The Lunacy of Artemis

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.

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.

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.

Then Nasa will find someone who can.

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

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”.

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

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

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.

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

Note that the first reason you give is tautological.

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

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

That is explicitly an Artemis mission purpose.

Where does it say that?

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?

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.

Cool. Can it be Oprah? If I'm doomed to endlessly hear about her weight loss might as well add an entertaining "how much is that on the moon" aspect.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Probably because Congress isn't smart enough to realize his mistake. Here's one of them worried that Guam might capsize https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cesSRfXqS1Q&t=75s

"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.

Relevant education and experience in aerospace fields is not important in Congress. Neither is factual correctness.

Politics and rules lawyering are what matter in that space.

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...

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.

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.

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

You are confusing the issue here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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. */

No idea if they did or not, but one immediate issue is that if anything does go wrong, now you have a nuclear incident as well as a tragedy.

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

International treaties and environmental protests make that infeasible.

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

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

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

Even the title is a creative jest, as Lunacy literally means "Looking at the moon" (via "Lunatic" which is someone who looks at the moon - Luna).

And another one:

"Costs on SLS have reached the point where private industry is now able to develop, test, and launch an entire rocket program for less than NASA spends on a single engine"

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

Where Apollo was built like a roadster, with a small crew compartment bolted onto an oversized engine, Orion is the Dodge Journey of spacecraft—a chunky, underpowered six-seater that advertises to the world that you're terrible at managing money.

To hear NASA tell it, NRHO is so full of advantages that it’s a wonder we stay on Earth.

NASA likes to boast that Orion can stay in space far longer than Apollo, but this is like bragging that you’re in the best shape of your life after the bank repossessed your car.

And I’m only halfway through.

u/idlewords has a way with words.

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

I'm appropriating this!

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.

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.

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.

There was a proposal to design an improved F-1B which would be much more simple due to advances in technology and produce 15% more thrust at sea level. From what I can tell the designs got rather far along but NASA ultimately decided to stick with SLS and shuttle derived hardware.

SpaceX is all about reusability and they have determined that having a large number of smaller engines gives them better control of the rocket during boostback and landing burns. F-1 style engines seem best suited for big disposable first stages and no one in the private sector seems to want to do that.

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

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

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

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.

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

Grumman built the Apollo Lunar Module (lunar lander).

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.

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.

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

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

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

They can buy seats on Crew Dragon though?

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.

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

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

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.

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

Fly.

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

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

That alone would surely be worth the price of admission?

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

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?

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?

Mars and Venus aren't that much harder

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

Simplicity as a feature.

Like TFA says, if you want something to work reliably, keep it simple.

But simple isn't impressive. Tackling complex problems in complex ways is what gets recognised and rewarded. Humans are weird.

until we could make things that were simple, polished, cheap, and reliable.

That was the original Apollo mission. We went to the moon 6 times.

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?

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.

Exactly. Don't forget this:

White House corrects NASA chief on Muslim comment

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Monday that NASA administrator Charles Bolden was wrong to say that reaching out to the Muslim world was a top priority of the U.S. space agency.

Bolden raised eyebrows in the space community and outrage among conservative pundits by telling Al-Jazeera television recently President Barack Obama had instructed him to work for better outreach with the Muslim world.

He said Obama told him one of his top priorities was to "find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering."

Improving relations with the Muslim world was a top foreign policy priority for Obama on taking office last year and he delivered a major speech on the topic in Cairo in June 2009.

The White House last week sought to clarify Bolden's comment, saying Obama wanted NASA to engage with the world's best scientists and engineers from countries like Russia and Japan, Israel and many Muslim-majority countries. That failed to end the controversy.

Gibbs, at his daily news briefing, was asked why Bolden had made the comment. "It's an excellent question, and I don't think -- that was not his task, and that's not the task of NASA," Gibbs said.

Many in the U.S. space community, such as moon astronaut Neil Armstrong, are disgruntled by Obama's proposals to bolster support for private space companies and abandon an over-budget NASA moon program.

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66B6MQ/

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.

If you're paying double for it, why are you getting the SLS for that price? Which, as the article painfully shows, INCREASES risk. By a lot.

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...

They have certainly in the company.

Also, one thing I'm not seeing mentioned is that Congress did not give NASA enough money to pay for any of the initial human lander system contract bids. SpaceX lowered their bid to accommodate this.

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.

One can look at Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy and reasonably project that SpaceX is capable of overcoming the engineering challenges of Starship.

The dubious part is accomplishing that on the Artemis mission schedule.

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 :) ...)

I'm strongly disagreeing with some qualifications there, to the point it's hard to find where to start.

E.g. what this passage mean -

"...this single-use lander carries less payload (both up and down) than the tiny Lunar Module on Apollo 17."

? Can't Starship HLS lift more than 50 kg of rocks from the Moon?.. I'm intentionally simplifying the question.

I actually was put off by the know-it-all nature of the whole thing as if nasa scientists had totally not considered any of this.

> 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.

NASA's budget changes every 4 years.

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

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

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

Any sufficiently large acquisition is indistinguishable from a jobs program.

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

That's 90% of US defense spending.

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.

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

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.

2025 or 2026 for Starship.

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

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.

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.

Never say problem. Say "opportunity".

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.

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

Follow the money.

Please do share what you've found.