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The Lunacy of Artemis

• preisschild 2y ago
  > It’s not clear how many Starship launches it will take to refuel HLS. Elon Musk has said four might be enough Has Musk once NOT lied about such figures?
  • ralfd 2y ago
    Elon often makes relative statements even if it is reported in an absolute way. In this example he called 16 refuel launches „extremely unlikely“ (but possible) and „may only need 4 launches“ should be read also as an unlikely possibility presented by him. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1425474903436939266 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1425474903436939266 Anyway that was 3 years ago and the 150 ton payload Starship 3 won’t likely be ready for HLS. Maybe if Artenis is delayed because of Orion reasons.
• asmithmd1 2y ago
  IDK why 81 year old Poli-sci major, attorney, and ultimate NASA executive decision maker Bill Nelson wasn't forced out of office after he incorrectly explained to Congress that the far side of the moon is always dark https://youtu.be/daZyPwCQak8?si=n9KXH-LJFBlpKXUp&t=153 https://youtu.be/daZyPwCQak8?si=n9KXH-LJFBlpKXUp&t=153
  • jonathankoren 2y ago
    The fact that he is an astronaut because of a congressional junket is just perfect from a bad faith argument perspective.
  • fallingknife 2y ago
    Probably because Congress isn't smart enough to realize his mistake. Here's one of them worried that Guam might capsize https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cesSRfXqS1Q&t=75s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cesSRfXqS1Q&t=75s
  • YZF 2y ago
    Didn't Asimov write about half the moon being dark? TIL the "far side of the moon" is actually referred to as "the dark side of the moon". But yeah, it's funny/sad that nobody in the room seems to know anything.
    • nine_k 2y ago
      When we earthlings see a new moon, we see one dark side turned towards us, while another dark side is the far side; Moon is completely in the Earth's shadow. During a solar eclipse, the far side is brightly lit, while the side turned towards us is dark. Most of the time the dark side does not match the far or the near side, we see a part of both the dark and lit sides as a crescent. I don't see how "the far side" and "the dark side" can be used interchangeably in any situation.
      • asmithmd1 2y ago
        Uh, no. The ONLY time we see a new moon is during an eclipse. Other times the moon is above or below the sun and is too dim to see. A lunar eclipse is when the moon passes into the earth’s shadow and they happens during full moons
        • nine_k 2y ago
          OK, we don't actually get to recognize the shape of the new moon with a naked eye because it's dark against the sky. It's still hot enough for some time to be visible in IR pretty well. The point is that the lit part of the Moon moves widely, while the far / near sides don't due to the tidal lock. Hence they can't be used interchangeably.
        • philwelch 2y ago
          I think if you’re somewhere free of light pollution you might notice a moon-sized gap in the stars.
      • adamomada 2y ago
        The earth’s shadow has nothing to do with moon phases and only affects our view during a lunar eclipse. I always thought the dark side of the moon meant from earths’ view: we can see the light side (even when it’s dark) but we can’t see the dark side (even when it’s light)
  • LeifCarrotson 2y ago
    Relevant education and experience in aerospace fields is not important in Congress. Neither is factual correctness. Politics and rules lawyering are what matter in that space.
  • Tao3300 2y ago
    Though there's a sense of the word "dark" that means it's unseen or that we are ignorant of it. Like "to leave someone in the dark", to "go dark" in communication, or a "dark match" in pro-wrestling (it happens but isn't broadcast and doesn't effect storylines). Might be too much to hope for, but he could just mean it's always dark to us. I'm getting of a kick out of this Trone calling it the "backside of a moon" and chewing on his glasses. Ain't no nerd. Tell me wut these Chinese is doing on the backside of the moon and leave the spacey mumbo jumbo out of it.
    • idlewords 2y ago
      The linked clip is pretty unequivocal, if you watch it. Nelson says: "They are going to have a lander on the far side of the moon, which is the side that is always in dark. We're not planning to go there."
      • Tao3300 2y ago
        Yeah, I watched it. I can hear it both ways. I don't know his mind or lack thereof, only that he hasn't necessarily spoken wrongly in that phrase I could see governmental types having a colloquial use of the word at times like these that doesn't mean "it's always in the literal absence of light".
        • pengaru 2y ago
          > Yeah, I watched it. I can hear it both ways. I don't know his mind or lack thereof, only that he hasn't necessarily spoken wrongly in that phrase What line do I have to stand in to receive some of your overflowing charity?
          • Tao3300 2y ago
            I had a really good breakfast today.
    • asmithmd1 2y ago
      Did you watch the video? He also says, “we don’t know what’s on the back side of the moon” I guess we have decided to elect political representatives are just egotistical camera whores, but why should the top decision maker at a technical agency be a complete idiot who is ignorant about many things the agency he runs has done? It would be like the head of the air force saying airplanes fly because of flubber
  • bryananderson 2y ago
    Like it or not, the job of the NASA administrator is not to actually do science or engineering, it is to fight for the agency’s budget with the President and Congress—a job for which political schmoozer extraordinaire Bill Nelson is eminently qualified, much more so than “real astronaut” Charlie Bolden, who struggled in this role despite being the epitome of the hypercompetent NASA pilot. I know which one I want at the controls of my aircraft, and which one I want on the witness stand on behalf of my government agency.
    • divbzero 2y ago
      Sounds like he’s so good at fighting for budget that he gets it in spite of questionable spending decisions.
      • p_l 2y ago
        A lot of the questionable spending decisions are part of the strings he has to accept to get the budget. Remember, it's Senate Launch System.
  • SJC_Hacker 2y ago
    "Dark" in this context could be ambigious. It is possible he meant that the sun didn't shine there (it was literally dark0, which is false. Another possibility its its "dark" to direct communication from Earth, which is what people who know what they are talking about understand it to mean and literally say. What's more troubling is the next statement - "We don't know whats there". Well, we've done tons of imaging on that side, since the 1960s. So I think we know something about whats there. Its just that there doesn't appear to be that much interesting there, that merits a specific landing mission.
    • selimthegrim 2y ago
      He probably thinks libration means a drink.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• fallingknife 2y ago
  The real lunacy is using chemical rockets instead of nuclear thermal once the ship is in orbit. That could reduce the fuel requirements for an Earth - Moon transfer by 4x. And this isn't some sci-fi tech. NASA built a working engine in the 70s.
  • buildbot 2y ago
    No idea if they did or not, but one immediate issue is that if anything does go wrong, now you have a nuclear incident as well as a tragedy.
    • adamomada 2y ago
      I still remember the fears of Cassini. What a different world it would be if that Earth fly-by* fucked up * edit I knew I got it wrong the first time, it’s not a transfer
      • anonymousiam 2y ago
        Lots of missions have flown RTGs, and there's always a group of protesters present every time one is launched.
  • jvanderbot 2y ago
    International treaties and environmental protests make that infeasible.
