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.
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.
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.
> NASA is just a really expensive organization achieving very little.
Granted, human spaceflight is crazy expensive. And yet...
Jet Propulsion Labs, to pick a single NASA site, has never been more busy. I counted 30 spacecraft listed as "active" on their Current Missions page, but I think I missed a couple of them.
NOTE: I don't think that web page of 'Current' missions is up to date.
For instance, the VSOP project is still on there; that was using a spacecraft designed mostly by JAXA, I believe, as an element of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA).
I was still attending the VLBA Operations meetings, early 2000's, and at that time it seemed that they were winding that project down. Data reduction and analysis of VLBA itself had been difficult to implement and wasn't totally integrated into the standard software package. Adding a telescope that was moving at orbital velocity made things quite spicy. I found it to be a profoundly humbling experience.
It's wild to think the world of 2001 A Space Odyssey seemed very possible to the people of the late 1960's. They went to the moon in only about 10 years, so a Jupiter mission in another 30 years would just be a continuation of current progress. Little did they know that humans would lose the capability to leave orbit just a few short years later.
> 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?
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)
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
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.
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."
> As the quote goes, "Once you get to earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system."
In terms of delta-v, yes. Going to the moon only takes 50% more delta-v than going to LEO. But the rocket equation makes getting that extra 50% a lot harder. Time for more staging and complexity and still having terrible payload fraction.
That might be Heinlein's most annoying quote ever and boy does it have competition.
It is very expensive to change orbits. If you had two space stations like the ISS with ascending nodes 180 degrees from each other it would be about as expensive to transit between them as it is to launch a rocket from the Earth to begin with. See
You've got the advantage in space that you can use electric rockets with a high specific impulse. Back in the 1950s folks like von Braun imagined that manned space flight might use electric rockets but after they discovered the Van Allen belts they discovered this is much too slow to make it through the magnetosphere.
> If you had two space stations like the ISS with ascending nodes 180 degrees from each other it would be about as expensive to transit between them as it is to launch a rocket from the Earth to begin with.
1+1 = 2 2/2 = 1; technically halfway.
To interpret “halfway to anywhere” that way is missing the point. Going from LEO to LEO wasn’t the point of “halfway to anywhere”. Yes a bit exuberant but not far off.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
I'm not very familiar with how US politics works internally, but how would it play out in practice? My experience with my (admittedly flawed) government is that the head of such agency would be dismissed from his position, and a new - more amicable - one appointed not long after. Are the US different?
The Congress person from Alabama where the fuel tank is built refuses to ok spending for NASA's other projects (or some other desirable project that needs to get done) unless the design requires things be built in their district. Since the tanks were previously built there it becomes the easiest way to satisfy their black mail. This may not be explicitly stated other than in meetings with the speaker of the house but it is understood none the less. This is not Congress people directly profiting from this decision but they have to run for office every 2 years and need to have consistent pork returns to keep their constituents happy.
There is nothing illegal here in fact the system is pretty much designed to work this way to insure that Federal money is distributed among the states.
Notice, however that it's not about _what_ to do, but _how_ to do it. And when it comes to to the how of human space flight, NASA has the experts, not Congress. Politicians rely on Engineers and Researchers to make informed decisions, it is therefore only a natural expectation on behalf of Congress that unreasonable, meaningless, or dangerous requests should be denied. If that doesn't happen the Administrator screwed up, it is that simple.
I think what you mean to say is congress approves the appointment of officials nominated by the executive branch and approves the budget for agencies. Agencies have no control over congress. The executive branch can dictate what an agency can do, within the boundaries of a law originally passed by the congress (though almost never a recent congress).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> And what if China gets there first? How exactly would that benefit them, in a geopolitical sense?
If China gets there first, the enormous amount of international credibility and resulting soft power that they will gain internationally, at the US's expense, will be immense and will be worth the resources they spend several times over.
> the enormous amount of international credibility and resulting soft power
You know what is giving China soft power? Funding projects around all of Africa.
You know what is not giving western countries soft power? Burning Billions on Space Programs that serve zero purpose and could achieve more with much less investments, if we just continued sending robots.
Again, I know where I would allocate my resources if I had a hand in this game.
I'm not a geopolitics expert, and I assume you're not either, so I'll just say what I feel. As an European, deep down my unconscious mental picture of the situation here is probably this: USA is a geopolitical and economic power, China is a far away country that assembles parts and devices for western companies. This mental picture is wrong and hilariously oversimplified (I know rationally that it's wrong), but this is the stereotype I've absorbed from my society.
If both counties actively tried to win, and China managed to build a Moon base before the US that would probably make a huge blow to that (subconscious) mental picture.
that's because the US and the rest of the west pretty much decided after 1990 that history had ended, even as their societies crumbled from the costs of the cold war.
the example of china's rise and eventual dominance disturbs that narrative but doesn't demolish it entirely. sinking a US carrier or building a moon base before white countries do would be concrete examples that they can't explain away.
> that would probably make a huge blow to that (subconscious) mental picture.
And?
Okay, so let's say this happens, and now some people think: "Wow China is more powerful in space than the US!".
What is the real world impact of this? Did Chinas army just get 10x more powerful? Does the CPP now own the moon? Did Chinas [economic challenges][1] suddenly disappear? Did their [demographic issues][2] suddenly improve?
No, of course not.
The only real world impact of this: China would now be faced with the choice between blowing billions upon billions of dollars anually for what is essentially a vanity project with little to no ROI, or find a way to abandon it quitely without too much public fanfare. And of course, the whole thing is constantly only one malfunctioning airlock away, from turning into a pile of dead astronauts and a complete PR desaster.
So please tell me, and you are completely right, I am not a geopolitics expert, in terms I can understand, what the specific and tangible benefits of building a Moon-/Mars-Base/NewMannedSpaceStation/etc. are supposed to be, in terms of geopolitics.
And sure, I can see some change to mental images, and yeah, that might e.g. attract some business that would otherwise be somewhere else, or make the odd contract negotiations go smoother. But at the end of the day, these advantages, such as they are, would still need to offset the pricetag of the whole show, and I don't believe they would.
> You know what is giving China soft power? Funding projects around all of Africa.
I don't disagree.
Are you suggesting that China will be satisfied with merely the amount of soft power that they are gaining from funding infrastructure projects in Africa and will not seek additional soft power through other routes?
I would assert that between the amount of soft power gained, and more, the amount of soft power lost by their rivals (the US), if China had the capability to create a moon base it would be entirely worthwhile for them to do so.
Thus, if the US wishes to prevent that loss of its own soft power, then it needs to beat China to the moon base.
> Are you suggesting that China will be satisfied with merely the amount of soft power that they are gaining from funding infrastructure projects in Africa and will not seek additional soft power through other routes?
No, I am not.
I am, however, suggesting that the amount of soft power gained through bragging rights along the lines of "We did it! We did it! We managed to to the same thing the US did in the 60s! And we only had to light a huge pile of money on fire to do it!!!" is kinda negligible when compared to, say, having direct financial influence in many developing countries, or having a couple additional aircraft carriers.
And sure, they could do both, but resources are finite. Every dollar pumped into a, technically unnecessary, moon base is a dollar less they can invest elsewhere.
Maybe weapons? Certainly you could hit speeds that would nullify any kind of missile defense, though MIRVs already accomplish that anyway.
Depending on where you established infrastructure on the moon, it might be pretty easy to conceal the things you're doing in space. You won't see anything launched from the other side, and anything leaving the moon is going to fall towards Earth, so may be difficult to detect (e.g. no heat signature).
The moon is also a pretty decent staging ground for the rest of the solar system, so getting there late means ceding any potential resource or technological advantages that being first might have attained.
There's also a slim possibility that there are things that can only be manufactured in low or zero gravity.
I think the last two reasons aren't a great justification, but anything that materially impacts geopolitics on Earth, as weapons systems and spying do, probably are if you think there's a credible threat that your adversary is capable of them. And that's probably a big part of why the US stopped going to the moon. The cost and risks didn't stack up when the US already had a pretty compelling technological lead, better intel, and the USSR never signalled that it was serious about going there.
China are serious, though, and the way they've vertically integrated the world's manufacturing base means they actually have a lead on the US in a number of areas. That's probably why there's suddenly a lot more urgency and credibility about claims of wanting to go back.
> Depending on where you established infrastructure on the moon, it might be pretty easy to conceal the things you're doing in space.
No it wouldn't be, because there is zero chance in hell of everyone else on Earth not realizing whats going on, if someone were suddenly busy launching all that machinery, building materials and weapons towards the Moon, not to mention hundreds of personnel with all their space suits, provisions, water, shelters, space poop collectors, etc.
Hiding something is pretty pointless, if the process of getting whatever it is to wherever it is hidden, is announced to the entire planet by shooting it into the sky on roaring pillars of fire.
> The moon is also a pretty decent staging ground for the rest of the solar system
The rest of what now?
There is Earth. There is the Moon. There is Mars. This is all the places in the solar system a human could, in theory, visit without immediately dying horribly. Maybe Phobos. Maybe.
The other planets are off limits: Mercury is worse than literal Hell. Venus is a hypercorrosive hothouse. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune would instantly crush everything in their deep gravity envelopes, and most of their moons are highly radioactive hellholes. Not to mention that everything beyond Mars is not even theoretically reachable with a manned spacecraft as of right now.
So, that leaves Mars. A freeze-dried, irradiated, airless, toxic rock desert covered in microabrasive regolith, with too low gravity, no magnetic field to speak off, no available Nitrogen, and no resources that aren't found in abundance on Earth. And before anyone says "Land": May I present the [Gobi Desert][1], a 1.295 Million square kilometers large rock desert, smack in the middle of Asia. And while it is largely a cold, barren rock desert, it is still a paradise compared to Mars.
And even so, the Moon offers ZERO advantage as a "staging ground" for Missions to Mars, because, there is nothing on the Moon to be staged. Every kg of stuff that would be "staged" there, has to be first launched from Earth, so all a Moon Base does, is add another launch to an already costly equation.
> No it wouldn't be, because there is zero chance in hell of everyone else on Earth not realizing whats going on, if someone were suddenly busy launching all that machinery, building materials and weapons towards the Moon, not to mention hundreds of personnel with all their space suits, provisions, water, shelters, space poop collectors, etc.
We're talking about a permanent manned presence on the moon. If I have that and you don't, you can watch me launch from Earth all you like. I can build a launch facility on the side of the moon that you can't see without circumnavigating it, and I can conduct launches from it that you don't know about. To go to the extreme, I could launch nukes on ballistic trajectories that you would be blind to.
> And even so, the Moon offers ZERO advantage as a "staging ground" for Missions to Mars, because, there is nothing on the Moon to be staged. Every kg of stuff that would be "staged" there, has to be first launched from Earth, so all a Moon Base does, is add another launch to an already costly equation.
This is the kind of confidently ignorant response that is thankfully not too common on hackernews.
