alt.hn

2/27/2026 at 4:33:39 PM

NASA announces overhaul of Artemis program amid safety concerns, delays

 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-artemis-moon-program-overhaul/

by voxadam

2/27/2026 at 6:52:57 PM

This is a good change. To summarize for those not following closely:

SLS, a rocket derived from Shuttle tech, takes astronauts on the Orion spacecraft to the vicinity of the moon. From there, a lander built by either SpaceX or Blue Origin will take the astronauts to the surface and then back to Orion. The astronauts will then return to Earth in Orion.

Artemis I flew a couple of years ago and took an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the moon and back to Earth.

Artemis II, which should hopefully fly in April, will take 4 astronauts around the moon--the first time humans have been that far in space in 50+ years.

Artemis III was going to be a crewed moon landing, planned around 2028, but between delays in the lander development and the complexity of this mission, no one expected it to happen on time.

The major change that NASA has announced is to launch SLS more often--ideally once every 10 months. There are two major advantages to this:

1. More frequent launches will improve reliability because the team/engineers will understand the system better. There will be more commonality between launches.

2. With more launches before the end of the decade deadline there are more opportunities for intermediate milestones. In particular, Artemis III will turn into an Earth-orbit mission in which Orion will dock with one or both of the landers. This will test out the system before heading to the moon. Moreover, NASA plans to have at least two lunar landing attempts in 2028, which means that even if the first attempt is scrubbed, they will still have a chance to land before the end of the decade.

by GMoromisato

2/27/2026 at 5:54:36 PM

On the surface, the changes appear logical.

The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.

I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?

(It seems that Artemis cost is $92B, where as SpaceX's Starship costs are less than $10B so far, give or take. So it seems that SpaceX is a more efficient approach.)

by bhouston

2/27/2026 at 6:40:15 PM

Given that SLS is the part of Artemis that has actually shown it works, and Starship is the part that is nowhere near schedule, and doesn't work, it's very funny to suggest that NASA should learn from SpaceX and not the other way around.

SpaceX hasn't even had the confidence to put Starship in LEO yet, and has not carried 1kg of real payload (and barely a few kg of test payloads) - while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.

by tsimionescu

2/27/2026 at 6:46:20 PM

It's not like SLS is on schedule either, and it is absurdly more expensive than Starship. It's very likely that Starship will eventually be operational with lower total costs by any accounting measure. (And I say this as a current NASA contractor and current anti-fan of Musk)

by 0xffff2

2/27/2026 at 6:53:00 PM

I agree that SLS is not an efficient project by any stretch of the imagination, and they have their own problems. I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it. In particular, their plan for how to achieve the Moon mission, requiring an unclear number of missions to fuel a single flight in orbit.

by tsimionescu

2/28/2026 at 3:00:07 AM

Starship is irrelevant. SLS was dumb already in 2011 when Starship doesn't exist. Its a dumb system and was never the right system. NASA own analysis showed that.

People who defend SLS on the bases that Starship isn't good don't get it. It doesn't matter if Starship exists. SLS should have been canceled even if you assume the state of the rocket industry in 2015.

Anybody with half a brain and 3h time to do analysis on the topic could figure this out.

by panick21

2/28/2026 at 6:52:35 AM

It's a total jobs program. I don't know what Starship will be, but at least Starship is trying to do something new and potentially very valuable. Maybe it is too ambitious but SLS is not that ambitious and not that successful :(

by georgeecollins

2/28/2026 at 10:36:12 AM

The only reason NOT to cancel SLS outright is "we can't get anything better". "Sure, it's pretty dumb, but it can be built, and good luck getting anything better built."

Starship is important because the closer Starship gets to coming online the more obviously wrong that line of thought is.

As is, Starship, with its first stage being online and reusable already says "we could have done something like SLS much cheaper if we were smart about it". When the second stage comes fully online, the argument for SLS will diminish further.

by ACCount37

3/1/2026 at 3:04:08 AM

This not actually a good reason. First of all, of course you can't get anything better if you never ask for anything better or consider alternatives or put any money into anything better.

If you never invested in anything else, then the M4 Sherman tank would still be the best tank. And then you could say 'we can't get anything better' and continue to use it while refusing to ever even put 1$ into developing anything else.

And actually there are plenty of ways, even without Starship to do these things differently.

I remember when SLS fans in 2016 told me that SLS is real and Falcon Heavy is fake. Even when Falcon Heavy and now New Gleen can do most things SLS can.

One NASA Administer was almost fired for exploring if Orion could launch on Falcon Heavy.

The thing is NASA is not looking for alternatives, and it doesn't matter if Starship is fully proven and operational. People will still say its not the same, because Starship will need refuel and isn't direct.

You can always find a reason to justify one solution if you only ever consider that solution and refuse to even look at any other possibility.

by panick21

2/27/2026 at 10:42:56 PM

> I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it.

