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NASA Is Outsourcing Its Next Moon Lander To a Private Company (pressherald.com)
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced Thursday that nine U.S. companies will compete to deliver experiments to the lunar surface. The space agency will buy the service and let private industry work out the details on getting there, he said. The Press Herald reports: The goal is to get small science and technology experiments to the surface of the moon as soon as possible. The first flight could be next year; 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the first manned moon landing. "We're going at high speed," said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA's science mission directorate, which will lead the effort. NASA officials said the research will help get astronauts back to the moon more quickly and keep them safer once they're there. The initial deliveries likely will include radiation monitors, as well as laser reflectors for gravity and other types of measurements, Zurbuchen said. Bridenstine said it will be up to the companies to arrange their own rocket rides. NASA will be one of multiple customers using these lunar services.
Last I checked, Grumman was a private company when the 1st lander was made.
NASA outsources pretty much everything, even the science. Remember, everything they do has to be calculated against an eventual "so what have you done for me lately?" from the public (and their congressional representatives).
I don't care WHO does it as long as it gets done. Some of my earliest fond memories were sitting with my family in front of our tv and watching the landings in all their black and white detail.I was 4 and it was the coolest thing I had ever seen that it still is 50 years later. We've done some pretty remarkable things since then but nothing compares to watching a man put his feet on a world other than our own.
Give Elon the $, see what he can do with it.
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:P
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Killing Nazi faggots is a proud American tradition, good point.
I'm sorry, but in every tv show atleast they show plenty of moon landings in US prisons, just a little different kind.
And we can't send people to ISS without Russian help. This is a national embarrassment. Russians spend one tenth that. That having been said, it's also like 10 days of Pentagon budget. In any case, I'm pretty sure SpaceX will make NASA obsolete within about a decade.
Just goes to show how demonic the muri cans truly are.
Is there new footage in the making?
Not at all like civilized European Aryan Ubermensch.
This was already in the making. NASA said big announcement on getting to the moon/Mars, making it sound like NASA was finally working with new space to speed things up. Instead, it is a red herring.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That's the fish that can't stop lying isn't it?
Political violence against the Nazi Party was wrong. Real news said so.
Heil Hitlary as mandated by the law!
Yay! Now we get to pay for it twice!
Space X l has reaction rocket soft landing in earth gravity coded and done in hardware. Moon gravity shoudl be do-able quickly. And who else has ready to go reliable launch capacity at any Scale as these contracts require? Look for a Space X trans lunar orbital mission soon?
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
From the summary: ""We're going at high speed," said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA's science mission directorate, which will lead the effort."
Why are you NASA nitwits going at high speed? You've had 49 years to prepare for the celebration of the July, 1969, moon landing. I fully realize the NASA of today is more nearly the gang that couldn't shoot straight, but by going at high speed, you are guaranteed to waste my tax dollars and to jeopardize the chances of a successful mission.
It's way past time to dump the NASA bureaucracy and to build a modern, success-oriented space agency in the same way that NASA succeeded the NACA.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
The first flight could be next year; 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the first manned moon landing. "We're going at high speed," said Thomas Zurbuchen
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Working of Error
They should just award it to SpaceX now, no one else is going to come close in term of value/$
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Great. Outsource more government activities to private industry. 'Cause that always works out well. I mean, look how swimmingly the prison industrial complex is working out. Or logistics for the military.
What's next? Outsourcing the IRS? Hoo boy.
The nine companies, representing seven states, are:
Astrobiotic Technology Inc., Pittsburgh;
Deep Space Systems, Littleton, Colorado;
Draper, Cambridge, Massachusetts;
Firefly Aerospace Inc.,
Cedar Park, Texas;
Intuitive Machines, Houston;
Lockheed Martin, Littleton;
Masten Space Systems Inc., Mojave, California;
Moon Express, Cape Canaveral; and
Orbit Beyond, Edison, New Jersey.
If you read ALL of what NASA has been saying about this over the past 12 months, you see that the subject of this current chat is only a part of the plan.
Just as commercial cargo(to/from ISS), which was started under the Bush43 administration was a pathfinder to lay a foundation for future possible commercial crew flights - which the Obama administration embraced after the cargo missions proved a good idea, this new plan is to have commercial transport of NASA experiments and NASA cargo to the lunar surface and then expand the service to manned. The companies working on the landers have been told to plan for future up-scaled or up-rated and man-rated future versions.
For the first time since the 1970s, I finally see a realistic plan that leads to a permanent manned presence on the moon. We may well see people walking on lunar soil again within a decade. After decades of watching NASA try to do anything new with its own in-house engineering and planning, I have concluded the agency (if left on that path) is locked into being a poster-child for timidity, bureacratic scoliosis and professional "can't do" while consuming BILLIONS of dollars per year.
NASA today consumes bearly 20 BILLION dollars per year and yet it is completely incapable of putting a chimpanzee into orbit (something it COULD do on a budget a fraction of the current one... in the 1950s).
"a hundredth of what NASA does"?????
What the hell does NASA currently do?
Waste mountains of money on unique one-off custom-built space probes that mostly just generate data of interest to scientists but of no real value to taxpayers? It could do far better here - instead of letting people build entire careers on a sinlg Mars lander and risking losing it all on a single launch they couls build an assembly line of smaller cheaper rovers built identically and launched to different regions of Mars. That path would be good for taxpayers but would offere fewer opportunities for careers to team leaders designing and building unique landers. Same for planetary orbiters. Same for space telescopes. Webb will cost BILLIONS before it launches and they only hand built ONE so if its Arianne failes to achieve orbit the taxpayers get NOTHING for all those years and dollars.