The moon has zero atmosphere, a trivial escape velocity, and is a huge mass that can be built on, within Earth's gravity well. Using a mass driver to launch from the moon around the Earth means you would need to carry less propellant on board your spacecraft, because in the best case scenario, you only need to carry the fuel to slow you down. Launching from Earth, you need X + Y fuel, where X gets you the delta-V to get to your destination from Earth, and Y is the fuel required to slow you down and land. Launching from the moon you need U + V, where U is the fuel that gets you to the moon, and V is the fuel you need to slow you down, because you don't need to launch from the moon using propellant. If X > U, launching from the moon is better. The faster you want to go, the more things tip in favor of launching from the moon, because you can keep adding stages and front-loading energy into your launch in a way that is impossible on Earth. Shit, if you launch around the Earth you can even regain some of the energy you put towards getting to the moon in the first place, because the Earth's gravity field accelerates you, and your propellant has potential energy as well as chemical energy (i.e. do an Oberth maneuver).
I'm well aware of the realities of the other bodies in the solar system. That doesn't mean we'll never want to go to any of them. If we do, going to the moon first makes a lot of sense.
If China gets there first, they will accomplish half of the above stated number two reason, reproduced below.
> 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.
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?
I have never found any math that made trip to the moon for materials even remotely wortwhile, by like orders of magnitude, not just today with today's technology, but for any foreseeable future we can meaningfully discuss. Water in particular is an unfortunate one to start with, given its abundance and ease of extraction on earth, vs absolutely positively ridiculous efforts to obtain them from the moon. But everything else from metals to obscurely valuable versions of Helium, seems to fall apart as soon as we go from "Look! Up there in the sky! Minerals!!!1", to "let's do a back-of-the-napkin math along any of the materials, science, energy, or money axis"
I enjoy using traditional cold-war bogey-men to scare ignorant politicians into accidentally sponsoring real science as much as any other person, I do, but... as long as we're not actually buying into that sillyness, right?.... right?
you should read the book delta v. The only time lunar mining makes sense is when there is a cislunar orbit economy. The delta v required to put things in orbit from the moon is a fraction of that of earth. So, if you have a vibrant manufacturing enviroment in space (Semi conductors, and other deposition methods) which space is more suited for, then the moon becomes a better place to source your materials from.
> So, if you have a vibrant manufacturing enviroment in space
And how does this "vibrant manufacturing environment" get into space? How is it supplied with personnel, food, water, spare parts, etc.?
Let's just focus on one component, shall we? The Moon only has 1/6th of Earths gravity, but to get stuff away from the Moon still requires a launch. That launch requires fuel. There is no fuel source on the Moon, so even if we had production facilities there, there are no high energy raw materials for them to process.
So where does the fuel come from? How about the only place in the solar system we know where we can make rocket fuel: EARTH!
So every liter of rocket fuel used to power launches to supply raw materials to a "cislunar orbit economy", first has to be transported to the moon by launching it from Earths gravity well.
So, where is the gain in efficiency exactly?
Also, where would this "cislunar orbit economy" find a market? The vast majority of people are here, on Earth. So even if there was a way to supply such an economy with raw materials (and energy, and personnel, and so on), the products would still need to be transported to Earth, adding a huge additional cost to everything manufactured. How is this supposed to compete with products made on earth exactly?
Hydrogen and oxygen can be made from water, and methane can be made from regolith and water.
>where would this "cislunar orbit economy" find a market?
The uniform distribution of microgravity lends itself to advanced manufacturing methods that cost hundreds if not billions of dollars to replicate here on earth. soooo many of earths manufacturing methods use very expensive means of creating the vacuum that is required, that is provided free in space.
Semiconductors. Turns out here on earth the machines costs hundreds of millions of dollars to etch a wafer because of the use of various technologies to create vacums, control for foreign material, and ensure the micro etches "Stay" and the material "goes". There is a wide discussion, and multiple tests conducted on the ISS that has confirmed this. So, space may be the only way to build next-gen semi conductor tech to get us below 2nm, and a much higher yield, with much cheaper equipment. With the cost of a launch at ~100m on a falcon, the launch would be cheaper than the equipment they are sending up.
ZBLAN fiber optics,
growing protein crystals,
Electron Beam Physical Vapor Deposition,
Regolith refining,
are all done better in space. And they will be cheaper in space, and on the moon and mars. They will be more expensive on earth due to the large gravity well.
Judging by [this][1], good luck trying to find adequate supplies of water on the Moon.
> methane can be made from regolith and water.
Again, good luck with that, because as shown [here][2], the amount of carbon in the lunar soil is, shall we say, not great. And since we are already talking about an immensely energy intensive process here, breaking down rocks in a smelter to get at tiny amounts of Carbon, may not be a very good solution.
So to have a chance at an adequate supply of CO_2 for the Sabbatier Process, you'd have to mine cold-trapped carbon dioxide. Which [may exist][3], or it might not. If it exists, it exists in the coldest regions of the moon, aka. places where you have no access to the only available energy source (Solar). Good luck hauling dry ice across the Moon to the base, especially since it will cease to be a solid the closer the transport comes to the processing plant.
And this process btw. requires HUGE amounts of energy, equipment, machinery and storage infrastructure. [This video][4] gives you a good idea of how difficult making CH_4/LOX fuel with ISRU using the Sabbatier process is ... on Mars, where you can actually pull CO_2 from the thin atmosphere, and likely have more water available.
So in summary:
1. No, we cannot just make the fuel on the Moon
2. Even if we could, it would likely end up being comparatively easier to just ship it there from Earth
3. Even ignoring all that, good luck making the amounts required to keep industrial-scale launches of materials happen
> control for foreign material
If you want to have a real challenge regarding keeping foreign material out, then try manufacturing things in an environment that is filled with hyperstatic, completely dry, microabrasive, pulverized regolith, and having to build clean rooms in an environment with the kind of temperature differentials experienced between the lunar day/night cycle, or worse, in space.
Also, if a clean room fails here on Earth, it's a huge headache for everyone to recover it. If an airlock fails on the Moon, people die, and the production facility gets destroyed by explosive decompression.
> And they will be cheaper in space, and on the moon and mars.
No, they won't, because again: These materials, even if they actually benefited from being produced off-world (and that's a big IF) will only be of any use here on Earth. There won't be any self-sustaining colonies in outer space, or on the Moon, or on Mars. There won't be sprawling industrial sites. We'll be lucky if we can keep a small crew of Astronauts alive on another Planet or the Moon for a few Months until they can get back and start the recovery process after having their bodies wrecked by Microgravity for a prolonged period of time.
So the only market for ANYTHING produced "up there", is "down here", and this, again, is where the prohibitive transportation costs come in and make the whole discussion moot.
I get the direction that the video was going on... but all it did in my mind was prove that it was completely possible. 5k solarpanels, two full football fields or 17 small nuclear reactors is all that is required for the process? I would have thought it'd be more.
I get what you're saying... it will be hard... for sure... Is it possible in the timeframes being discussed? probably not. Is it an endevor for our generation to embark on? yes. It's the greatest adventure ever written, and yeah... it's gunna suck for all people involved. It's a hostile wasteland.
With that out of the way... I think the video you linked tells the story dishonestly. The deltav required to get from mars, nor to the moon back to the ISS, is no where near refilling a full tank. Without a retro burn, it would require around 1/8th of the deltaV.
Secondly, you can send 10, 20 starships before, or each cycle and spin up. No one is saying that the very first time you send people they will use Insitu 100%. Maybe they bring the hydrogen, or the carbon dioxide and try and get a plant going. Or they can send all the fuel required beforehand. Once they have some kind of more permanant presence, they can slowly ramp up and take a more and more of the process on.
Not all these projects need to be solved at once. With 100T carrying capacity of each starship, all the youtube video convinced me of that it will take around 30-40 starships... which isn't that wild.
I would be more interested in what you think about the more advanced manufacturing, despite all the problems and infrastructure required?
No, that is only the panels required just to generate the electricity for the process.
This does not include, among other things: cabling, scaffolds, mountings, inverters, electronics, any batteries to cover operation during the night, any machinery required for mining, transportation, and building, nor building materials, piping, storage tanks, the actual sabbatier reactor chambers, insultation, duct tape, spare parts, tools, engineers, food, water, oxygen, space suits, vehicles, or toilet paper.
And keep in mind that for the sake of simplicity, [this assumes almost total conversion of energy][1] already, aka. almost losslessly converting the electricity harvested to chemical energy in the fuel, which of course doesn't happen in chemistry. It also ignores a whole lot of other stuff, outlined shortly after the timestamp linked.
And all that is to refill a single ship over the course of 500 days. Not a fleet. Not regular starts to support industry-scale transport logistics. One. Single. Ship. Over the course of 500 days
And we are, again, just talking about fuel production here. An industry also needs spare parts, personnel, tools, replacement machinery, building materials. The people working there need food, water, oxygen, toilet paper, ...
You know what else an industry needs? Waste disposal. We cannot just dump metal shavings, etc. into space: Because we are talking about orbiting platforms or something similar here, so these waste products would then become hyper-velocity projectiles ripping everything to shreds. So there needs to be a plan for that as well, which again involves all the same problems.
Another thing it needs: Energy. The video outlines how difficult it is to support even a single, scope-limited industrial process in a place where we cannot just connect to the electric grid or access large natural gas reservoirs. Solar panels are nice, but processes like smelting materials, welding, metalworking, anything that requires high temperatures? Good luck trying to cover that with solar.
And again another thing: Heat dispersal. Ever wondered why the ISS has so many fins? Many of those are not solar panels, they are heat-exchangers. And they just have to account for the body heat of a small group of people and their equipment. Try to imagine what an industrial facility would need, just in terms of that.
Yeah, so all in all, I guess that we won't support a "cis-lunar-orbit" industry any time soon. While in theory possible (as in, nothing so far violates any laws of physics), it simply isn't practical, and the cost of anything, from setting it up to maintaining it, would be prohibitive.
> I would be more interested in what you think about the more advanced manufacturing, despite all the problems and infrastructure required?
First I'd need to see tangible demonstrations that "having zero gravity" confers an advantage in the first place.
What do I mean by that? Simple: Does zero gravity enable certain processes, that cannot be replicated on Earth, and is the cost of setting up such facilities, vs. developing alternatives that work here, where we have materials, labour, air, etc. available really worth it.
Because "greatest adventure" sounds wonderful and all that, but when the term "industry" enters the discussion, we have to talk about efficiency, expedience and ROI.
The only way mining and refining on the moon makes any sense is if you're building stuff to be used on the moon in your lunar colonies, and that's a long way off.
This sounds completely insane to me. Are people worried that China is going to mine out the moon before the US gets there? You're talking about trillions of tons of material, it won't be the limiting factor in your lifetime. And this assumes that lunar mining/refining is even practical.
>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".
> 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?
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.
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).
You could make the same argument about any government spending program, no matter how wasteful it is. The money always goes into the economy. The question is how to get the most useful output from that spending.
"hundreds of billions of dollars burned by space-billionaires" is what I was replying to. It would be more serious if the "burning resources" in the original comment's first paragraph meant fossil fuels, for example. Non-renewable things. Their second paragraph clarifies that they mean money (and not even taxpayer's money in their comment), which isn't burned.
