The Lunacy of Artemis

https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

by feross • 2 years ago

723 506 2 years ago

asmithmd14• 2 years 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

jonathankoren• 2 years ago

The fact that he is an astronaut because of a congressional junket is just perfect from a bad faith argument perspective.

fallingknife2• 2 years 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

YZF• 2 years 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_k6• 2 years 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.

LeifCarrotson• 2 years 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.

Tao33005• 2 years 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.

idlewords17• 2 years 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."

asmithmd14• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Sounds like he’s so good at fighting for budget that he gets it in spite of questionable spending decisions.

SJC_Hacker3• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

He probably thinks libration means a drink.

fallingknife2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

adamomada2• 2 years 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

jvanderbot2• 2 years ago

International treaties and environmental protests make that infeasible.

nine_k6• 2 years 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. */

andbberger• 2 years ago

the treaty prohibits weapons, not reactors...

krisoft2• 2 years ago

You are asserting that nuclear reactors are banned from space. Which treaty do you think does that?

marcinzm• 2 years ago

I would say using an engine around Earth that emits radioactive exhaust that travels at less than Earth escape velocity is the real lunacy.

qayxc4• 2 years ago

NASA built a working engine in the 70s.

Kind of. No NTR has ever been flown and tested in space. The program achieved many milestones and got pretty far into development, but was cancelled 50 years ago due to budget constraints. It's always the last 10% that are the hardest in engineering and while NASA (as well as the Soviet Union) got 90% there, it would still have taken a few years (maybe just two) of further development.

The real lunacy is simply not being mission-driven. A true mission driven design would have used a simple, reliable option using proven and existing technology. Like non-cryogenic fuel for example.

Hydrazin might be highly toxic, but its beneficial chemical properties make it a much better choice for moon missions. Long term storage wouldn't be a problem and reliable proven engines already exist, too. In space (LEO and beyond), the toxicity doesn't matter while its use as a monopropellant makes it ideal for the ascend stage of a lunar lander due to reliability and simplicity.

Proven technology that existed for many decades - no new engines required, no complex refuelling in orbit (just send filled tanks into LEO and keep them there for later docking), cheaper, less risk, safer...

XorNot3• 2 years ago

The real lunacy is simply not being mission-driven.

Okay but why does the mission exist? People keep going "the mission is go to to the moon". Is it? Why are we doing that? How much do the "proven technologies" cost? Are they reusable?

The answer of course, is that the mission is not "go to the moon". It's "go to the moon and establish permanent, long term scientific research operations with a view to using that experience to send crewed missions to Mars and other deep-space destinations".

And in that box then, one might look at how the long term storage and handling of hydrazine has worked out in enclosed environments on Earth - like submarines as torpedo propellant - and concluded that the longer and more frequently you use it, the more likely you get to a vehicle loss due to the intrinsic hazards.

nordsieck5• 2 years ago

The real lunacy is simply not being mission-driven. A true mission driven design would have used a simple, reliable option using proven and existing technology. Like non-cryogenic fuel for example.

Are you talking about the lander? Because IMO, the lander it the least objectionable part of the whole thing. Congress, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the lander budget would be $3 B - about 1 year's worth of development costs of Orion + SLS, systems which have been in development for over a decade.

The moon rover got more money than that.

Any system that's going to squeeze into that constraint is going to need to be economically optimized and a bit... creative.

XorNot3• 2 years 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.

pdonis2• 2 years 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.

nerdponx• 2 years ago

The compensating benefits are jobs for constituents of key members of Congress and big contracts for their friends. But those are compensating benefits for the legislators specifically, not for the American people (who are paying for all of this) or the global scientific community.

nordsieck5• 2 years ago

NASA's budget changes every 4 years.

NASA's budget is weird - from what I understand, Congress doesn't just cut NASA a check - they fund specific programs.

That being said, NASA's budget (in inflation adjusted dollars) has been remarkably flat for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

boznz• 2 years ago

Did the American people really expect any other outcome from such a project ?

ein0p3• 2 years 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_k6• 2 years 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.

ein0p3• 2 years 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

LargeTomato2• 2 years 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.

ein0p3• 2 years 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.

dotnet0012• 2 years ago

NASA still can’t take humans to/from orbit on its own

They can buy seats on Crew Dragon though?

lyu072822• 2 years ago

This has been well known for years, it's just NASA operating for decades with it's hand tied behind it's back by neoliberal mandated public private partnerships embezzling it for tax dollars.

kryptiskt• 2 years ago

NASA still can’t take humans to/from orbit on its own.

NASA funded the capsules that SpaceX (and Boeing, rather less successfully) built so they wouldn't have to.

philipwhiuk5• 2 years ago

The leap of logic that requires this means NASA didn't take humans to the Moon either.

Grumman built the Apollo Lunar Module (lunar lander).

throwawayffffas3• 2 years ago

Also Boeing, North American and Douglas built the Saturn V.

OldGuyInTheClub• 2 years ago

Up there with "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses."

xt00• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

I don't think there is any plan for a roundtrip Starship lunar mission. I think it is too heavy to get back.

nordsieck5• 2 years 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.

kemotep2• 2 years 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.

dotnet0012• 2 years 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.

O5vYtytb• 2 years ago

People seem to miss the forest for the trees here. The goal is to get a base on the moon, and this is the first step. Starship will eventually be bringing lots and lots of cargo to the moon for this purpose. Bringing people there for a few days and then bringing them back is a very short term goal.

grecy6• 2 years ago

You are confusing the issue here.

Imagine a world where Space X does not exist - never did.

Even still, Artemis is a terribly designed rocket that costs gobs more than Saturn V and performs much less.

Would you be happy buying something today that costs more than it did in 1970 and performs worse?

It doesn't matter what else is going on in the world, Artemis is shit.

e_y_• 2 years ago

SLS is the rocket. Artemis is the project that uses SLS, Orion, and Starship to land humans on the moon.

There's also the dubious Lunar Gateway concept although that will likely get dropped as reality sets in. Maybe the same will happen to SLS. Wishful thinking.

rob74• 2 years ago

So the Artemis part of the program (the "pension plan") is just doing something that pretends to be marginally useful for insane amounts of money to secure political support through the jobs it enables at various companies strategically spread across the US (plus support from the international partners involved), while the hope is that the HLS part of the program (the "lottery ticket") will eventually succeed in making the other part redundant?