  • nine_k 2y ago
    But it would constitute nukes in space in a breach of international treaties! Certainly a NERVA-style rocket engine is not a nuclear bomb, and a few nuclear reactors with known and tightly watched positions won't constitute a threat of a sudden nuclear strike. But the treaties were made at times when the principal parties, the West and the Soviet bloc, did not trust each other one bit, and rightfully expected sabotage at any smallest loophole. So the treaties are overly tight. Today's world is about as bad, with a hot war in Europe, and a lot of tensions around Taiwan. No chance that the treaties would be relaxed for mutual good, due to the increased mutual trust. Breaking a treaty unilaterally just because it's inconvenient is also not great, and would untie the other sides' hands. That's why we can't have nice things. /* If you haven't yet, I recommend to read the novel Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem. It describes a civilization where all trust and cooperation are gone, and the planet is in the state of constant creeping war of sabotage. What Earthlings do there is another thing worth reading about. */
• XorNot 2y ago
  This is a criticism rooted in viewing the problem the wrong way. You can't compare a modern attempt at a moon landing to the Apollo program. It's straight up invalid. The Apollo program was a national prestige program, so successful we stopped going to the moon for ~49 years and counting. At it's peak it consumed 2.5% of US national GDP. We will never, ever, nor should we run a program like the Apollo program ever again. The second problem is, it's thoroughly dismissive of the political concerns which are the essence of the entire problem. NASA's budget changes every 4 years. It's priorities in fact change every year because the US has struggled to pass a yearly budget that didn't go to a government shutdown for multiple years at this point. In that view then, you get weird statements which are essentially arguments from increduality: i.e. the concern over how many launches you'd need to refuel an HLS in orbit. But it straight up doesn't matter how many, what matters is whether you can do it. SpaceX can launch multiple Falcons in a week, is there a reason to think scaling to the required number of launches is prohibitive? - who knows, because no one ever includes a failure expectation or cost expectation, they just throw the number out and gesticulate at it a bit. And that is the core problem of the arguments about the mission itself, because again, what is the goal? Getting to the moon with an Apollo style fully expendable, enormously expensive rocket is obviously possible because it was done. We absolutely should not do it that way again. If we don't get there with a more sustainable approach, then there's no point going. The SLS's deficiencies are accurately identified, but the reason for them is pretty obvious - NASA was ordered to build the SLS that way by Congress. NASA would really rather pay SpaceX or Blue Origin to build them the rocket they need instead, but they're not allowed to do that - by Congress.
  • pdonis 2y ago
    > it's thoroughly dismissive of the political concerns which are the essence of the entire problem No, it is quite correctly pointing out that political concerns are creating a lot of problems that shouldn't even exist. > If we don't get there with a more sustainable approach, then there's no point going. But the article's whole point is that this is not a "more sustainable approach". It's less capable than Apollo, for more money, without any compensating benefits. If that's what "political concerns...are the essence of the entire problem" looks like, then I agree that "there's no point in going"--meaning we shouldn't be doing Artemis at all if this is what it's going to look like. But of course the "political concerns" won't let that happen.
• boznz 2y ago
  Did the American people really expect any other outcome from such a project ?
• ein0p 2y ago
  Finally someone is saying it like it is. Sadly this someone isn’t a bigwig at NASA. NASA still can’t take humans to/from orbit on its own. To believe that in 18 months we’re going to have a successful lunar landing is batshit grade insanity.
  • nine_k 2y ago
    Why not, if NASA outsources 100% of the actual operations? Find reasonable contractors (for certain values of "reasonable" that would match SpaceX), give them attainable goals, provide the money, provide publicity, and otherwise stand back and do not interfere. For extra credit, provide some scientific mission spacecraft and rovers, the things NASA us actually quite good at. Key bureaucratic feat: keep Boeing away. 18 months is really tight though, realistically it should be twice as much maybe.
    • ein0p 2y ago
      Realistically it takes us “10 years” to repair a bridge in this country nowadays, so I’m not sure what the multiplier should be. And no, Boeing cannot be “kept away” from a fat government contract like this one. Nor can all the other usual suspects
      • nine_k 2y ago
        It takes 10 years to have the bridge repaired not because the actual fixing takes 10 years, right?
  • LargeTomato 2y ago
    I don't think you're reasoning is actually sound here. Nasa doesn't have the capability today, but that does not mean that the capabilities that they are building for tomorrow are "batshit Insanity". This is a very silly take.
    • ein0p 2y ago
      Building capability is not insanity. Expecting to land people on the moon in 18 months when you don’t have half the components already available for testing, however, is. Read the article. It’s long, but worth a read.
• OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
  Up there with "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses."
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• thegrim33 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • dotnet00 2y ago
    It'd do you well to read before making a fool of yourself. Everyone who's been paying attention to space stuff is aware of the mentioned issues. The fact is that NASA's hands are tied, they literally are not allowed to cancel SLS, as they have been legislated into using it for Artemis by Congress, who wants to keep pumping billions into Boeing. Until Senator Shelby retired a few years ago, NASA was forbidden from even talking about orbital refueling (under threat of having the entire space technology program cancelled), because that'd make the waste of money on SLS unnecessary. They literally redacted the word 'depot' in their public report on the selection of Starship as the primary Artemis lunar lander (despite it being obvious that's what they were referring to). ULA was coerced by Boeing into dropping orbital refueling capability and the ability to carry Orion from Vulcan's second stage, again, because it'd make SLS unnecessary: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/rocket-scientist-says-that-boeing-squelched-work-on-propellant-depots/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/rocket-scientist-say... Congress is so desperate on forcing SLS to be used, after NASA blindsided them by choosing SpaceX for the first HLS lander (instead of the other two far more expensive, far more technically immature proposals which were designed around tons of waste and possibly using SLS), they tried to make it so the second one had to use SLS, on top of mandating that they would have to launch at least 1 cargo SLS per year, regardless of payload: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/an-alabama-lawmaker-just-wants-nasa-to-fly-sls-doesnt-care-about-payloads/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/an-alabama-lawmaker-... The $4B per launch cost comes from a GAO report, it should be emphasized that prior to this report, NASA went out of its way to avoid counting SLS manufacturing costs so that the embarrassment of how wasteful it is would not become obvious: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/nasa-finally-admits-what-everyone-already-knows-sls-is-unaffordable/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/nasa-finally-admits-wh... The optimistically every 2 year launch rate comes from the simple fact that every launch keeps getting pushed back due to manufacturing delays: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2023/09/lack-of-sls-rockets-limit-nasa-artemis-manifest/ https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2023/09/lack-of-sls-rockets-...
  • jodrellblank 2y ago
• xt00 2y ago
  I think we all can understand the situation here unless people are really dense.. the Artemis program was setup at a time when the private space companies were still very new. SpaceX will soon be quite close to technically doing the entire mission themselves without Artemis at all. SpaceX took the money from NASA to help fund their Starship development and probably for other reasons as well. Net result is that by the time Starship can land on the Moon, they can basically do the entire mission without Artemis. So Artemis would be pointless.
  • venusenvy47 2y ago
    I don't think there is any plan for a roundtrip Starship lunar mission. I think it is too heavy to get back.
