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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

In the rocket equation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/02/there-are-no-g...

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

China plans a manned moon landing around 2030. Then, on to the lunar base.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_6

Westerners think the dark pattern on the moon looks like a face, but Chinese people think it looks like a rabbit.

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.

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.

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?

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

"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.

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.

The Shuttle had many other uses outside the ISS.

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.

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.

> That is explicitly an Artemis mission purpose.

Where does it say that?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To be clear:

SLS is shit. It is waaaay more expensive, heavier and less performant than Saturn V, Starship, etc.

Orion is shit. It is heavier, more expensive and wasteful in many ways than it needs to be. It's already old by this point too.

The Lunar Gateway is shit. It's a solution looking for a problem, and everyone knows it.

Artemis 2 and 3 should be delayed until NASA can fix their shit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

When Apollo ended, "space race" ended for USA and it decided to stop on laurels.

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.

Does it mean Artemis is the Electron of space missions?

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.

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].

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/632474-i-have-a-foreboding-...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZyRbnpGyzQ

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.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/09/NA...

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.

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.

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

> - 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.)

> 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.

“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.

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).

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

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

SpaceX claims to care a lot about going to Mars, but Mars has even less potential customers than the Moon has

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.

NASA and other space agencies are indeed picking the missions, but SpaceX has been a huge enabler here.

"Exploitation" has connotations of man-vs-man colonialism, which I don't think apply in the case of outer space.

* 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.

It's all man vs. man colonialism in the end.

Besides, "to exploit" something means to make productive use of something: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/exploit

Edit: just googled and they're predicting $6.6B in revenue for 2024.

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 have about 20 years of experience in Federal contracting.

we have nothing but process and zero accountability. It's literally a miracle anything ever gets completed.

we sink billions of dollars into projects that are forecast to have dubious economic benefits and then we never bother to see if it actually worked out the way the economics were justified.

empower programs and leaders to buck policy and regulations but make them accountable for failure of their core mission.

compensate leaders who save money by doing more with less.

etc.

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.

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

> 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.

[1] https://news.satnews.com/2024/03/31/spacex-enjoys-two-out-of...

can you use a plunger, instead of a pump? more like a syringe?

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.

deeper discussion with math: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=60124.60

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.

Fuel transfer and storage in orbit is problematic in many respects.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1308/why-are-there...

Sure, "easily".

> 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.

> Sure, "easily".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Roving_Vehicle#Usage

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.

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.

And yet they have put one on Mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseverance_(rover)#Instrumen...

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.

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.

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 they now claim 1/75 in the official reports, I'm very worried.

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...

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.