Waste money on aircraft research? There was a time when NASA (with a vastly smaller budget) built x plane after x plane after x plane, constantly pushing the boundaries of aviation. They've done very little on aviation over the past 20+ years; they've flown some model planes to test foldable wings, and blended wing body airframes - but NEVER carried any of this to a single full-scale manned test aircraft. They practically were embarrassed into the new push to build and fly a couple x planes (the new reduced sonic boom plane and the plane with electric motors all along the leading edge of the wing).
Humans in space? Not so much. They pretend to have astronauts these days, but they are really just Russian cosmonauts who were born in the USA or an American allied country and live in America some of the time - they train in Russia, wear Russian space suits, fly under Russian command on Russian vehicles from Russian launch facilities, dock to the Russian segment of the ISS, and return to be recovered by Russian ground teams on Russian soil at mission end.
Meanwhile: NASA brags about stunning progress as it converts a space shuttle ET and SRBS into a non-shuttle launcher over the span of 15 years and costing many billions of dollars to be able to transport four people to the orbit of the moon (where Saturn V could place 3 into lunar orbit and 2 of them actually onto the surface 50 years ago). This "new" rocket converts reusable RS-25 space shuttle engines and reusable SRBs into expendables at the very time that Musk is going the opposite way - developing reusable boosters, and fairings, and now proceeding to a sluuy reusable space system that could put a hundred people onto the moon in one launch. THE ENTIRE REASON NASA WENT WITH THE SLS and ORION DESIGN WAS TO SAVE TIME AND MONEY - and it did NEITHER. Orion's shape was chosen because we used it on Apollo and thus we had all the aerodynamic (for flight) and hydrodynamic (for post-flight) data parachute data, abort system data, etc and the taxpayers would not need to spend the time or money redeveloping all that (but NASA and LockheedMartin used the preferred-by-defense-contractors "cost-plus" contracts, so all the data was re-created and no time nor money was saved at all).
NOBODY at NASA has ANYTHING to be proud of in 2018. Even the new lander is an idiot show - basic landers are stupid platforms when you have the option of a mobile platform like a rover (which can move to an ideal location before deploying instruments and can move about making extra observations after any primary mission objective).
WindBourne opened strongly with a lie about American beef. Directly contradicting the link in the post he responded to. No excuse for that one.
Then he quickly followed up with a two for one. Claiming America makes the most Electric vehicles and buys the most efficient air conditioners.
He was really on a roll, as almost immediately he posted this set of lies, claiming China has the worse air conditioning efficiency (they are better than America) and falsely accusing someone else of lying (even though they showed links).
He also doubled down on his lies Replying to a linked IEA report with some random blog that didn't even agree with him anyway.
Thinking that wasn't enough lies, he then falsely claimed again someone else was lying. He also attempted to lie about what his link said and tried to pretend he proved the other person was a liar. Quite a ballsy move, he must have been getting quite desperate.
Lastly to round out the week he went back to one of his longtime favourite lies. Claiming China is 80% coal.
So in summary, lies about beef, lies about electric vehicles, lies about air conditioning, lies about coal, and the standard "falsely calling everyone else a liar".
Will this be the new baseline for his level of lying or was this week just an outlier?
Tune in next week to find out.
How many Russians died on Soviet flights? (hint: it was not zero - and they were COMMUNISTS)
How many Americans died on the Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia missions? These missions were NOT run as private/commercial flights but rather were designed by partnerships between NASA (a government agency) and defense contractors (crony capitalists, at best).
Nobody has been killed by a spaceflight conducted in a free marketplace, by a private company, operating for profit.
WindBourne opened strongly with a lie about American beef. Directly contradicting the link in the post he responded to. No excuse for that one.
Then he quickly followed up with a two for one. Claiming America makes the most Electric vehicles and buys the most efficient air conditioners.
He was really on a roll, as almost immediately he posted this set of lies, claiming China has the worse air conditioning efficiency (they are better than America) and falsely accusing someone else of lying (even though they showed links). He also doubled down on his lies Replying to a linked IEA report with some random blog that didn't even agree with him anyway. Thinking that wasn't enough lies, he then falsely claimed again someone else was lying. He also attempted to lie about what his link said and tried to pretend he proved the other person was a liar. Quite a ballsy move, he must have been getting quite desperate.
Lastly to round out the week he went back to one of his longtime favourite lies. Claiming China is 80% coal.
So in summary, lies about beef, lies about electric vehicles, lies about air conditioning, lies about coal, and the standard "falsely calling everyone else a liar".
Will this be the new baseline for his level of lying or was this week just an outlier? Tune in next week to find out.
The system can be traced to the Manusmriti code of Hindu laws, which suggests Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, created four categories of people from his own body: Brahmins from his head, Kshatriyas from his arms, Vysyas from his thighs, and Shudras from his feet.
This origin ordained an occupational hierarchy. You inherited your caste from your father, and that determined your future. The Brahmins were the priests and advisers – and primary enforcers of the caste system. The Kshatriyas were warriors and soldiers. Then Vysyas farmers and traders. The Shudras workers and tradespeople.
Beneath the Shudras were the Dalits – the “untouchables” – tasked with all menial jobs, including cleaning and disposing of the dead.