If you consider declared goals for Starship to be too hard (I assume not impossible), what aspect makes them that hard?

And since we talk about the Moon here, not stated goals of using Starships for Mars flights - what part of the Starship design makes it hard to believe that Starships may in next few years be regularly used for flights to the Moon?

I'm curious what it is which makes it so hard to believe.

by avmich

2/27/2026 at 11:40:57 PM

For me its the commodities.

I grant that SpaceX engineers are smart people and can figure out how to make Starship and Superheavy reliable and reusable.

But if they have to launch 10-14 times in order to get the propellant to the LEO depot in order to fuel the Lunar Starship, can we actually deliver that many launches worth of LOX and LNG to the launch pads in the timeframe needed to prevent it all from boiling off once in orbit before Lunar Starship can get there, get refueled and head to the moon? I don't know the answer to that, and to me that seems like the hard problem.

by coderjames

2/28/2026 at 12:46:39 AM

When Korolyov worked on N-1 rocket in 1960-s, some plans included building a hydrogen upper stage. http://astronautix.com/n/n1blocksr.html Hydrogen is rather hard to keep cold, but that stage was designed to work for over 11 days.

Falcon-9 flies almost every other day, about 3 times per week. Methane is way more storable than hydrogen. Of course we'd like to compare numbers, but, given that Starship is way bigger than than N-1 stage - about 15 times, and there is the law of squares-cubes, which for our case says the bigger the tank the less percent of boiloff per unit of time, and it's methane, and we can afford to lose a little and top off with another tanker...

Now, how many tanker flights we'll need? That's a favorite riddle in Musk's plans :) . Korolyov, again, had some early ideas for 5 tankers - https://graphicsnickstevens.substack.com/p/sever-the-bridge-... ... For Starship - if you have 1500 tons of fuel in the Starship, and 150 tons of payload in a tanker, you need 10 flights. You can probably optimize, or be disadvantaged by some obstacles - so, 8-12 flights? That many can fly in less than a month. We can also use additional measures to reduce boiloff - better protection from the Sun, active cooling, maybe more permanent orbital refueling depot - but still, with our today's Falcon-9 flight rate we may consider one Starship per month refueled on LEO. Even if some refueling flights won't be successful, the replacements could be sent.

I personally suspect Starship will fly much more often than Falcon-9. We're so much better in rendezvous and docking these day than we were during Apollo flights, the reliability is so much higher - just take a look how many Falcon-9 flights in a row are successful - so I don't think operationally LEO refuelling will present a significant problem. And I'm sure we need maybe a couple of years to see first examples of that.

Space is hard, yes. But we're getting better, for sure.

by avmich

2/28/2026 at 11:16:14 AM

Theres a huge difference between sending up a stage full of H2 and transferring H2 from one stage to another with acceptable losses at cryo temperatures.

NASA is actually further ahead with space refuelling tech than SpaceX. But either way the tech is unlikely to work at scale this decade.

by TheOtherHobbes

2/28/2026 at 2:33:34 AM

Allow me to reply with an anecdotal story.

In 1992 I watched a car parallel park itself in NYC on Today, on nbc before I went to school. My mind was reeling, automated car technology is right around the corner! That technology did not ship for 20 years.

It is easy to say we are getting better, that doesn’t mean we will see, in this case, starship fly in the near future. And while I have the utmost confidence in Gwynne Shotwell, I am not holding my breath that we see starship launch with any meaningful payload in this decade.

by grepfru_it

2/28/2026 at 7:46:47 PM

They are already past the point that they could have expended Starship and just reused Super Heavy and launched payloads successfully. It is only their own goals to have a fully reusable system that is preventing it.

by NetMageSCW

2/28/2026 at 11:00:49 AM

SpaceX is the undisputed king of launch cadence. Falcon 9 just flies every other day nowadays.

If anyone can take "we need 14 launches per mission" and make it work, it's SpaceX.

Boil off isn't somehow unsolvable. We know cryogenics can work in space, and SpaceX's approach is actually less aggressive than Blue Origin's requirement of zero boil off on LH2.

by ACCount37

2/28/2026 at 3:37:40 AM

> But if they have to launch 10-14 times in order to get the propellant to the LEO depot in order to fuel the Lunar Starship, can we actually deliver that many launches worth of LOX and LNG to the launch pads in the timeframe needed

