** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **

It looks like they lost quite a few tiles when they hit the atmosphere in the wrong orientation. Unfortunately, NASA found out the hard way what happens with missing heat shields.
 
robfosters said:
No way will NASA get astronauts on the moon by the end of 2026. No chance in hell.
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Richard - London said:
Depends on how they spend the money, if they had given Spacex the budget wasted on SLS, starship would be flying daily at this point.
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I mean...the SLS has already sent an Orion capsule on an unmanned lunar flyby. Next up for that programme is a manned flyby in September 2025, and a crewed landing a year later. Yeah, it's wildly over budget and delayed. But it does at least vaguely function, which for something that Boeing is involved with is a pretty major achievement right now :D
 
robfosters said:
No way will NASA get astronauts on the moon by the end of 2026. No chance in hell.
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It'll probably be somewhere around 2030 now. But New Glenn, and possibly SLS, should be flying by that point which will help.

Richard - London said:
Depends on how they spend the money, if they had given Spacex the budget wasted on SLS, starship would be flying daily at this point.
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SLS is a bit of a mess but NASA diversified to use multiple providers for launch security; it's not up to NASA to fund R&D of a private launch platform like SpaceX.
 
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JRS said:
I mean...the SLS has already sent an Orion capsule on an unmanned lunar flyby. Next up for that programme is a manned flyby in September 2025, and a crewed landing a year later. Yeah, it's wildly over budget and delayed. But it does at least vaguely function, which for something that Boeing is involved with is a pretty major achievement right now :D
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Its a billion dollar per launch, not including R&D. how many do you think they will do before the budget gets pulled?
 
Richard - London said:
Its a billion dollar per launch, not including R&D. how many do you think they will do before the budget gets pulled?
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$1b per launch is a bargain compared with the shuttle ;) Including R&D costs, at the pathetic rate they could launch them they cost $1.64b per flight (source: Dennis R. Jenkins, "Space Shuttle - Developing An Icon - 1972-2013").
 
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Sadly missed the launch and re-entry due to work. However I've just finished catching up. What a spectacle! The sheer size and power on display. I'd love to witness a super heavy launch in person! Also those plasma shots, so beautiful!!! May not have had the ending we all hoped for but that was still huge progress over test 2 and I think the SpaceX team will be very happy with that. They will have got an awful lot of data from that launch and I look forward to seeing how IFT4 progresses from there.

I think SpaceX should be proud of what was achieved, it may still be a long ways off being the finished article but today was another big step in the right direction.
 
SLS is $4Bn per launch according NASA.

I'm fairly sure I read that with some development work Flacon Heavy could get Orion to the moon (needs an adapter) for a $200m-$250m per launch expendable cost. SLS can take substantially more but the cost is eyewatering.

Starship is unlikely to be man rated anytime soon but for getting mass into LEO it will be a gamechanger. Technically Falcon Heavy can do most of the work of building the Moon Gateway or Orion and non-Starship HLS systems. But SLS in required by legislation to be the delivery vehicle for Orion. Pork Barrel at it's best.
 
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