Quote:
Originally Posted by M_Six
I think private industry will be the next entity to land people on the moon.
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The original government moondoggle [
sic] called for the SLS/Orion to ferry astronauts to a non-existent space station orbiting beyond the moon. From there, they would board a lunar lander made by SpaceX for the trip to/from the moon's surface. Once back at the non-existent space station, they would climb back into the Orion capsule for the trip back to Earth.
SpaceX's lunar lander proposal that was accepted by NASA is essentially one of their in-development Starship rockets with landing legs attached. You know, the one that has suffered a few rapid unscheduled disassemblies (aka: explosions) in early sub-orbital testing.
Someone at NASA apparently realized that building a non-existent space station orbiting the moon that really didn't serve any required purpose in the Artemis program was a waste, so they eliminated that step and now just have the Orion capsule docking with the SpaceX lander in orbit for the trip to/from the moon's surface.
With NASA's current administrator being a person who paid to fly on a SpaceX private launch, I am pretty sure that this will be the last SLS/Orion launch that ever happens. SpaceX needs to send their lunar lander to lunar orbit to meet the Orion capsule, so why not just dump the recycled Space Shuttle junk that the SLS rocket is made of and just book a one-seat ride direct from Earth to the moon's surface and back on the SpaceX lander?
Privatization of space has already shown to be financially beneficial, with SpaceX able to send astronauts to the space station on the Falcon-9/Dragon stack that cost less than half of the government welfare that NASA paid to Boeing for the Starlemon development that is yet to complete a single flight to the ISS successfully.
The current race to the moon is between SpaceX, Bezos/Blue Origin, and China. With Musk launching the SpaceX stock IPO in a few weeks, I'd put my money on them to be first to land.....