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posted by Fnord666 on Friday October 04 2019, @09:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the picture-this dept.

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine issued a statement seen as chiding SpaceX prior to the company's Starship update presentation:

Specifically, Bridenstine (or whoever fed him the statement) went out of his way to make it entirely one-sided in its focus on SpaceX. By all appearances, it would have never been posted if not for Elon Musk's plans to present on Starship. Bridenstine additionally notes that "Commercial Crew is years behind schedule" and indicates that "NASA expects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on [its] investments".

Altogether, it's simply impossible to interpret it as anything less than Bridenstine scolding SpaceX – and SpaceX alone – for not falling to the floor, kissing NASA's feet, and pretending that Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 are the only things in existence. Absent from Bridenstine's criticism was NASA's other (and even more delay-complicit) Commercial Crew Partner, Boeing, who has yet to complete a pad abort or orbital flight test of its Starliner spacecraft. SpaceX completed Crew Dragon's pad abort in 2015 and completed a flawless orbital flight test in March 2019.

[...] [As] Musk noted in his relatively subtle September 28th responses to Bridenstine's implicitly derisive comment, something like 50-80% of the entirety of SpaceX's workforce and resources are focused on Crew Dragon, the Falcon 9 rockets that will launch it, or a combination of both. At present, Starship is – at most – a side project, even if its strategic importance to SpaceX is hard to exaggerate. The same is largely true for Starlink, SpaceX's ambitious internet satellite constellation program. It may be true that Starship will eventually make Crew and Cargo Dragon (as well as Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy) wholly redundant, but that is likely years away and SpaceX will support NASA – as it is contractually required to – for as long as the space agency has vested interest in using Crew Dragon.

[...] It would be another two years before Congress began to seriously fund Commercial Crew at its requested levels, beginning in FY2016. In response to Bridenstine, former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver noted that over the ~5 years Congress consistently withheld hundreds of millions of dollars of critical funds from Commercial Crew, NASA's SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft were just as consistently overfunded above and beyond their budget requests. From 2011 to 2016 alone, SLS and Orion programs requested $11B and received an incredible $16.3B (148%) from Congress, while Commercial Crew requested $5.8B and received $2.4B (41%).

Human contamination of Mars with Earth microbes may be a "moral catastrophe":

If SpaceX was serious about planetary protection, I would expect to see a policy on its website, or easily found by searching "SpaceX planetary protection". But that isn't the case. So while it is possible that it has a rigorous planetary protection plan in place behind the scenes, its public-facing content seems to suggest that pushing the boundaries of human exploration is more important than the consequences of that exploration.

Others are arguing in favor of deliberate contamination of Mars:

On our planet, microbes like Rhizobium (which converts atmospheric nitrogen to biological nitrogen that can be used by plants) help maintain the gases our atmosphere and drive our food webs. So the scientists suggest that before sending humans to Mars, we should send some microorganisms from Earth there first.

They describe this idea in an opinion paper [open, DOI: 10.1093/femsec/fiz127] [DX] published in the journal FEMS Microbiology Ecology.

"Life as we know it cannot exist without beneficial microorganisms," Jose Lopez, the lead author of the paper, said in a press release. "To survive on a barren (and as far as all voyages to date tell us) sterile planet, we will have to take beneficial microbes with us."

The Verge wonders how humans could be kept alive and well on a journey to Mars:

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has now given four presentations about his company's Starship rocket, but all of those updates mostly focused on the vehicle's external stats. Musk has barely touched on the technologies needed to keep people alive and healthy while on Starship — technologies that need to be developed relatively soon if the spacecraft has any hope of carrying people to deep-space destinations like the Moon and Mars in the near future.

[...] Thanks to the long distance, astronauts won't get resupply missions for years, and they will have communication delays with Earth. Radiation exposure will become even more severe, and it's unclear how that will affect the human body. "It's extremely naive to think that we can send people to Mars within even the next decade," Dorit Donoviel, director for the Translational Research Institute for Space Health, which is partnered with NASA, tells The Verge. "Realistically, it's going to be at least 10 years or more before we feel comfortable doing that."

Musk has addressed life support and human health in his Starship talks before, but only briefly. In his most recent presentation, the SpaceX CEO was asked twice about the types of life support systems that Starship would use. "I don't think it's actually super hard to do that, relative to the spacecraft itself," Musk said. "The life support system is pretty straightforward."

I went to Mars and all I got was this lousy cancer!

Finally, a SpaceX fan has been arrested for trespassing at SpaceX's Boca Chica facility:

Passionate photographers will often edge as close as they can to their subjects to frame the perfect shot. But over the weekend, JB Wagoner — a California resident, Tesla electric-car owner, aspiring space-technology entrepreneur, and self-described "big fan" of SpaceX — was accused of getting too close to a muse of many spaceflight enthusiasts: Starhopper, a rocket ship at the aerospace company's private launch site in Boca Chica, Texas.

Within hours of photographing the six-story steel vehicle, Wagoner said, he found himself spending time behind bars. "I get arrested, I get taken to jail, and spent the night with seven other guys in a 12-by-16 concrete cell, sleeping on the floor," Wagoner told Business Insider.

SpaceX pressed charges, and the Cameron County Sheriff's Department filed them. They called Wagoner just as he was about to leave for the airport, and he voluntarily turned himself in. Wagoner was interviewed by the Department of Homeland Security, but no federal charges were filed. He has been charged with a criminal trespassing, a class B misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $2,000 fine.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 05 2019, @01:18AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday October 05 2019, @01:18AM (#902893) Journal

    Sexual harassment at SpaceX is young, fun, and hip. At Boeing [inhersight.com] it's just old, boring, and grody.

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    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 05 2019, @03:47AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 05 2019, @03:47AM (#902928)

    Nice.