Realistically, there’s a SpaceX Dragon docked to the ISS, so that’s probably their emergency shelter and ride home.

Better than nothing. Hopefully this prevents some deaths.

VW must be running them

I can echo almost all of this, to the point that I was wondering if we used to work at the same company.

(I fully believe on purpose, to milk more money out of NASA)

I remember a pretty absurd situation along these lines. We ended up delivering faulty hardware to the prime contractor, who said there wasn’t a specific requirement for this failure mode, so they wanted to ship it, get paid, then have NASA fail it, write a new requirement, and buy another. The world of contract modifications and requirement lawyering always left a bad taste in my mouth. There are a handful of companies that I really want to see get banned from NASA contracting.

I’m surprised to learn that he had a heart

It wasn’t a NASA lander, it was an Astrobotic lander. NASA has been busy with Mars landings. The whole point of CLPS is to get cheaper missions by doing less micromanaging. We’ll see how Intuitive Machines does next.

I don’t think anyone even moderately informed has though a 2025 Artemis 3 landing is realistic for years at this point. It sounds like the official delay announcement is coming soon.

He might be right wing from a global perspective, but I’m still gonna vote for him instead of whoever has the R label. I wish we had cooler viable options, but “lesser of two evils” reigns supreme.

60% is still a ton of fossil fuels. At least solar and wind are the cheapest sources of electricity, so hopefully that helps speed things up.

The number I’m seeing is up to 95% recyclable. That’s preeetttty much the entire battery. Are you talking about something else?

I don’t know if their statement is universally true, but the EPA’s fuel economy / total emissions calculator seems to show it for what I’ve put in. You can put in a Prius or random EV and see how they compare.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myth1

https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=bt2

The batteries are also recyclable, which should make the equation even simpler.

Which Pocketbook do you have? I’ve been looking for an e-reader with a 7" screen, so the Pocketbook Era or Kobo Libra 2 look decent. The Kobo is $30 cheaper, though.

But also literally everything around us? Of my friends who went into materials sci/eng, two work in civil/commercial aerospace and one went to semiconductor.

Regarding the profitability - spaceflight isn't profitable yet. Some companies are trying to do manufacturing and mining that could be profitable in the future, especially if launch costs keep dropping. Moving heavy industry off planet seems like a good goal to me. That's also ignoring different imaging and communications companies that are doing alright.

Regarding privatization - NASA has contacted out services from their literal beginning in the Mercury program. Contracting out basic/boring launch makes sense to me and lets them focus on bigger ideas. I don't really think SpaceX is "subsidized" vs winning contracts to deliver hardware and provide services, especially when you compare to their competition for programs like ISS commercial crew/cargo and Artemis human landing system, where their direct competitors (Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin, etc) are more expensive.

My big gripe is that no one else has launch capacity right now, so SpaceX has no pressure to get cheaper and companies don't have a choice. Ariane 5 retired, Atlas V is booked out, and Vulcan, Ariane 6, New Glenn, Neutron, Terran R, etc. are not flying yet.

Twitter is so easy for people to get off of. But they won't.

Now, if any companies could give any serious competition in the US to SpaceX (launch or Starlink) and Tesla, that would be phenomenal.

Luna-25 launched on a Soyuz rocket, which is actually derived from an ICBM in the R-7 family. There aren’t any active ICBMs in that family anymore, and it seems like their newer liquid fueled ICBMs use different fuels and engines. They could share avionics, structures, and upper stages, but the heavy lifting is done pretty differently.

*As far as I can tell from memory and a quick Wikipedia scan

So, the ISS still relies on the Russian side to stay up. Russian Progress spacecraft do most of the reboosting for it to stay in orbit. It stinks, but that’s still the reality up there. At least the war got every Western satellite off Russian rockets, but we’re still doing crew exchanges, where a Roscomos Cosmonaut flies on a SpaceX Dragon 2 and a NASA Astronaut flies on a Soyuz.

I wish NASA would have been able to fund ISS replacements sooner so we could get out of there before 2030.