"Jensen described an iterative process of flight and ground tests. “That will wind up determining how many missions we need,” she said.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson then stepped in. “The question was, how many fuel transfers?”
“I will say it will roughly be ten-ish,” Jensen responded. “It could be lower, depending on how well the first flight tests go, or it could be a little bit higher.”"
“SLS and Orion are boring, normal, and work” (and expensive) are actually a big reason why I could see Artemis getting cancelled. Nobody outside of huge nerds or people in the industry knows or cares about Artemis. “Didn’t we already do that?” The program needs something exciting and new to get any public interest.
Could you give sources on SpaceX potential bankruptcy? People have been saying that for years, but the company seems stronger than ever. Even Starlink, one of their craziest projects, has been toying with cash flow positivity.
As far as the rest of the company, Falcon and Dragon are the darlings of the DoD and NASA. Falcon has helped change the game for commercial spaceflight.
I’m not going to get into the Musk stuff here. He’s pretty awful. I wish he never got involved with Twitter or politics or anything. I look forward to Rocket Lab and Relativity getting their bigger rockets up and running to give them some competition.