I read "A City on Mars" last year, and it opened my eyes to just hard space travel is. The government constraints on aerospace projects doesn't help. There's a reason SpaceX moves so much faster; they don't have to justify and explain things to taxpayers.
Beyond that, the book makes a good case for how unrealistic a long-term colony on Mars is... at least in the short term (Short being the next 50 to 100 years).
My biggest take away is: for all his talk, Musk basically just wants to be the Uber to Mars: shuttling people there and back. He don't seem serious about _actually_ solving the problems of how to stay alive and thrive once we get there.
I found it sort of depressing as first, as I'd love to see people loving on Mars in my lifetime. But when I thought about it, I saw that they outlined a bunch of really important problems we should be working on as a society. The sooner we work on those problems, the better.
> Boeing developed Starliner under the exact same set of constraints that SpaceX had for crewed dragon.
You could be right. My (limited) understanding is that SpaceX is doing most of their R&D internally, and therefore they don't have the same oversight requirements more NASA-centric projects require. But that was based on an article about Artemis, and not Starliner.
NASA officials have previously admitted to applying more oversight to SpaceX than they did to Boeing regarding commercial crew. SpaceX's success is in being self-motivated. The government money is nice, but they want to develop and commercialize the tech anyway and are willing to put their own money into it. As evidence we have all the private Dragon flights, extra capsules built for free-flying missions and their self-developed EVA capability that should launch some time in the coming week.
That significantly relaxes the controls compared to Boeing, which is structured around exploiting cost-plus contracting, so every bit of work needs to be tracked and billed, the more time it takes, the better. Starliner was fixed price and they had to put in their own money so they would've been doing the bare minimum to keep the program going. They've only built the bare minimum 2 vehicles they'd need to meet contract requirements, and can only launch on the few launches reserved on a now retired rocket, so no room to commercialize until someone pays them to make it work with Vulcan.
Beyond that, the book makes a good case for how unrealistic a long-term colony on Mars is... at least in the short term (Short being the next 50 to 100 years).
My biggest take away is: for all his talk, Musk basically just wants to be the Uber to Mars: shuttling people there and back. He don't seem serious about _actually_ solving the problems of how to stay alive and thrive once we get there.
I found it sort of depressing as first, as I'd love to see people loving on Mars in my lifetime. But when I thought about it, I saw that they outlined a bunch of really important problems we should be working on as a society. The sooner we work on those problems, the better.
[1] https://www.acityonmars.com/