That’s okay. They can cover their race track bets with the little people’s savings, or put it on their Too Big to Fail card.
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Sounds like you’re referring to the “Commercial Crew” rocket from ULA, which uses an Atlas V rocket with the Boeing Starliner capsule. They already did an uncrewed test flight to the Space Station in May with a crewed flight planned for February 2023.
SLS is meant for Lunar missions and the like, and certainly wouldn’t be appropriate for rides to the Space Station.
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Yep. I’m also speaking of SLS, though. Its ostensible rationale, as told to me personally by Scott Pace, is partly to preserve a backup national launch capability so we’re not wholly at the mercy of commercial forces - not just for commercial crew, but for unmanned missions as well.
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Ok, but I struggle to understand the fundamental difference when NASA is signing a sole-source contract with a Boeing/Northrop joint venture to provide SLS launch services. How does that put us any less at the mercy of “commercial forces” than the launch services contracts that NASA has with SpaceX or ULA?
In the case of the former, NASA had a much larger role in directing for their needs. Space X and Blue Origin have their own agenda that isn’t there to service NASA’s needs and in general, serve the public good. These new companies are much more concerned with being vanity projects for rich assholes who might also treat space like a commodity to be exploited rather than a place to be explored and understood.
Of course, Boeing/Northrop aren’t pure by any means, but the relationship was driven by NASA, instead of the other way around, which is more of what we have now.
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@anon61221983 beat me to the punch. What she said.
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In all fairness I can’t think of a single situation where we DO need a billionaire narcissist.
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“An explosive new report claims that Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin before he floated a “peace plan” for Ukraine that was widely panned by critics as a gift to Russia“
That’s the kinda guy you want in charge of your military satellite launch. And privy to your secrets.
Someone needs his security clearance revoked.
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Ok, forget SpaceX. Help me understand how the NASA launch services contract with ULA (of which Boeing is the largest contractor) is being driven by ULA whereas the NASA launch services contract with Boeing for the SLS is being driven by NASA? Is is just about who took the primary responsibility in the design of the rocket?
This is about companies that don’t give a shit about space exploration. I don’t think Space X does - which is my problem with them (and Blue origin). They’re already focused on space tourism, as opposed to being about building in the service of exploration. I don’t know nearly enough about ULA to say, but it seems like it’s a spin-off of Boeing to more generally focus on spacecraft, hopefully in service to NASA and the public good.
Are people just forgetting all the decades of science fiction stories that warn about the privatization of space here?
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Stripped down to the simplest (possibly over-simplifying) terms: SLS is NASA’s rocket. It’s just being built by contractors, as all of NASA’s rockets in the past have been. In comparison with ULA and SpaceX (which you can’t really leave out of the picture, it’s central to the comparison), where they own the rocket, and are simply providing the service of delivering a payload.
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I think the difference really does matter. It would be a huge mistake to let private corporations drive space exploration, because then it’s really not going to be about exploration, but about exploitation. We’ll be paying for oxygen on mars in the future if Elon get’s his way…
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See, that’s exactly why I included that story about the new NASA SLS contract. Because it explicitly says that NASA will just be paying for launch services for that rather that for the rockets themselves:
So forgive me if I still think that the fundamental distinction between the launch services contracts are blurry at best.
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Does one of them have an espionage approval clause?
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I trust Musk to the same degree that I trust Trump with national security.
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Well, I did say I might be oversimplifying. 
SLS as originally envisioned was “NASA’s rocket.” Designed to NASA’s specifications, and meant to be managed by NASA. This new contract changes things, of course - as you say, making it service-based - but under its original conception it was to be little different than any of the earlier NASA launch systems such as the shuttle or the Saturns. And it’s still, despite the changes, built to NASA’s spec, and for, as far as we know, its exclusive use. The difference is on paper, but it doesn’t seem to me that anything has fundamentally changed regarding its role within the agency. In any case, I don’t expect it to be around for more than one or two launches (Artemis 5? Yeah, right) so ultimately I don’t know how much it matters.
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The shift might also just be an outcome from belt-tightening necessitated by people demanding we give less money to “useless” programs like NASA (no doubt, in part driven by people who wish to invest in private space industry).
But as you note, little has actually changed with regards to how these are being used by NASA
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Game show contestants? Thinking less Jeopardy and more The Running Man.
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NASA actually does want other entities to use the rocket as well. Per the article:
Although it does seem incredibly unlikely that anyone else will buy the services unless they somehow bring the price tag way down. Maybe one of the few billionaires who doesn’t own his own rocket company will buy a ride to escape Earth when everything goes to hell? That would be embarrassing for said billionaire though. Akin to being the guy who takes a taxi when all his rich friends are driving their own customized cars.
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