Summary
Elon Musk and his advisers are pressuring Trump to cancel NASA’s $24 billion Space Launch System (SLS), citing high costs and outdated technology.
GOP lawmakers from Alabama and Texas oppose the move due to job losses and national security concerns.
Critics favor SpaceX’s cheaper, reusable Starship, but supporters argue SLS has already flown successfully and is more powerful.
Former NASA administrator Bill Nelson believes SLS will survive, as Trump likely wants to be the president who oversees the next moon landing.
Going to the moon should use technology that is tried and tested.
Another “Apollo 13” happening because the new strategy is “move fast and break things” won’t have the same happy ending.
You shouldn’t throw out all your hammers just because they were designed a “too long” ago. Some tools are fit for purpose.
It’s not sustainable. The reason the Apollo missions never were further developed after the landings was because the entire program was designed to get to the moon as fast as possible, where money was no object, in order to beat the Soviets. We don’t need anything like that now. If we are to build bases and establish a permanent presence, we can’t be using a vehicle that takes billions per launch.
Something like the Space Shuttle program. Not cheap, but also not with an Apollo price tag, where it can fly for decades without some politician seeing a giant wad of cash going out and getting ideas about cutting it. That’s what Starship is supposed to be. A Space Shuttle 2.0. It’s just unfortunate that the world’s richest Nazi has control of it.
Switching to Starship, which is designed to get to space as fast as possible to beat their competition, is not better. Even if there weren’t a conflict of interest the size of Jupiter.
The NASA moonshot has been choosing hardware that will do what is asked of it every time and has known failure modes and fixes. Not the shiny new thing. That’s a good thing.
Starship or it’s successors may in the future be a good option. For the first experimental mission(s) it’s a ship designed for LEO and should not be pointed at the moon just because it is also rocket shaped.