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> SLS is the elephant in the room and is a complete disaster SLS isn't great but it does.. you know.. work.

belter 1y ago
Except for the under powered orbits but that is a whole other issue. https://youtu.be/XFIvKSVRtZ0 https://youtu.be/XFIvKSVRtZ0 https://youtu.be/sGT-8PHSVso https://youtu.be/sGT-8PHSVso
- jordanb 1y ago
  While it's hard to get the truth out of SpaceX but there's reliable evidence that the block one starship wasn't anywhere near its mass to orbit projections which is why they rushed the block two design which stopped their progress practically cold.
eagerpace 1y ago
Does it? Do we want to repeat what we did 50 years ago or do we want to do something better and stay this time?
- jordanb 1y ago
  "Meet your mission objectives on the first try" is a pretty reasonable - if low-bar - definition of "works".
chadcmulligan 1y ago
I read this recently, and it doesn't sound good https://idlewords.com/2024/05/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm https://idlewords.com/2024/05/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
- brandmeyer 1y ago
  Any argument that is filled with this much ragebait should be dismissed out of hand.
  - chadcmulligan 1y ago
    I was hoping it was nonsense and someone would point out the errors, no such luck so far.
    - shkkmo 1y ago
      It's not complete nonsense, but it conveniently leaves out key relevant details and includes key pieces of misinformation needed to make the talking points make sense (as you would expect from rage bait.) > Early on, SLS designers made the catastrophic decision to reuse Shuttle hardware The law that mandated that NASA built the SLS also required that they re-use that hardware. This wasn't a choice made by NASA designers but by a bipartisan congress and it wasn't designed so much to advance our space program so much as a way to keep funneling money to space contractors with the end of the Shuttle program. Any article that proposed to discuss the "lunacy" of Artemis without ever mentioning Congress's role in that lunacy is pretty clearly rage bait.
      - chadcmulligan 1y ago
        good to know, but the outlook for success is still the same? just the blame is not only NASA.
        shkkmo 1y ago
        Artemis and SLS have many problems but I would look elsewhere than that article if you want an understanding of what they are and why they exist.
perihelions 1y ago
SLS doesn't serve any actual NASA needs. It's fake make-work. Case in point: Congress expressly ordered NASA to launch Europa Clipper on SLS, to make it appear that SLS was indispensable to core NASA science missions. But, due to design flaws, SLS turned out to be technically incapable of launching Clipper at all. So they backtracked and allowed free-market competition to compete for the Clipper launch. Which it did: a very, very cheap Falcon Heavy launched it instead. Which it was capable of doing all along—Congress and NASA lied about this, misled the public, to make it appear that their jobs-creating, pork-barrel project was serving some genuine need NASA had. It wasn't! They had alternatives all along—they were pretending they didn't. When you read about these things, you have to know all the actors you're getting information from, and what motives they have to mislead you. There's not a single real mission in NASA's budget, or conceivable future budget, that needs an SLS—full stop. Sole exception being the moon project, which was created with the express purpose of finding a problem SLS would be the only answer for (and even that's now in doubt, what with Starship).
- SJC_Hacker 1y ago
  How many orbital refuels would Starship need for a lunar landing and return mission? Something like 20? I honestly wonder why we didn't just stick with the Saturn V. 13 launches and only one (non-catastrophic) failure. If it aint broke don't fix it.
  - ACCount36 1y ago
    How many tons of payload would that Starship land? How many could Saturn V? If you want to go beyond planting a flag, you need to be thinking of how to land hundreds of tons of equipment and industrial infrastructure on the Moon. Saturn V isn't a very good fit for that. But SLS is much worse.
  - pklausler 1y ago
    What was the one failure of the Saturn V that you mention? If you're thinking of Apollo 13, that took place after the Apollo stack had ditched all of the Saturn V stages.
lupusreal 1y ago
It doesn't work, not for Moon missions. It was never designed for Moon missions in the first place, the original plan was unspecified "deep space" missions without any clear plan of what it would actually be doing (because it's actual purpose is to keep money flowing to old Shuttle contractors.) Consequently, it can't do a Moon mission like the Saturn V could, it requires the idiotic nonsense that is the NHRO, which will endanger astronauts because it can't get Orion (which is a whole other can of pork) into a low lunar orbit. It also can't handle the lander, so now Artemis has to count on SpaceX and/or Blue Origin for that, which is probably what you're alluding to not working. But if those don't work, then neither does Artemis and then how can you say SLS works? Another problem with SLS is it's expensive AF and has a terrible launch cadence. Maybe you think that doesn't really matter, but it is for those reasons that NASA isn't going to test Orion again before putting astronauts on it. The last time they tested Orion, to verify the design and modelling, the heat shield started to come apart. But NASA can't do another test flight, because SLS sucks so hard, so instead they're going to fly Orion on an untested trajectory and trust their modeling to keep astronauts safe. Their same modeling which failed to predict Orion performance the first time. It's homicidally reckless. There is a real risk of this becoming yet another instance of NASA management's "go culture" getting people killed. Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia, each time they say they've learned their lesson and will make changes to ensure it doesn't happen again, but either those changes are only superficial or they decay over time. We're now on the precipice of NASA management flying astronauts around the Moon with a heat shield which may quite possibly disintegrate during reentry, because SLS is too expensive for NASA to test it but NASA management wants to move forward anyway.
- matthewdgreen 1y ago
  We need to have a viable heavy rocket launch capability in the US at any given time, at very least just in case we detect an asteroid on a collision course. Right now that seems to fall entirely onto Falcon 9 (and Falcon Heavy), but the max payload weight even for Falcon Heavy seems much lower than the planned payload for SLS. Someday Starship may fix this, but we don't know if it will -- or if the final version will actually meet the planned specs.
  - 1y ago