> "The question is how to get the most useful output from that spending."
That is a question, not the thing I was replying to.
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.
> And the purpose of the ISS? So that the Space Shuttle would have somewhere to go.
I don’t think this is accurate. ISS was conceived almost 10 years after the Shuttle started launching, and the U.S. obviously had space station ambitions even before the Shuttle was on the drawing board (Skylab).
Additionally the Soviets did the exact same, with Mir being launched prior to the Buran’s first test flight — heck Salyut 1 was launched in 1971.
ISS stems from Space Station Freedom[1], which itself has its roots in the the Space Transportation System's space station component[2]. The Space Shuttle was a part of the Space Transportation System and the only part to receive funding and see development.
Again, the Challenger disaster was 12 years prior to the launch of the first ISS module. ISS missions only flew 37 times, out of 135 total missions for the Shuttle.
I first heard the saying I think sometime around the loss of Colombia. Maybe before, maybe after. By the return to flight, it was most certainly more true than false. By that time the shuttles performed very few non-ISS flights. I think that Atlantis flew a service mission to Hubble, other than that I can't think of any other shuttle flights that didn't go to the space station.
Columbia was heavier than the other orbiters, so she was flying the non-ISS missions from about '98 until her demise. After that US satellites were launched on disposable, unmanned rockets like the Deltas and Atlas.
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.
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
"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."
That seems like a side effect more than an explicit purpose. Down below is more to the point:
> WHY WE’RE GOING TO THE MOON
> We’re going back to the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and inspiration for a new generation of explorers: the Artemis Generation. While maintaining American leadership in exploration, we will build a global alliance and explore deep space for the benefit of all.
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.
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.
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.
Counterpoint: all of those incidents, except Apollo 1 are proof that the engineering was great, because nobody died.
For example, you mention the computer on the Apollo 11 lunar module crashing. In fact, it was recovering and working properly. The astronauts had left the rendezvous radar on during descent, in case it was needed for abort. That was not a nominal configuration, and the radar kept stealing cycles and causing the guidance computer to be overloaded with tasks. Remember, it was a hard real time system. What did the computer do? Reset and prioritize the key task: landing.
Apollo 12: Got hit (twice) by lightning. The electrical system wasn't fried, it survived it, in a protective mode. Importantly, the computers in the Instrument Unit, placed on the third stage, were completely unaffected.
Apollo 15: One lost parachute, still landed safely (if a bit hard) because of redundancy.
I could go on, but you get the point. It was a well-engineered system backed by a team of engineers.
Maybe. But it's hard to tell whether nobody died because the system was robust vs. nobody died because we got lucky.
For example, there were several cases of burn-through on the O-rings before Challenger. The engineers thought there was enough margin to not worry about it, so they didn't
Similarly, when Columbia was hit by foam-ice on ascent no one worried because it had happened before and nobody had died.
Correction -- at least for Challenger, engineers did not think there was margin, and argued against the launch.
At the technical level, both tragedies were caused by design flaws. Organizationally and culturally, multiple factors contributed, but an attitude of "nothing has happened yet, so this is fine" (normalizing risk) was a major one.
In my mind I have stored this phrase that "production pressures move the Overton window of acceptable shortcuts closer to disaster."
I think it captures several important nuances, like how it's a gradual process, how it ecpnomises/improves things at first, that there is a destination, that it covers even things such as discussions about shortcuts and not just their usage.
We don't disagree about the engineering being excellent. I was commenting on safety culture. A few days ago I saw Tory Bruno explain with visible frustration how they canceled the launch due to a valve that had to be cycled before it behaved. In that environment, the Apollo risks would not have been tolerated, even though they turned out to have been good bets.
The abort button on Apollo 14 would at worst have rendezvouzed the lander with the orbiter prior to landing on the moon. It would have killed the mission, but definitely not the astronauts.
The brownout also had several safe abort alternatives and the question was only ever about how to continue the mission, not how to save people.
Apollo 13 also had severe pogo on launch. Obviously it's overshadowed by the unrelated oxygen tank issues later, but that mission actually got extremely lucky that the oscillations happened to occur in such a way that the computer noticed the issue and shut down the affected engine. That could easily not have been the case, and if the oscillations had continued for a few more seconds it would have destroyed the vehicle.
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.
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.
> 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.
waterfall project, cost-plus contracting and congressional appropriations "report language"
On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones, a paper by Pete Worden about NASA's bureaucracy, to describe the relationship between the Space Shuttle and Space Station. [0, linked from 1]
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Yep. Even taking SpaceX off the table, we could have built a lunar program based on existing launchers like the Atlas and Delta class of rockets, using smaller modules docked in orbit, and orbital refueling.
Instead we have a giant rocket that costs billions per launch whose only purpose is to launch Orion to the moon in one shot, and it can't even deliver Orion to a conventional lunar orbit.
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...
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.
I would argue plenty of lander designs (including LM) were tailless and landed on their butts! That should be easier than the balancing act of standing on the tail.
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.
The center of mass should be pretty low relative to the height of the lander, the engines and propellant are the heaviest parts, the engines are obviously at the bottom. The heaviest component of the propellant is the LOX, which is also at the bottom.
This is false most of the fuel is gone by the time it lands and most of the payload is up high that's why the latest designs for starship have diagonal thrusters 2/3 of the way up the rocket so they can stabilize the top heavy part of the rocket without having to control it from a high moment arm
Starship carries ~1200t of propellant, of which ~950t is LOX, and 250t is Methane. While yes, most of that will be burned off by landing, it'll still need enough to return to lunar orbit. Even if we assume that only 10% of the fuel is needed to return to orbit, that's 95t right on the bottom with another 10t of engines and most of the 100t of dry mass of the Starship itself (plumbing, tank domes etc).
The thrusters you're (probably) thinking of are the landing thrusters that NASA thinks they might end up needing. Not to stabilize the rocket when on the ground, but because the Raptors might be too powerful and might dig out a crater underneath the vehicle when landing on an unprepared surface (such as the Moon, at least before a base is established or something is sent to prepare a proper surface). Placing weaker landing thrusters up top eliminates this issue, although at the moment they're still considered speculative in the sense that last we heard (which was admittedly a year or two ago), SpaceX are not convinced that this will be an issue.
Thrusters would anyway be a crazy approach to preventing a crewed vehicle from tipping over, as you wouldn't want them to be firing when the crew are doing any of the things that would involve the ship becoming potentially unstable (eg unloading cargo). For stability they'd have to use the large self-leveling legs from the original HLS design.
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.
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.
Falcon 9 launches every three days. It's not even fully reusable and it burns kerolox, requiring the engine be cleaned.
I doubt they'll have that cadence ready for Starship within NASA's ambitious timeframe, but if they can get orbital refuelling and full reuse working (which are big ifs) high cadence should only be a matter of time. And when you're just refueling it every flight, rather than building a bespoke new rocket (as with SLS), the cost for twelve launches would likely be significantly lower than one SLS launch.
The internal cost for a Falcon 9 is approximately 15 million, and that's including a thrown away second stage, drone ship usage, fairing recovery, and engine refurbishment.
> 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.
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.
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.
I understand it didn’t land on the moon but it flew to the moon and back (which is what my comment was saying) in 2021. The mission wasn’t perfect but their half of Artemis was demonstrated. Starship has not yet shown to be capable of completing its half.
Artemis 2 and 3 should be delayed until NASA can fix their shit.
> The mission wasn’t perfect but their half of Artemis was demonstrated.
Sort of.
The first fully functional Orion will be debuted on Artemis III. As an example of the differences, the Artemis I Orion didn't have functional life support systems. And the Artemis II Orion won't be able to dock with anything.
SLS does not fly "to the moon". To put it simply, it flies near the moon and back. Saying it flies "to the moon" it like saying that getting on a plane that flies over Orlando FL, lets you take pictures out the window, and then flies back home to your starting airport is "going to Disney World".
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.
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.
> 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?".
The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to move space exploration forward.
While arguably today there are comparable tensions, countries no longer have to prove anything to the world, and space exploration is mostly a scientific endeavour fueled by private companies that want to make a profit. There's less of an urgency to get to the moon, which can explain that difference in spirit that you mention.
FWIW I don't think that's a bad thing. Space exploration is the most difficult human endeavour, and taking the time to do it right seems like the optimal way to go. The fact world superpowers achieved what they did in a couple of decades of the last century, a mere 60 years after flying machines were invented, is nothing short of extraordinary. But it was a special time, and we shouldn't feel pressured to repeat it.
> 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.
That doesn't seem like a bad approach to me. There is a lot of value to be gained by gluing existing technology together, and if anything, Docker is proof of how wildly successful that can be. Most scientific breakthroughs are effectively a repurposing or combination of previous ideas, after all. I don't think this is a valid criticism of Docker, nor of this approach.
For anyone interested in this, Apple TV's "For All Mankind" is a wonderful exploration of what could have happened if the space race never ended. It's not a historical treatise or anything, but it's still a fascinating take and makes me hope we see real progress in the coming years.
>The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to move space exploration forward.
Well, money wise they now spend much more budget (inflation adjusted) it seems. Technology wise, one would expect they have more of it now, than back then. So, what, they lack some mystery motivation factor?
I'd say it's rather general modern bureucratic incompetence, overdesign, plus losing the people who knew how to build stuff and had actual Apollo-era experience, with a huge period in between without Moon missions that meant they couldn't pass anything directly to the current NASA generation (a 40 year old NASA engineer today would be negative years old back then), which obliterated all kinds of tacit knowledge.
It's like they had the people who designed UNIX back in the 70s, and a room full of JS framework programmers in 2024, plus all kinds of managers "experts" in Agile Development.
>FWIW I don't think that's a bad thing. Space exploration is the most difficult human endeavour, and taking the time to do it right seems like the optimal way to go.
Isn't the whole point that they're not "taking time to do it right", but waste enormous amounts of money and time while doing it massively wrong?
Apollo program got to the point that NASA budget was >4% of total federal budget.
And Apollo program itself was, IIRC, over half of it.
Never since NASA had such funding and political will to just let them try to get a stated goal. History of projects since Apollo is full of every attempt at making things simpler and more reusable either getting canceled, blown with congressional requirements for pork-barrel (SLS), damaged by needing to beg for money from organizations with different goals (Shuttle is a great example), smothered by budget cuts resulting in reuse plans getting canceled skyrocketing per-mission cost (Shuttle, Cassini), and that with NASA being effectively prevented from doing iterative approach and ending having to gold-plate everything to reduce risks on the often "once in a lifetime" launch.
It's important to remember that Apollo was one of Kennedy's signature political projects at the time he was assassinated, which was an important factor in its political viability.
>Apollo program got to the point that NASA budget was >4% of total federal budget
Given the figures in TFA, that points to a much smaller federal budget and much smaller government expenditures in general, than to less absolute (inflation adjusted) money for this over Apollo.
>It's like they had the people who designed UNIX back in the 70s, and a room full of JS framework programmers in 2024, plus all kinds of managers "experts" in Agile Development.
Does it mean Artemis is the Electron of space missions?
