edit: Oh ya, also forgot the Hyugens Titan Probe - first time we saw lakes and rivers outside Earth!
Huygens was European Space Agency. Cassini was NASA
edit: Oh ya, also forgot the Hyugens Titan Probe - first time we saw lakes and rivers outside Earth!
Were these engines that were methane powered? If so I wonder if the exhaust smelled like farts.
Since it's Elon musk, he probably added the stinky gas we add in commercial methane just for the lolMethane is odorless.
Theyve pretty much been like this since the Shuttle. Its been nothing more than a jobs program for certain politicians and senior management is just yes men to support that.It isn't so much that NASA is incapable, but that isn't their current directive. The shift to private industry post-Space Shuttle for LEO stuff started over a decade ago. NASA was then tasked with deep space stuff, so you had stuff like SLS. And ultimately the stuff that gets budgetary approval by Congress is the stuff that scratches the back of enough different states and districts.
Dunno about that. Two Starship with 33 engines isnt launching off Mars, just the second stage with far fewer engines.Nah, if anything he wants as much “mars test” shit as possible. The original waterless launch pad was probably that way because Mars launches can’t do that.
Which is all just a bunch of examples of why government is completely inefficient at everything and worthless for accomplishing a task.NASA has done a lot of good shit, as mentioned above, but the thing to remember is that most of this shit is multi-decade stuff. Take the New Horizons probe. The first stages of planning go back to the early 90s. Then you have years of preliminary design before it gets the green light, then years of final planning and building, then it's launched in 2006, takes a decade to reach it's destination, then another decade of working the data. That's three decades of work.
James Webb started planning in 1996, and so on. A lot of the stuff we are seeing being done now and over the past 10 years were planned in the 90s when NASA was a very different beast, and diversity hiring not a main feature. Now think about the stuff that is in planning now by diversity hires and won't be operational for another 20 years. Is it going to work as well and for as long as the stuff we have now that is from the 80s and 90s? Who knows.