But still, I think the article has a point when it describes the difficulties of landing Starship on the moon and being able to lift off again several days later. Landing a rocket on its tail is cool when the only consequence of a failure is not being able to reuse the rocket, but when there are human lives in the balance, it starts to sound really scary. Not to mention the possibility of damaging an engine during the landing or of fuel loss preventing them from lifting off again...

jlangenauer• 2 years ago

It's a fair point, but the only way at all to land on a body that has no atmosphere is to use rocket engines that point down. The Apollo Lunar Module landed on its "tail", though it did at least have a separate ascent stage with its own engine, so might have had some chance of taking off again if the landing was damagingly hard.

rst• 2 years ago

The point is more that compared to prior landers, the Starship version at least has a uniquely high center of gravity over a narrow base, which makes it a whole lot easier to tip, and amplifies the consequences of, say, leg damage.

stetrain3• 2 years 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.

SLS's design and shuttle-derived components were basically stipulated by Congress, specifically representatives from states where these shuttle-derived components are built and tested.

The goal here is to achieve something, yes, but doing so with billions spent in specific states is a large part of it as well. These representatives and senators also tend to still be loudly skeptical of commercial launch providers like SpaceX despite their successful track record, likely for the same reasons.

pfdietz14• 2 years ago

They also suppressed propellant depot work.

xondono2• 2 years ago

the Artemis program was setup at a time when the private space companies were still very new.

This is completely orthogonal. If it weren’t, the lander would be in a better shape, but it’s as much of a clusterfuck as the rest of the mission.

SpaceX has never been outside of LEO, and I’m very unconvinced Starship can do it’s part on Artemis, much less do all the mission by themselves.

readthenotes1• 2 years 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.

jvanderbot2• 2 years ago

Any sufficiently large acquisition is indistinguishable from a jobs program.

dudinax• 2 years ago

"fears NASA is becoming just a white collar jobs program"

That's 90% of US defense spending.

LargeTomato2• 2 years 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.

idlewords17• 2 years ago

Note that the first reason you give is tautological.

dotancohen5• 2 years 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.

shkkmo• 2 years ago

Which is the explanation for some of the paradoxes rasied in the article.

SLS was foisted on NASA by politicians. The design of Artemis seems set to take advantage of that political will to fund the private development of the next stage of space flight by pretending that funding supports a role for SLS instead of making it completely obsolete.

Yossarrian22• 2 years ago

There’s also the unstated purpose of beating China to setting up a base.

usrbinbash31• 2 years ago

And what if China gets there first? How exactly would that benefit them, in a geopolitical sense?

Sorry, but if I have the choice of wasting that much resources just so I can brag about it a bit sooner than my opponent, or watch my opponent do so, while I use said resources more productively, I know what to do.

wolverine876• 2 years ago

Afiak, the purposes are to begin to setup the infrastructure for permanent habitation, and to prepare for a crewed flight to Mars.

That is explicitly an Artemis mission purpose.

Where does it say that?

mathgeek• 2 years ago

Where does it say that?

First line of the official page at https://www.nasa.gov/feature/artemis/

"With the Artemis campaign, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before."

dudeinjapan3• 2 years ago

I'd like to see us put the first ventriloquist on the moon, with a miniature spacesuit for their little buddy. "That's one small step for dummy-kind--", "Who ya callin' small ya big dummy!" This is why we go to space.

thombat2• 2 years ago

So long as they do a gag where the dummy's suit is depressurised and he continues to protest but now silently, then I'm all for it. If Man is truly to live along the stars then vaudeville humour shall be part of it

RobotToaster2• 2 years ago

It seems crazy to me they've managed to use shuttle parts to make a design that seems older and worse than the shuttle.

People called the shuttle a truck, but they've used parts from it to make something that looks like a Ford model-T in comparison.

pookha• 2 years ago

The moon has trillions of dollars in water, helium, and metals (rare earth, titanium, etc). It's an f'ing goldmine and controlling said resource will be something hostile authoritarian regimes (China) would seek out. There's simply no excuse that the US should be this bad at making a system to reach the moon. The Chinese have committed insane sins and dropped massive amounts of space hardware on the earth (luckily it landed in the ocean). We should be dunking on them but instead we've got this buffoonery?

usrbinbash31• 2 years ago

Only time will tell if either of these two missions were actually worth it.

No time required, we already know the answer: neither of these two goals is worth the enormeous pile of resources burned to achive it.

1. A permanent human presence on the moon serves what purpose exactly that Robots cannot do? If we want to set up shop there: Why not send robots and an automatic laboratory-repair-bay? It's the moon, we can even remote control the damn things with only 2 seconds latency! What excatly are humans supposed to do there, that robots cannot?

2. Go ask women in underpaid care work and people of color in underserved communities, what they think would benefit them, and the general sense of equality, more: Hundreds of billions of dollars poured into improving social services like adequate pensions for carework, childcare, better supervision programs against discrimination in the workplace, better educational systems, etc. OR hundreds of billions of dollars burned by space-billionaires to let some old politician say "We did it!" at a press conference?

nathan_compton2• 2 years ago

People who get miffed at putting women and poc in space also don't want to spend more on social services, though, so its kind of a false dichotomy. It's not like if we could somehow convince the powers that be to cancel the space program they would put it all into education, jobs programs and basic income.

jodrellblank3• 2 years ago

Money isn't burned when spent on space programs. resources, e.g. fuels are, but money is spent, it stays down here on Earth, employing people, boosting corporate profits (and therefore pension funds and other things which invest in them), employing people (who maybe women and people of colour).