There is a space race now, between the US and China. It is tempered by China being only a non-NATO regional security threat, especially in the form of forcibly uniting Taiwan with the PRC. The modern space race is one branch of a many-faceted technological rivalry. So it doesn't have to make business sense or scientific sense in any strict way. But it also can't consume a large fraction of the GDP, or blow up a crew if that can be avoided.
>The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to move space exploration forward.
I'd say the climate is as tense today, and it is getting tenser. NATO is now talking about putting "trainers" into Ukraine, and US-made weaponry is being used to kill Vatniks; China is using water cannon on Philippine ships in the South China Sea; Iran is shooting missiles at Israel and the Houthis are trying to knock international shipping out of the Gulf of Aden.
It's just that the US looks a lot weaker and less competent today. (But perhaps that is hindsight? In the 60s people were still worried that the USSR would overtake the West economically.)
> I'd say the climate is as tense today, and it is getting tenser.
I think that all the examples you mentioned pale in comparison to the terror of global annihilation from nuclear weapons, a couple of decades after the bloodiest war in human history, during the peak of the Cold War. Conflicts exist today as well, and there is an increasing risk of a global conflict, but there is no urgency of beating an adversary ideologically because you can't fight them militarily. There was a nationwide competitive spirit back then that just doesn't exist today, which caused nations to accomplish things that seem impossible in hindsight.
> It's just that the US looks a lot weaker and less competent today.
I wouldn't say the US as a whole, since as a country it's still a leader in science and technology, and it has sufficient financial resources to invest in this project, if it wanted to. I think it boils down to the lack of urgency and political/public support, and perhaps managerial and competency problems at NASA itself.
> (But perhaps that is hindsight? In the 60s people were still worried that the USSR would overtake the West economically.)
By some measures, China has overtaken the US economically, and they have a space program with a focus on the moon, yet both sides are sloppy in their own ways. I think we'll get there eventually, but it will take more attempts, time and resources than we planned for. And, to be fair, it took 11 missions for Apollo to land on the moon, 10 Gemini missions before it, and many failures along the way. But if you take a look at the rate of progress, and time between missions, it's clear that getting to the moon was US' primary objective in the '60s, which is far from what it is today.
I certainly agree with the lack of political support, but the American public never supported Apollo. There was a brief moment, right when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, when just over 50% of Americans thought Apollo was a good idea. The rest of the time it was a majority opinion that it wasn't worth it.
asked of 58% of people who favored cuts in domestic spending, found 5% of people wanted cuts to "Space technology, Moon Shots, Scientific Research" (compared to 20% in welfare)
says 54% of people think the space program is "not worth it" in July 1967 and similar questions around that time get similar results. In April 1970 (after the 1969 success) Harris asks the question
You're probably right. I wasn't alive nor in the US during that period, so can only infer from what I've seen and read, but I would wager that even the staunchest opponents of the US space program back then couldn't have helped but feel pride of what their country accomplished in such a short time.
And even if the majority opposed it, I still think that overall the amount of supporters then would've been greater than the amount of people who support it today. We're living in a time of ignorance and public disinterest in science that Carl Sagan predicted in the '90s[1], which didn't exist in the '60s. That spirit of optimism was partly what enabled such grand scientific projects, and I think most Americans were deeply moved by the words of JFK in that historic 1962 speech[2].
Apollo was a development and technical marvel. I don't think I would necessarily consider it done in an "optimal way" except for optimizing for time at great expense.
Artemis certainly isn't fiscally optimal either, mostly driven by a bunch of stipulations in their budget placed there by senators from states where all of these Shuttle-derived parts are built.
> "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?".
What if we don't have the same spirit any longer? Nobody is going to acknowledge that publicly at NASA but they are acknowledging it by their actions. What if people who had "spirit" went to make youtube videos, work for Musk, Wall Street or Google? It takes some time to gauge the stickiness and depth of bureaucratic muck, but after a few years people can see it, and move on to other things. Guess who's left? Those who don't have much spirit left.
> "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?".
Isn't that just personal opinion? If anything, the current era of spaceflight has finally restored the Apollo ethos that had been dead for decades. So the answer to your question is "we're already doing it". Lots of people seem to be going nuts and saying "but not like that!" as they seem to have some alternative weird vision for what Apollo was. My dad grew up watching Apollo launches, he even got to work on the Apollo-Soyuz mission in a small part. He's one of the people more hyped for SpaceX's mission/goal and Starship than anyone I know.
NASA had only contracted for 15 Saturn V stacks, and in 1968 declined to start the second production run. Nixon only assumed office in 1969, at which point the only question was how many of the remaining ten stacks would fly as part of Apollo. Under Nixon the final three Apollo lunar missions were cancelled, with one of those Saturn V stacks being used for Skylab instead. But even if all three had flown to the moon stagnation was inevitable as NASA's focus had already been directed to the shuttle.
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
You raise the point, that particularly when it comes to manufacturing, living knowledge is paramount -
Could we have restarted Saturn V production in 1975? yes, at some vast cost to remake tooling.
What about 1985? oof, that's a little harder, how many of the people alive know how to make a Rocketdyne F-1, but probably still doable, at some yet greater cost.
What about 1995? maybe still possible - lots of the base industries we relied on to make it have ceased to exist, and the production knowledge for base components have changed so much that you're almost gonna start over. Some knowledge on how to build it is still alive, it's only 30 years later.
What about 2005? almost impossible, you'd have to recreate whole kinds of technologies from scratch - the tech trees have evolved so much, almost all of the first hand knowledge is dead, or very near to dead. It'd probably be easier to start over, with a clean sheet.
This is why the US Army still buys some number of tanks every year - so the production line stays open and we dont lose the knowledge. We're running into issues restarting some missile production (which is being used in Ukraine because of similar issues).
I do think in the end Artemis will likely be a success, but at a vast cost - but dont forget how expensive Apollo was. It too was vastly expensive.
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.
> - 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.)
> 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.
That is not the problem. Its that a technology designed in the 1960s for a 1960s workforce and tool base can't be made in the USA today, for the same reason that you can't produce cost-effective Browning HPs in Belgium today https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
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.)
SpaceX is a business controlled by a single man that is really interested in making humanity multi-planetary by building a self-sustaining base on Mars.
Maybe. As part of the control he currently has, I think we can safely assume he has been filling the company with employees who are also very jazzed about going to Mars / making humans multi-planetary. So it really depends on where the power lies when Musk dies.
SpaceX is a space exploitation business, Starlink being the foremost example but also commercial and governmental launches of Falcon 9 and eventually Starship. Even going to Mars is ultimately a mission of exploitation, not exploration.
Space exploration is the duty of governmental space agencies such as NASA, who (assuming sufficient budgeting) can all literally afford to run red ink for entire projects and not have to give a damn.
Starlink was basically created to get SpaceX's launch cadence up. Which it absolutely succeeded at. SpaceX exists to cause space exploration/colonization/all-activities to occur, specifically going to Mars, but also more generally. Which again, it has absolutely succeeded at.
NASA and other space agencies are indeed picking the missions, but SpaceX has been a huge enabler here.
* Whoever gets to Mars (and the Moon for that matter) first in a permanent fashion gets to write all the rules. Full stop. It's also why the US really does not want China achieving a Moon presence first.
* Starlink is competing (and winning) against all the incumbent ISPs for being pieces of shit one way or another, especially incumbent satellite ISPs like Hughesnet who are their immediate competitors.
SpaceX makes sense as a business in the way a mega-yacht makes sense as a ship. The valuation was set by a vanity investment by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. 2.7 million subscribers can't keep 4500 satellites in orbit and replaced every 5 years. It is a prestige investment.
SpaceX is cash flow positive despite spending multiple billions each year on Starship and Starlink. The only way this is possible is if Starlink is profitable, and significantly so.
If you assume a very conservative $100/m subscription for every Starlink customer, they're making $3.6B a year already and it seems like they can do a lot more capacity.
Edit: just googled and they're predicting $6.6B in revenue for 2024.
>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.
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).
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
I disagree that he humiliated the program, or the people behind it, which such a statement implies (although I do respect your conclusion). I've been following Destin for years and this guy genuinely cares. It's incredibly difficult to come up with a constructive criticism without offending people and he did a great job doing just that. He was humble, yet firm, well prepared and brought a fresh perspective to the table. Whether the stakeholders will acknowledge that is up to them. Hats off to the guy!
The refueling risk and cost is being borne by SpaceX, not the taxpayer. The SpaceX HLS portion of Artemis (aka the refueling) is a fabulous deal for the taxpayer.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
Yes, the article lists a few reasons, none of them convincing. Specifically:
> 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)
SpaceX has done 2 Falcon 9 launches in 1 day, and they would have done 3 if the third one had not have been scrubbed [1]. I really don't think that launching Starship is going to be any different, especially as it was specifically designed for reuse, unlike Falcon 9.
> 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
First part is same argument as above. Second part (shading) - again, I don't see why it is harder than other hard things. Just add more insulation. Possibly do some passive or active cooling.
> There is no gravity: whereas on earth the propellant separates relatively cleanly into liquid and gas this isn't the case in space
Very similar problem to how you feed liquid propellant into a rocket engine when it relights in zero gravity. You use a small ullage thruster for this.
Yeah, a 9 meter diameter one, which adds mass and volume and complexity and detracts from the payload.
Instead what they do is use thrust to accelerate the whole vehicle a little, which presses all the liquid into one end of its tank where it can be pumped out. Instead of carrying special settling thrusters, they originally planned to use ullage gas for this but it's not clear that can work.
pretty much everything, including and especially plastic, becomes a fuel when it comes into contact with liquid oxygen. With liquid oxygen in contact with a fuel you're virtually guaranteed a fire at some point as it takes very little heat to start the combustion. This is why when rockets tip over it's an explosion and not just a broken airframe with fuel/oxidizer leaking out.
Most plastics are very brittle at the cryogenic temperatures. Also if you are using that method for a liquid oxygen tank, you need to make sure that the plastic you choose doesn't spontaneously combust on contact with LOX.
Cryogenic temperatures make most materials more brittle, hard to get a material that works at a wide enough range of temperatures to make a balloon to work correctly.
If you go for a narrower range of temperatures (ie. not structurally stable above 0C), it would need to be manufactured, transported, stored, tested and installed at seriously low temps which probably negates the possible advantage with the added technical complexity.
> 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.
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.
Very hard and foundational capability need not be correlated though. I think the more likely explanation that orbital refueling hasn't been done yet is not that's it's exceptionally hard, but that there hasn't been a need for it. Orbital refueling needs rapid reuse, and that has only been possible recently (with Falcon 9, and soon Starship).
Ha I was just thinking how after the recent QA whistleblower fiasco and MCAS, one can't really look at Starliner's ongoing list of problems without a sensible chuckle. It truly is the 737 Max of space capsules.
> 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”.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Imagine being born in a habitat on another planet that is further away from Earth in travel time than one's lifespan, and being robbed of your birthright to experience the natural wonders and beauty of the cradle of humanity.
