[HN Gopher] The Lunacy of Artemis
___________________________________________________________________
The Lunacy of Artemis
Author : feross
Score : 613 points
Date : 2024-05-19 23:02 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (idlewords.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (idlewords.com)
| asmithmd1 wrote:
| IDK why 81 year old Poli-sci major, attorney, and ultimate NASA
| executive decision maker Bill Nelson wasn't forced out of office
| after he incorrectly explained to Congress that the far side of
| the moon is always dark
|
| https://youtu.be/daZyPwCQak8?si=n9KXH-LJFBlpKXUp&t=153
| jonathankoren wrote:
| The fact that he is an astronaut because of a congressional
| junket is just perfect from a bad faith argument perspective.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Probably because Congress isn't smart enough to realize his
| mistake. Here's one of them worried that Guam might capsize
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cesSRfXqS1Q&t=75s
| YZF wrote:
| Didn't Asimov write about half the moon being dark? TIL the
| "far side of the moon" is actually referred to as "the dark
| side of the moon". But yeah, it's funny/sad that nobody in the
| room seems to know anything.
| nine_k wrote:
| When we earthlings see a new moon, we see one dark side
| turned towards us, while another dark side is the far side;
| Moon is completely in the Earth's shadow.
|
| During a solar eclipse, the far side is brightly lit, while
| the side turned towards us is dark.
|
| Most of the time the dark side does not match the far or the
| near side, we see a part of both the dark and lit sides as a
| crescent.
|
| I don't see how "the far side" and "the dark side" can be
| used interchangeably in any situation.
| asmithmd1 wrote:
| Uh, no. The ONLY time we see a new moon is during an
| eclipse. Other times the moon is above or below the sun and
| is too dim to see. A lunar eclipse is when the moon passes
| into the earth's shadow and they happens during full moons
| nine_k wrote:
| OK, we don't actually get to recognize the shape of the
| new moon with a naked eye because it's dark against the
| sky. It's still hot enough for some time to be visible in
| IR pretty well.
|
| The point is that the lit part of the Moon moves widely,
| while the far / near sides don't due to the tidal lock.
| Hence they can't be used interchangeably.
| philwelch wrote:
| I think if you're somewhere free of light pollution you
| might notice a moon-sized gap in the stars.
| adamomada wrote:
| The earth's shadow has nothing to do with moon phases and
| only affects our view during a lunar eclipse.
|
| I always thought the dark side of the moon meant from
| earths' view: we can see the light side (even when it's
| dark) but we can't see the dark side (even when it's light)
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| 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.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| 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.
| idlewords wrote:
| The linked clip is pretty unequivocal, if you watch it.
| Nelson says: "They are going to have a lander on the far side
| of the moon, which is the side that is always in dark. We're
| not planning to go there."
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Yeah, I watched it. I can hear it both ways. I don't know
| his mind or lack thereof, only that he hasn't necessarily
| spoken wrongly in that phrase
|
| I could see governmental types having a colloquial use of
| the word at times like these that doesn't mean "it's always
| in the literal absence of light".
| pengaru wrote:
| > Yeah, I watched it. I can hear it both ways. I don't
| know his mind or lack thereof, only that he hasn't
| necessarily spoken wrongly in that phrase
|
| What line do I have to stand in to receive some of your
| overflowing charity?
| Tao3300 wrote:
| I had a _really_ good breakfast today.
| asmithmd1 wrote:
| Did you watch the video? He also says, "we don't know what's
| on the back side of the moon"
|
| I guess we have decided to elect political representatives
| are just egotistical camera whores, but why should the top
| decision maker at a technical agency be a complete idiot who
| is ignorant about many things the agency he runs has done? It
| would be like the head of the air force saying airplanes fly
| because of flubber
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Do we have something in place to monitor the far side? We
| don't have a visual on it like we do the near side. Yeah,
| we've flown around it, imaged it in the past. Nothing
| ongoing though.
|
| If you think about it in a national security sense instead
| of an astronomical one, the question is "what is a rival
| power up to", then indeed it is dark and unknown.
|
| Mind I only watched from the timestamp, I might have missed
| something and this guy is a complete shit for brains.
| asmithmd1 wrote:
| Yes, this has been observing the moon, both near and far
| side since 2009
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Reconnaissance_Orbi
| ter
|
| I don't see how any NASA employee, who ultimately work
| for him, could have any respect for his ability to make
| strategic decisions for NASA
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing.
|
| 1. That's awesome
|
| 2. Yeah, he's a doofus.
| bryananderson wrote:
| Like it or not, the job of the NASA administrator is not to
| actually do science or engineering, it is to fight for the
| agency's budget with the President and Congress--a job for
| which political schmoozer extraordinaire Bill Nelson is
| eminently qualified, much more so than "real astronaut" Charlie
| Bolden, who struggled in this role despite being the epitome of
| the hypercompetent NASA pilot. I know which one I want at the
| controls of my aircraft, and which one I want on the witness
| stand on behalf of my government agency.
| divbzero wrote:
| Sounds like he's so good at fighting for budget that he gets
| it in spite of questionable spending decisions.
| p_l wrote:
| A lot of the questionable spending decisions are part of
| the strings he has to accept to get the budget.