GolfPopper2• 2 years ago

First, we want to set up a more permanent base. Nasa refers to this as "we're here to stay"

Perhaps I've not been following Artemis closely enough, but it doesn't seem to have anything actually in progress that would directly connect to the "permanent base" idea, beyond "Well, we need to go to the moon if we want a permanent base there". But that's sort-of like saying, "Well, I need to enroll in a university if I want a PhD".

wpietri4• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

eru3• 2 years ago

Apollo wasn't exactly cheap.

marcus_holmes2• 2 years 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.

wpietri4• 2 years ago

For sure. And to me that's related to the spread of managerialism and MBA thinking. One of the fundamental beliefs in that paradigm is that management is universal; an expert manager can manage anything. (This is in the contrast to the view that you need domain expertise to be effectively in charge of something.) I think this falls down because, not understanding the substance of the work, pure managers have to go by proxy indicators, like the polish of the presentations, the amount of confidence expressed, and the general wow factor.

People with a lot of engineering experience are suspicious of complex solutions to complex problems. They know the value in iteration and testing. So even if an engineer is pushing a complex solution (for resume reasons or just love of the fancy stuff), they can be reined in by senior engineers. But in the MBA mindset, a complicated solution is an opportunity to have big budgets and lots of excitement. Slow feedback loops are even better, because they can produce shiny documents, get promoted, and move on before the problems become obvious.

just_steve_h• 2 years ago

I find this essay to be well-crafted and compelling.

avmich3• 2 years 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.

dotnet0012• 2 years 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.

hackeraccount• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

idlewords17• 2 years 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.

jessriedel5• 2 years ago

The cryogenic aspect seems much more distinct than whether it's rocket-to-rocket or rocket-to-ISS.

dotnet0012• 2 years ago

That was on-orbit refueling of hypergolic propellants, which is already done regularly on the ISS and is conceptually straightforward since you can just use bladder tanks to do the transfer without any special considerations.

What hasn't been demonstrated is on-orbit refueling with cryogenic propellants, which involve more considerations regarding thermal and pressure management. Technically the most recent Starship flight test demonstrated on-orbit transfer of cryogenic propellants (between two internal tanks), but of course doing it with docking still needs to be done.

pclmulqdq• 2 years ago

"Demonstrated" is a strong word given what we all saw. I'm not sure there has been any document released that they actually proved that they successfully did a propellant transfer.

codewiz3• 2 years 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."

codewiz3• 2 years 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"

codewiz3• 2 years 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."

dotancohen5• 2 years 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).

thaumasiotes2• 2 years ago

as Lunacy literally means "Looking at the moon" (via "Lunatic" which is someone who looks at the moon

Literally? There is no "looking" element in the word. You'd need something like "lunavident". In the most literal terms, lunacy is the noun form of "lunate", which is a shape. ("C" is the "lunate sigma", the sigma in the shape of a moon.)

Outside of the shape meaning, "lunacy" is just a relationship to the moon; the form of the relationship is not specified by the form of the word.

bandyaboot2• 2 years ago

Agree that the criticism is overall well-founded, but this one is a bit strange:

SLS looks like someone started building a Space Shuttle and ran out of legos for the orbiter

Should the booster look different just for the sake of looking different?

dotnet0012• 2 years ago

I think the point they're trying to make is that it looks the same for the sake of looking the same.

wpietri4• 2 years ago

I think the argument is that it should look different for the sake of doing better. By, say, using modern tools and techniques rather than trying to resurrect some old parts designed in the 1970s. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Design_process

77pt77• 2 years ago

which is like using Fabergé eggs to save money on an omelette

I'm appropriating this!

oefrha• 2 years ago

I guess you didn’t reach the end, there are more choice quotes later on:

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.
To hear NASA tell it, NRHO is so full of advantages that it’s a wonder we stay on Earth.
NASA likes to boast that Orion can stay in space far longer than Apollo, but this is like bragging that you’re in the best shape of your life after the bank repossessed your car.

And I’m only halfway through.

cryptonector• 2 years ago

u/idlewords has a way with words.

zefhous• 2 years 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

jessriedel5• 2 years ago

Just skimmed it, but he mostly agrees with the criticisms right? ("Addresses" often suggests a rebuttal.)

Neywiny2• 2 years 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

fastball5• 2 years ago

My problem with his criticism (and to some extent echoed by Maciej in this article) is that the main takeaway seems to be "we did it once, we can do it again, let's revisit the past instead of re-inventing the wheel".

But I don't think anyone actively involved wants to revisit the past. Who wants to go back to the moon just because we can? Nobody. Assuming best intentions:

- People at NASA want to go to the moon to build a permanent base there. Maybe this is just to beat China, maybe it will actually be very useful to have a moon base. But that is the stated goal.

- People at SpaceX want to go to the moon as a way to fund Starship development, so that they can go to Mars.

- People at Lockheed Martin / Aerojet Rocketdyne / etc just want to get paid. I am going to ignore this cohort for the purposes of my argument.

These motivations are not served by doing what the Apollo missions did. Can you get to the moon and back on a Saturn V with a single rocket launch, making for a much simpler mission plan? Absolutely, we did it 6 times. Can you build a moon base using a series of Saturn V launches? Absolutely not. Would SpaceX (clearly the most competent launch provider available in 2024) get anything out of building a much smaller HLS / not using methalox / anything else that would be more practical if your only purpose was to go to the moon? Also no – SpaceX doesn't really care about the moon. So a mission profile that is actually optimized for the moon does little for them.

So while I think overall Artemis is a dumpster fire of spending, I don't think pointing at the Apollo missions is the gotcha that critics seem to think it is.

bayindirh• 2 years ago

From my understanding, nobody is telling that "We should use Apollo as-is", but "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?".

Everything made/designed in Apollo are no short of marvels. Today we can do much better with lighter, smaller electronics, and should be able to do weight savings or at least cost savings where it matters.

Instead Artemis feels like "let's dig the parts pile and put what we have together, and invent the glue required for the missing parts", akin to today's Docker based development ecosystem.

Yes, the plan might be to carry much more equipment in fewer launches, but if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If this amount of people are saying that something is lost in spirit and some stuff is not done in an optimal way, I tend to believe them.

lijok• 2 years ago

"Let's revisit the past instead of re-inventing the wheel" challenge was posed to the project management, not engineering.

Dalewyn4• 2 years ago

SpaceX doesn't really care about the moon.

SpaceX is a business, SpaceX doesn't care about the Moon because there are no customers interested in going to the Moon.

