amateur rocketry
Thanks,
Lars Osborne
On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 12:17 PM, John Dom <johndom@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dawn or New Horizons (Ceres/Pluto) are several orders of magnitude more
sophisticated and enlightening for humanity than anything SpaceX ever
accomplished. We'll see if SpaceX still exists 5 years from now. Who'll
pay
for such a mission privately?
jd
-----Original Message-----
From: arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On
Behalf Of Henry Spencer
Sent: woensdag 20 januari 2016 19:41
To: Arocket List
Subject: [AR] Re: 3 no 4 no 5 legs.
On Wed, 20 Jan 2016, Gert van Spijker wrote:
... SpaceX is, and has been for some time, wary of doing anything
that could embarrass its biggest customer.
Feasibility aside, it would only be embarrassing for Nasa if someone
else, e.g. SpaceX, would do something that Nasa has been planning to
do much quicker, cheaper, better, or any combination of the 3. Since
Nasa has no plans to put an empty, payload-less, stage on the moon I
don't see how Nasa could be embarrassed by such a stunt.
The issue is public perception, not actual achievement. Would it be big
news? Sure it would. Has NASA achieved anything that dramatic lately?
Well... no, actually. Plans to do so a decade from now don't count. Nor
does Dawn or New Horizons -- the issue is things that look like they're on
the path to manned exploration.
Anything that looks like a real step along that path only underlines the
fact that NASA, for all its talk and all its spending, is short of visible
achievements along that path in recent decades. Whether NASA planned to do
that exact thing is irrelevant; the message it sends is "SpaceX is making
progress while NASA isn't".
Assuming SpaceX will have to fly one or more empty missions anyway...
Based on recent history, an unjustified assumption.
In any case, if Elon is going to do what he says he will do, which is
landing on mars in around 10 years time, then he will be embarrassing
Nasa anyway...
Yes, if he manages to do *that*, there's going to be some really heavy
spin-doctoring needed. :-) But that's still some distance away. Right
now,
NASA is an important customer, and can be a rather touchy one too.
Henry