    • nordsieck 2y ago
      > I don't think there is any plan for a roundtrip Starship lunar mission. There are currently no official NASA plans to do so. In part because if there were that would be NASA tacitly giving up on SLS and Orion, which Congress would never support. We'll see what happens if SpaceX ever advertises such a capability. > I think it is too heavy to get back. There are a number of architectures that have been proposed that should work. From what I recall, all of the involve using multiple Starship vehicles going to Lunar orbit.
  • kemotep 2y ago
    SpaceX’s Starship allegedly needs up to 12 additional Starship launches to refuel the lander after getting into orbit so it can complete the mission. SLS can get from the ground to the moon and back with just the one rocket. I don’t think it’s clear that SpaceX can “do it by themselves” any time soon, they haven’t done an entire mission yet, of which the lunar lander Starship is only one small part of. Artemis is a dumpster fire of a NASA mission but like all of it is, including Starship.
    • dotnet00 2y ago
      SLS cannot get from the ground to the moon and back with just the one rocket. Orion is too heavy to land and return from the Moon. That's why the plan, even before Starship's involvement, was to transfer from Orion to the lander in lunar orbit, either directly or via the Lunar Gateway spacestation.
• readthenotes1 2y ago
  It's not really NASA that's building this, it's Lockheed Martin and other too big to fail defense companies. This is just a little something something to keep them in the game. As one person in NASA told me, they "fears NASA is becoming just a white collar jobs program"--artemis is clearly on mission.
  • jvanderbot 2y ago
    Any sufficiently large acquisition is indistinguishable from a jobs program.
  • dudinax 2y ago
    "fears NASA is becoming just a white collar jobs program" That's 90% of US defense spending.
• LargeTomato 2y ago
  We are going to The moon for two reasons. First, we want to set up a more permanent base. Nasa refers to this as "we're here to stay" The second reason we are going to the moon so that we can put the first person of color and the first woman on the moon. That is explicitly an Artemis mission purpose. Only time will tell if either of these two missions were actually worth it. One more point > Early on, SLS designers made the catastrophic decision to reuse Shuttle hardware, which is like using Fabergé eggs to save money on an omelette. SLS designers did not make the decision to use shuttle hardware per se. SLS was explicitly designed and funded to use that hardware. One of the original purposes of Artemis, before the other two purposes that we see in the media were even decided upon, was to make use of shuttle hardware.
  • idlewords 2y ago
    Note that the first reason you give is tautological.
    • dotancohen 2y ago
      Possibly, but it's not unique to SLS. People were jesting twenty years ago about the purpose of the Space Shuttle being just a vehicle to get to and from the ISS. And the purpose of the ISS? So that the Space Shuttle would have somewhere to go.
      • iamthirsty 2y ago
        > And the purpose of the ISS? So that the Space Shuttle would have somewhere to go. I don’t think this is accurate. ISS was conceived almost 10 years after the Shuttle started launching, and the U.S. obviously had space station ambitions even before the Shuttle was on the drawing board (Skylab). Additionally the Soviets did the exact same, with Mir being launched prior to the Buran’s first test flight — heck Salyut 1 was launched in 1971.
        • idlewords 2y ago
          It's true for the post-Challenger Shuttle, which really didn't have a credible job to perform except for ISS assembly.
• wpietri 2y ago
  As a kid, mainlining Heinlein, I just assumed we'd have a moonbase by now and that it would be up to something important and useful. In my 20s, I assumed that our then-primitive software engineering techniques would be refined until we could make things that were simple, polished, cheap, and reliable. So it's a little wild to me to see software not only get more chaotic, but influence hardware as well. All in service to a creeping managerialism that runs on goals that, to the extent they can be articulated at all, get more detached from any sane human purpose. I know shit about Artemis and would love to believe Maciej is totally wrong here. But it fits with so much of my experience of the world that it seems very believable to me.
  • iJohnDoe 2y ago
    > until we could make things that were simple, polished, cheap, and reliable. That was the original Apollo mission. We went to the moon 6 times.
    • eru 2y ago
      Apollo wasn't exactly cheap.
      • wpietri 2y ago
        As the article explains, Apollo was cheaper per mission than this.
        • eru 2y ago
          Yes. And a Rolls-Royce is cheaper than a Lamborghini. Ie A can be cheaper than B, but still be expensive.
  • marcus_holmes 2y ago
    Simplicity as a feature. Like TFA says, if you want something to work reliably, keep it simple. But simple isn't impressive. Tackling complex problems in complex ways is what gets recognised and rewarded. Humans are weird.
• just_steve_h 2y ago
  I find this essay to be well-crafted and compelling.
  • avmich 2y ago
    I'm strongly disagreeing with some qualifications there, to the point it's hard to find where to start. E.g. what this passage mean - "...this single-use lander carries less payload (both up and down) than the tiny Lunar Module on Apollo 17." ? Can't Starship HLS lift more than 50 kg of rocks from the Moon?.. I'm intentionally simplifying the question.
    • dotnet00 2y ago
      Starship HLS can lift much more than 50kg, but since Congress/NASA requires Orion to be the return vehicle, the amount they can return is limited by that, which only has a 100kg payload return capacity (and presumably a chunk of that is going to be taken up by food, spacesuits etc). Same with why each stay is going to have to be just ~1 week. Starship can obviously carry more than enough stuff for 2 people to live off for months. But Orion is only able to stay undocked for 21 days.
      • avmich 2y ago
        But that's not the lander's problem. I do agree NASA's Artemis program is strange. However it's enmeshed with Starship, and that's sufficiently different story.
    • hackeraccount 2y ago
      This. I scanned through the article saw that part and decided that a lot of the article was playing hard ball. The other comments in this thread suggest what the author was getting at but it's not in the plain reading of the article.
  • empath-nirvana 2y ago
    I actually was put off by the know-it-all nature of the whole thing as if nasa scientists had totally not considered any of this.
• GlenTheMachine 2y ago
  One minor quibble: on-orbit refueling has been demonstrated, during the DARPA Orbital Express mission in 2006. Otherwise, if NASA issued stock, you should consider shorting it.
  • idlewords 2y ago
    I think I cover this in a footnote? ISS gets refueled, and there have been satellite experiments like Orbital Express, but no one has attempted bulk rocket-to-rocket propellant transfer.
    • jessriedel 2y ago
      The cryogenic aspect seems much more distinct than whether it's rocket-to-rocket or rocket-to-ISS.
      • idlewords 2y ago
        No, they're both pretty significant. In the ISS case you have propellant mass moving around that's just a tiny fraction of the total system mass, while in the rocket case a sizable portion of the total mass gets shifted. Moreover, in refueling ISS you can use something like a flexible bladder and pressure differential to simplify the job of moving liquid from container A into container B. But in the rocket-to-rocket case, you might be moving propellant from an almost-empty Starship into an almost-full depot rocket. In that case, you're trying to hunt around for liquid in an almost empty fuel tank, and push it into an almost full one. You can't use a bladder because Starship is too big, and it's hard to maintain a big pressure difference (unless you're willing to vent a lot of propellant in the process). The problem would be very hard even without cryogens.
        • jessriedel 2y ago
          The lack of bladder seems directly driven by the cryogenic temp. Whats stopping you from using large (or many) bladders for warm fuels? I don’t see the hard problem of “hunting” for fuel in a rigid container. Yes you need ullage, but how is this worse than what you need typically to feed an engine?
