had these two rockets, so at least there was redundancy on the technological side, but no competition. After SpaceX entered the launch market, DoD and ULA weren't willing to allow SpaceX (not yet a part of the military-industrial complex) to compete for DoD launches, but SpaceX sued their way into these contracts. And after SpaceX became the cheapest, most reliable and fastest launch provider, the benefits of opening the market are obvious, so there's no coming back to the ULA monopoly (or any other monopoly, at least in launches).
But on the side of NASA resupply/crew programs, yeah, it was a great decision by NASA/government/congress that paid off massively, and allowed today's space boom to happen (and made SpaceX what it is today).
no it does not seem likely, that's nonsense. the pentagon likes the spacex product just the way it is
They say “the only US alternative”, which is true, but it’s not the only alternative - nasa paid for seats on Soyuz for many years, and I’m sure they could go back to doing the same. Perhaps China would be willing to sell seats on their launches. Maybe India will be in a position to offer human launches to the U.S. fairly soon - should be up and running by 2027, and they seem to hit their objectives most of the time.
Cooperation with roscosmos seems to have been largely unimpeded by Russia’s political and military actions over the years, so these all seem like realistic possibilities.
Yes, it will be a shame if the U.S. has no launch capability of their own, but short term partisan political thinking is much more important to the electorate than long term national strategic interest.
NASA still cooperates heavily with Roscosmos and American astronauts regularly fly in paid Soyuz seats. The latest one is Johnny Kim who launched in late April on Soyuz MS-27 from Baikonur and will stay on the ISS until december. And Christopher Williams is already scheduled for the next Soyuz mission.
China on the other hand will probably never happen because of the general political climate in the US and this administration in particular.
Congress has forbidden NASA to cooperate with China for many years. It's been law since 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment
Also I believe that Russia isn't being paid for astronauts to fly on Soyuz. Instead, cosmonauts fly on Dragon. It's a like-for-like exchange which is mutually beneficial (both countries need the other's cooperation to keep the ISS operational, so these exchanges ensure that can continue if either Soyuz or Dragon are grounded for some reason.)
Correct. The US paid for the Soyuz flights that they owed Russian astronauts, because they had no means of bringing them to the ISS.
The ISS was built in the late 90s and China was already barred from joining back then.
My understanding is Russia wants out of ISS cooperation. Whatever contract there is, it will expire soon, and may not be extended.
> American astronauts regularly fly in paid Soyuz seats
It's a seat swap arrangement, no money is exchanged.
https://spacenews.com/nasa-extends-seat-barter-agreement-wit...
Swap means they still get something in return, even if it's not cash. It's not like it was ever free.
>nasa paid for seats on Soyuz for many years, and I’m sure they could go back to doing the same
No. Obviously not.
>Perhaps China would be willing to sell seats on their launches.
That would be an extreme humiliation of the US and NASA. Abandoning civil space programs entirely would be preferable.
>Maybe India will be in a position to offer human launches to the U.S. fairly soon - should be up and running by 2027, and they seem to hit their objectives most of the time.
India is nowhere close to the capabilities of the US, China or Russia.