I’m kinda confused… I see the Space X test launch approaching and I’m just mind blown.
We went to the moon in 1969 ya? Why is it so difficult to re enact that? Why is SpaceX doing it and not NASA? I’ve seen/heard of a few unsuccessful test runs but I’m not super up to date with our space journeys. But don’t we have this technology/engineering capability?
I don’t mean to be arrogant but can someone explain it to me?
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The Apollo program was a huge national effort to do something in space that would beat the Russians. Once that had been done, both the public and the government lost interest and were unwilling to pay the continuing cost of the Apollo program.
The current NASA program is known as Artemis. It uses the shuttle-derived SLS rocket carrying the Orion Capsule to get the astronauts from the earth to lunar orbit and back. NASA decided for that for Artemis they would choose a commercial provider to make provide the lunar lander, and for the program, the commercial company needs to launch the lander, get it to lunar orbit, and then take the astronauts to the surface and bring them back
SpaceX chose to big the huge starship rocket as a lunar lander, and were much cheaper than the competing bids and had an approach that NASA thought would work, so NASA gave them the contract. So we end up in the weird situation where the lunar lander absolutely dwarfs the Orion capsule.
The obvious question is “why do you need SLS and Orion if you have Starship?”. The short answer is that there isn’t a full solution just using starship, but there could easily be an option like that in a few years.
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