If market forces shift and companies start wanting to go to the Moon, you bet SpaceX will care about the Moon because there's money to be made.

coldtea3• 2 years ago

My problem with his criticism (and to some extent echoed by Maciej in this article) is that the main takeaway seems to be "we did it once, we can do it again, let's revisit the past instead of re-inventing the wheel".

The problem is that this re-invention creates a square wheel made of marshmallow (with the road-trustiness one would imagine from the above design and materials), that costs 10x what a rubber wheel does.

lupusreal6• 2 years ago

Frankly I do think the whole point from the government's perspective is to beat China back to the Moon. And "Apollo style" short moon visit should be enough to give America a propaganda victory. SpaceX like Lockheed just wants to get paid (albeit so they can put that money into R&D instead of their shareholders.) The rank and file at NASA probably have some romantic notions of a Moon base but there are always a few dreamers to get disappointed by reality (Congress pulling funding once the propaganda victory is secured.)

nordsieck5• 2 years ago

My problem with his criticism (and to some extent echoed by Maciej in this article) is that the main takeaway seems to be "we did it once, we can do it again, let's revisit the past instead of re-inventing the wheel".
But I don't think anyone actively involved wants to revisit the past.

I think that's fair... but then we should make systems that are at least as good as the ones from the past.

And SLS, even in the fully upgraded "Block 2" state is not as good a rocket as the Saturn V. One of the core problems is: we can't build Saturn V. It's Greek fire - we've lost the ability. There are schematics and plans, but apparently there was enough custom work and deviations by the actual welders and machinists that the plans are ... insufficiently specified.

And needless to say, those same workers are either dead or have forgotten the necessary details.

K0balt3• 2 years ago

This is probably the most relevant take. “Going to the moon” is primarily a PR facade on “testing and development of technologies required to expand human space presence and begin the process of colonization of the moon and eventually mars”

“Going to the moon” appeals to the Everyman ego.

As for the obscene fraud/waste by the encumbent defense contractors, that is something we need to deal with. If we don’t make them compete dollar for dollar with spacex we will never see them evolve back into functioning organizations that will deliver real value to US strategic dominance. Having them as fat, lumbering slop-hogs hobbles the strategic and economic progress of the US MIC.

GuB-422• 2 years ago

The problem is that Artemis is in many ways inferior to Apollo. It is less safe, more expensive (which is to say something!), less capable,... If the goal is to build a moon base, it should be able to do what Apollo did with ample margins, but from the look of it, it doesn't appear like there is much margin. It is complexity for complexity sake, it doesn't translate into more payload, more scientific potential, or lower costs.

The only breakthroughs with Artemis is the part with Starship, the refueling in space part could change the deal for future mission, for the Moon, Mars, or elsewhere. And finding an excuse to write a blank cheque to SpaceX is, I think, not too bad an idea despite all the Elon Musk bullshit. SpaceX actually launches rockets, they are even pretty good at it, a rare thing. But do we really need all that baggage with SLS, Orion, and convoluted orbits? Just have SpaceX send a Starship to the moon (which is one of the last points in the article).

WorldMaker• 2 years ago

- People at NASA want to go to the moon to build a permanent base there. Maybe this is just to beat China, maybe it will actually be very useful to have a moon base. But that is the stated goal.
- People at SpaceX want to go to the moon as a way to fund Starship development, so that they can go to Mars.

These seem to be inter-related, too. NASA seems to want Artemis to be a stepping stone to Mars as well (whether or not they are competing or cooperating with SpaceX to get there). Some of the arguments for Gateway in NRHO and/or even a possible permanent base on the Moon from NASA seem to indicate that some of the engineers believe NRHO is a great "launch pad" to Mars.

Some at NASA also clearly don't believe SLS as it exists is capable of getting to Mars and are pushing SpaceX and Blue Origin in the HLS stages of Artemis seemingly to try to get competition going today for whatever rockets can actually make it to Mars. SpaceX's HLS plans being based on Mars plans looks like a feature more than bug, if Mars may be a shared end goal anyway. (Blue Origin also presumably is equally Mars-focused like SpaceX.)

kragen• 2 years ago

the people who did it once are almost all dead

people in the age range 20–70 in 01970 would be in the age range 74–124 today. different people, who identify with those people, in several different countries, would like to do what those people did. it behooves them to study what those people did and how they did it, not because they can't do anything better, but because it's easy to do worse, and both of these criticisms make a good case that artemis is doing much worse. the ussr at the same time did so much worse that they never landed humans on the moon at all. similarly with contemporary france, the uk, the prc, etc.

you cannot get to the moon and back on a saturn v because there aren't any saturn v rockets in operable condition, and there never will be again. it belongs to history now, like children's chemistry sets that could make rocket fuel, being able to order rocket fuel ingredients without getting a visit from a police agency, drugs being legal by default instead of illegal, new classes of antibiotics being brought to market, and being able to go out in public without your movements being permanently archived for spy agencies to data-mine later on

artemis is on track to follow in the footsteps not of apollo but of the soviet n1/l3 program, which was canceled after losing the race decisively to apollo. it's chang'e that's following in the footsteps of apollo. we'll see if spacex can change that, but i'm not that optimistic

schoen• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Artemis is probably the best evidence moon-landing conspiracists have ever had.

causality02• 2 years 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.

anonymousiam2• 2 years 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/

lyu072822• 2 years 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.

9dev2• 2 years ago

From what I can gather, they largely distribute money to lots of places in the USA, thereby pouring money into regions that wouldn’t have it otherwise, creating jobs that wouldn’t exist otherwise, and raise the baseline income overall. If anything, this should have a beneficial effect where more people can spend more, don’t require social services, slide into drug abuse or homelessness. Some part of the government has to do that; but instead of just handing the money out to poor people, they do it indirectly and keep folk in active employment. What would be bad about that?

csomar• 2 years ago

This is a dangerous path (assuming it is the case, I don't know about NASA internals). If you want to improve people's living or help them; just do that and help them by putting money in their bank accounts no strings attached.

causality02• 2 years ago

I would rather just give poor people money and have a bunch of government agencies that aren't shit.

hi_hi2• 2 years 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?

philwelch2• 2 years ago

Man, I wish. We need to catch up and build out the high frontier already.