If only Starbase was located somewhere near abundant gas pipelines, within spitting distance of of the Texas Shale Oil boom…

by oceanplexian

2/27/2026 at 11:33:02 PM

All of SapaceX rockets waste close to half their payload capacity on extra fuel for landing, extra equipment for landing, and they still have a 100% failure rate on every super-heavy launch they've ever attempted. SpaceX has blown up more rockets in the last year than NASA has in its entire history. NASA's super heavy rockets have been working successfully since 1967. NASA did build the first single-stage-to-orbit rockets that also successfully landed, but it immediately realized that was a huge waste of resources. Instead, they put parachutes on rockets and then refurbished them instead. So NASA gets double the payload capacity for free. The boosters currently strapped to the SLS that's about to go to the Moon are the same ones that previously took space shuttles to orbit in the 90s. NASA has been to the Moon and Mars; SpaceX has never made it to either, and just last week Elon said they've officially given up on going to Mars, and they're hoping to make it to Moon in another decade instead. NASA is going next month. SpaceX is just vaporware being run by a drug addict whose only goal is to sell it to the public markets before the house of cards comes down.

by cjtrowbridge

2/27/2026 at 11:44:28 PM

It would be great to have some actual numbers. How did reuse work out for Falcon 9? How much does the reused boosters for SLS cost? What's the cost and performance of an expendable Starship vs SLS?

by platybubsy

2/28/2026 at 1:29:42 PM

> SpaceX has blown up more rockets in the last year than NASA has in its entire history.

SpaceX's number of successful launches last year exceeded the total number of launches by all other U.S. agencies over the past decade.

by XYen0n

2/27/2026 at 11:57:59 PM

Going to Mars takes about the same delta-v as the moon.

SpaceX launches 80% of the world's mass to orbit, they probably know what they're doing.

Starship is an extremely hard problem, and their aim is to reduce cost of getting mass to orbit by another 10x after Falcon 9 did the same.

Falcon 9 needs about 4% of fuel to land on a ship, 14% to return to launchpad

Why would you say they've had 100% failure rate? What did you think the reason was to launch and how did it fail?

by mavhc

2/28/2026 at 3:25:46 AM

Surely the could put a traditional upper stage on Super Heavy and just go directly to the moon, no? I’m not sure what the obsession with second stage reuse is, because you lose almost all your margin.

by pennomi

2/28/2026 at 3:36:04 AM

I'm not sure what the obsession with airplane reuse is. Why not just build a new one for each flight?

by terminalshort

2/28/2026 at 3:06:10 PM

You don’t gain additional margin throwing away an airplane. Reuse is a lovely idea but the rocket equation is a harsh mistress.

by pennomi

3/1/2026 at 7:59:54 AM

Space X cares way more about reusability than the moon, they're not actually in a race to the moon. Step 1: build the best general solution. Step 2: do everything

by mavhc

2/28/2026 at 7:48:40 PM

They’ve already caught and reused a Super Heavy and had multiple successful soft landings in water with Starship.

by NetMageSCW

2/28/2026 at 12:26:53 AM

[flagged]

by allenrb

2/27/2026 at 7:38:17 PM

Even if Starship completely fails, SLS is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. Terminating it is the only logical thing to do.

by pfdietz

2/27/2026 at 9:08:00 PM

The whole moon thing is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. But if one wants to do it, one should choose between the working approaches.

by luke5441

2/27/2026 at 9:38:55 PM

Orion is actually pointless, I don't understand why the mission goals are valuable. Partial success would be meaningless. Success is meaningless.

Starship in contrast has a variety of meaningful objectives. Even if Starship only achieves proving that cryogenic fuel transfer in LEO is possible that's a valuable mission goal in and of itself.

If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.

by lukeschlather

2/28/2026 at 2:51:37 AM

> If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.

There's more to NASA than Artemis! NASA's robotic spaceflight programs generate extremely high science return at relatively low cost. Missions like Psyche, Europa Clipper, and Dragonfly are humanity's real explorers.

And their aeronautics work is valuable as well. Low-boom, etc.

by foobarbecue

2/27/2026 at 10:52:29 PM

NASA does not seem to be constituted to be able to engage in a coherent manned space program of actual value. It's a long standing systemic issue.

They are great at pretending to deliver value, but there's no "there" there.

by pfdietz

2/27/2026 at 8:39:09 PM

Might as well get some ROI out of it though.

IMO the Blue Origin hate was overhyped. They're clearly the only ones who know what they're doing. NASA and SpaceX both are way in over their heads.

by kunai

2/28/2026 at 7:50:15 PM

The Blue Origin skepticism is based in how many decades they spent in making buildings instead of rockets and how long it has taken them to get anything to orbit.

by NetMageSCW

2/28/2026 at 3:26:57 AM

The Blue Origin hate is mostly how opaque the program is compared to SpaceX.

by pennomi

2/27/2026 at 10:09:19 PM

[dead]

by potjack777

2/27/2026 at 7:25:10 PM

You don't have long to wait to see an obvious reason, the first v3 starship is in preflight testing right now.

by brandonagr2

2/27/2026 at 9:43:15 PM

And do you think the this next launch will deploy actual satellites in orbit around the Moon? If not, I still don't see why you'd compare it to SLS's current success. Or do you think this will deploy 100 tons to orbit for less than $10/ton, or fly to Mars, since these are the stated goals for Starship?

