alt.hn

6/19/2026 at 12:41:15 PM

NASA picks Eric Schmidt's rocket company for Mars mission

 https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/nasa-picks-eric-schmidts-rocket-company-for-mars-mission-setting-up-a-race-with-spacex/

by isaacfrond

6/19/2026 at 1:29:08 PM

This mission is an orbital science mission studying Mars' atmosphere, not the same objective as SpaceX's long-term goal of sending large cargo and eventually humans to Mars. So I think the title might be taking the piss just a smidge.

by ajay-b

6/19/2026 at 2:20:25 PM

I don't assume "Mars mission" to necessarily mean cargo for settlement or humans. In fact, that all seems quite distant at this point, so I ignore it entirely unless specific concrete actions occur.

So for many people like myself, the title is perfectly reasonable. The world does not revolve around SpaceX and its purported plans.

by dundarious

6/19/2026 at 2:57:46 PM

To be fair to the original commenter though... the actual title of the TechCrunch article is:

"NASA picks Eric Schmidt’s rocket company for Mars mission, setting up a race with SpaceX"

That title establishes a context in which looking at their relative goals is completely valid.

by sbuttgereit

6/19/2026 at 4:05:02 PM

I mean one would assume / hope that even SpaceX plans to send firstly just craft to Mars, and/or cargo, before large cargo/humans.

by FireBeyond

6/19/2026 at 2:27:56 PM

By that logic the Russians won the space race pretty completely.

by mr_toad

6/19/2026 at 2:37:36 PM

They did. It was the Soviets winning the space race that caused the USA to sink everything into the Apollo mission, to prove they could go bigger.

Russia were first to almost every other milestone, first orbit, first man in orbit, first woman in orbit, first EVA, first moon orbit, first (unmanned) moon landing, and many others.

Edited "Russians" to Soviets because lot was done by non-Russian parts of the union, my original reply just mirrored the OP use of Russians.

by eterm

6/19/2026 at 3:50:16 PM

The Russians got to the Soyuz in the 1960s, so yeah, they won the race.

by toast0

6/19/2026 at 2:28:04 PM

only if you squint at it while slightly tilting your head and really want it to be acrimonious.

"NASA picks Eric Schmidt's rocket company for Mars mission" comes no where close to implying it was a manned mission while absolutely being accurate in it's a rocket company being selected for a mission going to Mars. You're reading into it a manned mission.

by dylan604

6/19/2026 at 6:12:26 PM

Why?

Not everything is about Elon’s wacky plan to settle Mars.

by Gud

6/20/2026 at 8:37:46 AM

SpaceX is incredibly sensitive about this after they've been beaten to Mars orbit by ... it's quite a list: NASA/JPL, the Soviet/Lavochkin Mars program, ESA, ISRO, ESA+Roscosmos, the UAE Space Agency/MBRSC + JAXA (Japan), and China’s CNSA. And Blue Origin: it launched NASA’s ESCAPADE probes. And while they are still en route and are expected to enter Mars orbit in 2027, orbital dynamics means it's not possible to beat them. Oh and adding these up you might think SpaceX has been beaten to Mars 7 times, but that's not correct. They've been beaten 17 times to Mars orbit in total, and that number will inevitably rise to 18 even if they launched a Mars mission tomorrow. It's over 30 if you count individual vehicles that launched on one rocket separately.

(yes, I'm a bit disappointed, I worked on a canceled European Mars mission long ago. Unfortunately, the financial math on why the entire company was canned was entirely correct, and yes I'm a bit angry that SpaceX gets such incredible funding, with a financial plan that, while better than the one we used, still isn't good enough)

Doubly so now it has been made clear that Falcon 9 is a failure. Reusable rockets are, as an innovation, in fact not good enough for a company to profitably sell access to earth orbit, as it turns out (but was extensively predicted)

(note: this is because starlink is of course using SpaceX funds, and is making a big loss doing it. In other words: the market for falcon9 launches is not big enough to sustain SpaceX, without artificial tricks that look good in the short term but unless something changes, increase the losses in the long term)

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/nov/13/jeff-bezos-b...

by spwa4

6/19/2026 at 4:46:34 PM

>It's not the delusional attempt to send people to mars, it's just the pratical application of science. Lets not get confused guys!

by cyanydeez

6/19/2026 at 2:39:25 PM

NASA always needs more competition to keep launch costs low and encouraging innovation and it seems like he hasn't been CEO for a long time. This is indicative of funding competition which is a good thing.

by zitterbewegung

6/19/2026 at 2:51:10 PM

It's so weird that space launches is one of the businesses where the free market appear to be working.

by mrweasel

6/19/2026 at 4:51:44 PM

why couldn’t NASA have internal design competitions that vie on cost?