SJC_Hacker3• 2 years 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.

avmich3• 2 years 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.

zzzeek• 2 years ago

hm what IS it worth ? There's some kind of valuable minerals there?

Google: "Helium 3". well we do need that

hi_hi2• 2 years ago

Yes, exactly this. Helium 3 isn't naturally occurring on Earth, and is very expensive.

Nasa are already running challenges for the best way for rovers to process/mine the moons surface. https://www.nasa.gov/learning-resources/lunabotics-challenge...

And how do we deal with the boundary issues of who gets to mine where. Let alone the political issues I'm sure will arise.

Theres so much fascinating discussion to be had, but I guess rockets win the cool badge.

jcranmer2• 2 years ago

³He, aka the material whose primary envisioned use is for something we can't do and don't look able to do anytime soon (nuclear fusion), and which exists in comparable concentration on the moon as it does on Earth. That people run to it for the standard example of what can be feasibly mined from the moon should be a strong indicator of how little viability there is for space mining.

carapace• 2 years ago

Fly.

On Luna a human being can fly. You need wings and a large air-filled cave and then you can fly like a bird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menace_from_Earth

That alone would surely be worth the price of admission?

Also, it's the gateway to the rest of the Solar system, galaxy, and Universe.

bnralt• 2 years 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.

idlewords17• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

They've essentially hedged, but in a way that gets the worst of both worlds rather than the best.

davedx• 2 years ago

What do you think is useful for NASA to do? Do you think any form of spaceflight is useful?

kqr9• 2 years ago

I'm confused by this analogy also. Is the article saying that NASA is spending money on things that are negative EV? When it comes to these space exploration things that sounds like a subjective value judgment rather than an objective cost/benefit type thing.

Are they saying this sort of lottery has positive EV, just that the expectation is small? Then the Kelly-optimal course of action is indeed to split one's salary between it and the pension fund -- the exact ratio takes a more ambitious estimation of the EV, of course. But the idea to split money between safe, sure returns and moonshots is not a flawed idea at all.

mangecoeur• 2 years ago

From a purely engineering standpoint maybe, but that’s also not fully the point of these programs. Look at the suppliers and you will see money going to every state, spread across many regions. This is as much a public money stimulus program as anything else. You want to create skilled jobs, and also print money without devaluing it, what better than a huge billion dollar high tech program.

eru3• 2 years ago

You are mixing things up. There's one part of the government that's spending this money, but they can't print money. They have to borrow it (or collect it as taxes).

There's another part of the government, the Fed, that can print money. But by and large, they don't 'spend' it. And they are bound by an inflation target. If inflation goes above target, the Fed sells assets from its balance sheet to remove money from circulation.

Borrowing or taxation just shuffles money around. If it has any impact on total nominal spending, that's nullified by the Fed adjusting the money supply to hit their inflation target.

You are right, that the point of many government programs seems to be to distribute the pork. But that pork comes from current and future tax payers.

SJC_Hacker3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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_l5• 2 years 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.

idlewords17• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

Panzer04• 2 years ago

A good part of the article argues that we aren't getting that safety, though. Spending a week around the moon to make up for hardware shortcomings is not encouraging.

It appears by and large that most of the components being used for this will be lucky to have been tested in action more than once before they have to carry astronauts...

Sniffnoy• 2 years 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.

idlewords17• 2 years ago

Never say problem. Say "opportunity".

xarope• 2 years 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"

mlindner7• 2 years 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.

alexey-salmin7• 2 years ago

Does anyone has a theory why in 60 years no one beats the F-1 engine? How is this possible?

idlewords17• 2 years ago

This video on what a modern Saturn V would look like goes into it a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNZx208bw0g

alexey-salmin7• 2 years ago

Thanks, very helpful.

BuyMyBitcoins2• 2 years 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

philipwhiuk5• 2 years ago

decided

That's putting way more control in NASA's wheelhouse than really belongs there.

dotnet0012• 2 years 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.

throwawayffffas3• 2 years ago

Now the technology has caught up, we can make small, highly efficient, powerful, reliable and restartable engines, and can control large numbers of them.

Can we? Starships keep exploding. I get it, great engines are built on heaps of blown up engines. But are we there yet?

mlindner7• 2 years ago

Not sure what you're saying. The F-1 engine is easily beaten by many engines that exist today. It was not a very high efficiency engine at all.

alexey-salmin7• 2 years ago

We don't have decent heavy engines and my understanding is that that's main the reason why we don't have decent heavy rockets.

It's true that in the end we may get there the long way, N1-style, but we still didn't.

perilunar• 2 years 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.

idlewords17• 2 years ago

It was published today. I've fixed the wrong heading date.

DeathArrow2• 2 years ago

I wonder how much will it cost China to put people on the moon.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

I wonder what it costs China to put batteries and other commodities on the global market.

adolph3• 2 years 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

oldkinglog• 2 years 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.

pavlov• 2 years 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.

DeathArrow2• 2 years ago

Follow the money. Maybe Artemis is inneficient but it will still make some people a lot of money.

jpk• 2 years ago

Follow the money.

Please do share what you've found.

tibbydudeza• 2 years 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 ???.

mlindner7• 2 years ago

2025 or 2026 for Starship.

mlindner7• 2 years 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...

That should probably be made more clear lest people be confused and think it's official.

krisoft2• 2 years 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.

mlindner7• 2 years 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• 2 years 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?

mlindner7• 2 years 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• 2 years 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 :) ...)

rockemsockem6• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

kqr9• 2 years 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.

mglz• 2 years 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.

kqr9• 2 years ago

Sure, that's probably true.

As the saying goes, the Apollo program was one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of the Soviet Union.

sidewndr462• 2 years ago

The other thing you have to remember is that back in that era, the various military agencies all had a vested interest in rocket technology. Either for suborbital attack profiles or for orbital reasons like recon satellites (which at one point were assumed to be manned, but that didn't prove required).

NASA wound up giving Congress a way to partially unify some of this. Saturn V obviously isn't an ICBM, but if we have the people and technology to make a man-rated rocket to get to the moon it's pretty safe to assume we can build ICBMs to any specification. The military wasn't thrilled with this early on because it meant rockets that were seen as weapons needed to be designed with huge safety margins.