by tsimionescu

2/27/2026 at 10:40:28 PM

Do you think perhaps you should give SpaceX as much time as NASA has had for SLS to fail at its goals before complaining that SpaceX’s system in testing isn’t accomplishing all of its goals?

by NetMageSCW

2/28/2026 at 9:15:34 AM

Sure, that's fair. My comment above was just about the poster claiming that v3 will prove that Starship can succeed on all of its goals.

by tsimionescu

2/28/2026 at 7:51:45 PM

Your comment was a strawman about launching satellites around the moon which is literally no one’s goal.

by NetMageSCW

2/28/2026 at 4:55:39 AM

Is it clear how many SLS launches would be needed to subsume Starship's part of the mission?

by itishappy

2/28/2026 at 7:50:57 PM

It doesn’t matter because SLS can’t launch but once a year if lucky. And so far they have never even approached that.

by NetMageSCW

2/27/2026 at 8:31:20 PM

We have no idea what starship has cost. It's a private company.

by bparsons

2/27/2026 at 8:52:29 PM

I don't think "no idea" is fair. We don't have exact numbers, but there are various statements out there that give clues. Even the highest estimates I can put together put Starship far cheaper than SLS.

by 0xffff2

2/27/2026 at 9:35:19 PM

You have to consider that Starship has not reached anywhere near the operational goals for Artemis, and there is no realistic time line for when it might. So we really do have no idea how much it might cost by the time it reaches the milestone SLS has already cleared (successful flight in lunar orbit, with a full payload that it successfully deploys).

by tsimionescu

2/27/2026 at 10:42:14 PM

You also have to consider that SpaceX has the fastest, most reliable, most cost efficient launch service in operation ever, and are using the same methodology to develop the most advanced launch system ever attempted.

by NetMageSCW

2/28/2026 at 5:07:55 AM

We also have to consider the other major Musk lead company Telsa had the best selling car in the world and string of successful cars leading up to that before completely shitting the bed on the Cyber Truck.

I want Starship to be a success and reduce the cost to orbit and beyond, but past success does not in any way guarantee future success.

by biaachmonkie

2/28/2026 at 5:50:22 PM

You must compare the AI chip in the Tesla vehicle to the chip in F-35 "Fat Amy" on value for money thermal design.

by __patchbit__

2/28/2026 at 5:08:01 PM

Life has no guarantees. Past success is the best predictor of future success regardless.

by Schiendelman

2/28/2026 at 3:03:09 AM

True but we know for a fact that it doesn't consume 4-5 billion $ a year for the last 15 years like SLS/Orion because SpaceX couldn't afford that. If you actually do some basic math and look at SpaceX revenue and so on, you can make some pretty decent guesses. And SpaceX is analyzed in detail by lots of people.

by panick21

2/27/2026 at 9:25:19 PM

Even if a Starship needs to be scrapped after landing, the Super Heavy booster works, returns nominally to the launch site, and can be reused. This alone should make the whole thing cheaper than SLS.

by nine_k

2/27/2026 at 9:32:10 PM

Only if the SuperHeavy booster can achieve the same performance as the SLS (payload to orbit), with similar levels of operational complexity.

The SLS has already proven it can fly to lunar orbit and back on one single launch. In contrast, even if everything goes according to plan, Starship requires at least a dozen re-fueling flights while it hangs in orbit around the Earth to be able to then fly to the Moon.

Will one Starship launch, when it eventually works, be cheaper than SLS? Very likely. Will 12+ Starship launches + the time in orbit be cheaper than a single SLS launch? Much, much less likely.

by tsimionescu

2/27/2026 at 10:43:35 PM

Actually, we already know that with booster reuse disposing of 12 tanker starships will cost less than an SLS launch and actually be able to get to the moon, which SLS with Orion can’t actually do.

by NetMageSCW

2/28/2026 at 9:23:18 AM

We don't, because Starship has not had even one successful flight with any appreciable payload. It's absolutely possible that the booster will need to be completely redesigned, and become much more expensive, in order to achieve the mission goals.

It's also worth noting that a captured booster has only once been successfully flown again - and certainly not in the kind of tight time line that the in-orbit refueling operation requires (first flight was March 6, second flight was October 13 - and no more flights are planned anyway). There is currently little proof that boosters can be "rapidly and fully reused" as needed to match any of the cost promises.

by tsimionescu

2/28/2026 at 7:53:09 PM

Then it should be equally worth nothing that SLS has only launched once.

by NetMageSCW

2/27/2026 at 6:52:09 PM

I think it's actually a reasonable comparison.

To OP's point, Artemis has cost $92 billion over 14 years. This has produced exactly one launch.

It's hard to put an exact timeline on Starship since a lot of its development overlaps with Falcon 9 using the same components, but it's inarguable that it has cost one tenth Artemis so far.