You don’t have to imagine too hard. Imagine being born right here on Earth in some shitty country never being allowed to really venture beyond the same 14 mile radius you were born in because you just have to slave away at a job all day and night just to survive. For some, it is life.
Imagine being born on an earth where millions of species have gone extinct, where there are hardly any old growth forests left, no bison roaming the central/western US plains and where thousands of water bodies around the world are so toxic they'll kill you if you fall in.
I feel strongly that I was robbed of my birthright to be a mammoth hunter in a caveman tribe. Man didn't evolve for this industrial society we've created, our machinations have already denied to us our natural condition.
Move North. I spent years up there hunting bison & moose, catching salmon so big my arms hurt, cutting my own firewood to heat my home, helping friends build their log cabins with our bare hands (never got around to building my own...).
You can live that life if you want, plenty of people up there live off grid and only come into town once a month or so.
-48 is a hell of a thing. The most beautiful place I've ever been.
There are times and places (including the 18th century) that seem like they could be interesting to live in, but then I consider the lack of indoor plumbing. It's not just the convenience -- the lack of hygienic facilities was a major reason why cholera and other water-transmitted diseases was such a problem even in the West until the late 19th century.
I am an advocate of wildlife conservation efforts, and regularly donate to charities that work to conserve species and their habitats.
I am just replying to a single comment, so forgive me for addressing everyone else as well as you here. I think it's very funny that people are making obvious replies to my comment to defend against (the also very obvious) observation that perhaps being born and dying in a tin can on another planet might be an undesirable fate for the vast majority of the human race.
Oh, I agree with you 100%, and I'm just pointing out that people probably said exactly the same thing a few hundred years ago about living in 2000 (if they knew what it would be like), and likely will say it again in a few hundred years about living in 3000.
We have already been robbed of so much biodiversity in the last 100 years and it doesn't take much research to realize it. We should do our best to avoid depriving those generations ahead of us even more :(
I guess that would be kind of like the life experience of the billions of humans who never had the opportunity to go to the cradle of civilization or whereever humans are thought to have evolved first.
> a stepping stone to being able to live in space long term in very large, permanently spaceborne crafts.
That is not going to happen, without technology that currently only exists in Science Fiction, like artificial gravity, for the simple reason that we require 1g to live, let alone thrive.
> because of immediate access to materials that’d need to be launched into orbit otherwise.
1. How does this "immediate access" benefit the aforementioned "very large, permanently spaceborne crafts", which apparently won't be moored to planetary bodies?
2. There is no "immediate access". Having rocks next to me, and having the sort of highly refined materials that go into building the tech required for spacecraft, are 2 VERY different things. But, I am always happy to be proven wrong: Let's take a very simple task, like ISRU'ing LOX & Methane, and let's do it, at scale, here on Earth, where there is no lack of energy, breathable atmosphere, building materials and labour. Strange, isn't it, that no one seems to be doing that.
> 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 and discoveries that each branch will take that Earth’s branch in its lonesome may never have trodden.
I agree. But given that, what evidence supports the idea that the branch that eventually allows us to leave our solar system requires us to first waste tons of resources on trying to send people to inhospitable, irradiated rocks for no good reason?
Especially since we have a perfectly good alternative to this waste of time: Sending robots.
> 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.
Unless we discover a way to do FTL travel, it doesn't matter if that feels cruel or not, it is reality.
And I can pretty much guarantee that the person discovering the means to cheat physics in such a way won't be doing so while constantly worrying about his habitats airlock malfunctioning, or the piss-regeneration system giving out, or the supply ship getting canceled in the next congressional-bickering about the budget.
It will happen here on Earth, likely by someone who never visited even LEO, someone who works and lives in a stable environment with books, people to talk to, air to breathe and delicious non-freeze dried food to eat, who never has to worry whether there will be enough recycled piss to make his next cup of coffee.
> That is not going to happen, without technology that currently only exists in Science Fiction, like artificial gravity, for the simple reason that we require 1g to live, let alone thrive.
Artificial gravity is easily generated via rotation or thrust.
> 1. How does this "immediate access" benefit the aforementioned "very large, permanently spaceborne crafts", which apparently won't be moored to planetary bodies?
It will be far easier to get materials into space from the moon than from the much deeper gravity well of earth.
> I agree. But given that, what evidence supports the idea that the branch that eventually allows us to leave our solar system requires us to first waste tons of resources on trying to send people to inhospitable, irradiated rocks for no good reason?
How do you see us developing the technology for humans to leave the solar system if we never develop the technology to visit the moon?
Technology is generally driven forward by increments, and having smaller goals leading to the larger one is pretty normal. Also, you don't need to "cheat physics" to explore space.
> It will be far easier to get materials into space from the moon than from the much deeper gravity well of earth.
No it won't, for a very, very simple reason:
Every single kilogram of stuff you launch from the moon, has to be launched FIRST from exactly that "deeper gravity well" here on Earth. Including btw. the fuel required to launch it. Because the Moon is shockingly devoid of any steelworks, factories, fuel refineries, Astronaut training facilities, food processing plants or any of the other myriad sources of stuff required in space.
So yeah, launching something from 1/6th of Earths gravity is easier. However, all this does, is add another launch to the equation.
> How do you see us developing the technology for humans to leave the solar system if we never develop the technology to visit the moon?
For the same reason why we developed radio transmission, without first inventing super-sonic carrier pidgeons.
Technology does not only advance incrementially. Ever so often, a radically new technology emerges, that is leaps and bounds better than existing systems, and often wasn't developed from these systems either.
And btw. Rocket Engines are just one such technology as it happens. Before them, the strongest way to propel something through the air, were propellers, a technology which we since improved by alot, but is still incapable (and never will be capable to) put things into space.
So no, doing what we have done before is not a reqirement for finding a much better way to do it.
> Also, you don't need to "cheat physics" to explore space.
Where exactly did I assume that? But you do need to cheat our current understanding of physics for FTL travel.
Just to nitpick the gravity argument:
I think a major reason there currently is no spacecraft with artificial gravity is that microgravity is the whole point of space currently. You could probably build a spacestation with two sides and a long tether, but you don’t want that because you couldn’t do the interesting research anymore.
The top post of the link is talking about building a ship with a diameter of 200m. In reality you would just need a tether and counterweight. So yes, as far as new space technology goes, "easily."
> No it won't, for a very, very simple reason:
> Every single kilogram of stuff you launch from the moon, has to be launched FIRST... etc
That is the entire point of building out the moon. Sure the investment is difficult, but the longterm return makes it worthwhile. Your argument seems similar to saying "why would we build a steel foundry, when we will need steel to build it in the first place."
> How do you see us developing the technology for humans to leave the solar system if we never develop the technology to visit the moon? etc..
The technological difficulty with going to the moon is way more than just rocketry. There's life support systems, shielding, navigation, long term space habitation etc... There are literally hundred if not thousands of technologies that will need to be refined over time, and manned moon missions will go a long way to advancing them.
> But you do need to cheat our current understanding of physics for FTL travel.
My point was that you do not need ftl to travel through space.
> In reality you would just need a tether and counterweight.
And a ship that still maintains its course, and can still be steered when bound to such a contraption. Oh, and a tether material that can actually hold against that strain under conditions found in space reliably. The temperature differential between in- and out-of-sun would destroy most materials under such a stress. And a way to deploy the whole thing, start its rotation, and keep it stable over time.
So no, as far as any technology is concerned, this is not done "easily".
And all this effort STILL doesn't get you gravity. It gets radial acceleration over a short distance. Just imagine, for a moment, the difference in "gravity" experienced between the feet and the head of a person in such a contraption, and what that will do to their brains, skeleton, muscles, circulatory system, etc.
Oh, and: While the whole "rotating thingamabob" idea works theoretically in space, there is no practical way to use in on the surface of a low-gravity planetary body. So, what's the plan for keeping people alive against 1/6th gravity on a permanent Moon Base?
> That is the entire point of building out the moon
Building out what exactly, foundries and factories? On the moon? You know, the place where the dust alone is enough to kill almost any machinery exposed to it?
Let me ask you a question: If oil is found in antarctica, where would we build the refinery? I think we both know the answer to this one. And building machinery as comparatively simple as an oil refinery in antarctica is a cakewalk compared to building even a simple ore-smelter on the Moon.
You're getting piled on, but you're absolutely right. We don't even have the capability to permanently inhabit Antarctica, which has 1. an atmosphere of breathable air at the right pressure, 2. survivable temperature range, 3. abundant water, 4. a magnetic field and radiation shielding, 5. safe transit to and from. How does anyone think we can inhabit Mars, which doesn't have any of these?
Build a city of 100K on the northern-most habitable tip of Antarctica and have it (physically, socially, and economically) last 10 years, and I'll be convinced that we are ready to at least attempt Mars.
Not sure if that's a good argument. There are lots of places more hospitable and less remote than Antarctica that aren't inhabited either - the reasons why a large number of people would inhabit an area or not are complex.
We have the technology as a species to be able to inhabit Antarctica; there's just no compelling reason to do so at present, so we don't.
That's my point, it takes more than technology to inhabit a place. We might barely have the technology to live in Antarctica (or the middle of the Sahara desert), but it's still not economically feasible, there are no resources there that we need, and there's no social/societal need to be there. Even if we had the technology to safely get to Mars and viably live there (like aliens arrived and handed the technology to us), there's no point to doing it.
We definitely have the capability to permanently inhabit Antarctica, except there's nobody who's both willing and permitted to do it. This is also the main problem with Moon/Mars colonies; it could be done but who will pay for it? It's not an economically sound proposal.
We don't really know how much we need. I think we'd probably do just fine in 0.9g for instance, and maybe even substantially lower than that. Humans thriving in Lunar gravity isn't out of the question, we don't have data that rules out such a possibility.
> 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.
> 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?
> But a manned outpost beyond earth would make the logistics for large scale space exploration (even with robots) much more feasible, no?
How would it do so exactly? Please give me a technical reason for this assumption.
Because, I predict it would do the exact opposite: Keeping humans alive away from Earth eats up an enormeous amount of resources all on its own. Resources that could instead go into building better robots, building more robots, building more rockets.
> 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.
Really? Please, name some. Because we have had space toilets, space showers, etc. for quite some time now. What specific advancement to the tech that everyday people here on earth use in their daily lives have come from these developments?
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!
This isn't about making optimal decisions, this is about not making obviously bad ones.
Right now, with our current science and technology, sending humans on space-exploration missions, simply isn't worth it. It adds a huge pile of problems to an already difficult task, and technically speaking, we get almost nothing out of it; Robots are just better at examining rocks on other planets than we are, for the simple reason that the robot doesn't require a huge support infrastructure just to be kept alive.
And the usual argument that developing such infrastructure would, in itself, confer some future advantage, has to be viewed with a lot of scepticism; fact of the matter is, the development of space-toilets does very little to improve the day-to-day tech we use here on Earth.
Space Exploration is not comparable to any exploratory task in history, based on the sheer amount of resources and time required. These resources are finite. Allocating them correctly may not be super romantic, may not tickle the "human spirit", sure. But when things are this expensive and difficult, such considerations simply take a backseat.