In the end a sort of uneasy truce arose from this and lead to the Space Shuttle. This was intended to create a civilian program with indefinite access to low earth orbit, servicing military and intelligence needs when required. Once it became apparent this was impossible, Congress gave the DoD the go ahead to resume spending on their own ride to space. This in turn lead to the absolute debacle that was the Titan IV. This lead to the EELV program which gave us Atlas V. By this point the US's capabilities had declined so much the best we could do was strap a US made fuel tank to a bunch of Russian made rockets.

dennis_jeeves2• 2 years ago

The space race likely necessitated NASA to show some improvement frequently.

One could add agile + jira +standup

leoedin• 2 years ago

Iterative development is the only way you can do R&D. That truth was clearly known by NASA leadership in the 60s in a way that clearly isn’t today.

I think it’s probably a symptom of wider culture. In the 60s every major industry was in the middle of a massive improvement cycle, a lot of the engineers would have learned their skills during the R&D boom of the Second World War, and everything was still manufactured locally. It was the perfect environment for rapid engineering improvement.

Most of that has gone today. The major physical technologies we use - vehicles, appliances, manufacturing technology, have largely been solved. Improvement is incremental. If you did a survey of 100 engineers across the aerospace industry you’d probably find a handful who had any experience of boundary pushing R&D - most of the work is in documenting changes and making slight tweaks. SpaceX is definitely an exception.

scotty79• 2 years ago

That truth was clearly known by NASA leadership in the 60s in a way that clearly isn’t today.

Maybe the current generation grew up on way too many vivid SF movies. And their intuitions are that we should know it enough already to wing it on the large parts.

slowmovintarget• 2 years ago

Iterative (repeating) and incremental (additive). We sometimes forget that last part in software development, too.

jgeada• 2 years ago

We used to have leadership by people who knew how to do and make things and we've replace them by people that only know how to "manage" things. MBAs, finance types, lawyers, marketeers and their like make up the bulk of people in the decision making seats. They only know how to extract value from companies, creating said value largely eludes them. And as a side effect, America now can't build things(), or only can build them at ridiculous expense and absurdly long timescales.

() yes, there are exceptions; it is interesting to study how those companies differ in their leadership.

GMoromisato2• 2 years ago

This is an excellent narrative, but I think it omits the many risks the program took to get to the moon before the Soviets.

For example, Apollo 8 was the first time a Saturn V (and command module) was sent all the way to the moon, and it was done with a crew. Because there was no lander, there was no backup in case the command module had a problem. If the explosion on Apollo 13 had happened on Apollo 8, the crew would have died in space and never returned.

Remember also that Apollo 8 orbited the moon--it wasn't just a free-return trajectory. The command module had to fire to get into lunar orbit (for the first time ever) and even more importantly, fire to get out (also for the first time ever).

Apollo 8 was originally supposed to have a lunar lander--everyone felt safer with a "lifeboat" just in case. But delays on the lander program meant that they either had to delay Apollo 8 (and miss the end of the decade deadline and maybe the claim to land first) or fly without. The safe course was to delay, but NASA decided to take the risk.

The magic of the Apollo era is that they made it look so easy that we forget how hard it was. The tragedy of Apollo 1 highlights that even simple things, like testing a new capsule on the ground, are incredibly risky.

Apollo 6, the second uncrewed flight of Saturn V was almost a disaster. The booster vibrated badly because of engine instability, and two second stage engines shut down early. But on the very next flight, they decided to send it up with a crew. This would be the equivalent of putting humans on board the next Starship test launch (IFT-4).

Sure, the timeline seems incremental, but only because the dates are omitted. Mercury 1 was in 1961 and the first moon landing was only 8 years later. In contrast, SLS started development in 2011, using existing Shuttle engines and solid rocket motors, and the first landing probably won't happen before 2028.

smallmancontrov2• 2 years ago

Yeah, the risk appetite was much higher. Those are good reminders on Apollo 1/6/8, but the problems didn't stop there. The first 5 landing missions all had huge problems that nearly killed everyone, too. Only the last 2 landings were sort of OK.

Apollo 1: burned all astronauts alive

...

Apollo 10: POGO oscillations on launch (Saturn V still trying to tear itself apart), LEM tumbling

Apollo 11: Computer kept crashing all the way down to the moon (it controlled the engines)

Apollo 12: Brownout in the command module during launch, "Set SCE to Aux"

Apollo 13: Oxygen tank fire. So rough they made a movie.

Apollo 14: Shorted abort button almost killed everyone

Apollo 15: Parachute failure

---------

We have no shortage of people who would be willing to put their life on the line, but we do have a shortage of the political urgency/unity to tolerate actual problems. Just look at people dig into Elon Musk every time he explodes a prototype with his own money and nobody on board, and realize that accelerating a human program creates 10x the political sniping opportunity.

Waterluvian• 2 years ago

I’m interested in what we committed enormous effort to researching and testing and discovered it’s simply not something to worry about or be bothered with.

phoe18• 2 years ago

Would you recommend any books to read on this history?

grecy6• 2 years ago

From the Earth to the Moon is a brilliant TV series that shows it all really well.

I love the episode where they sit down and list out the ~10 things they'll have to figure out how to do in order to achieve Kennedy's promise of landing within the decade.

Then they just assign teams and get on it, working on each item until they can actually do it.

kqr9• 2 years ago

I really enjoyed Sunburst and Luminary by Eyles, from the perspective of one of the young students who stumbled into the space programme and ended up writing a lot of the code for the LM.

I also found Go, Flight! enjoyable. It is about the recruitment and culture of the young flight controllers ("ground control") who figured out as they went how to direct and orchestrate missions in space.

Both are from a specific set of people's perspectives rather than an attempt to summarise. With some care on what one accepts as truth I think that's the more intriguing way to follow the program.

trollerator23• 2 years ago

They were incremental but they were incredibly accelerated and ambitious. From nobody ever been in space to landing on the Moon less in 10 years. It's mind boggling how fast they were, and how many projects were running in parallel that all had to work when integrated or no "landing on the moon before the decade is over".

