[panick21]

SLS was 6 years and like 10-20 billion $ over budget and nobody ever complainged, in fact they got consistantly more and more money. And that is for technology that is fundamentally from the 1970s.

Starship is trying to do the hardest thing in the history of space flight. And of course its not on schedule, its schedule was always insane.

The way of approching things as 'is X on schedule' is a fundamentally false way of approching the problem. The question is who makes the schedules and why. Who decides the budget and why. Who planes for the architecture and why.

Just thrwing around and accusing different groups about who is 'delayed' is kind of counter-productive.

The fact is, the schedule is something Trump made up to sound cool in his first term, and has since been revised for multible reasons. And the demand for a lander was equally rushed. So the schedule is mostly just whatever politics at the moment wants to project.

[logifail]

> SLS was 6 years and like 10-20 billion $ over budget and nobody ever complainged, in fact they got consistantly more and more money

Ah, but SLS were the right kind of people. Allegedly. /s

SpaceX, less so. Allegedly.

[mmooss]

> Ah, but SLS were the right kind of people. Allegedly. /s / SpaceX, less so. Allegedly.

Doesn't that attitude, in reverse, describe most HN commenters every time SpaceX or SLS is mentioned?

[panick21]

I'm not sure what are talking about. I don't like giving contracts to SpaceX because they are the right kind of people, I like it because they tend to deliver faster and at less cost with something more modern and more future looking.

While on the contrary Boieng and friends try to use old tech they have in their archive to slap togetehr a minimal viable product to meet the requirment.

But the contract structure changes is not about giving contract to SpaceX only. Its about developing a space industry. And this has worked extremely well. Commercial cargo resulted in Falcon 9, Antares rockets. Antares team is now working with the Firefly startup for a next generation rocket. Clearly not as successful as Falcon, but without Falcon on the market it might have delivered differently.

It also produce Cargo Dragon and Cygnus. Both have seen a lot of further development since then and have all kinds of uses.

You can also look at CLIPS for moon landers, where some companies at small budgets have managed to build landers. And even those that weren't successful, training a lot of people on deep space probes.

If you comapre the explosion of the space industry since Commercial Cargo to the stgantion in the Shuttle/Constellation area you will see why many space fans are so in favor of the new model. And the amazing thing is, that a tiny fraction of the money was spent on the non-Shuttle/Constellation/SLS part.

In fact, I did the math and the total spend on just development of Constellation/SLS/Orion is going toward 200 billion $ over the last 25 years. And that is without actually delivering anything meaningful.

In comparison the complete development budget of Commercial Cargo was a few billion $ at most, and it has revolutionized the US space industry. The complete spend on all Commerical Cargo, Commercial Crew and Lunar development more like 20 billion $. And the impact is just hilariously larger.

Seems fairly obious what the way forward is, its just politically not feasable. As long as 50% of NASA discretionary budget is spent on ISS and Shuttle-derived stuff that will never be forward looking, you are playing the game with a hand tied behind your back and cement shoes.

[mmooss]

You don't see that, on HN, a large number of people support and defend everything SpaceX does and demonize any possible competition, critic, or criticism?

IOW, it doesn't matter what SpaceX or the others are doing, SpaceX is the 'right kind of people' to them.

[panick21]

I have read most of this threads and most threads about space on HN. There are occational full on Musk shills but I would argue its very much not the norm.

And those comments are usually not long or detailed. Almost everybody that actually engadges in the discussion doesn't seem to defend that position.

[mmooss]

The shills write the longest comments, IME. They can't contain themselves. Look at your comment - contract structures, clips, ... who would care that much about SpaceX?