• codewiz 2y ago
  Unkind quotes, but hilarious and probably well deserved: "SLS looks like someone started building a Space Shuttle and ran out of legos for the orbiter" "But on top of this monster sits a second stage so anemic that even its name (the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage) is a kind of apology." "the minds behind SLS achieved a first in space flight, creating a rocket that is at the same time more powerful and less capable than the Saturn V." "And SLS is a “one and done” rocket, artisanally hand-crafted by a workforce that likes to get home before traffic gets bad." "The rocket can only launch once every two years at a cost of about four billion dollars—about twice what it would cost to light the rocket’s weight in dollar bills on fire." "Early on, SLS designers made the catastrophic decision to reuse Shuttle hardware, which is like using Fabergé eggs to save money on an omelette."
  • codewiz 2y ago
    And another one: "Costs on SLS have reached the point where private industry is now able to develop, test, and launch an entire rocket program for less than NASA spends on a single engine"
    • codewiz 2y ago
      And a few more on on the Orion capsule: "Orion, the capsule that launches on top of SLS, is a relaxed-fit reimagining of the Apollo command module suitable for today’s larger astronaut." "The capsule’s official name is the Orion Multipurpose Crew Vehicle, but finding even a single purpose for Orion has greatly challenged NASA." "Where Apollo was built like a roadster, with a small crew compartment bolted onto an oversized engine, Orion is the Dodge Journey of spacecraft—a chunky, underpowered six-seater that advertises to the world that you're terrible at managing money."
  • dotancohen 2y ago
    Even the title is a creative jest, as Lunacy literally means "Looking at the moon" (via "Lunatic" which is someone who looks at the moon - Luna).
    • 2y ago
• zefhous 2y ago
  Destin from Smarter Every Day gave a talk that addresses a lot of these issues that I found pretty interesting too. https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU
  • jessriedel 2y ago
    Just skimmed it, but he mostly agrees with the criticisms right? ("Addresses" often suggests a rebuttal.)
    • Neywiny 2y ago
      I watched the whole thing but a bit ago when it came out. He did better than just that, he frankly humiliated the program in my eyes. The points I took away from his talk were: 1. Stop lying to yourselves and figure out the hard math (mostly in relation to the refueling question) 2. Learn from the past. Apollo kept excruciating notes (I'm still discovering new notes. For example, the lunar rover's manual is publicly online). Like this article, look at what worked and what didn't. Be better not worse. I've found in my own work I'm always terrified of failure. From what I've seen with the talk and this article, it's as if this program views failure as a selling point for more waste. /Rant
      • nutrie 2y ago
        I disagree that he humiliated the program, or the people behind it, which such a statement implies (although I do respect your conclusion). I've been following Destin for years and this guy genuinely cares. It's incredibly difficult to come up with a constructive criticism without offending people and he did a great job doing just that. He was humble, yet firm, well prepared and brought a fresh perspective to the table. Whether the stakeholders will acknowledge that is up to them. Hats off to the guy!
        • CraftingLinks 2y ago
          [flagged]
        • 2y ago
• schoen 2y ago
  > Imagine trying to pour water from a thermos into a red-hot skillet while falling off a cliff and you get some idea of the difficulties. Maciej has such a talent for picturesque metaphors.
• RyanShook 2y ago
  Artemis is probably the best evidence moon-landing conspiracists have ever had.
• causality0 2y ago
  NASA is excellent at its job. You just have to accept the fact that in 1969, NASA's job was putting astronauts on the moon, and in 2024 NASA's job is distributing taxpayer money to various places that don't deserve it. They're damn good at their job.
  • anonymousiam 2y ago
    Exactly. Don't forget this: White House corrects NASA chief on Muslim comment WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Monday that NASA administrator Charles Bolden was wrong to say that reaching out to the Muslim world was a top priority of the U.S. space agency. Bolden raised eyebrows in the space community and outrage among conservative pundits by telling Al-Jazeera television recently President Barack Obama had instructed him to work for better outreach with the Muslim world. He said Obama told him one of his top priorities was to "find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering." Improving relations with the Muslim world was a top foreign policy priority for Obama on taking office last year and he delivered a major speech on the topic in Cairo in June 2009. The White House last week sought to clarify Bolden's comment, saying Obama wanted NASA to engage with the world's best scientists and engineers from countries like Russia and Japan, Israel and many Muslim-majority countries. That failed to end the controversy. Gibbs, at his daily news briefing, was asked why Bolden had made the comment. "It's an excellent question, and I don't think -- that was not his task, and that's not the task of NASA," Gibbs said. Many in the U.S. space community, such as moon astronaut Neil Armstrong, are disgruntled by Obama's proposals to bolster support for private space companies and abandon an over-budget NASA moon program. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66B6MQ/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66B6MQ/
  • lyu07282 2y ago
    another important role of NASA is to demonstrate that government agencies waste money, its like the USPS or the NBN in Australia, its liberals putting other liberals in charge of these projects so liberals can say "look private space flight is way more efficient!". It is not allowed to be a functional agency for ideological reasons.
  • 2y ago
• hi_hi 2y ago
  Out of interest, what do people think is going to happen once humans can semi-reliably get to the moon? I don't often see this part talked about. I read lots about the astronomical (thank you!) cost and effort of getting there, often framed in a way that makes the whole endeavour appear pointless and dumb. Will they just potter about for a few days, grab a handful of rocks, take some jaunty selfies, have a cup of tea and then head home? Like Wallace and Grommit? No. They will prepare to strip mine it for all it is worth. Where is that discussion?
  • philwelch 2y ago
    Man, I wish. We need to catch up and build out the high frontier already.
  • SJC_Hacker 2y ago
    Not much probably. I think it would be at best, be research station. It will be a bit like Antartica. The moon isn't going to be mined anytime soon. There's nothing there we can't get on Earth, 10x cheaper. If there was a permanent presence there anyway, and in addition, you had something like a mass driver (probably built for other purposes, such as further exploration), then the economics might make sense IF you can find valuable ores, which we don't know where they are. But I think even then its dodgy - you would have to manufacture re-entry grade heat shields on the Moon as well to ship your ores / refined products back. If they could do local manufacturing, especially for the less complex/bulky items. To support that you probably need a population there of at least 20 or so, with all the supporting equipment and life support. And they couldn't stay there indefinitely, would probably want a rotation of 6 months-1 year (length of navy deployments / ISS stays). We're talking several thousand kg that you would have to move between Earth / Moon a regular basis. Annual program costs would quickly run into the hundreds of billions. Yeah thats comparable to the US defense budget but one of those things people view as necessary, the other not so much. And no private investor is going to touch it.
    • avmich 2y ago
      > There's nothing there we can't get on Earth, 10x cheaper. It's not too big a stretch of imagination to consider producing oxygen on the Moon from rocks and sending it to LEO for refueling Starships - this activity might get useful enough if we're going to use Starships to fly someplace more distant than the low Earth orbit. And Moon-originated oxygen has an energy advantage over the Earth-originated one.
