To be fair, they do take their failures well.
NASA have chosen SpaceX to build their next moon lander. I'd like to wish the crew the very best of luck.
F.T.F.A.
To be fair, they do take their failures well.
Don't just do something, sit there. - TNH
I'm sure they won't be worrying about any corners being cut though.
"In recent times, Nasa has chosen more than one company when procuring space transport services, giving it options if one of them fails to deliver."
"But Nasa has received only $850m of the $3.3bn it requested from Congress to build the Moon lander. In a statement, Ms Lueders said that 'while it remains the agency's desire to preserve a competitive environment at this stage of the HLS program', its current budget precluded it from selecting two companies, as it was expected to."
"Cost is believed to have been a major factor; SpaceX's bid was the lowest of the three competitors 'by a wide margin'."
What could possibly go wrong? ;-)
F.T.F.A.
Mag, very interesting.
Didn't know that.
I have listened to countless hours of Musk talking though as I love to hear about his plans.
Just his description of the journey to Mars is incredible. From memory, there is a window for launch to coincide with the orbit of Earth or something. Anyway, he thinks terraformers will refer to themselves by the date of their slingshot to the planet.
BTW, in his defence, he says he actively expects failure in his testing as they are working at such a rate. This ties in with the fail fast theory.
Probably.
Anyway, thanks for posting as it's something I can discuss with the children.
Last edited by AlphaOmega; 17th April 2021 at 09:09.
Maybe they could save a few quid by going back to using the re-entry and landing method that Uri Gagarin had to endure when the Russians decided the need to be the first to put a man in space outweighed the need to get him back alive.
They didn’t have time to design and test a landing system like the Americans were developing on the Gemini program, so poor old Uri had to blow out the escape hatch and blast himself out of the rapidly descending, red hot space capsule and use a regular parachute to get back to the ground in one piece.
That man had balls of steal.
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/vostok1_landing.html
As Michael Caine once said.....”Not a lot of people know that.”
I think the Spacex iterative way of developing is a step change in pace compared to the traditional approach. NASA won't let them fly with their astronauts on board if they don't think it's safe. Although NASA's view of safe was 1 loss of crew every 50 flights in the shuttle era!
Scott Manley's view, always worth a watch.
There is nothing quite like the thrill of going into space in something built by the lowest bidder.