I agree that Starship has been plagued by delays and the capabilities are so far mostly just talk. However, it has flown a number of times, and I would be willing to make a strong bet that it will orbit the moon with real payload long before it catches up to Artemis in budget.

by margalabargala

2/27/2026 at 9:39:57 PM

Starship has not yet flown even a fraction of what SLS has, so I think the comparison is premature. If it takes another ten years to get to a point that it can successfully achieve its Artemis objectives, I doubt it will remain cheaper than SLS. And given that it has already been delayed way beyond the first estimates for when it might be ready (it was supposed to have flown to Mars with astronauts on board by 2022, I believe), I don't see why another 10 years is any worse an estimate than others.

by tsimionescu

2/27/2026 at 9:46:07 PM

SLS has flown once. What are you talking about?

by margalabargala

2/28/2026 at 2:44:12 AM

SLS has had one fully functional operational flight, where it deployed satellites in lunar orbit. Starship has had 0 operational flights, and a bunch of dummy test flights without payload and without even attempting to reach LEO.

by tsimionescu

2/28/2026 at 3:21:17 AM

Sure, but it's a bit disingenuous to one one hand have one successful flight, and on the other hand 11 test flights of varying success (reaching space but not orbit) and dismiss the latter because the former has technically flown infinitely many times more successful real flights. The absolute value is so low, 1 vs zero.

by margalabargala

2/28/2026 at 9:35:00 AM

You can take another tack then - kilometers traveled (while in control of the rocket) multiplied by payload. This should be a more comparable metric, and the conclusion will be the same without the pesky 0: Starship tests have flown only a fraction of what SLS has achieved in its single successful flight.

by tsimionescu

2/27/2026 at 10:04:27 PM

> the capabilities are so far mostly just talk

lol what? They've caught and successfully reflown the super heavy booster, and they've mostly successfully done a soft landing of Starship in the sea. How is that remotely "just talk"?

by timhh

2/28/2026 at 12:05:29 AM

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, things like delivering a real payload or orbiting the earth.

Yes they've reflown a caught rocket, and they've soft landed in the ocean. I can do those things with a paper airplane.

by margalabargala

2/28/2026 at 3:30:05 AM

Not at orbital speeds you can’t. You’re being deliberately obtuse.

by pennomi

2/28/2026 at 7:24:51 AM

Do you want to put a dollar amount per kg to orbit on that? Because if you're spending orders of magnitude more, the expectations also go up, no?

And mind you, SLS isn't a new system. It's old space shuttle engines. It's old solid rocket boosters that were extended by a segment. So, it should be cheap and fast?

I think the point here is really that SLS should be a walk in the park. Mostly old tech, reused with not a lot of innovation.

Starship might not have put a real payload into orbit yet but it has already delivered vastly superior engine technology (full flow staged combustion), a new way to land rocket boosters to allow for reuse and many more smaller things.

If you're going to innovate, things will not be smooth because you're learning things. You should be celebrating those achievements, especially as it didn't cost you a dime

by hvb2

2/28/2026 at 8:25:36 AM

They are not trying to accomplish the same thing or on the same schedule, so your comparison is per-se invalid.

One could also ask "how many times has the SLS booster landed and been reused?". This would be a silly question to ask, because SLS is not trying to reuse the booster.

by mpweiher

2/27/2026 at 6:49:07 PM

Isn’t SLS still costing like $4 b’s per launch?

by cheschire

2/27/2026 at 7:29:29 PM

This is why I do not believe in America setting up a permanent lunar base.

The Chinese are basically going to launch a few astronauts up there with a modern Saturn 5. But for them that would be a success because it is their first time.

You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.

by PearlRiver

2/27/2026 at 7:39:22 PM

> You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.

Depends on what happens once on the moon. If all you do is send 2 people at a time to collect rocks, then it does get boring to the general public. If each landing assembles the next section of a moon habitat, then I think the interest sticks around longer.

by dylan604

2/28/2026 at 5:50:21 AM

That’s just the ISS on the moon instead of space, which is also uninteresting.

by linehedonist

2/28/2026 at 7:23:20 AM

Well, luckily for me and at least a couple of other people, we seem to have better imaginations than you. Must be boring at your place if you think taking a walk on the moon or going for a drive to see the sights is uninteresting.

It's the next step of progress. Did you suddenly become bored because you learned to walk after crawling? Sounds kind of like you did to me.

by dylan604

2/27/2026 at 8:47:02 PM

> You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.

If America (or China) says the best spots on the moon belong to America (or China), suddenly it's Space Race 2.0 and everyone cares.

This is what will happen once any building actually starts happening.

by echelon

2/27/2026 at 10:59:38 PM

There would have to actually be meaningful best spots. If a base gets de-facto control over a 10 mile circle of arbitrary wasteland, it's not a very compelling claim to fight over.

by Dylan16807

2/28/2026 at 3:25:01 AM

If your 10-mile circle has any water in it at all it’s extremely valuable.

by throwaway173738

2/28/2026 at 4:07:43 AM

Are there likely to be more than 0 spots with usable water, but less than 20 or 100?

by Dylan16807

2/28/2026 at 2:57:59 AM

Difference is SLS has received 2 billion $ a year for 15 years in a row, while SpaceX get that much once and has to actually cover any extra cost themselves. Why do people just totally ignore money when it comes to SLS.