And if they don't, well, then there is the very real possibility of programs running into so many problems, delays and exploding costs, that at some point governments and companies can, or will, no longer support them, meaning decades before any significant development is even tried again.
And as someone who wants space exploration to go forward as quickly and efficiently as possible, that simply doesn't seem like a very desirable outcome to me.
> We covered more ground in a lunar rover in a week than any of our mars rovers covered in a year.
And this counters my argument...how exactly?
Even forgetting the fact that scientific progress isn't measured in "kilometers driven" (just count the number of experiments that Perseverance carries, and compare the amounts of data produced(, there is no technical reason a robot cannot drive as far as a vehicle carrying humans.
In fact it's the opposite: One of the most important restrictions regarding the LRVs driving distance wasn't technological in nature, it was due to the the fact it had to carry humans:
An operational constraint on the use of the LRV was that the astronauts must be able to walk back to the LM if the LRV were to fail at any time during the EVA (called the "Walkback Limit"). Thus, the traverses were limited in the distance they could go at the start and at any time later in the EVA.
And even though they relaxed the constraints later on, the fact still remains: As soon as you have a human in the mix, things become more cumbersome, way more expensive, slower, less risks can be taken, and if things go wrong, the results can suddenly involve dead people instead of just trashed equipment.
If our world-wide herculean efforts towards building a self driving robotic car have yielded mediocre results, I have low expectations for a robotic field geologist built on a NASA budget.
Also note that even with the limitations, the humans surveyed more ground. Remove the limitation by making the rover a mobile habitat and now the humans can have an even more expansive and productive mission.
Ultimately we're going to colonize space, why take 50x the time to gather the science needed for that goal, when worst-case we can spend 50x the budget and just put humans there to incidentally also gather knowledge on how to live in space.
Thing is: Building something that can autonomously navigate the many many variables of city traffic without killing people in the process, is a whole different problem space than building something that can stick a scientific instrument into the ground in an empty rock-desert.
> the humans surveyed more ground
Again: Scientific progress is not measured in "kilometers driven". And what "surveying" were they doing exactly? How many experiments did they perform during these runs? How many Terabytes of Data did these excursions produce per kilometer driven?
I don't know the number tbh. but I am willing to bet that the Mars rovers did better. ALOT better.
But okay, if you want to measure distance, lets:
Perseverance (which is still active btw.) covered 25.113 km so far. The Ingenuity drone (which perseverance carried), covered a total of 17.242 km.
So that's a grand total (so far, again, Perseverance is still active) of 42.355 km.
The longest LRV drive was LVR-3 on Apollo 17: 35.89 km. And, let's be clear: That is the total of all its excursions, not a single drive.
So yeah, sorry, but the robots have also out-distanced humans already. Comfortably so.
> Ultimately we're going to colonize space
No, we're not, until such time as we figure out how to leave the solar system and travel to other Earth-like planets.
That seems unfair and unsatisfying, I know, but there is simply no way around the facts: other than Earth, every single place in the solar system that doesn't just outright kill humans the moment they leave the spacecraft (and quite a few would kill people instantly even before that), is less hospitable than Earth would be during an ice age, or after a nuclear war.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Government isn’t meant to be efficient. It’s meant to be strategic and to do both the fundamentals everyone needs access to and the things private enterprise won’t do because they are not profitable yet.
The US doesn’t really understand or appreciate that concept. Also, NASA’s job is not to explore the universe, but to prevent rocket scientists from defecting to North Korea. And to develop technology SpaceX and others will later use. A lot of CFD work was pioneered there, for instance. There would be no SpaceX, or Blue Origin, or ULA without NASA.
> 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.
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.
I'm a big fan of space exploration and would love to see a robotic exploration program on the scale of our current human space flight endeavors, sending rovers and landers all over the solar system, along with a major space telescope every 3 years or so (instead of once a decade).
I feel like we're squandering an amazing chance to explore space by getting stuck on sending people instead of leveraging the enormous progress in microelectronics, robotics, and autonomy of the last 60 years.
If we did want to become a spacefaring, world-hopping, intergalactic, etc., species in the long term, we wouldn't be sending humans into space right now, because robots are easier to keep alive and do more science with. That was the overall point I got from this and why not mars, which seems true for now.
But, even though putting humans on the rockets makes them cost more, it also garners more funding. I don't know, maybe we could convince all American schoolchildren to aspire to be robot programmers rather than astronauts. But typing this out, it seems like:
a) you could ask congress to fund robotic exploration, which maybe citizens care about and support, but if they don't then...
b) you could instead set up a giant human space program that wastes tens of billions of dollars to do nothing, then quietly siphon off a few billion here or there for JPL or SpaceX to do valuable unmanned research.
Maybe the former is possible, and you're fighting the good fight, but most voters don't read long blog posts comparing manned vs unmanned space exploration, and really when it comes to space are only excited by people standing on the moon. I do hope you convince more people, but fortunately whatever monstrosity we have now is at least a nice jobs program.
The weird thing about NASA's budget when you look at it[1] is that funding allocation appears to be inversely proportional to the benefit. Human spaceflight is the largest chunk, at 44.9% of the budget. Aeronautics and technology are at the bottom, with technology being allocated 4.9% of the budget, and aeronautics 3.5%.
There were good reasons why people were interested in sending people into space in the early days of space exploration. Before automated systems were sufficiently developed, manned programs looked like the best choice. But once automated systems became sufficiently advanced, it was clear that they were the way to go.
You can see this when it comes to reconnaissance satellites - both the U.S. (with the uncompleted Manned Orbital Laboratory) and the USSR (with Almaz, which was completed) began with the idea of having manned reconnaissance satellites, but as time progressed they realized autonomous ones were better.
If we were sticking people in reconnaissance satellites just for the sake of sticking them in reconnaissance satellites today, it would obviously be farcical. But NASA’s manned space program has being doing the equivalent for decades - blowing a huge part of their budget on sending people into space just for the sake of sending them into space (by the 80’s this had reached the point where they had a program of sending teachers into space for the purpose of having them come back and tell students how cool it was to go to space). But since NASA has more open ended objectives than the military, it’s easier to hide the fact that this isn’t accomplishing much, or that these programs have diverted so much from many of NASA’s core objectives.
> There were good reasons why people were interested in sending people into space in the early days of space exploration. Before automated systems were sufficiently developed, manned programs looked like the best choice. But once automated systems became sufficiently advanced, it was clear that they were the way to go.
This, and it never ceases to baffle me that there are people who still believe that there is some sort of actual, honest, technical reason to put people into things that go into space.
There is one benefit to human spaceflight over robotic spaceflight: the human body is a much more adapted tool to unknown situations than robots are. A human hand is a better manipulator than any robotic tool (look up videos of robots trying to turn a doorknob and open a door, e.g.), and our locomotion tends to be well-adapted to adverse terrain.
But it is far from clear that such versatility is worth all of the costs of human spaceflight, principally the fact that humans are fragile bags of water that require fine-tuned environmental conditions to operate (and such conditions are difficult to provide in space).
> : the human body is a much more adapted tool to unknown situations than robots are.
Here on Earth, that is true.
Everywhere else however, our body is confined to a bulky, heavy, unwieldy space suit, and has exactly as much range of movement as the air supply allows.
And the thing is: We can make better robots. There is clear progress in terms of their capabilities. Not so long ago, [this][1] would only have been possible as CGI, today, it is technical reality.
This rapid path to improvement, simply doesn't exist for biological systems.
If launch becomes sufficiently cheap, then the cost of supporting humans in space also becomes cheap. The cost of developing space robots doesn't decline nearly as much. At some point, "why not robots in space?" has the answer "because on Earth there are plenty of applications where people are cheaper", and cheap space moves that argument to space as well.
Note that this implies the overriding importance of reducing costs vs. just sending people expensively for symbolic reasons. The latter is as idiotic as it has ever been.
I seriously doubt NASA as it is currently funded and constructed can deliver this.
> The cost of developing space robots doesn't decline nearly as much.
Developing Costs wouldn't, but deployment costs would.
If launching becomes cheaper, then, sure, I could launch more space toilets and freeze-dried groceries. Or I could use that capacity to launch more and bigger robots, more often and further. Guess which of these two has a better ROI given the many many many limitations humans have once they leave our Planet, compared to robots.
It doesn't matter how cheap a launch becomes. I have to support an astronaut with food. They have to exercise or their body breaks down in low gravity. I have to let them sleep.
All this is time, payload capacity and energy wasted, that I could instead funnel into more, better, bigger more capable robots.
And, finally: I have to bring astronauts back home safely, unless I want to risk a PR desaster (which is not good for funding). Once I am done with the robot, I can just leave it where it is and sell T-Shirts with its silhouette printed on.
> So, if it were to be as cheap to go into space as to go to St. Louis
Obviously there is a breakpoint at which the cost differential would no longer matter, I agree.
It's just as obvious however, that this breakpoint won't be reached in the near future, or even the forseeable future.
It would require a radically new propulsion technology, which, and this is the sad truth, we don't have. The way we launch rockets today has remained pretty much the same for more than half a century: By burning chemicals in a tube.
As long as that doesn't change, I can pretty much guarantee that the cost differential between doing space-exploration using humans, and doing it with robotic probes, will not look good for good 'ol humans any time soon.
Why is it obvious? Starship, if it succeeds, could reduce launch costs per mass by two orders of magnitude over Falcon 9. For the cost of one SLS launch, Starship, if it meets its cost targets, could launch the mass of a nuclear supercarrier into low earth orbit. The cost to LEO would become similar to the cost of transport to the South Pole.
You will notice we are not using robots at the South Pole.
It could be that for the sort of work we want to do on the south pole a human in a jacket outperforms our current robots, but for the sort of work we want to do on the moon a robot, or our future robot, will outperform a human in a spacesuit.
Good thing the argument wasn't that this will necessarily happen, just that the case can be made that it could happen, and therefore human spacelight is not necessarily a bad idea.
Note that I'm not proposing abandoning robots in space. Your whataboutism assumes a symmetry that's not there.
> just that the case can be made that it could happen, and therefore human spacelight is not necessarily a bad idea
Nuclear war could happen, that doesn't make waging nuclear war a good idea.
> Your whataboutism
Please explain how advocating for useful allocation of resources within a reference topic, without ever leaving said topic, constitutes "whataboutism".
I want space exploration to happen. Right now, the most efficient, most promising, and most fruitful way, including in terms of developing future technology that can one day benefit human spaceflight, is to send robots.
Trying to send people to do a robots work in space exploration right now, is a waste of resources that will, long term, hinder our efforts of becoming a spacefaring species. It doesn't make sense for a tribe that just recently invented small canoues to try and send them across the ocean. It is possible to do so in theory, aka. "it could happen", that doesn't make it a good idea. And every tribe member who drowns during these efforts, is one person less who could father the future inventor of the Galleon.
That’s an argument argument that human spaceflight could, at some point in the future, make sense. Though it’s also likely that automation becomes cheaper in the future. When people are claiming that automation is going to replace many tasks for humans on earth, it’s not much of a stretch to think they would continue to perform better than humans in space, where humans are at a severe disadvantage.
