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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

Correct, the problem isn't that SpaceX no longer needs NASA, it's that SpaceX has failed to achieve any meaningful development milestones with Starship so far and the competition has either had some setbacks or isn't delivering either.

Crew dragon being retired is only a problem in so far that Starship isn't ready. It's really strange to somehow spin "SpaceX is doing something stupid that hurts customers" into "SpaceX is too competent for its customers".

As far as we know, Starship should fix the limited payload issues of Falcon 9 so why would anyone ever have to worry about Starship only launching Starlink satellites?

It's also weird how shutting down Falcon 9 and crew dragon means that SLS and Orion cannot be canceled anymore even if congress (the boogeyman) agreed.

Make this make sense.

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What do you mean? The problem is that for SpaceX it's more profitable to focus on its own internal projects. The development milestones of SpaceX are fine, in particular Falcon-9 and Crew Dragon is a pretty good way to launch people to space, and the problem is that it is becoming for SpaceX not interesting to keep launching them, because other things are better.

> Crew dragon being retired is only a problem in so far that Starship isn't ready.

Starship is not going to fly people next quite a few years. And NASA wouldn't like to have a gap with human spaceflight. And not only NASA.

The alternate to Crew Dragon is Starliner. Not whatever you're on about.

There's New Glenn too

The more competition in this space (pun intended), the better

I'm sure everyone agrees with that

I'm confident Starship will be used to fly human crews at some point as well

If others come up with similar or even better rockets, everyone wins

> I'm confident Starship will be used to fly human crews at some point as well

Problem is this time is far away, and in the meantime we need something. And the best currently available system is Falcon 9 + Crew Dragon.

Which even the bad-faith article admits will still fly until 2030

ISS will be decommissioned in 2030 anyway

Lots of things will change

But Spaceship won't be ready to fly humans Earth-LEO in 2030, and likely not in 2035.

To make a manned capsule one needs about $3B and 6-7 years. It's good some are working on it - but maybe these numbers, especially time, are a bit optimistic. I would certainly prefer more activity here.

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