Third parties will always build in profit to their services which is wasteful.

by nielsbot

6/19/2026 at 1:29:38 PM

For context, Relativity gained Eric Schmidt as CEO in March last year.

They built a 3D printed small sat launcher which failed it's first launch. They cancelled further work in favour of Terran R which has less 3D printing. First launch probably early next year. First successful launch, probably late next year.

A Mars mission 2028 is not crazy but it's ambitious.

by philipwhiuk

6/19/2026 at 2:13:06 PM

Don't read too much into this.

The way these always work is they pick a low-stakes mission to give a new competitor a chance to build the market. If they're on track to miss the deadline badly they'll switch vendors to SpaceX who they know can pick up the slack on a short timeline. And if they do manage to deliver, great.

by bpodgursky

6/19/2026 at 12:44:48 PM

I need to jump on this rocket company spacewagon.

  Claude, make me a space rocket. Using only lisp, if and regex statements.

by doublerabbit

6/20/2026 at 6:03:16 AM

/ultraboost

by jbverschoor

6/19/2026 at 1:19:12 PM

You didn't add "make no mistakes" so that first test burn will probably blow up the pad, but now you know.

by danielbln

6/19/2026 at 2:27:50 PM

The first one has to blow up, or you'll never get off the ground.

by bombcar

6/19/2026 at 4:20:57 PM

If you don't blow up a few rockets on the pad, are you even a real rocketry company?

That's gotta be some kind of rite of passage

by bluefirebrand

6/19/2026 at 2:47:18 PM

Relativity Space had a really interesting idea even before Eric Schmidt bought it. The key ideas were new technologies in 3d printing of designs for rapid iteration of design-to-implementation on what was previously extremely difficult (rocket engines, rocket bodies).

They even called their printers "Pylons" if recall (a nod to StarCraft's Protoss). The manufacturing tech has far broader implications than the application they were putting it toward.

My worry is that Eric bought them solely to get launch-for-compute in his pocket. Given his track record of "steal and when you get caught just have the lawyers 'clean all that up'" and "we didn't intend to unleash evil on the world, 'but it happened'" aren't encouraging. I always hope the golden goose doesn't get carved to pieces, but it usually happens.

by slowmovintarget

6/19/2026 at 5:06:05 PM

Sounds like they must construct additional pylons...

by zelias

6/19/2026 at 1:27:33 PM

> might just beat SpaceX to Mars.

SpaceX/Musk can always spin it as “we have more ambitious goals than some lowly scientific instruments”.

by close04

6/19/2026 at 1:32:26 PM

Since SpaceX now includes controlling the Twitter culture war narrative, yes... lots of other things to do for "SpaceX."

I say this as a huge fan of the OG SpaceX, and a space nerd in general.

I was thinking that I felt bad for the OG SpaceX folks working on rockets, and Starlink... with all the distractions. However, many of them just became millionaires. So, what do I know.

Elon is a heck of an economic engineer. I would probably want to be along for the ride.

by consumer451

6/19/2026 at 1:41:42 PM

[flagged]

by 17383848

6/19/2026 at 1:44:30 PM

Pathetic response, and even lazier a comment history.

https://postimg.cc/JDyRWZJv/d3056008

by consumer451

6/19/2026 at 1:47:39 PM

[flagged]

by beanjuiceII

6/19/2026 at 4:54:30 PM

I do have to say, the most interesting cope is hundreds of people telling me that this is not what is happening:

> The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

https://old.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i7w4nz/comparison_of...

I understand that this very uncomfortable for many people, but, yeah... this is reality.

by consumer451

6/19/2026 at 1:49:06 PM

what does this even mean?

You know what, neverminded.

by consumer451

6/19/2026 at 1:53:59 PM

Well they reached europa i think

by __m

6/19/2026 at 1:45:59 PM

Now that spacex is public we can expect more headlines like this to sway the price similar to what is done with tesla.

by t1234s

6/19/2026 at 2:32:54 PM

"Don't read to much into this. It's just a key talent, stable and productive, forming relationships with a key partner, gathering experience that you would think would be critical information to another companies valuation."

by smrtinsert

6/19/2026 at 2:27:43 PM

[flagged]

by 1970-01-01

6/19/2026 at 2:32:24 PM

Not crewed.

> a spacecraft to house a suite of scientific instruments

Second sentence of the article.

by andrewflnr

6/19/2026 at 2:44:40 PM

Link doesn't fit but the argument stands. No billionaire-funded misison to Mars has ever succeeded. Not even SpaceX. You need at minimum an entire space program. Here's a better link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One

by 1970-01-01

6/19/2026 at 2:51:53 PM

You didn't make an argument. You still haven't. Every new thing goes through a long stage where it hasn't happened yet. You haven't even begun to argue, with evidence, that this thing can't happen.