Not to mention that SpaceX got funding in like 2021, and SLS in 2011.

And SLS works, then why can it only launch every couple of years. I mean what good is a rocket that is so hard to produce that the whole politics and everything around it changes between launches. They basically have to teach a whole new group of people about SLS for each launch.

> while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.

If you want things launched to the moon, SpaceX, BlueOrigin or ULA could have done that many times every year for the last 15 years just as well.

Starship isn't just another 'look we can launch some stuff to the moon', its much more, and therefore much more difficult.

You are praising SLS for doing the very, very, very minimum that it should have been doing since 2017. And it will do it at most 3 times until 2027.

by panick21

2/28/2026 at 3:04:54 AM

The biggest problem right now with Starship is the heatshield problem. If it's a one and done flight it's actually still worth it but full re-use without solving the heat shield problem is not actually possible (right now). It turns out slamming into Earth's atmosphere at orbital velocity or higher is one of those things that pretty much every material we've thrown at the problem has had problems being used forever. We need to do experimental flights in order to provide more data to materials folks working on this. Honestly I respect the hell out of anyone working on this problem because it's the next big tech hurdle we need besides landing a booster. And this one is still not solved.

by hparadiz

2/28/2026 at 3:50:00 AM

I would agree. The heatshield is tricky. But they have shown they can survive without parts of the heatshield. But its a problem for rapid re-usability.

That said, I think Starship architecture can be useful even if this issue is not fully solved.

Starship can be much, much cheaper then SLS even if they throw away the upper stage.

by panick21

2/28/2026 at 3:42:39 AM

Artemis is nowhere near schedule, had vast cost blowouts, and it's a commercial dead end though. It's incredibly expensive boutique warmed-over 50 year old technology.

NASA absolutely should learn from SpaceX, they were the company that liberated US astronaut's access to space from Russian rockets after NASA had lost that capability. And they have brought down the cost of payload to orbit enormously, and they have been finding viable commercial non-government markets for space. They've been launching around 90% of global mass to orbit. An order of magnitude more than all other corporations and governments in the world combined.

All other serious commercial space companies have taken lessons from SpaceX, so has the Chinese space program. To suggest NASA should not learn from SpaceX is just astounding. That's the kind of think you'd only hear from western government bureaucrats.

by stinkbeetle

2/27/2026 at 8:05:34 PM

This reminds me of my all-time-favourite HN comment[0] (and a life lesson too):

This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105478

by dyukqu

2/27/2026 at 8:47:01 PM

This works if there's no cost of failure in the meantime.

If we're putting humans into rockets into space, I'd like to think we adopt a balanced approach.

by nixpulvis

2/27/2026 at 10:37:55 PM

No. This works if you are able to tell a work of fiction and don't have to provide evidence.

And it works because we all know that repetition and practice are, in fact, important. So it feels believable that having people just repeat something over and over is the answer.

Similarly, people can be swayed by the master coming in and producing a single artifact that blows away everyone. You see this archetype story as often as the student that learns by just repeating a motion over and over. (Indeed.... this is literally the Karate Kid plot...)

The truth is far more mundane. Yes, you have to repeat things. But also yes, you have to give thought to what you are doing. This is why actual art classes aren't just "lets build things", but also "lets learn how to critique things that you build."

by taeric

2/27/2026 at 8:59:40 PM

Isn't this a non-sequitur though? Artemis presumably doesn't have to actually load up humans on the rockets to flight test them.

by distortionfield

2/27/2026 at 10:02:18 PM

It works perfectly well when you’ve got deep pockets and unmanned test vehicles though.

by danw1979

2/28/2026 at 3:06:19 AM

False. SpaceX development of Starship is much cheaper then SLS despite using more test vehicles. The claim that building hardware rich is more expensive is not really shown in the data.