KasianFranks• 2 years 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

philipwhiuk5• 2 years ago

This is just a pitch for your company hamfisted into unrelated content.

philipwhiuk5• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

philipwhiuk5• 2 years ago

They were required, by Congress, to use Shuttle engines and SRBs to build a vehicle capable of deep space transportation.

gibolt• 2 years ago

NASA does the most ambitious thing modern, bureaucratic NASA can do with the funding, considering that each previously approved project is 4x over budget and 5-10 years late, eating into the feasibility of new projects.

Old NASA could do 5-10x as much, with the same amount of inflation-adjusted money and people. The motivation was to fail+learn and achieve a shared goal. SpaceX is the closest analog today, with a long term mission and the drive to make it happen.

p_l5• 2 years ago

NASA could do the same, but it's tied up by Congress and jockeying for any money, with funds allocated by Congress on a per-project basis.

Perseids• 2 years 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/ 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/

delusional• 2 years 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.

throwawayffffas3• 2 years 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.

geertj3• 2 years 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.

K0balt3• 2 years 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.

GuB-422• 2 years ago

From the article:

Like a lot of space technology, orbital refueling sounds simple, has never been attempted, and can’t be adequately simulated on Earth.[18] The crux of the problem is that liquid and gas phases in microgravity jumble up into a three-dimensional mess, so that even measuring the quantity of propellant in a tank becomes difficult.

And for cryogenic propellents specifically:

Getting this plan to work requires solving a second engineering problem, how to keep cryogenic propellants cold in space. Low earth orbit is a toasty place, and without special measures, the cryogenic propellants Starship uses will quickly vent off into space.

objclxt• 2 years ago

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.

The article goes into this in some detail. In particular:

* You have to get the propellant into space. This is going to take a large number of flights (~15) at a pace that has not been done before for a vehicle of that size (a launch every six days)

* You need to launch at pace because otherwise the propellant will boil off, which is another issue - you need to shade or insulate the propellant for a much longer period of time in much harsher conditions

* There is no gravity: whereas on earth the propellant separates relatively cleanly into liquid and gas this isn't the case in space

preisschild3• 2 years ago

Landing/reusing a rocket isn't new and has been done before.

moffkalast3• 2 years ago

Then Nasa will find someone who can.

Who's even left? Northrop? Lockmart? Adds an extra 10 years to the timeline at the most optimistic.

spiritbear14• 2 years ago

I think they should give it to Boeing

usrbinbash31• 2 years ago

It's about building and living in habitats beyond low orbit

And what for if I may ask?

And please don't say "technological development" or "colonizing space".

ad Development): Most of the tech that needs to be developed for this, is what is commonly called space plumbing: Figuring out ways to make human bodily functions not immediately fail in space. Next to none of these technologies benefit humanity at large in any way. Also: We keep coming up with amazing new tech all the time, without the extra cost of strapping it to a human and shooting that package into orbit.

ad Colonization): There is nothing in our solar system to colonize. Period. Everything other than Earth is less hospitable than Earth would be after a thermonuclear war, by a huge margin. Terraforming another planet is practically impossible fora species that still has to count the kilos for every launch.

And as for the one goal that makes sense, which is exploration: We have a perfectly reliable form of space exploration: Robots. And they are much better at it than we are, for one simple reason: They don't require space plumbing.

There is exactly ONE reason why Apollo was manned by people instead of robots: Because computers, electronics and robotics in the 60s were not up to the task. If todays tech existed back then, I would bet the Apollo rocket would have had exactly one passenger, and that would have been the Lunar Roving vehicle.

lupusreal6• 2 years ago

There is exactly ONE reason why Apollo was manned by people instead of robots: Because computers, electronics and robotics in the 60s were not up to the task. If todays tech existed back then, I would bet the Apollo rocket would have had exactly one passenger, and that would have been the Lunar Roving vehicle.

The Soviet Union did send a rover. Anyway, the science wasn't worth it and the project was driven by romantics who thought that it was the duty of mankind to explore. Putting men on the Moon was the real point of it.

jwells892• 2 years ago

Long-term habitation of surfaces of bodies other than that of Earth is a stepping stone to being able to live in space long term in very large, permanently spaceborne crafts. It’s easier to develop these things on the moon, mars, etc because of immediate access to materials that’d need to be launched into orbit otherwise. In the long term, it may make sense to build shipyards on the moon, on Mars, or somewhere in the asteroid belt where large ships can be built and launched without having to fight Earth’s strong gravity well.

As for why to do that, I like to think of Earth as a very cozy cave that humanity’s caveman would serve itself well to venture beyond, if only to increase the number of possibilities for the species. In a universe where there are large human civilizations not just throughout the solar system but also scattered amongst other star systems, there are numerous paths that each branch will take that Earth’s branch in its lonesome may never have trodden.

It also just seems a bit cruel to be able to see the vastness of the universe and never be able to touch any of it in person. At the risk of being dramatic, only sending rovers and probes while we remain on earth feels a bit like being stuck in a gilded cage piloting around drones and RC cars to explore what lies beyond.

preisschild3• 2 years ago

There is exactly ONE reason why Apollo was manned by people instead of robots: Because computers, electronics and robotics in the 60s were not up to the task. If todays tech existed back then, I would bet the Apollo rocket would have had exactly one passenger, and that would have been the Lunar Roving vehicle.

But a manned outpost beyond earth would make the logistics for large scale space exploration (even with robots) much more feasible, no?

elsonrodriguez3• 2 years ago

We covered more ground in a lunar rover in a week than any of our mars rovers covered in a year.

billbrown• 2 years ago

This is why nearly all ocean exploration is done via remotely-piloted vehicles instead of the massive yet cramped submersibles they started with. The explorers still get to do the science they love but they do it from a comfortable surface ship in shifts.

botro• 2 years ago

I think if we follow your logic exactly, and make mathematically optimal decisions in every instance, leaving no space for the human spirit - we're robots anyway and may as well go to space!

wtetzner• 2 years ago

Figuring out ways to make human bodily functions not immediately fail in space. Next to none of these technologies benefit humanity at large in any way.