• bnralt 2y ago
  > What NASA is doing is like an office worker blowing half their salary on lottery tickets while putting the other half in a pension fund. If the lottery money comes through, then there was really no need for the pension fund. But without the lottery win, there’s not enough money in the pension account to retire on. The two strategies don't make sense together. I don't think this analogy works, and it reflects a bigger issue with the essay. Unlike a pension fund, gateway and lunar landings don't actually seem to do anything or move us forward. Like many of NASA's human spaceflight programs (and a decent amount of its unmanned spaceflight programs), they seem to be doing something just to be doing it. So a better analogy might be using half of your money to buy lottery tickets, and setting the other half on fire. Buying lottery tickets might not be a great way to spend money, but it's at least possible you'll get some return from it.
  • idlewords 2y ago
    Personally, I agree with you that the whole program is useless. The point I'm trying to make with this analogy is that the effort is internally incoherent even if you grant the premise that moon landings and building Gateway are desirable outcomes.
    • danpalmer 2y ago
      They've essentially hedged, but in a way that gets the worst of both worlds rather than the best.
    • davedx 2y ago
      What do you think is useful for NASA to do? Do you think any form of spaceflight is useful?
      • idlewords 2y ago
        I'm a big fan of space exploration and would love to see a robotic exploration program on the scale of our current human space flight endeavors, sending rovers and landers all over the solar system, along with a major space telescope every 3 years or so (instead of once a decade). I feel like we're squandering an amazing chance to explore space by getting stuck on sending people instead of leveraging the enormous progress in microelectronics, robotics, and autonomy of the last 60 years.
• SJC_Hacker 2y ago
  Loss of crew tolerance is not what it used to be. The Apollo astronauts were given about a 10% chance of not coming back. In Apollo 13 they very narrowly avoided. Which was considered acceptable for the time period. I'd argue that mission failure tolerance is also considerably lower, in todays political environment. Again, Armstrong said their chances of actually landing were maybe 50/50. So if they get there and have a frack up and can't land, calls to defund NASA, etc. will start to reverberate. So thats what we're paying double for. Which I'd think, is fairly cheap.
  • boxed 2y ago
    If you're paying double for it, why are you getting the SLS for that price? Which, as the article painfully shows, INCREASES risk. By a lot.
    • p_l 2y ago
      Because it's not called Senate Launch System without a reason. Just like with Shuttle, which was seriously technically compromised due to issues with budgeting, NASA can not operate according to their best knowledge as if they just had that money. The money has strings, many of them.
  • idlewords 2y ago
    According to NASA's own advisory panel, the chance of losing the crew on just the SLS/Orion portion of the mission (so not including the landing, Gateway, or the trip to and from the lunar surface) is 1 in 75. If you make the reasonable assumption that the landing is at least as risky as the trip over, you get a 1 in 30 chance the crew dies. The Shuttle towards the end of its life had an estimated chance of loss of crew of 1 in 90, and two administrations decided that was untenable. The standard for missions to ISS is 1:250. If a goal of Artemis is to meet modern safety standards, it's falling way short.
    • gus_massa 2y ago
      IIRC from the Feynman apendix, Nasa claimed in the official reports that the SLS had 1/10.000 or 1/1.000.000 chance of failures, but the real numeber was close to 1/100. If they now claim 1/75 in the official reports, I'm very worried.
• Sniffnoy 2y ago
  Hey, just a note, there's a problem with the footnote numbering. Clicking on a footnote takes you to the right text, but often the numbers don't match.
  • idlewords 2y ago
    Never say problem. Say "opportunity".
• xarope 2y ago
  This quote is a doozy too: "Visionaries at NASA identified a futuristic new energy source (space billionaire egos) and found a way to tap it on a fixed-cost basis"
  • mlindner 2y ago
    I think that's reversing cause and effect though. NASA didn't "figure out" anything, they had to be forced kicking and screaming to do it. They may be embracing it now, but they did not cause it.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• alexey-salmin 2y ago
  Does anyone has a theory why in 60 years no one beats the F-1 engine? How is this possible?
  • idlewords 2y ago
    This video on what a modern Saturn V would look like goes into it a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNZx208bw0g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNZx208bw0g
    • alexey-salmin 2y ago
      Thanks, very helpful.
  • BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
    There was a proposal to design an improved F-1B which would be much more simple due to advances in technology and produce 15% more thrust at sea level. From what I can tell the designs got rather far along but NASA ultimately decided to stick with SLS and shuttle derived hardware. SpaceX is all about reusability and they have determined that having a large number of smaller engines gives them better control of the rocket during boostback and landing burns. F-1 style engines seem best suited for big disposable first stages and no one in the private sector seems to want to do that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrios https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrios
    • philipwhiuk 2y ago
      > decided That's putting way more control in NASA's wheelhouse than really belongs there.
      • BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
        You’re right, I should have said “the Senate”.
  • dotnet00 2y ago
    F-1 was a design based around the limits of its time. The engineers were concerned about the challenges of controlling a large number of smaller engines, plus concerns about reliability with large numbers of smaller engines. It also had to be designed 'by hand', computers were not advanced enough to do much of the simulation driven refinement used nowadays. So, they traded off efficiency for large size, potential combustion instability and high thrust. Now the technology has caught up, we can make small, highly efficient, powerful, reliable and restartable engines, and can control large numbers of them. Raptor being at the very peak of this, mass producible, cheapest in its class, throttleable, electrically restartable, very efficient and the highest thrust-to-weight ratio of any rocket engine. Put differently, the F-1 has been beat in all measures that matter.
• perilunar 2y ago
  When was this published? The heading says 1.1.2023 but the article URL says 2024/5 ? Also, in the first sentence "A little over 51 years ago" (referring to Apollo 17 of December 1972) would indicate that that the article was indeed written in early 2023. Yet some of the links in the footnotes seem to postdate this.
  • idlewords 2y ago
    It was published today. I've fixed the wrong heading date.
• DeathArrow 2y ago
  I wonder how much will it cost China to put people on the moon.
  • actionfromafar 2y ago
    I wonder what it costs China to put batteries and other commodities on the global market.
    • adolph 2y ago
      I wonder how China will keep the spigot flowing. By one estimate, in 2023 China's population stood at 1.409 billion, down from the 1.412 billion recorded in the 2020 census. By another, the population was likely 1.28 billion in 2020 and had been surpassed by India some years earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
• oldkinglog 2y ago
  > This is a remarkable situation. It’s like if you hired someone to redo your kitchen and they started building a boat in your driveway. Sure, the boat gives the builders a place to relax, lets them practice tricky plumbing and finishing work, and is a safe place to store their tools. But all those arguments will fail to satisfy. You still want to know what building a boat has to do with kitchen repair, and why you’re the one footing the bill. What is this? The essay is littered with these awkward family guy-esque jokes that do nothing to illustrate any point.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • pavlov 2y ago
    I felt this little story did a good job of illustrating why a tiny space station around the Moon might not be very useful at this stage of the program, even though it sounds cool. I’m assuming the article is not written for experts but for laypeople like myself who haven’t read much about Artemis beyond NASA’s hype. For that audience it’s useful to explain with real-world analogies why these program goals might be problematic. But If you have a better analogy in mind to describe the purpose of Gateway, I’d be interested to hear it.
