Well ... Boeing got themselves into the perfect storm. They need this flight to work right, after the catastrophic first attempt. But the longer they wait to get things right, the more eyebrows will be raised. They need a good flight, now.

But they do not determine the schedule - it's determined by NASA, which has about a thousand problems of itself right now, and cannot afford to screw up either.

I do not envy anyone in that chain of delivery right now.

You just did. The counter reply is that true capitalism drove NASA. The original space programs were built with hundreds of contractors selected from thousands of bids. The entire purpose of NASA was to create a viable commercial space program.

Now we have two choices for some reason.

I beat this drum a lot.. but this is "monopoly" and "oligarchy."

And corruption!

> Now we have two choices for some reason.

Because its an insanely difficult problem when you have to be 99.9999% sure you won't kill an astronaut because we generally don't have the "if they die it sucks for them" attitude with space anymore.

Seems like letting the hand wringing pearl clutching public weigh in on these things was perhaps a mistake and we should be doing it the way we do every other dangerous or bleeding edge thing. There's a big enough pool of guys who'll jump off cliffs in wing suits or whatever that surely we can spare a few to put on rockets.

(Spare me the lecture about people who have no better choice feeling pressured to do so for money. Seems like every other navigable waterway in North America is named after someone who could've lived comfortably but continued sailing off into the unknown until he didn't come back. People do this stuff for glory more than money.)

> we generally don't have the "if they die it sucks for them" attitude with space anymore.

We kind of do though, although we strongly pretend we don't. Each time after Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia, NASA has made a show of reforming their safety culture but either not sticking to it ot not actually doing it beyond a superficial level. Most recently, there has been a developing issue with the Artemis program. The Artemis I mission, unmanned, was intended to validate all the design and modeling of the Orion spacecraft before people fly on it. It was subsequently discovered that the Orion heat shield suffered severe damage during reentry, partially falling apart in a way that wasn't expected.

At this point, a space program which actually takes the preservation of human life as seriously as NASA claims would postpone the manned Artemis II flight and fly more test missions until they get the Orion heat shield to perform as expected. But that's not what NASA is doing. They are instead proceeding with Artemis II, confident that this time their modeling is accurate. Instead of reentering with the trajectory they tested, they're going to send humans on a completely new reentry trajectory they have never tested before. Their modeling failed to predict the heat shield damage that occurred during Artemis I, but now they are trusting their modeling to keep people alive for Artemis II. It's totally wreckless.

And yeah yeah, it's mostly Congress's fault, NASA funding and all that, SLS costs too much and NASA doesn't have any more to spare for tests and they don't have time anyway with the politically imposed deadlines, etc etc.

"Musk, who has been engaged in a high-profile feud with US President Donald Trump, on Thursday threatened to decommission the Dragon before later saying the spacecraft would stay in operation."

Interesting timing.

I'm usually not one to defend Elmo, but it was a response to P47 threatening to defund SpaceX. It's like watching children. Poor USA, poor us.

He was.

They pulled Jared Isaacman because it was revealed he had donated to Democrats.

That's pretty amusing, considering Trump spent decades as a NY Democrat.

Rules for thee, not for me.

That was their excuse. But they probably knew it already upfront, and of course Trump himself has done so and obviously knows that rich people donate to both parties just to cover their bases and that it means relatively little.

I think it's more likely that Jared was pulled at the suggestion of some staffers that never liked him or Musk in the first place but weren't able to get their way with Trump as long as Musk was still around.

Basically they pulled a fast one on Musk, who believed that with his giant (300$ million give or take) donation would be able to get his preferred candidate to NASA.

The fact that he was quite competent and generally liked doesn’t matter to Trump, who seems set on defunding NASA and having someone there who won’t complain.

They knew that from the start. He pretty much said himself it was a retaliation in the Musk/Trump situation.

DragonX is the smaller and leaner government.

he got himself on gov watch list after that tweet for sure

Yeah I heard they're gonna start live-tracking his private jet flights

That was a pretty dumb tweet as it gives Trump all the ammo to put SpaceX under close government scrutiny and/or make plans to nationalize it, or whatever whimsical thing he can think of to hurt Musk.

I'm hoping Melon loses his SpaceX security clearances. He routinely commits federal crimes. Everyone else would have lost theirs long ago.

He was never going to decommission Dragon. That was just playground petulance.

There's nothing Putin enjoys more than watching two senior underlings fighting like rats in a sack.

The US space and science programmes are useful collateral damage in this.

They say “the only US alternative”, which is true, but it’s not the only alternative - nasa paid for seats on Soyuz for many years, and I’m sure they could go back to doing the same. Perhaps China would be willing to sell seats on their launches. Maybe India will be in a position to offer human launches to the U.S. fairly soon - should be up and running by 2027, and they seem to hit their objectives most of the time.

Cooperation with roscosmos seems to have been largely unimpeded by Russia’s political and military actions over the years, so these all seem like realistic possibilities.

Yes, it will be a shame if the U.S. has no launch capability of their own, but short term partisan political thinking is much more important to the electorate than long term national strategic interest.

NASA still cooperates heavily with Roscosmos and American astronauts regularly fly in paid Soyuz seats. The latest one is Johnny Kim who launched in late April on Soyuz MS-27 from Baikonur and will stay on the ISS until december. And Christopher Williams is already scheduled for the next Soyuz mission.

China on the other hand will probably never happen because of the general political climate in the US and this administration in particular.

Congress has forbidden NASA to cooperate with China for many years. It's been law since 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment

Also I believe that Russia isn't being paid for astronauts to fly on Soyuz. Instead, cosmonauts fly on Dragon. It's a like-for-like exchange which is mutually beneficial (both countries need the other's cooperation to keep the ISS operational, so these exchanges ensure that can continue if either Soyuz or Dragon are grounded for some reason.)

Correct. The US paid for the Soyuz flights that they owed Russian astronauts, because they had no means of bringing them to the ISS.

What would be the goal?

Putting SpaceX under the CEO of Boeing would make SpaceX as bad as Boeing, not Boeing as good as SpaceX.

Also, it's still America. Good luck to anyone trying to "force" SpaceX, a private company, to do anything they don't want.

"it's still America"

Is it?

> The real plan

Ugh that is being way too generous. A private space industry exists despite their plans not because of them.

>A private space industry exists despite their plans not because of them.

No, this is completely opposite to reality. The current US private space industry was absolutely the result in large part of a rare modern spell of good policy decisions and sustained support (and absolutely yes, a certain amount of luck, but it's important to create conditions where luck can snowball). Support that has paid off in spades and now is self-sustaining sure, but that's a good thing and doesn't change the vital nature of the bootstrapping period. Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew were critical, as was opening up national security launches then actually embracing it. Multiple providers is now an explicit goal of the DOD and they have repeatedly acted to support it, from awarding NSSL launch contracts with an eye towards which player really needed them to stay in business to being willing to take on more risk for less critical payloads. It hasn't been a short road or one without bumps and conflicting interests, and it's almost a miracle it happened at all given Congress' general shortsightedness and desire to use space almost purely as a vehicle for pork regardless of efficiency, but happen it did (ironically thanks in significant part to Boeing [0]). The contrast with the slow, anemic and visionless efforts of the EU during the same time period is striking.

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0: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/actually-boeing-is-p...