We also have to consider what it is that we actually want people to do up there. A lot of people say “A human could do more science on Mars than a rover!” Leaving aside the fact that we could send multiple rovers for the cost and effort of sending a human, and those rovers would be on the planet much longer - “do science” isn’t a goal. Even the current rover missions have questionable usefulness, which is why there’s always a big celebration when they land, or a discussion about how impressive the engineering is, but extremely little discussion about any of the things they’re learning.
For human spaceflight to be ruled out, automation has to be superior for every worthwhile application of human labor in space, not just some of them. Here on Earth, automation is predicted to increase, but few are predicting it makes human labor useless.
I think greatly advanced automation would improve the argument for humans in space, not refute it, by making it easier to support humans in space.
For all of the things we want to do, automation outperforms humans in space. I pointed this out in my earlier post - this wasn’t the case in the 50’s and early 60’s, so these satellites were planned to be manned (and actually were in the USSR’s case). But automation made much more sense, so the plans changed to unmanned satellites.
Perhaps this could change in the future. But at least in the present, unmanned makes more sense, which is why these things are unmanned. And historically, increased automation has lessened the need for something to be manned (which, is to be expected), so it’s likely the same will be true when it comes to space.
Really? Automation outperforms astronauts for (say) Hubble Telescope Repair? Or for that matter for doing maintenace on robots?
Your assertion only makes sense if the set of activities we do in space is sharply circumscribed. It's a mindset that comes from the "space is extremely expensive" environment.
> Automation outperforms astronauts for (say) Hubble Telescope Repair?
The last hubble repair mission was in 2009. Robotics have come a long way since then. And the Hubble was still pretty close to earth. I can guarantee you that no human hand will ever touch the James Webb telescope ever again. If things go wrong at the 2nd lagrange point, its either robots-to-the-rescue, or bye-bye-telescope.
Comparing a short, limited scope mission, close to earth, to the challenges of doing space things on other planets, is a bit far fetched.
> Your assertion only makes sense if the set of activities we do in space is sharply circumscribed
They are. They have to be, because activities that are not sharply circumscribed, have a very high probability to kill people in space.
> It's a mindset that comes from the "space is extremely expensive" environment
No, it's a mindset that comes from the "space is extremely deadly, and humans are surprisingly fragile outside of the habitat they evolved in" environment.
Your assertion can be reality checked by looking at the proposed private mission to service HST. This mission would use crew to do manual maintenance, not develop robots to try to do the servicing.
Yes, HST is close to Earth. It's still in space. This is a demonstration that when costs of getting the people there are low enough, people > robots.
> This is a demonstration that when costs of getting the people there are low enough, people > robots.
Maintenance missions close to Earth and space exploration are 2 very different tasks. This does in no way "reality check" my assertion that trying to make people live long term on other planetary bodies, or even send them there on limited excursions, makes no sense in todays reality.
You want a reality check? Fine, here is a reality check:
[Perseverance Mission cost][1]: 2.725 Billion $, is already up there doing work, and only the lastest in a line of ever more capable robots.
[2014 Projected Manned Mars Mission Cost][2]: 100 Billion $, could take 20 years or more. That was 10 years ago. Today we know it's likely to be even more expensive and take much longer.
This is the reality. Today, Robots outperform people when it comes to going to other planets, by any scientific or economic metric.
> For human spaceflight to be ruled out, automation has to be superior for every worthwhile application of human labor in space, not just some of them.
This is the case right now. There is not a single activity in space exploration right now, that humans can do better than robots.
> Here on Earth, automation is predicted to increase, but few are predicting it makes human labor useless.
Because here on earth, humans can breathe, eat, drink, piss and poop, without millions of dollars of equipment required to do so.
> There is not a single activity in space exploration right now, that humans can do better than robots.
This is clearly false. If you mean "there is no activity for which a robot could be developed at great expense to do that activity", then that's closer to the truth, but that cost is part of the argument why humans might still do the activity if launch costs are much lower.
> there is no activity for which a robot could be developed at great expense to do that activity
That expense is still orders of magnitude lower than sending humans.
And even IF launch costs go lower (and that's a big if), it wouldn't change the equation: If I can send more into space for my money, then sure, I could launch astronauts and their water supply and space toilets...or I could use that capacity to launch more, bigger, and more capable robots.
So, that explains why the private effort to service the HST wants to send up a robot.
Oh wait. That's totally wrong. They're proposing a mission to send up people to do the maintenance. Because that's far cheaper than developing robots to do it would be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
"On Flight 3, they did an intertank transfer of cryogens, which was successful by all accounts,"
It has admittedly been a weirdly quiet confirmation though, coming from a NASA official rather than from the usual sources (Elon/Gwynne/SpaceX official X).
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.
No, they're both pretty significant. In the ISS case you have propellant mass moving around that's just a tiny fraction of the total system mass, while in the rocket case a sizable portion of the total mass gets shifted.
Moreover, in refueling ISS you can use something like a flexible bladder and pressure differential to simplify the job of moving liquid from container A into container B. But in the rocket-to-rocket case, you might be moving propellant from an almost-empty Starship into an almost-full depot rocket. In that case, you're trying to hunt around for liquid in an almost empty fuel tank, and push it into an almost full one.
You can't use a bladder because Starship is too big, and it's hard to maintain a big pressure difference (unless you're willing to vent a lot of propellant in the process).
The problem would be very hard even without cryogens.
> Moreover, in refueling ISS you can use something like a flexible bladder and pressure differential to simplify the job of moving liquid from container A into container B. But in the rocket-to-rocket case, you might be moving propellant from an almost-empty Starship into an almost-full depot rocket. In that case, you're trying to hunt around for liquid in an almost empty fuel tank, and push it into an almost full one.
> You can't use a bladder because Starship is too big, and it's hard to maintain a big pressure difference (unless you're willing to vent a lot of propellant in the process).
You just put a baffle in the tank so the volume with remaining propellant is small and close to full. Also eliminates sloshing issues that you'd need to deal with anyways.
In orbit fluid transfer is a reasonably solved problem, and there are many ways to do it. In addition to using bladders, you can also use ullage motors, centrifugal propellant settling, capillary tubes, etc. Cryogenics are harder because cryogenic pumps are just generally more challenging than standard pumps, but luckily the pumping requirements for propellant transfer are much less demanding than for engine restart - rocket engines need high flow rates and can't tolerate entrained gas, propellant transfer can use slower but more robust pumps.
I don't mean this to diminish the accomplishment of the engineers who spent quite a bit of time solving this problem, but rather to point out that people have been working on this for decades and have had significant success. Sure we haven't done a perfect 1:1 dress rehearsal in orbit where large quantities of cryogenic propellants are transferred between docked spacecraft, but we've done everything shy of that.
The lack of bladder seems directly driven by the cryogenic temp. Whats stopping you from using large (or many) bladders for warm fuels?
I don’t see the hard problem of “hunting” for fuel in a rigid container. Yes you need ullage, but how is this worse than what you need typically to feed an engine?
I'll defer to people who know more about rocket design about why you couldn't have a huge stretchy bladder holding RP-1 (for example) in a rocket stage.
The problem with hunting is that a liquid/gas system forms a bunch of weird intermixed 3D blobs in microgravity. You either need to accelerate the docked rockets (so the liquids pool at one end) or you need some apparatus to separate liquid and gas in microgravity. Both are hard to do.
Engines never have to worry about the microgravity case, there are always ullage motors or some other mechanism to accelerate the rocket before engine ignition so that fluid and gas separate.
> I'll defer to people who know more about rocket design about why you couldn't have a huge stretchy bladder holding RP-1 (for example) in a rocket stage.
Do you mean you have a cite to this claim? Would love to read.
> You either need to accelerate the docked rockets (so the liquids pool at one end)
Right, this is what I was referring to as “ullage”.
> Engines never have to worry about the microgravity case, there are always ullage motors
My point was that standard ullage motors can and will be used by SpaceX for the transfer. Why do you think this is harder than the fairly standard case of starting an engine in microgravity?
> Do you mean you have a cite to this claim? Would love to read.
No, I mean that I have a handwavy explanation for why you can't put 500 tons of kerosene in a big stretchy bladder inside your rocket, but I'm hoping that someone who knows more about rocket design than I do will comment here.
> My point was that standard ullage motors can and will be used by SpaceX for the transfer. Why do you think this is harder than the fairly standard case of starting an engine in microgravity?
Because the motors have to run for much longer (many minutes instead of a few seconds) and the mass distribution of the docked system is rapidly changing during that entire time.
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.
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.
Agree completely. Unfortunately it seems to be impossible to build large organisations without creating the sort of incentives that feeds this kind of thinking.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes, I understand that there are "compensating benefits" for certain people. But they're not compensating benefits to the mission itself. They're just political pork.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Most governments of the world would disagree with you here; wealth redistribution programmes are a normal and proven way to organise a state. You can help people in a multitudes of ways, and just handing them out money is not always the best option—people also need maintained infrastructure, schools, entertainment, parks, municipal services, and so on; and they usually also need purpose, which many people derive from their jobs. So having a large employer, or a project that builds on many contractors that employee people, is a good way to distribute wealth and achieve something beneficial in the process, like GPS satellites, space science, or just plain power display to other nations. All the people that are employed in the process pay taxes, care about their neighbourhoods, send their kids to universities, go shopping, and keep the economy alive.
I'm not to say this is the only true answer, other approaches exist, like the (so far unproven) unconditional basic income, or just social security services. But I would definitely argue that it has positive effects for an economy to keep people busy, to give them purpose and secure jobs.
Edit: Having said all that, of course I'm neither an authority on NASA internals here, but the strategy would make sense and definitely is applied in other areas and countries, too.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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 :) ...)
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
Yes, on the last flight both the first and second stages had no problems with the engines on ascent. If this were a Saturn V booster, it would have been a complete success. They did suffer failures with booster recovery, and with the RCS in orbit, but controlling large numbers of small powerful cheap engines seems to be a solved problem already.
'Starships keep exploding' is kind of like saying 'tests keep failing' in test-driven development. Yeah, the tests for the stuff you're actively writing or haven't written yet are going to fail until you finish working on them and to someone who doesn't have a debugger it's just going to look like a crash...
People have forgotten how much destructive testing NASA used to do back in the Apollo era (eg with the Ranger program, 9 were launched over 5 years, the first 5 were total failures, 6th was a partial failure).
SpaceX has pretty rapidly improved in Raptor reliability, we've gone from seeing them routinely spitting out green flames (ie eating themselves) on the early tests, to now routinely firing them on the test stand without issue (with the exceptions assumed to be when they're trying to probe the limits). We've gone from them having trouble lighting them reliably, to lighting and maintaining all engines at launch on both vehicles in the most recent test flight. Similarly it's been a while since we've seen a static fire where an engine failed to light. This is despite the constant performance upgrades pushing its already world leading specs even higher.