• DeathArrow 2y ago
  Follow the money. Maybe Artemis is inneficient but it will still make some people a lot of money.
  • jpk 2y ago
    > Follow the money. Please do share what you've found.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• tibbydudeza 2y ago
  As a army general once said paraphrased "You fly with what you have". When will Starship and Glenn be ready to achieve trans lunar injection ???.
  • mlindner 2y ago
    2025 or 2026 for Starship.
• mlindner 2y ago
  Note that one of the images he uses is a doctored/edited NASA image. It's the 4th slide in this slide deck: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220003725/downloads/22%203%207%20Kent%20IEEE%20paper.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220003725/downloads/22... That should probably be made more clear lest people be confused and think it's official.
  • krisoft 2y ago
    Why would anyone think it is official when there is nothing indicating that on the image in question? To know that it is "official", as opposed to something which was just drawn to illustrate the article, you have to remember that it came from a nasa slide deck. The article clearly makes the point that nobody seems to know how many Starship launches the lunar mission will take. It varies from 4 launches (by Elon) to high teens (by Lakiesha Hawkins) and 15 (by Kathy Lueders). If you don't recognise the source of the original image then it just illustrates the text of the article. No harm, no foul. If you are so much into inside baseball that you recognise the resemblance to the nasa slide then you get the additional meaning: the plan changed. Not even the diagrammatic "concept of operations" is fixed properly here.
    • mlindner 2y ago
      > The article clearly makes the point that nobody seems to know how many Starship launches the lunar mission will take. It varies from 4 launches (by Elon) to high teens (by Lakiesha Hawkins) and 15 (by Kathy Lueders). That's expected when your rocket is under development. People over-hype on this for some reason. They either misunderstand engineering or they're intentionally trying to nitpick something. > the plan changed The plan hasn't changed in as much there was no plan at all yet, as we're still too early.
• nativeit 2y ago
  I’m seeing Starship discussed in terms that suggest I’ve missed something. When did it accomplish even the most base level demonstration of its required capabilities? How could anyone have any certainty in Starship at this stage, and how could anyone possibly compare it with anything?
  • mlindner 2y ago
    What do you define as "most base level"? It's a development project. When something is in development you still have lots of bugs to be ironed out. However it was quite successful, even given that. It reached orbital velocities the last launch, which is all that a regular rocket is expected to do. It did fail to do a in-space relight of its engines, which eliminates some usages, but if it was just launching a regular payload it could've done that. And the next launch is happening sometime next month.
  • Culonavirus 2y ago
    Vulcan is not yet rated to fly National Security missions (needs at least a second successful launch), yet it already has 60% of these contracts going forward. Why? Because there is confidence in the company and its ability to deliver based on past performance. It's not rocket science. (Pun not intended :) ...)
  • rockemsockem 2y ago
    They have certainly in the company. Also, one thing I'm not seeing mentioned is that Congress did not give NASA enough money to pay for any of the initial human lander system contract bids. SpaceX lowered their bid to accommodate this.
  • dialup_sounds 2y ago
    One can look at Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy and reasonably project that SpaceX is capable of overcoming the engineering challenges of Starship. The dubious part is accomplishing that on the Artemis mission schedule.
• kqr 2y ago
  I didn't live through the early space programmes, but having read about them recently, I'm surprised by how incremental they (and the Soviet Sputnik and Vostok counterparts) were. - The early Mercury flights developed the idea of putting a human in a capsule on top of an ICBM to see what happens at altitude and during re-entry. - Later Mercury flights experimented with de-orbiting techniques. (The early flights didn't need that because the ICBMs that launched the first people into space did so on a ballistic trajectory – they never achieved orbit.) - With Gemini we figured out things like endurance (what is it like to have humans in space for weeks), rendezvous and docking (incredibly difficult), and extravehicular activities (preparation for walking on another astronomical body.) - Early Apollo was focused entirely on solving multi-stage flights without humans on board. - With Apollo 7 we verified the command module was good enough to attempt to send a few laps around the moon, which happened with Apollo 8, while we were still waiting for a fully functioning lander. - Apollo 9 was a dry run of the entire moon landing sequence – except in low Earth orbit. - Apollo 10 repeated the same exercise from Apollo 9 except in Lunar orbit. - Apollo 11 is often considered the first moon landing, but from the perspective of the program, it was really just another experiment: can we repeat Apollo 10 except also make a brief touch-and-go anywhere on the lunar surface? - Even Apollo 12 isn't really a moon landing proper, but another experiment: can we repeat Apollo 11 but now also make a precision touchdown? It wasn't until somewhere around Apollo 14/15 where the main purpose of the missions started becoming scientifically exploring the moon. That's something like 25 crewed flights at various stages of development that had as their purpose to explore/learn about just one or two new aspects of the future moon missions, pushing the envelope a little further. Granted, many of these things we have fresh practise in thanks to the space station, but also many of them we don't. It seems a little weird to bet it all on a small number of big bang launches.
  • 1oooqooq 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • mglz 2y ago
    The space race likely necessitated NASA to show some improvement frequently. Otherwise the Soviet Union would have filled the large gaps between infrequent launches with their incremental successes.
• KasianFranks 2y ago
  This person is forgetting the entire operation is based on space biosciences, not just space. Vector Space Biosciences presents at DeSci London March 2024 - Min: 4:27:33 https://youtu.be/fbnFEvfKRO8?t=16052 https://youtu.be/fbnFEvfKRO8?t=16052
  • philipwhiuk 2y ago
    This is just a pitch for your company hamfisted into unrelated content.
• philipwhiuk 2y ago
  People forget that NASA's portion of the federal budget during Apollo was more than an order of magnitude higher than today. NASA does the most ambitious thing it can get funding from Congress for.
  • ssijak 2y ago
    If this article was correct, then what you said is not true. Seems like NASA went with a bad plan from the start to refurbish the old tech and made a costly, inefficient and risky tech-franken-zilla.
    • philipwhiuk 2y ago
      They were required, by Congress, to use Shuttle engines and SRBs to build a vehicle capable of deep space transportation.
      • seastarer 2y ago
        They should have refused
        • ikeashark 2y ago
          Congress: Use Shuttle engines and SRBs to build a vehicle capable of deep space transportation. Nasa: No that's too costly. Congress: lol ok we'll slash funding + you legally can't refuse.
          • pfdietz 2y ago
            If the customer demands it they'll sell their integrity, and damn the taxpayers. I have little sympathy for this. If this sort of continued honesty-free space program is what Congress + NASA are going to give us, we'd be better off without a manned space program.