Even your line about "an entire space program" is incoherent in this context because the rocket in question is literally being used as a component in "an entire space program".

by andrewflnr

6/19/2026 at 4:04:26 PM

I fully disagree. Is that good enough to discuss? Name a private company that has landed on private devices on another planet. Here's the picture of where the argument stands:

Venus Rocket Lab / MIT: Venus Life Finder: Late (Missed original 2023/2025 windows; now targeted for late 2026/2028)

Mars One: Conceptual Failure

Inspiration Mars Foundation: Cancelled

SpaceX: very, very, very late (timeline pushed to 2028+)

Relativity Space: Aeolus <-- you are here

by 1970-01-01

6/19/2026 at 4:47:13 PM

There's still nothing here worth debunking. But as long as we're trying to extrapolate from history and vibes, I'll just point out that your timeline is at least as plausibly interpretable as the early stages of a progression that eventually leads to a privately built rocket going to mars.

by andrewflnr

6/19/2026 at 1:46:29 PM

Folks, this is not a democracy, or a meritocracy, it is a corpocracy.

by Noaidi

6/19/2026 at 2:08:41 PM

Picking company that haven't launched anything at the size and range your need where there are competitors that do is ... interesting move.

by PunchyHamster

6/19/2026 at 2:11:08 PM

Maybe ES' companies gave they a contract stating they assume all the risks and take not a cent unless they succeed, including reparation on failure, just to win the market.

by BiteCode_dev

6/19/2026 at 2:11:02 PM

"trust me bro"

by 0x59

6/19/2026 at 1:36:24 PM

Using private rocket companies is highly concerning.

by josefritzishere

6/19/2026 at 1:42:16 PM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V

Manufacturer: Boeing (S-IC), North American (S-II), Douglas (S-IVB)

by ceejayoz

6/19/2026 at 1:53:26 PM

This is a disingenuous statement.

The Saturn V[f] is a retired American super heavy-lift launch vehicle developed by NASA under the Apollo program for human exploration of the Moon.

NASA is not developing Relativity Space's rocket.

"On Tuesday, NASA said it hired the company to build a spacecraft to house a suite of scientific instruments, launch it into space, and fly it to Mars."

Plus, George Mueller, who managed the rocket team, worked for NASA, not some private company. So did all the engineers.

"The largest production model of the Saturn family of rockets, the Saturn V was designed at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama. The program was managed by American George Mueller; technical design was led by scientists relocated from Nazi Germany, most notably Wernher von Braun, as well as Kurt Debus and Arthur Rudolph. This group had developed the first US launch vehicles, the Redstone rocket family, under the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. All engines were built by Rocketdyne. Boeing built the kerolox S-IC first stage powered by five F-1 engines; these remain the most powerful single chamber liquid-fuelled engines ever built. North American Aviation the hydrolox S-II second stage, and Douglas Aircraft Company the hydrolox S-IVB third stage, powered by five and one J-2 engines respectively. IBM and MSFC designed the rocket's instrument unit. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mueller_(engineer)

by Noaidi

6/19/2026 at 2:34:48 PM

As with SpaceX and the Commercial Cargo/Crew projects, NASA sets requirements, milestones, procedures, etc., as they did with Boeing et al during Apollo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mueller_(engineer)#NASA...

> Borrowing from the US Air Force Minuteman program, Mueller formed the Apollo Executive Group, which consisted of himself and the presidents of Apollo's main contractors.

by ceejayoz

6/19/2026 at 2:01:06 PM

Why? Are private companies not the engineering force in most military equipment these days.

by infecto

6/19/2026 at 2:11:33 PM

Private companies paid with government dollars that employ lots of smart people from public universities.

This is not Arasaka.

by expedition32

6/19/2026 at 2:16:58 PM

Sorry I could not understand your point through all the snark.

How is using Schmidt’s company any different than any of the other thousands of military equipment programs? I don’t see how anything you said shows the difference.

by infecto

6/19/2026 at 1:37:15 PM

Then you know nothing of NASA and it's history

by ThrowawayTestr

6/19/2026 at 1:55:08 PM

NASA hired private companies to engineer and design their early rockets? I thought Wernher von Braun engineered the Saturn V rocket after NASA borrowed him from thew Nazi's

by Noaidi

6/19/2026 at 2:24:52 PM

Not to design them, but definitely to engineer and build them.

These days NASA doesn’t even build the payloads.

by mr_toad