Nah. Folks are big mad because it’s exactly what we all expected when bezos bought the post. It didn’t immediately slide headlong into the void of bullshit pandering, so we developed a sense of false hope. Now it’s gone, we know it, we’re annoyed, and we’re mad about getting took.
It’s the odds-on favorite for the next generation of radiation-hardened space computers (HPSC). Potential to be a 25x improvement over current capabilities. Guessing most of the use cases will be niche like that, but who knows.
The Starship concept of operations requires 11 launches for each mission to the moon - one for the vehicle, another 10 to refuel it once it get into earth orbit. Each of these missions have to autonomously dock and perform a cryogenic fuel transfer.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, has shown an operationally-viable in-space cryo transfer. Even doing it on Earth is a fussy thing - cryo transfer was behind two of the Artemis I scrubs, and NASA’s been doing it since Apollo.
Getting one Starship into orbit is an interesting milestone but it’s a long way from what they promised the world they could do… and the clock is ticking.
This directive is largely pointless, which is pretty normal for government travel. Absent orders to the contrary, it’s still “lowest-price option that gets you to the destination in time.” 9 times out of 10, that’ll still be the contract airline fare, a basic per diem hotel, and the lowest-bid compact car at the destination.
I’m part of a pretty large subset of government folks that travel largely to large installations (military bases, etc) with no guarantee of EV charging stations because facilities funds have been constricted for decades. The per diem hotels don’t usually have much charger infrastructure either, which means government EV renters will have to run around looking for fast chargers in unfamiliar towns. I’m not at all unusual in this regard; I think it’s pretty unlikely that a given federal govt worker will be able to catch a train to their TDY.
The train thing is goofy except for the northeast and maybe California. I’m not in those places, there isn’t a train station in my zip code, and it looks like POV travel is a no-go now so I can’t leave my immediate vicinity without a rental.
Outside of big population centers, this new rule has no real effect other than to make a few new checkboxes on our travel forms… “did you consider rail travel for this trip? Y/n”, “was an EV rental available at a rate equal to the compact car rate? Y/n
The only thing that would really work here would be a requirement and a subsidy. “Rail travel is required unless the total cost of the rail option is greater than 125% of the air travel option.” “Government travelers are required to rent EVs unless the EV rental price is more than double the cost of a conventional compact.” You’ll also need an “all government buildings shall provide EV charging for official travel.” …and probably a “Government travelers with an EV rental may exceed hotel per-diem by up to $15/night if the hotel has EV charging infrastructure.”
Eric Burger has been against SLS for like 15 years, it’s his whole schtick. Loves making points about how expensive it is, about how late it was, and that it means NASA can’t design rockets anymore. Never talks the other side - how Congress hamstrung the design, how it was consistently under-funded, and how it was shackled to Boeing at the same time that the entire company hit the skids.
SLS was forced to be a Frankenstein rocket slash jobs program by legislative fiat. Of course it’s not sustainable in a financially-constrained environment - it was designed to spread money and jobs just as much as it was designed to deliver payloads.
It’s still the only thing that can put an Orion vehicle in orbit, and Orion is the only vehicle we’ve got today that can get crew off the earth and to lunar orbit, and Artemis I was a masterpiece launch of a first-build rocket.
Another SLS hit piece from Ars Technica isn’t news, it’s just noise.
I call shenanigans. A fully autonomous space vehicle is three miracles away - we need a revolution in avionics to get systems capable of running computationally-expensive models, a revolution in sensor technology to allow for dense state knowledge of satellite systems without blowing mass and volume budgets, and we need a revolution in AI/ML that makes onboard collision avoidance and system upkeep viable.
I do believe that someone has pre-trained a model on vegetation and terrain features, has put that model up on a cube sat, and is using it to “autonomously” identify features of interest. I do believe someone has duct-taped a LLM to the ground systems to allow for voice interaction. I do not agree that those features indicate a high level of autonomy on the spacecraft.
At the heart of the OC’s question there’s a valid and useful impulse. We should, as a society, always be asking whether we’re putting our resources in the right places. I just think that the case for space exploration dovetails pretty nicely into where OC wants to focus. Folks that want to shift funding into environmental reclamation are the natural allies of us space exploration nerds. It’s all science, it’s all toward improving humanity. Just need to get us all on the same side of the ball. :)
Every big program is appropriated annually; this isn’t a death knell, it’s just a vote of no confidence in the way things are. Proposed budget Is probably enough to keep the lights on during a reorg and rethink of the current mission scope, it’s just not enough to make forward progress. If they can get back in the box, I’d expect future appropriations to match the cost challenge Congress gave.
Of all the stupid things that Congress does, this feels…less stupid than usual. Usually they’d just cancel it outright.
This isn’t a particularly hot take. It’s been a steady drumbeat since at least the instantiation of NASA… and it’s probably traceable all the way back to the folks standing around eating raw meat and laughing about the fool trying to tame fire.
The two biggest drivers for innovation are exploration and war. Exploration is the useful force in your proposed endeavor, teaching us how to survive in hostile environments and giving us insights about other resources or natural systems that we can adapt to our own. Exploration keeps the human race learning, thinking, and working together. You need those things.
What isn’t going to help you is the piddling handful of spare change that is spent across the world on space exploration. If your goals look inward, I respect that - you’ll have better returns by reforming the health and education mafias that siphon cash and stifle innovation. You’ll find more money and progress by far if you can divert funds and engineering focus from the military to environmental renewal.
What you shouldn’t want is to stifle any existing area of peaceful collaboration and innovation; this isn’t an either-or, it’s a yes-and. The target should be any societal aberration that makes it harder for people to get higher on Maslow’s pyramid. You’ve got valid goals, but bad aim.
I bet the fine just offsets the cost of the prosecution, it’s not gonna be some settlement, it’s just “time and costs of the lawyers on our side”. Agree that if it’s meant to be punitive, it’s pretty laughable.