NASA concerned Starship problems will delay Artemis 3
NASA concerned Starship problems will delay Artemis 3
NASA has growing concerns that the lunar lander version of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle will not be ready in time for the Artemis 3 mission in late 2025.
Another reason to stop letting private enterprise determine the future of spaceflight.
This was always the plan. Back during DAC 2 kickoff meetings for what became the HLS “government reference design”, folks were struggling to figure out how to get back by 2028.
The press conference where Pence said “2024” happened in the middle of those meetings. Shifting to the private model also shifted the inevitable failure to meet that 2024 date off of NASA (who was/is still wiping SLS egg off it’s face) and onto the “service provider”.
With Trump, there was a mandate to do a moon thing before the 2024 election. With Biden, that schedule pressure is gone… so my personal guess on a crewed lunar surface flight is back to 2028. This is a good thing; 2024 was not enough time.
This seems to me to be more more of a case of Hofstadter's law. Cost-plus contracts don’t seem to have any better track record than fixed-price contracts. For example, JWST was delayed several times, and SLS was originally mandated to launch in 2016, 6 years before the actual first launch date. Starship does not meet the ambitious internal schedule of SpaceX, but the speed of development is still impressive to most other space-related projects.
I think folks are focusing on the wrong thing. Both cost-plus and fixed-price contracts can succeed or fail. Cost-plus fails on budget. Both can fail on schedule (see both SLS and Starliner). If budget can’t move, though, fixed-price can fail on either technical (couldn’t deliver all features for the fixed price) or on risk (tried too many untested things to force the design into the cost box).
What SpaceX agreed to do was to take any cost hit against their own internal budget instead of NASA’s. That kind of power play is only available to very wealthy companies or to companies with bankruptcy lawyers on perpetual standby. It doesn’t build a sustainable space industry… it just allows a bunch of billionaires to enter the market by putting their fortunes up as collateral… which they could have done under a cost-plus model too.
The big upside for the private companies is that they don’t have to share the IP with the American people or with other companies. The result is that every significant difference in competing products (Starship vs Blue) will have to be hashed out in the marketplace in order to arrive at a standard… but with only two entrants, one customer, and a transaction every 18 months, the invisible hand of the market is going to take a VERY LONG TIME to find the most efficient solution.
All of the contract mechanisms suck for different reasons. SLS shows worst-case cost-plus… took forever and was stupid expensive but mostly worked. Starliner shows a worse-case for fixed-price… still taking forever, the company would be bankrupt fixing their problems if it wasn’t the size of Boeing, notably doesn’t work. The discriminating factor is what the American people get for the money. We own SLS, for all the good that’ll do us. For Starship, we paid into the pot, but not enough to get an ownership stake… so that money is just gone.
All comes down to economics at the end of the day. Public sector projects cost so much more than the private sector. Just look at the SLS cost vs Falcon heavy for example. And no part of SLS is reusable!
Public sector projects cost so much more than the private sector.
i'm not gonna lie: i have yet to hear a compelling argument for why anyone should care about this when the cost is being assumed by one of the richest and unambiguously the most powerful government in the world, and possibly in human history. i guess it's theoretically cool that Elon can build a thing for cheaper than the government can, but he has a profit incentive for doing that, which probably shouldn't be a variable influencing the construction of any vehicle that is highly liable to kill all its occupants if anything goes wrong.
Do you have another suggestion ? Target than doing a public-private partnership what should NASA do ?
Valid concern, although I wonder if it's more or less likely to be the reason for delay than the other required parts.
I wouldn't expect for Artemis 3 to male 2025, but I couldn't guess at the reason.Did anyone seriously think it would be ready?
Nope. NASA really needed to get the ball rolling sooner on the Human Landing System and new space suits for them to have any hope of being on time.
NASA usually makes sane and educated decisions. But making anything depending on Elon's BS fraud is beyond me.
SpaceX has been the most reliable Space company for years, trusting them is only logical. And the Starship is not the only Artemis launch vehicle with issues.