      • neuronexmachina 2y ago
        Yep. For reference regarding the budget stipulations: https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls
• Perseids 2y ago
  Given that the Artemis program is motivated by space settlement, I'm surprised nobody has referenced "A City On Mars" by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (of https://www.smbc-comics.com/ https://www.smbc-comics.com/ acclaim) yet. I went into the book with lots excitement for extraterrestrial colonies, and finished it being convinced to better wait. They argue that if you actually look into the details, especially into the "dry" political, legal and social ones, trying to settle mars or the moon likely actually increases our risk of existential crises (at the current point in time at least). Think conflicts between nuclear powers over the (surprisingly few) good spots on the moon, or rocks (=asteroids) flung to earth by space settlers (there is a lot of deadly potential energy floating above all our heads). Furthermore, there are loads of open space biology questions that quickly become ethical questions when permanent settlements are considered. Can you have babies in low/micro gravity? How can you do it without too much harm to your child? The responsible approach is to do a few more decades of targeted research first. Regardless of the downers it delivers, it's actually a fun read and I can recommend it wholeheartedly. [1] http://www.acityonmars.com/ http://www.acityonmars.com/
  • delusional 2y ago
    That's a very engineering way to approach the problem. The issue it runs into is that the question "should we go to mars" isn't a settled matter that leads into the question of "how do we go to mars". The first question is as flexible as the second. Getting to mars means that the question "can you have babies on mars" now becomes highly emotionally charged, which means the answer to "should you have babies on mars" becomes obvious. Without any pressure, the former question will always be answered by asking the latter.
• throwawayffffas 2y ago
  > Conversely, if SpaceX and Blue Origin can’t make cryogenic refueling work, then NASA has no plan B for landing on the moon. If SpaceX and Blue Origin can't. Then Nasa will find someone who can. Cryogenic refueling is the projects real engineering target. Landing on the moon in the twenty twenties just isn't that impressive anymore. The Artemis program is nominally about going to the moon, but it really isn't. It's about building and living in habitats beyond low orbit, in orbit refueling, building habitats on the surface of another planetary body, and obviously in the future in situ resource extraction and surface refueling. If the mission was to land on the moon, a carbon copy of the Apollo program would do. But the mission is to prove they can do what it takes to go to and return from Mars.
  • geertj 2y ago
    Why is cryogenic propellant transfer any more difficult than other difficult things SpaceX have already done (eg landing a rocket, and building a full flow staged combustion engine)? They do this on earth every time they fuel the rocket. I understand it will be more difficult in space, but I don’t see why specifically this problem is the real engineering target over say, reuse.
    • preisschild 2y ago
      Landing/reusing a rocket isn't new and has been done before.
    • K0balt 2y ago
      I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is the “real” engineering target, but it is a foundational capability that underpins the ability for humans to explore beyond the earth-moon system, and it is fraught with difficulty and uncertainty. Fuel transfer and storage in orbit is problematic in many respects.
      • geertj 2y ago
        Very hard and foundational capability need not be correlated though. I think the more likely explanation that orbital refueling hasn't been done yet is not that's it's exceptionally hard, but that there hasn't been a need for it. Orbital refueling needs rapid reuse, and that has only been possible recently (with Falcon 9, and soon Starship).
• moffkalast 2y ago
  "Hey man how's it going?" > replacing the asbestos lining in the boosters with a greener material, a project budgeted at $4.4M, has now cost NASA a quarter of a billion dollars "... Jesus Christ."
• javier_e06 2y ago
  The premise gives good material for writing an article and yet we are not comparing apples to apples. A cargo rocket main use would be for building a moon space station, transport materials. Hence its size.
• amai 2y ago
  „And though the Shuttle engines are designed to be fully reusable (the main reason they're so expensive), every SLS launch throws four of them away.“ Using reusable engines on non-reusable rocket? That alone doesn’t make sense at all.
• Symmetry 2y ago
  I think there's only one part of that essay I disagree with: That SpaceX knows "How much propellant a Starship can carry to low Earth orbit". They're iterating on Starship. Falcon 9 started out with an LEO payload of 10.4 tons and they managed to get it up to 22.8 in its current iteration. By all accounts Starship's payload isn't up to expectations right now but SpaceX has lots of knobs they intend to turn to get it up. They'll try them and see, but there's no way to know what will work and how much right now. So really nobody knows at this point how many refueling launches it will take. Should NASA have committed to this design before the kinks were worked out. No really but Congress had put them in an impossible position so I think they didn't have a choice. But this is risk that happens at the start of the mission before any astronauts board. If things go badly here they can always abort. Unlike the landing on the Moon. And rapid launches and orbital refueling are something SpaceX is going to be working on a lot anyways regardless of the Artemis program. Unlike the landing on the Moon.
  • bryanlarsen 2y ago
    > No really but Congress had put them in an impossible position so I think they didn't have a choice. It's an "impossible" situation they've been in many times before and had a standard strategy to weasel out of: award the contract for more money than Congress has allocated, and then slip the project to the right until you get enough money. Every large NASA contract has worked this way, even their contracts with SpaceX -- Commercial Crew (aka Crew Dragon) was several years late because the project was underfunded in its initial years. SpaceX's $3B bid for HLS broke this unwritten convention.
• PaulHoule 2y ago
  It's easy to miss how clever the Apollo mission architecture was. The moon is not so far away in terms of distance but it is very far away in terms of Δv because, not least, you have to land propulsively because there is no atmosphere to slow you down. Trips to some near-Earth asteroids are easier than the lunar surface, Mars and Venus aren't that much harder because in any of those cases the Moon's gravity can be helpful. Werner von Braun's early plans to go to the moon https://www.scribd.com/doc/118710867/Collier-s-Magazine-Man-Will-Conquer-Space https://www.scribd.com/doc/118710867/Collier-s-Magazine-Man-... involved multiple launches, space stations, etc. The recognition that you could get there and back with 7 "stages" * Saturn V 1 * Saturn V 2 * Saturn V 3 * Service Module * Command Module * Bottom half of Lunar Module * Top half of Lunar Module was the key to realizing Kennedy's dream to do it in a decade.
  • sidewndr46 2y ago
    When you say "Moon's gravity can be helpful." do you mean some sort of slingshot around the moon to get to a trajectory that is closer to a Mars orbital insertion?
    • PaulHoule 2y ago
      Yes, but the right way to think about it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo... and Luna is just the first stop on the way from Earth. That Wikipedia article doesn't explain the concept as well as I'd like but the papers it references do.
  • kqr 2y ago
    > The moon is not so far away in terms of distance but it is very far away in terms of Δv because, not least, you have to land propulsively because there is no atmosphere to slow you down. Not least, but certainly the requirement to brake before you land must be on the small order compared to achieving escape velocity from the much bigger rock I'm on?
    • PaulHoule 2y ago
• flerchin 2y ago
  IMO the only "lunacy" with the current plan is regarding schedule and budget slip.
  • luyu_wu 2y ago
    Have you read the article? Those are just the outward symptoms of the much greater engineering lunacy within the project.
    • flerchin 2y ago
      The engineering challenges are just that. They'll either solve them or change the plan, and there's little reason to think they can't solve them. No one thought reusing boosters was possible either.
• jjk166 2y ago
  > Articles about Artemis often give the program’s tangled backstory. But I want to talk about Artemis as a technical design, because there’s just so much to drink in. You can't separate one from the other. Artemis seems like a hodgepodge of mismatched and poorly thought out subprojects cobbled together by people who neither know how to make a rocket fly nor really care if it does because that's exactly what it is. All the design decisions make perfect sense if you stop looking at the mission as "design the best moon rocket" and start seeing it as "turn these things into a moon rocket," and frankly that NASA engineers could take all the absurd requirements that congress and top level leadership had placed upon them and still found a way to salvage a technically viable system is a testament to their skill.
