can it at least crash straight into the oval office while trump is in there
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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Well that sucks.
But it's also like the least scary thing NASA could announce we're on the brink of. So when you phrase it that way, it comes as a relief.
It would have been hilarious if our astronauts had been stuck in there and we had to race against time to rescue them. Just a death defying struggle to save them.
The entire time the Chinese space station is just vibin in the background.
If this were KSP, I would drop the station with the kerbonauts inside, just to see if any kerbals manage to cheat the physics engine enough to survive reentry and landing sans parachutes.
I am sure Elon's trillion dollar fireworks program is on the case!
Talk about losing the mandate of heaven, meanwhile 
And still no real plan for a replacement in the near future.
Tiangong is gonna be the only space station.
Well there are plans just not directly from governments, NASA awarded contracts in 2023 to commercial providers to develop stations. Vast plans to launch their Haven-1 station in May 2026, it's a similar size to the Tiangong 2 but a meter wider. Smaller than the current Tiangong station though.
But ya, China will probably be doing the majority of science in space for a while. I'm glad they're doing it for humanity!
I know this is Hexbear, so probably an unpopular opinion, but I'm hopeful the commercial aspect will be as successful In lowering costs as the NASA commercial resupply /crew programs were in lowering cost to orbit.
I don't understand why it's so complicated for people to understand that the government can offer things at the lowest possible cost because the government doesn't have to make profit. Any private industry running at equal efficiency to public industry will, necessarily, cost more because it must build in margins for profit. Literally anything else a private company can do, so could the government.
Private industry cannot save us. It cannot be cheaper. This is not complicated math it's extremely simple and yet seemingly completely impossible for the vast majority of Americans to understand
Because people still believe in the Reagan line that profit is the best motive to bring out the best results from people. That, in a government agency, it’s just a bunch of bureaucrats half-assing and clocking out at their union-mandated 7.5 hours.
Yeah, if it's all being done in-house by state industry then all else being equal it will be cheaper than a private alternative. But "bringing down costs" and technological innovation are known effects of competition between firms and is a reason why China uses markets and also a reason why Chinese aerospace is in a better long term position than the US's. For most of NASA's history, the way it funded the development of launch vehicles was not conducive to bringing down costs whatsoever. The current paradigm is better, although like you suggest it is not the only alternative.
The issue with NASA was that they were the sole client for one industry until recently, and they choose to pick one or two companies to work with to simplify their own admin (as well as grease palms since it's a political entity in a capitalist state).
That creates monopoly and immediately defeats any possible benefit from "natural selection" in the market. They also tend towards that because the most optimal configuration is a unified state run industry that is allowed to build up the institutional knowledge that their current private counterparts (Boeing and Lockheed) have, while also ignoring the drive for profits.
If there isn't already an industry in place that can meet those knowledge requirements (as is China's case), then allowing them to develop, then consuming them is the only really sustainable course of action.
Only the Soviets managed to build a new tech industry from scratch, and that took military development between 2 world wars and almost half a century, China managed to get there using a hybrid of those models in a decade.
The other, deeper, issue with NASA is that Congress required them to do everything wrong on purpose and kept cutting their budget
"shuttle derived hardware"
Whoa now, putting words into my mouth. That's not something I ever said or believed. I'm just reflecting on the reality of our current existence, NASA spent a lot of money on rockets, It would have been the best possible outcome if NASA "offered things at the lowest possible cost". But they didn't, and our timeline missed the miracle where they did that.
They did give contracts to private industry to develop rockets In the hopes of driving down launch costs for themselves and their plan worked, that's what happened.
I'm a pretty big space enthusiast and I like to fantasize that I may someday be able to go to space before I die, I'm fairly young, but I know probably not. However because of that I'm happy about the reality we got, even if it's not the best one. It's certainly not the worst reality we could've had. Plus (if NASAs budget wasn't getting gutted) NASA can now allocate more money to science missions like landers, probes, telescopes, and orbiters and that is just as exciting.
I'm just reflecting on the reality of our current existence, NASA spent a lot of money on rockets, It would have been the best possible outcome if NASA "offered things at the lowest possible cost". But they didn't, and our timeline missed the miracle where they did that.
NASA has always been used to funnel money to arms dealer companies who actually make rockets for them. Like it never had its own factories or production pipeline, it was always just big handouts to corporate MIC contractors who were further financially incentivized to delay and drive up costs even more since the contracts let them do that completely unchecked.
It was also kept pretty tangential to what the US military wanted: they wanted ICBMs, so NASA did rocket research for them; they wanted satellites, so NASA did satellite launch research for them; they wanted some nonsense contraption for "space commandos" to steal Soviet satellites with, so NASA had to incorporate that into the Space Shuttle program which was further gutted to the point of barely being functional at all.
Well, you're not gonna date Olivia Rodrigo going on like that.
But I feel you.
That's less than a tenth of the pressurized volume of the ISS, of which almost none is lab space, and it doesn't seem to have any capability for either long term habitation or expansion. Calling it a replacement for the ISS is pretty serious exaggeration, it's not even a credible replacement for Skylab.
Ya I suppose my wording wasn't great. I compared it to tiangong 2 to point out how small it is, and followed that up with saying China will probably be doing the majority of science in space for a while because I agree with you.
I'm just happy the USA is doing something at all, we've gone stale and stagnant in space development. I am just excited that this will hopefully spark as much competition and price decreases in the space station market over the next 20 years as commercial crew has with launch vehicles. Its not the best outcome at all, but its something thats happening.
What competition, there's only one actually viable competitor in the commercial crew program?
That's true, but it still drove down costs so the original mission goal still worked. Sierra Space has Dream Chaser that will be launching this year which is exciting competition. No crew at first, just cargo. However that's exactly how SpaceX started so I'm hopefully they will be as successful and we'll get better competition than Boeing has been offering SpaceX.
It drove down costs relative to a program explicitly designed (by Congress) to maximize costs in the form of graft. Being cheaper than the Senate Launch System is hardly an achievement.
This is a common pattern seen with neoliberal privatization schemes. First, make the government program as bad as possible by cutting its budget and by saddling it with unreasonable mandates, then introduce privatization measures which at first seems to save money but in the long run cost more because profits must always rise and cede control to capitalists.
The Falcon/Dragon system is a legitimately good human launch system, and the first stage reuse is legitimately impressive, but it's actually less reusable and more expensive to fly per mission than the original version of the Shuttle would have been before the Nixon cuts ruined it.
here's hoping they can retire the station before anyone gets hurt. It's been a dinosaur for a while now.
not my problem