NASA has done some analysis on early SpaceX and shown that their methods produced a 10x improvement in cost. And that was with the method NASA uses that often turn out to be wrong.

by panick21

2/27/2026 at 10:36:32 PM

Those deep pockets are funded by the same pot we all feed from.

by nixpulvis

2/28/2026 at 1:37:23 AM

And everyone should be happy that pot is TEN TIMES smaller than the pot holders draining the pot with the same goal.

by testing22321

2/27/2026 at 9:55:44 PM

The actual real world result is the opposite. When you score on quantity you get James Patterson, not F Scott Fitzgerald.

by gamblor956

2/27/2026 at 10:47:30 PM

And F Scott Fitzgerald died in poverty essentially unknown, while James Patterson is worth over $800 million.

by NetMageSCW

2/28/2026 at 9:16:41 AM

I would think that it's just as likely that the quantity group would sit around philosophizing about what constitutes a "pot" so that they could get away with doing the least amount of work and still earning an A.

by ajam1507

2/27/2026 at 9:44:40 PM

Now tell the fake story about the moneys and the ladder too.

by ahoka

2/28/2026 at 5:53:03 AM

If I was being graded solely on quantity, why would I bother caring at all to make anything good? Make the minimum quality necessary to be counted as a pot and move on with your life. That was basically my real world approach to ceramics back in HS, and I still feel good about my B+.

by linehedonist

2/28/2026 at 7:10:44 AM

I'll take Things That Never Happened for 500 please.

by dweinus

2/27/2026 at 6:41:50 PM

2cents from a kid who grew up in a NASA family during the shuttle years - As others have commented, NASA’s baseline objective is to not kill astronauts. My understanding of their ethos growing up was that there was absolutely no excuse not to pursue excellence and prioritize safety when people’s lives were on the line. One would have to think that goal is fundamentally incompatible with SpaceX’s way of doing things (see the many exploding rockets - who wants to get in that?). And from what I’ve read and heard through the grapevine, working with SpaceX as a contractor on Artemis has certainly had pain points related to these mismatched priorities.

by Arthurian

2/27/2026 at 8:50:39 PM

SpaceX has the most reliable orbital launch vehicle ever made. Falcon 9 block 5 has had 550 successful launches out of 551 attempts, giving it a 99.8% success rate. For comparison, Soyuz-2's success rate is 97%, Ariane 5 is 95.7%, and the Space Shuttle was 98.5%. All of these are worse than Falcon 9's block 5's landing success rate of 98.9% (552 out of 558 attempts[1]).

The current Starship launches are part of a development and testing program. They expect quite a few failures (though probably not as many as they've experienced). But since each Starship launch is only 1/25th the cost of an SLS launch, SpaceX can afford to blow up a lot of them. And they won't put people on them until they have a track record of safe operation. Falcon 9 didn't have crew on it until the 85th launch.

1. The number of landing attempts is higher than the number of launches because Falcon Heavy results in multiple landings per launch.

by ggreer

2/27/2026 at 7:08:24 PM

You risk it when there are no people on board to find the issues. Fix issues, rinse repeat.

NASA/Congress pushes the armchair quarterback approach. Analyze forever, fail because analysis isn't the same thing as real world experience, get stuck using 50 year old rocket technology. Each engine on SLS cost more than the entire Starship super heavy launch vehicle.

By weight the RS-25 engines cost about 70% of that of building their 7000lb mass dry mass out of gold. That's insane.

by elictronic

2/27/2026 at 10:50:37 PM

NASA says its baseline is to not kill astronauts and yet it is currently planning to send astronauts on a mission in space with an Environmental Control System on its first space flight in a capsule that has flown in space once, and was different on that one flight, and had unexpected heat shield problems with another different heat shield and on a untested return path that is guessed to fix the issues. Actions speak louder than words.

by NetMageSCW

2/27/2026 at 6:58:00 PM

The shuttle lost two crews. Maybe pushing its limits in unmanned testing would have prevented those incidents.

by zardo

2/27/2026 at 8:27:41 PM

I don't think so, because both losses were due to bad management decisions under irrational political pressure, not any lack of engineering knowledge that more unmanned testing could have provided.

Challenger was lost because NASA ignored a critical flight risk with the SRB joint O-rings. And by "ignored", I mean "documented that the risk existed, that it could result in loss of vehicle and loss of lives of the crew, and then waived the risk so the Shuttle could keep flying instead of being grounded until the issue was fixed". They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it. But that was politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.

Columbia was lost because NASA ignored the risks of tile damage due to their belief that it couldn't be fixed anyway once the Shuttle was in orbit. But that meant NASA also devoted no effort to eliminating the risk of tile damage by fixing the issue that caused it. Which again would have been politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.

by pdonis

2/28/2026 at 3:10:13 AM

Wrong. Both were lost because of a fundamentally BAD ARCHITECTURE. And that architecture was bad because the NASA engineers who designed it, had never designed anything like it before and were never able to test or evaluate any of their assumptions.

Columbia would not have been lost if the Shuttle was top stacked, instead of side stacked.

Challenger would not have been lost if not for the use of solid rockets to launch humans.

Both of these design decisions were done to reduce development effort.

by panick21

3/1/2026 at 6:12:21 PM

> Wrong.

No, I'm not wrong. We're both right. Yes, the original decisions on the Shuttle design were braindead. But even given that, the decisions to ignore clear red flags from Shuttle missions were also braindead.

by pdonis

3/1/2026 at 6:56:24 PM

Agree. But I think that Shuttle didn't do intermediate tests of these things is part of the reason it never lived up to its potential. During development they lost fact of what they tried to achieve in the first place.