• 8bitme 2y ago
  *The Lunarcy of Artemis ¬‿¬
  • jodrellblank 2y ago
    https://www.etymonline.com/word/lunacy https://www.etymonline.com/word/lunacy - lunacy (n.) 1540s, "condition of being a lunatic," formed irregularly in English from lunatic (q.v.) + -cy. Originally in reference to intermittent periods of insanity, such as were believed to be triggered by the moon's cycle. -> lunatic (adj.) late 13c., "affected with periodic insanity dependent on the changes of the moon," from Old French lunatique "insane," or directly from Late Latin lunaticus "moon-struck," from Latin luna "moon" (see luna).
• twothreeone 2y ago
  > artisanally hand-crafted by a workforce that likes to get home before traffic gets bad. Ouch, that's gotta hurt.. I'm not saying I disagree, but I do wonder if a project is going "right" only when it starts to hit excruciatingly long shifts and burns workforce like coals - especially if it is expected to safely carry humans to the Moon. I think it's more likely a sign of doing something that wasn't planned and budgeted properly (which may certainly be because it simply had never been done before - so it will often correlate with innovative projects). If you worry about your workforce being motivated, transparently tying compensation to company success does wonders.
  • strangattractor 2y ago
    More likely the problem is DBC (designed by congress). Where are those old Shuttle Boosters made? The Orange tank? There are 535 member of Congress of which 10 are engineers of any kind. Probably even less Scientist.
    • twothreeone 2y ago
      That's not on congress though. If a budget for the agency only comes with those kinds of political strings attached, the right thing for the agency would be to say "please keep your money, the US won't be going to Moon or Mars".
      • hifromwork 2y ago
        I'm not very familiar with how US politics works internally, but how would it play out in practice? My experience with my (admittedly flawed) government is that the head of such agency would be dismissed from his position, and a new - more amicable - one appointed not long after. Are the US different?
        • strangattractor 2y ago
          It usually plays out like this. The Congress person from Alabama where the fuel tank is built refuses to ok spending for NASA's other projects (or some other desirable project that needs to get done) unless the design requires things be built in their district. Since the tanks were previously built there it becomes the easiest way to satisfy their black mail. This may not be explicitly stated other than in meetings with the speaker of the house but it is understood none the less. This is not Congress people directly profiting from this decision but they have to run for office every 2 years and need to have consistent pork returns to keep their constituents happy. There is nothing illegal here in fact the system is pretty much designed to work this way to insure that Federal money is distributed among the states.
• Animats 2y ago
  Meanwhile, China's moon program keeps plugging along. There's already been a robotic landing and return with samples. Chang'e 6, the second land and return vehicle, is in lunar orbit now, being prepared for landing.[1] This one has a robotic lunar rover. China plans a manned moon landing around 2030. Then, on to the lunar base. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_6
  • hifromwork 2y ago
    Interesting name! At first I assumed it's a pun on "Chang" (which looks like a romanized Chinese word) and English "Change". Instead: >the spacecraft is named after the Chinese Moon goddess Chang'e[1] What a great name for a Chinese Lunar spacecraft! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e
    • DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
      The Chang'e 3 lander released a small rover called Yutu, which means "jade rabbit." In Chinese mythology, the moon goddess has a pet rabbit. Westerners think the dark pattern on the moon looks like a face, but Chinese people think it looks like a rabbit.
      • watersb 2y ago
        Always looked like a rabbit to me, too.
  • Wingman4l7 2y ago
    A robotic moon landing with sample return? Luna 16 called, it wants to remind you that the Russians did this in 1970.
    • vaguba 2y ago
      did they do it on the dark side of the moon?
• chasd00 2y ago
  when the drama of Artemis started unfolding i remember thinking SpaceX ought to just go to the moon themselves. Iirc Falcon Heavy in a full thrust config already has the capability to get there they just need a lander and return. On the other hand, that effort doesn't get SpaceX closer to Mars and would be a pretty big distraction. Also, I imagine they want to play ball for funding purposes.
  • HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
    If SpaceX wants to put people on Mars, and get them back, then the moon seems a pretty good proving ground for things like a lander and ascent module, orbiter, etc, not to mention for any kind of habitat/etc they're planning for Mars. SpaceX planing to land Starship on the moon (and take off again) seems like a complete non-starter. I expect NASA can get the rest of their useless program built given enough money, but if Starship needs arms to catch it even when landing on a smooth concrete surface, then how the hell does it expect to land on an uneven pile of soft lunar regolith, much less take off again?
• gnarbarian 2y ago
  this is how our entire federal apparatus works these days. our government is profoundly broken but we lack the will to acknowledge it. I have about 20 years of experience in Federal contracting. we have nothing but process and zero accountability. It's literally a miracle anything ever gets completed. we sink billions of dollars into projects that are forecast to have dubious economic benefits and then we never bother to see if it actually worked out the way the economics were justified. empower programs and leaders to buck policy and regulations but make them accountable for failure of their core mission. compensate leaders who save money by doing more with less. etc.
  • rbanffy 2y ago
    > compensate leaders who save money by doing more with less. This is a recipe for burnout
    • gnarbarian 2y ago
      we have the opposite problem in government
      • rbanffy 2y ago
        Government isn’t meant to be efficient. It’s meant to be strategic and to do both the fundamentals everyone needs access to and the things private enterprise won’t do because they are not profitable yet.
        • gnarbarian 2y ago
          come work here for 20 years and tell me how you feel about it after.
          • rbanffy 2y ago
            The US doesn’t really understand or appreciate that concept. Also, NASA’s job is not to explore the universe, but to prevent rocket scientists from defecting to North Korea. And to develop technology SpaceX and others will later use. A lot of CFD work was pioneered there, for instance. There would be no SpaceX, or Blue Origin, or ULA without NASA.
• w10-1 2y ago
  Money used to be how things got done. Now it's why.
• JohnCClarke 2y ago
  Seems to me that the actual, albeit unstated, goal of the Artemis program is to preserve the US's defence industrial base. In that light slow, expensive, progress is not a bug - slow and expensive are features.
• shirro 2y ago
  Artemis does involve a lot of BS unfortunately. The SLS stack is a political bridge to nowhere that was never capable of directly returning people to the moon. When SLS got propagandized into a moon mission the limited delta-v necessitated a lunar halo space station and rendezvous which adds unnecessary cost and complexity. NASA hand balled much of the critical stuff like the lander and spacesuits to industry at the last minute with insufficient funds and time. It isn't all over yet for Artemis but they are in a mess. It is hard not to notice the contrast with China's steady incremental progress.
• eterevsky 2y ago
  The whole idea of Artemis is to build up new technologies that would expand our capabilities. Artemis 3 is kept simple and I don't have a strong opinion about this, but it tests the hardware that allows brining to the Moon dozens of people at a time using a reusable lander.