Just refill it with a tanker and send it on its merry way.
Going off on a tangent, as far as mass production goes, the satellite constellations and their suppliers/subcontractors are evidence that things are improving. Iridium, Starlink, Oneweb, SDA, etc.
I'll give them a bit of a pass on this for needing to suddenly retire the Antares 2xx and start the 3xx with Firefly in 2022. Hopefully the new one can be more competitive and launch something other than just Cygnus.
Props to SpaceX for having the launch capacity to fill the gap until Antares 330 is ready. In the meantime, the dissimilar redundancy that NASA wants is on hold for cargo delivery, at least until Dreamchaser goes up on a Vulcan.
NASA added that no payloads have been identified yet for those landers. The earliest the cargo landers would be used is Artemis 7, a mission projected for no earlier than the early 2030s.
Well that's not great. If a hab and pressurized rover and whatever else are supposed to be part of a sustained lunar presence, they should really get going on that first, right? The same way that Artemis 3 is getting delayed because the lander and suits are behind schedule because NASA took forever to contract them, Jamestown base is going to keep getting pushed back while they decide what to do.
"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.
Soooo what brings you to the SpaceX community? Lol.
I'm glad that NASA, who has much more information than the public, invested in such an ambitious program. I've enjoyed following the development and demo flights. I'm looking forward to upcoming tests and hopeful that they'll be successful. Sometimes it's fun to just be a spaceflight fan.
The Artemis program as a whole is pretty cursed with weird political motivations and slow contractors. SLS and Orion were Congressionally mandated to fly in 2016, but took until 2022. NASA didn't award the first HLS development contracts until 2020. I'm disappointed that Starship HLS is behind schedule, but it's more ambitious than everything else in the program, so I'm inclined to give it more leeway than the mobile launcher, EUS, spacesuits, etc.
One of my least favorite things is when internet stonk people talk about anything space related. This is kind of a relief for not needing to deal with them as much.
I haven't had Prime for years but still shop on Amazon a bit. You get free shipping on orders over... $25 or $35? So group a few non urgent things and you're good to go. I pay for quicker shipping maybe once or twice a year, and pay for shipping in other sites maybe a half dozen times a year.
It seems like Blue has made so little progress toward their stated goal of "millions of people living and working in space", and it's weird to me how little he seems to focus on that anymore. Show a timeline with New Glenn flying [Blue Crew?] to Orbital Reef, then more Reefs and a moon base, then orbital rings, then...
It'll take some work to undo Bob Smith's bureaucracy and speed up their development, contracting, and "decision making".
In pursuit of known dunamancer Rick Sanchez