The most recent explosions were very likely not due to the engines. For the booster, iirc the theory based on the public data is that the oscillations due to some issue with the grid fin control system caused the propellants to slosh around very hard, damaging the plumbing, causing the engines to shut down and the booster to smash into the water. The Starship had a very visible leak under its skirt that caused it to be unable to maintain attitude, I think the theory with this is that it was a stuck or damaged valve in the RCS.
And, of course, as the other poster mentioned, they're almost at the point where what's failing is the reusability rather than launch, the only launch related milestone left to prove out is engine relight in vacuum. While they will probably figure out reuse eventually, it is not strictly necessary for HLS, especially as it pertains to the Starship itself (which is a much bigger challenge than the booster). The booster is the most expensive part of the vehicle, so their priority is to get reuse for it working. If they encounter significant hurdles with reusing the Starships, they can throw them away for early HLS launches and still be cheaper than SLS.
As far as controlling large numbers of engines and having them be cheap, restartable and throttleable, we have the Merlin in Falcon 9 and especially Falcon Heavy as an example. Heavy has to control 27 engines at liftoff. For powerful, highly efficient engines, we have the RS-25 in Shuttle/SLS and BE-4 in Vulcan/New Glen as additional examples.
Apollo 6 was a partial failure due to engine failure of the 2nd stage.
Also they blew up tons of F1 engines during testing. They never got the POGO issues fixed.
I really don't understand why people make these arguments. SpaceX is explicitly saying they dont want to spend money proving everything works the first time.
Because in the end the statement that started this whole discussion is still true: we're not there yet, the starship keeps exploding. I have deep respect for SpaceX but what they "explicitly say" doesn't change facts.
We may get there eventually, perhaps even with starship, but the fact remains that in 60 years after Apollo we don't have a comparable heavy rocket.
Wanting F-1 capable engine is like wanting exact recreation of combat performance of F-4. No one involved has cared about that for more than 40 years. Just people who don't understand the tradeoffs so they judge stuff based on silly heuristics.
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.
Shuttle was heavy rocket. Decent in quite a few metrics.
Also the arguments about not having heavy rockets has nothing to do with engines, it's either "we don't need them" or "just use propellant depots". Without certain Alabama senator even SLS would be probably dead already. Big rockets are only useful when you sacrifice performance for reuse AND have enough payloads to maintain good flightrate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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."
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.
"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"
"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."
> 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.
Considering the sense of the word comes from the idea that the phase of the moon affects people's minds whether they're looking at it or not, this is obviously false.
You can look at the moon, you can look away from the moon, you can hide from the moon, you can worship the moon, you can love the moon, you can describe the moon... but the relationship actually being expressed was just "being affected by the moon". Looking at the moon is no more necessary to this process than it is for the ocean as it's drawn in and out by the tide.
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]
The initial resemblance really just comes down to 2 fairly pragmatic design decisions. We’ll use 2 side solid propellant boosters and we won’t redesign them from scratch because they work. And, we’ll use the same foam insulation on the rocket that we used on the STS liquid propellant tank because it also works…furthermore, we won’t try to paint over the orange insulation because we know that that doesn’t work very well.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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
Do we have something in place to monitor the far side? We don't have a visual on it like we do the near side. Yeah, we've flown around it, imaged it in the past. Nothing ongoing though.
If you think about it in a national security sense instead of an astronomical one, the question is "what is a rival power up to", then indeed it is dark and unknown.
Mind I only watched from the timestamp, I might have missed something and this guy is a complete shit for brains.
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."
Yeah, I watched it. I can hear it both ways. I don't know his mind or lack thereof, only that he hasn't necessarily spoken wrongly in that phrase
I could see governmental types having a colloquial use of the word at times like these that doesn't mean "it's always in the literal absence of light".
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.
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.
The earth’s shadow has nothing to do with moon phases and only affects our view during a lunar eclipse.
I always thought the dark side of the moon meant from earths’ view: we can see the light side (even when it’s dark) but we can’t see the dark side (even when it’s light)
Uh, no.
The ONLY time we see a new moon is during an eclipse. Other times the moon is above or below the sun and is too dim to see. A lunar eclipse is when the moon passes into the earth’s shadow and they happens during full moons
OK, we don't actually get to recognize the shape of the new moon with a naked eye because it's dark against the sky. It's still hot enough for some time to be visible in IR pretty well.
The point is that the lit part of the Moon moves widely, while the far / near sides don't due to the tidal lock. Hence they can't be used interchangeably.
> 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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work." - ad-homming the author conveniently saves you from having to post anything interesting or refute any of the claims in the article. People don't need industry experience to compare NASA 2024 with NASA 1969 and observe that things are going worse; results are down, costs and delays are up.
It'd do you well to read before making a fool of yourself.
Everyone who's been paying attention to space stuff is aware of the mentioned issues. The fact is that NASA's hands are tied, they literally are not allowed to cancel SLS, as they have been legislated into using it for Artemis by Congress, who wants to keep pumping billions into Boeing. Until Senator Shelby retired a few years ago, NASA was forbidden from even talking about orbital refueling (under threat of having the entire space technology program cancelled), because that'd make the waste of money on SLS unnecessary. They literally redacted the word 'depot' in their public report on the selection of Starship as the primary Artemis lunar lander (despite it being obvious that's what they were referring to).
Congress is so desperate on forcing SLS to be used, after NASA blindsided them by choosing SpaceX for the first HLS lander (instead of the other two far more expensive, far more technically immature proposals which were designed around tons of waste and possibly using SLS), they tried to make it so the second one had to use SLS, on top of mandating that they would have to launch at least 1 cargo SLS per year, regardless of payload: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/an-alabama-lawmaker-...
The $4B per launch cost comes from a GAO report, it should be emphasized that prior to this report, NASA went out of its way to avoid counting SLS manufacturing costs so that the embarrassment of how wasteful it is would not become obvious: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/nasa-finally-admits-wh...
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
> People keep going "the mission is go to to the moon". Is it? Why are we doing that?
Again, politics. The US has to assert dominance in space and cannot allow parties like China to one-up them. It's also a great way for political leadership to score points with the public. A more rational approach for establishing a permanent human presence on the moon would have included a thorough requirement analysis like Apollo did. Just FYI, SpaceX to this day (i.e. less than 12 months before the initially planned first landing!) don't even known how many tanker launches are required...
> How much do the "proven technologies" cost?
Less than developing a set of radically new systems from scratch - if done correctly (i.e. no cost-plus contracts). Some ideas, just for pondering:
* Falcon 9 is a reliable, proven, and partly reusable system. Its capabilities are sufficient to put crew and cargo into LEO
* FH is a proven and partly reusable system. Its capabilities are sufficient even for Lunar missions.
* Designing a mission around these existing capabilities would eliminate the risk of developing two completely new rockets (SLS and Super Heavy/"Starship") while allowing for testing vital equipment basically from day one (i.e. autonomous docking with fuel tanks, long term fuel storage in orbit, etc.)
> Are they reusable?
There's no reason why a moon lander and transfer vehicles shouldn't be reusable. This is not a question of the engines or fuel used. Just a side note: the "Lunar Starship" isn't going to be reused either on its first missions. This is a medium to long term goal that hinges on quite a few factors (like the feasibility of long-term cryogenic storage in space).
> one might look at how the long term storage and handling of hydrazine has worked out in enclosed environments on Earth
First of all, the environments are not the same - i.e. no unprotected humans will ever be around the fuel tanks or perform hazardous activities like smoking near them or operate valves. Secondly, in stark contrast to cryogenic fuels, we actually do have plenty of data points for long term use and storage of non-cryogenic fuels in space. Most satellites used hydrazine or its derivatives for station keeping and manoeuvring in deep space missions for decades. This is nothing new whatsoever.
On the other hand no one has ever successfully performed a vehicle to vehicle fuel transfer in space, let alone cryogenic fuel or long term storage of said fuels in space. This is new territory that doesn't even have all of its physics fully understood.
You're saying "we need to be mission focused". If the mission is "politics", then hey, you're right - turn on the money faucet we're doing Apollo again. Developing new technology, doing science, whatever - all not actually happening.
Of course...if it's not politics, then maybe the new technology is the point? That a mission where you don't fundamentally improve how you're doing it would in fact be the only waste of money, because it's just the same pointless thing all over again.
When I say mission, I specifically mean the mission in the form of Artemis, not a permanent human presence on the Moon. The latter doesn't require three brand new rocket systems, especially not a Shuttle derived one.
SLS was created to keep job in the states that had STS facilities and needed Shuttle tech to justify their continued existence.
SpaceX HLS was just as questionable. Competitors presented realistic timelines and budgets, while a single person at NASA on her own decided to exploit the power vacuum after an administration change to award the only contract to SpaceX only to be hired by them shortly after.
The mission is not to develop a rocket that can deploy StarLink 2.0 satellites or supposedly take people to Mars. The mission is also NOT to keep engineers who worked on Shuttle employed. That's the issue and that's the problem with Artemis.
As far as new technology is concerned - you focus on tech required for the mission: new and more capable space suits (in the works), a more capable vehicle (Orion), reliable long term power delivery (NASA's KiloPower reactors), a logistics hub (Lunar gateway), communication systems (relay satellites), new surface capabilities (contract signed with JAXA), etc.
If you really want to achieve a goal, like giving NASA some new focus and establish a permanent presence on the Moon, you take the lessons from the past and improve upon them. A shoestring budget, a needlessly expensive new launch system that only exists to keep jobs and reliance on high risk new technologies without proper justification aren't it.
> 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.
I'm talking about the entirety of Artemis. SLS was basically a job-saving programme initiated by Congress to appease senators that feared job losses in their respective states after the Shuttle programme was axed. Alternative designs that would use fuel storage in space and space tugs could've worked without an expensive new rocket.
> IMO, the lander it the least objectionable part of the whole thing
Then we have a disagreement :) The HLS requires the following in order work:
* the development of a rapidly reusable, radically new rocket system with new engines that haven't been flight tested before; alternative options could've used existing systems
* development of long term in-orbit cryogenic fuel storage - something that has never been tried before
* development of safe and reliable cryogenic fuel transfer between vehicles in orbit - again, a capability that has never been demonstrated before
* a lander with a single point of failure for exiting/entering the vehicle (on account of its ridiculous height)
* a lander that relies on turbo-pump driven bi-propellant engines for ascend - something so risky that Apollo-era engineers didn't even consider it
* a lander with a mass of around 100 tons for 2 crew initially - horrible weight to payload ratio, as this mass has to be launched from the surface
* several (actual number unknown as of now, but certainly more than 4) required refuelling launches
In conclusion we have 4 mission critical technologies that have never been demonstrated before, yet need to work flawlessly. We also have added risk due to the use of turbo-pump driven bi-propellant cryogenic fuel and the requirement of a 30+ metre crane for accessing the vehicle. I cannot comment on the stability during landing and ascend or the risks involved with dust and rocks from the exhaust plume on the moon.
As far as the economics go, yeah, I agree that with such tight budget a mission like that is very challenging to say the least. Low-balling the cost, exaggerating the timeline and hiring the person who on her own decided to hand out the contract throws a bad light on the issue, though.
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. */
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
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.