They sacrificed what worked for potential, but tried to take far to big of a step.

I would argue, if you design something that has so many potential pitfalls and so many operational constraints, and so many drivers that make it incredibly expensive and slow, it is understandable why they started overlooking red flags. They would have barley ever lunched at all if they had not overlooked red flags.

by panick21

2/27/2026 at 9:28:32 PM

> They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it.

Should such testing have been needed? No.

Was such testing needed, given NASA's political pressures and management? Maybe. Unmanned testing in similar conditions before putting humans on it might've resulted in a nice explosion without loss of life that would've been much harder to ignore than "the hypothesizing of those worrywart engineers," and might've provided the necessary ammunition to resist said political pressures.

by MaulingMonkey

2/27/2026 at 10:08:30 PM

> Unmanned testing in similar conditions before putting humans on it might've resulted in a nice explosion without loss of life that would've been much harder to ignore

The loss of the Challenger was the 25th manned orbital mission. So we can expect that it might have taken 25 unmanned missions to cause a similar loss of vehicle. But what would those 25 unmanned missions have been doing? There just wasn't 25 unmanned missions' worth of things to find out. That's also far more unmanned missions than were flown on any previous NASA space program before manned flights began.

Even leaving the above aside, if it would have been politically possible to even fly that many unmanned missions, it would have been politically possible to ground the Shuttle even after manned missions started based on the obvious signs of problems with the SRB joint O-rings. There were, IIRC, at least a dozen previous manned flights which showed issues. There were also good critiques of the design available at the time--which, in the kind of political environment you're imagining, would have been listened to. That design might not even have made it into the final Shuttle when it was flown.

In short, I don't see your alternative scenario as plausible, because the very things that would have been required to make it possible would also have made it unnecessary.

by pdonis

2/28/2026 at 2:26:43 AM

Record low launch temperatures are exactly the kind of boundary pushing conditions that would warrant unmanned testing in a way that not all of those previous 25 would have been. Then again, so was the first launch, and that was manned.

> I don't see your alternative scenario as plausible

Valid.

by MaulingMonkey

2/28/2026 at 2:46:45 AM

> Record low launch temperatures

Were not necessary to show problems with the SRB joint O-rings. There had been previous problems noted on flights at temperatures up to 75 degrees F. And the Thiokol engineers had test stand data showing that the O-rings were not fully sealing the joint even at 100 degrees F. Any rational assessment of the data would have concluded that the joint was unacceptably risky at any temperature.

It might have been true that a flight at 29 degrees F (the estimated O-ring temperature at the Challenger launch) was a little more unacceptably risky than a flight at a higher temperature. But that was actually a relatively minor point. The reason the Thiokol engineers focused on the low temperature the night before the Challenger launch was not because they had a solid case, or even a reasonable suspicion, that launching at that cold a temperature was too risky as compared with launching at higher temperatures. It was because NASA had already ignored much better arguments that they had advanced previously, and they were trying to find something, anything, to get NASA to stop at least some launches, given that they knew NASA was not going to stop all launches for political reasons.

And just to round off this issue, other SRB joint designs have been well known since, I believe, the 1960s, that do not have the issue the Shuttle SRBs had, and can be launched just fine at temperatures much colder than 29 F (for example, a launch from Siberia in the winter). So it's not even the case that SRB launches at such cold temperatures were unknown or not well understood prior to the Challenger launch. The Shuttle design simply was braindead in this respect (for political reasons).

by pdonis

2/28/2026 at 11:59:06 AM

I should point out that the Buran launched and took earth, with bad conditions, completely automated. It's sad how it ended.

by Zardoz84

2/27/2026 at 10:15:55 PM

> So we can expect that it might have taken 25 unmanned missions to cause a similar loss of vehicle.

That doesn't follow. If those were unmanned test flights pushing the vehicle limits you can't just assume they would have gone as they actually did.

by zardo

2/28/2026 at 12:01:38 AM

> If those were unmanned test flights pushing the vehicle limits

As far as the launch to orbit, which was the flight phase when Challenger was lost, every Shuttle flight pushed the vehicle to its limits. That was unavoidable. There was no way to do a launch that was any more stressful than the actual launches were.

by pdonis

2/28/2026 at 1:17:02 AM

You can push the environmental conditions of the launch e.g. winds and temperatures.

by zardo

2/28/2026 at 2:53:07 AM

See my response to Mauling Monkey upthread on why the cold temperature of the Challenger launch actually wasn't the major issue it was made out to be.

Note also my comments there about other SRB designs that were known well before the Shuttle and the range of temperatures they could launch in. Those designs were used on many unmanned flights for years before the Shuttle was even designed. So in this respect, the unmanned test work had already been done. The Shuttle designers just refused to take advantage of all that knowledge for braindead political reasons.

by pdonis