Except for the under powered orbits but that is a whole other issue. https://youtu.be/XFIvKSVRtZ0 https://youtu.be/XFIvKSVRtZ0 https://youtu.be/sGT-8PHSVso https://youtu.be/sGT-8PHSVso

jordanb 1y ago
While it's hard to get the truth out of SpaceX but there's reliable evidence that the block one starship wasn't anywhere near its mass to orbit projections which is why they rushed the block two design which stopped their progress practically cold.

eagerpace 1y ago

Does it? Do we want to repeat what we did 50 years ago or do we want to do something better and stay this time?

jordanb 1y ago
"Meet your mission objectives on the first try" is a pretty reasonable - if low-bar - definition of "works".

chadcmulligan 1y ago

I read this recently, and it doesn't sound good https://idlewords.com/2024/05/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm https://idlewords.com/2024/05/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

brandmeyer 1y ago
Any argument that is filled with this much ragebait should be dismissed out of hand.
- chadcmulligan 1y ago
  I was hoping it was nonsense and someone would point out the errors, no such luck so far.
  - shkkmo 1y ago
    It's not complete nonsense, but it conveniently leaves out key relevant details and includes key pieces of misinformation needed to make the talking points make sense (as you would expect from rage bait.) > Early on, SLS designers made the catastrophic decision to reuse Shuttle hardware The law that mandated that NASA built the SLS also required that they re-use that hardware. This wasn't a choice made by NASA designers but by a bipartisan congress and it wasn't designed so much to advance our space program so much as a way to keep funneling money to space contractors with the end of the Shuttle program. Any article that proposed to discuss the "lunacy" of Artemis without ever mentioning Congress's role in that lunacy is pretty clearly rage bait.
    - chadcmulligan 1y ago
      good to know, but the outlook for success is still the same? just the blame is not only NASA.
      - shkkmo 1y ago
        Artemis and SLS have many problems but I would look elsewhere than that article if you want an understanding of what they are and why they exist.

perihelions 1y ago

SLS doesn't serve any actual NASA needs. It's fake make-work. Case in point: Congress expressly ordered NASA to launch Europa Clipper on SLS, to make it appear that SLS was indispensable to core NASA science missions. But, due to design flaws, SLS turned out to be technically incapable of launching Clipper at all. So they backtracked and allowed free-market competition to compete for the Clipper launch. Which it did: a very, very cheap Falcon Heavy launched it instead. Which it was capable of doing all along—Congress and NASA lied about this, misled the public, to make it appear that their jobs-creating, pork-barrel project was serving some genuine need NASA had. It wasn't! They had alternatives all along—they were pretending they didn't. When you read about these things, you have to know all the actors you're getting information from, and what motives they have to mislead you. There's not a single real mission in NASA's budget, or conceivable future budget, that needs an SLS—full stop. Sole exception being the moon project, which was created with the express purpose of finding a problem SLS would be the only answer for (and even that's now in doubt, what with Starship).

SJC_Hacker 1y ago
How many orbital refuels would Starship need for a lunar landing and return mission? Something like 20? I honestly wonder why we didn't just stick with the Saturn V. 13 launches and only one (non-catastrophic) failure. If it aint broke don't fix it.
- ACCount36 1y ago
  How many tons of payload would that Starship land? How many could Saturn V? If you want to go beyond planting a flag, you need to be thinking of how to land hundreds of tons of equipment and industrial infrastructure on the Moon. Saturn V isn't a very good fit for that. But SLS is much worse.
- pklausler 1y ago
  What was the one failure of the Saturn V that you mention? If you're thinking of Apollo 13, that took place after the Apollo stack had ditched all of the Saturn V stages.

lupusreal 1y ago

It doesn't work, not for Moon missions. It was never designed for Moon missions in the first place, the original plan was unspecified "deep space" missions without any clear plan of what it would actually be doing (because it's actual purpose is to keep money flowing to old Shuttle contractors.) Consequently, it can't do a Moon mission like the Saturn V could, it requires the idiotic nonsense that is the NHRO, which will endanger astronauts because it can't get Orion (which is a whole other can of pork) into a low lunar orbit. It also can't handle the lander, so now Artemis has to count on SpaceX and/or Blue Origin for that, which is probably what you're alluding to not working. But if those don't work, then neither does Artemis and then how can you say SLS works? Another problem with SLS is it's expensive AF and has a terrible launch cadence. Maybe you think that doesn't really matter, but it is for those reasons that NASA isn't going to test Orion again before putting astronauts on it. The last time they tested Orion, to verify the design and modelling, the heat shield started to come apart. But NASA can't do another test flight, because SLS sucks so hard, so instead they're going to fly Orion on an untested trajectory and trust their modeling to keep astronauts safe. Their same modeling which failed to predict Orion performance the first time. It's homicidally reckless. There is a real risk of this becoming yet another instance of NASA management's "go culture" getting people killed. Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia, each time they say they've learned their lesson and will make changes to ensure it doesn't happen again, but either those changes are only superficial or they decay over time. We're now on the precipice of NASA management flying astronauts around the Moon with a heat shield which may quite possibly disintegrate during reentry, because SLS is too expensive for NASA to test it but NASA management wants to move forward anyway.

matthewdgreen 1y ago
We need to have a viable heavy rocket launch capability in the US at any given time, at very least just in case we detect an asteroid on a collision course. Right now that seems to fall entirely onto Falcon 9 (and Falcon Heavy), but the max payload weight even for Falcon Heavy seems much lower than the planned payload for SLS. Someday Starship may fix this, but we don't know if it will -- or if the final version will actually meet the planned specs.
- 1y ago