Comments by "TheThirdMan" (@thethirdman225) on "" video.

  1. CombraStudios SpaceX wouldn’t exist without NASA.
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  2. You should stop getting all your information fro Musk’s Twitter feed.
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  3. Odysseus Rex Obama’s space program was based on a load of unrealistic and grossly underfunded crap handed down from Bush (who was trying to find a cheerful story to get Katrina off the front page). And Falcon Heavy would never be able to do the deep space things SLS could.
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  4. SpaceX would not exist without NASA.
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  5. Why?
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  6. Which things? SLS would do deep space better than SpaceX.
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  7. @Semicon07 "By the time that the NASA administrators realise it, SpaceX will have landed on the moon and be planing a trip to Mars." All funded by taxpayers. There is little difference between the way subcontractors operated during the Apollo era and what they do today. SpaceX is the geek boy's wet dream and Tony Stark Elon Musk is it's self-promoter in chief. Furthermore,, you've left out Blue Origin. They are on a totally different roadmap to SpaceX and Bezos is usually pretty quiet about his achievements but in time things will change. But none of this is as simple as private industry showing the government how it's done. The fact is that they simply cannot afford to do their own missions to the Moon and Mars (Mars is a dumb idea anyway) and will be relying extensively on government funding. "If I worked at NASA, I would be totally and absolutely ashamed of myself. My predecessors put men on the moon and we can't even put a man in space let alone orbit." The only reason your predecessors were able to put people on the Moon etc. was that they took massive risks. That those risks paid off was a remarkable thing but should not be seen as a total vindication of the way things were done back then. Everyone in the US space program, from NASA to Musk and Jeff Bezos, knows that such risks are no longer acceptable and fatalities in space will seriously damage public interest in it. The failure of the Space Shuttle to live up to expectations (it was an extremely complicated machine) and that lack of an obvious successor is what left the US program high and dry. The original proposals under Bush Jr were somewhat disingenuous (like putting a manned Orion Spacecraft on top of a single solid fuel booster) and stupidly underfunded.
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  8. Semicon07 I agree: space travel is inherently risky. Just sitting a bunch of people on top of what is, after all, a very large bomb, is extremely risky. We’ve seen what can go wrong. The problems with the earlier programs are well known today. The hypergolic ascent motor in the lunar lander was an all-or-nothing device. It would work or the astronauts would die (Nixon even bad speech prepared for the occasion). The Space Shuttle had sections of its flight envelope where failure was not survivable. If humans are to return to the Moon, for example, we cannot afford to be in a situation where there is no plan B, as was the case with Apollo. Being risk averse is basically a good thing. It drives us towards safer and more reliable situations but I think we’d probably both agree that such things can’t be achieved without some measure of risk. The big question is - and this was at the heart of my original point - how much risk is acceptable? What will be the fallout from a disaster? Will it result in a drop in public support and a consequent loss of funding? The point is that if we want this to be a long term thing - and I’m sure everyone here does - the best strategy is to get it right from the start. If the answer to the question, “What’s Plans B?” Is, “There is no Plan B” then the risk is simply too great to be sustainable. We can only imagine what the political fallout would have been like if Armstrong and Aldrin had been stranded on the Moon.
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  9. Semicon07 By the way, there are a few videos out there showing the New Shepard doing its thing, from liftoff to landing. There are other on the New Glenn and BE4 engine that are worth a look. Bezos operates on a completely different level to Musk and simply doesn’t play the same publicly game Musk does. You might be surprised how far they’ve come.
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  10. James C No thanks.
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  11. Sean Z Why SpaceX? Why not Blue Origin?
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  12. Rick Harper Perhaps you should look at it on a case-by-case basis because there are points where SLS makes more sense than you think.
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  13. Bill Fauber Those private companies could not exist without NASA. NASA/JPL also do research that nobody else does.
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  14. NordboDK Well, if it doesn’t, it will not be NASA’s fault. They are having to fund two programs at the moment, the one to get crews to the ISS as well as SLS, all while having their budget cut.
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  15. Starship does not exist yet.
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  16.  Bill Fauber  So what?
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  17.  Bill Fauber  Don't care about what?
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