I though that was Voyager 9, launched about the time of the Eugenics Wars.
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Kiss a crewed US Moon landing inside this decade goodbye.
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Strange new worlds changed the dates of the eugenics wars, with some timey-wimey stuff…
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Honestly were we even really on track for that in the first place, though? The plan was already reliant both on an unproven SpaceX Starship-based lander as well as a ludicrously expensive, fully expendable SLS rocket.
This billionaire is obviously personally very enthusiastic about human spaceflight, having flown twice on privately funded launches already, and to be honest that enthusiasm is part of what concerns me about him. NASA does a lot more than just put humans in space, and arguably their non-human science work is more important to the world than their crewed programs. I worry that a guy who is singularly obsessed with getting himself and other astronauts to the moon and beyond would be willing to sacrifice the science missions in order to divert all funding to his passion project.
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2029, 2030 seemed somewhat possible.
Without a lander based on Starship and a mission architecture depending on tankers.
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Ok, then I guess that would have depended on the Blue Origin lander that’s even further behind in development and testing. Anything is possible but I really don’t see that timeline as being a likely scenario no matter who was running NASA.
As far as this guy is concerned I definitely don’t trust any billionaire, especially one that’s connected with or willing to work for Trump. Very likely he’ll do a lot of damage. But still, from what I’ve seen of the guy so far he’s among the Trump appointees that I worry about the least. Unlike most of them he’s got at least a little bit of relevant experience in the area, and he hasn’t pledged to completely dismantle the agency like the appointees for FBI, Department of Education, Health and Human Services, etc. say that they want to do.
Edit: and for whatever it’s worth, Obama’s deputy NASA administrator Lori Garver is supportive of this pick and she knows a lot more about the job than I do, so I probably won’t stress over it too hard just yet.
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Per a NASA press conference today the Artemis 2 mission (which doesn’t include a moon landing) is getting delayed again, this time to April 2026. If that actually happens that would be about 3-1/2 years since Artemis 1. Not a particularly impressive launch cadence.
The landing now wouldn’t happen before 2027, but I doubt that many people really believe they’ll actually make that schedule, whether or not the Trump administration guts the program.
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An update on that interesting but likely doomed space start-up
I don’t think that they’ll be launching any payloads any time soon (or probably ever) but I have to hand it to the CEO: he’s quite proficient at spinning.
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Yikes. They say they figured out what the problem with the Orion 1 heat shield was. (Not permeable enough, like how a potato can explode in the microwave if you don’t stab it a few times with a fork first.) And Orion 2’s heat shield is even less permeable. But they’ll fly it as-is and just adjust the entry profile to reenter the atmosphere faster so that it has less time to heat up.
I’m glad I’m not part of that crew.
Don’t they have a fancy NASA-engineered fork that they can use to perforate the heat shield material a little?
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$143.69 ea.
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