What a weirdly confident statement. I could imagine all kinds of technology coming from that that would benefit life on Earth.

wffurr2• 2 years ago

The advanced technologies you're describing are part of Artemis. The other part is a huge pork barrel jobs project for the SLS workforce across the country, in as many states as possible.

hehdhdjehehegwv• 2 years ago

Nobody in congress will vote to kill jobs in their district. The military industrial complex figured that out a while ago, which is why at least one screw for some weapon or aircraft is produced in every state.

If NASA is going to use the same playbook to be benefit space exploration, I’m not remotely upset.

mcswell• 2 years ago

It's not called the Senate Launch System (SL) for nothing!

api• 2 years ago

Hmm... so it's really a half-mission to Mars with the Moon as stand-in?

That makes a lot more sense. It's still sub-optimal but not as bad as it looks at first glance.

xondono2• 2 years ago

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.

Side-goals, fake goals and scope creep are one of the biggest red flags for “projects to avoid”.

kristianp• 2 years ago

One thing that boggles the mind is that Blue Origin decided to use liquid Hydrogen fuel in their design. I don't see their lander working early enough to matter to Artemis with that challenge to overcome, given how slowly Blue Origin works.

moffkalast3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

Symmetry2• 2 years 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.

bryanlarsen4• 2 years 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.

PaulHoule5• 2 years 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-...

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.

sidewndr462• 2 years 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?

PaulHoule5• 2 years ago

Yes, but the right way to think about it is

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.

kqr9• 2 years 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?

PaulHoule5• 2 years ago

You gotta get off Earth no matter where you go in space. It's almost free to come home from LEO, you get a huge amount of free velocity change returning from the moon. (At the cost of rejecting the heat)

In the rocket equation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation

the required mass ratio is an exponential function of the velocity change so adding another 2.5 km/sec for this and another 2.5 km/sec for that you are making the mission much more difficult.

It's bad enough that it takes two stages to get to LEO comfortably but going beyond that adds cost and complexity pretty quick, for instance the large number of Starship launches required to get a Moon mission into the right orbit.

I like to think about what interstellar travellers would do if they wanted to land on the Earth on the assumption that they are accustomed to life in deep space and have spent 1,000 to 10,000 years "living off the land" off comets and rouge planets and are used to a lifestyle like cutting up a planet like Pluto and building a number of small ringworlds powered by D-D fusion.

I'd conjecture that despite having advanced technology they would still find the "reverse space shuttle" problem where you land with a full load of fuel and then take off from the ground to be difficult. It's not like they are going to haul a space shuttle along with them and would probably find it non-trivial to 3-d print one from plans that old. My take is that it would probably take them a decade to figure it out and that they might well come up with an alternative answer like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure)

which depends on in-space infrastructure that they'd be experience with although it could work together with an air-breathing aircraft which would be something new for them.

ryandrake3• 2 years ago

Everything is on the small order of magnitude when compared with getting into Earth orbit. As the quote goes, "Once you get to earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system."

alexey-salmin7• 2 years ago

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?

The problem is all the fuel you use to break before landing also has to achieve earth escape velocity at first. And it makes the original problem much harder because the total mass that needs acceleration grow exponentially with delta speed.

lupusreal6• 2 years ago

Mars and Venus aren't that much harder

Related; a proposal to do a Venus flyby with Apollo hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_flyby

Aeolun2• 2 years ago

There’s so much cool stuff that was rejected before I was even born. It’s kinda bizarre how the space program is so in the dumps now.

The space shuttle, while expensive, was at least an icon. I grew up with it as a symbol of US spaceflight hegemony. Now NASA is just a really expensive organisation achieving very little.

shirro2• 2 years ago

The Apollo mission architecture was inspired. Going to the moon likely would have remained a fantasy if they hadn't done the only thing that could work. Any country with ambitions to land people on the moon in the future is facing the same laws of physics.

NASA is stuck with a complicated architecture because they are required to use a legacy system incapable of supporting an Apollo style campaign, not because they have some great vision. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX will need to reinvent space launch to make Artemis work which isn't necessarily a bad thing but I don't feel like NASA has made that clear to the public.

flerchin2• 2 years ago

IMO the only "lunacy" with the current plan is regarding schedule and budget slip.

luyu_wu• 2 years ago

Have you read the article? Those are just the outward symptoms of the much greater engineering lunacy within the project.

flerchin2• 2 years 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.

preisschild3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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

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.

jjk1662• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

*The Lunarcy of Artemis

¬‿¬

jodrellblank3• 2 years ago

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).

twothreeone3• 2 years 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.

strangattractor2• 2 years 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.

twothreeone3• 2 years 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".

concordDance• 2 years ago

If you worry about your workforce being motivated, transparently tying compensation to company success does wonders.

That works only if the company is small, otherwise the worker's compensation isn't really tied to the success. And once the direct link is broken all you have is KPIs.

kqr9• 2 years ago

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

I want to agree, but for literal moonshots, I'm not sure I can.

We all know there's a point after which throwing more people at the problem won't solve it. For complex, integrated products this can be a relatively low number. So maybe even an infinite budget does not help.

Planning maybe, but then again maybe a high launch cadence is a necessity for projects like this? I'm thinking of the learning cycle -- if there are years between missions maybe we will forget some of the knowledge obtained from the third when we launch the fifth, in a way we wouldn't have had with months between missions.

So maybe there are some things that are best done at high cadence with a small-ish number of people. If there are, then complex, integrated, innovative products would be it.

Animats• 2 years 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

hifromwork3• 2 years 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

DiogenesKynikos• 2 years 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.

Wingman4l7• 2 years ago

A robotic moon landing with sample return? Luna 16 called, it wants to remind you that the Russians did this in 1970.

vaguba2• 2 years ago

did they do it on the dark side of the moon?

chasd002• 2 years 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• 2 years 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?

gnarbarian3• 2 years 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.

rbanffy3• 2 years ago

compensate leaders who save money by doing more with less.

This is a recipe for burnout

gnarbarian3• 2 years ago

we have the opposite problem in government

w10-1• 2 years ago

Money used to be how things got done.

Now it's why.

JohnCClarke• 2 years 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.

shirro2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

The Lunacy of Artemis

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