|
| Remember, it's Senate Launch System.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| "Dark" in this context could be ambigious. It is possible he
| meant that the sun didn't shine there (it was literally dark0,
| which is false. Another possibility its its "dark" to direct
| communication from Earth, which is what people who know what
| they are talking about understand it to mean and literally say.
|
| What's more troubling is the next statement - "We don't know
| whats there". Well, we've done tons of imaging on that side,
| since the 1960s. So I think we know something about whats
| there. Its just that there doesn't appear to be that much
| interesting there, that merits a specific landing mission.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| He probably thinks libration means a drink.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The real lunacy is using chemical rockets instead of nuclear
| thermal once the ship is in orbit. That could reduce the fuel
| requirements for an Earth - Moon transfer by 4x. And this isn't
| some sci-fi tech. NASA built a working engine in the 70s.
| buildbot wrote:
| 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.
| adamomada wrote:
| I still remember the fears of Cassini. What a different world
| it would be if that Earth fly-by* fucked up
|
| * edit I knew I got it wrong the first time, it's not a
| transfer
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Lots of missions have flown RTGs, and there's always a
| group of protesters present every time one is launched.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| International treaties and environmental protests make that
| infeasible.
| nine_k wrote:
| But it would constitute _nukes in space_ in a breach of
| international treaties!
|
| Certainly a NERVA-style rocket engine is not a nuclear bomb,
| and a few nuclear reactors with known and tightly watched
| positions won't constitute a threat of a sudden nuclear strike.
|
| But the treaties were made at times when the principal parties,
| the West and the Soviet bloc, did not trust each other one bit,
| and rightfully expected sabotage at any smallest loophole. So
| the treaties are overly tight.
|
| Today's world is about as bad, with a hot war in Europe, and a
| lot of tensions around Taiwan. No chance that the treaties
| would be relaxed for mutual good, due to the increased mutual
| trust.
|
| Breaking a treaty unilaterally just because it's inconvenient
| is also not great, and would untie the other sides' hands.
|
| That's why we can't have nice things.
|
| /* If you haven't yet, I recommend to read the novel _Fiasco_
| by Stanislaw Lem. It describes a civilization where all trust
| and cooperation are gone, and the planet is in the state of
| constant creeping war of sabotage. What Earthlings do there is
| another thing worth reading about. * /
| andbberger wrote:
| the treaty prohibits weapons, not reactors...
| nine_k wrote:
| Also "contamination".
|
| Despite that, NERVA has been proposed for a number of
| missions, mostly deeper space.
| krisoft wrote:
| You are asserting that nuclear reactors are banned from
| space. Which treaty do you think does that?
| marcinzm wrote:
| I would say using an engine around Earth that emits radioactive
| exhaust that travels at less than Earth escape velocity is the
| real lunacy.
| qayxc wrote:
| > 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...
| XorNot wrote:
| > The real lunacy is simply not being mission-driven.
|
| Okay but why does the mission exist? People keep going "the
| mission is go to to the moon". Is it? Why are we doing that?
| How much do the "proven technologies" cost? Are they
| reusable?
|
| The answer of course, is that the mission is _not_ "go to the
| moon". It's "go to the moon and establish permanent, long
| term scientific research operations with a view to using that
| experience to send crewed missions to Mars and other deep-
| space destinations".
|
| And in that box then, one might look at how the long term
| storage and handling of hydrazine has worked out in enclosed
| environments on Earth - like submarines as torpedo propellant
| - and concluded that the longer and more frequently you use
| it, the more likely you get to a vehicle loss due to the
| intrinsic hazards.
| qayxc wrote:
| > Okay but why does the mission exist?
|
| Politics.
|
| > People keep going "the mission is go to to the moon". Is
| it? Why are we doing that?
|
| Again, politics. The US has to assert dominance in space
| and cannot allow parties like China to one-up them. It's
| also a great way for political leadership to score points
| with the public. A more rational approach for establishing
| a permanent human presence on the moon would have included
| a thorough requirement analysis like Apollo did. Just FYI,
| SpaceX to this day (i.e. less than 12 months before the
| initially planned first landing!) don't even known how many
| tanker launches are required...
|
| > How much do the "proven technologies" cost?
|
| Less than developing a set of radically new systems from
| scratch - if done correctly (i.e. no cost-plus contracts).
| Some ideas, just for pondering:
|
| * Falcon 9 is a reliable, proven, and partly reusable
| system. Its capabilities are sufficient to put crew and
| cargo into LEO
|
| * FH is a proven and partly reusable system. Its
| capabilities are sufficient even for Lunar missions.
|
| * Designing a mission around these existing capabilities
| would eliminate the risk of developing two completely new
| rockets (SLS and Super Heavy/"Starship") while allowing for
| testing vital equipment basically from day one (i.e.
| autonomous docking with fuel tanks, long term fuel storage
| in orbit, etc.)
|
| > Are they reusable?
|
| There's no reason why a moon lander and transfer vehicles
| shouldn't be reusable. This is not a question of the
| engines or fuel used. Just a side note: the "Lunar
| Starship" isn't going to be reused either on its first
| missions. This is a medium to long term goal that hinges on
| quite a few factors (like the feasibility of long-term
| cryogenic storage in space).
|
| > one might look at how the long term storage and handling
| of hydrazine has worked out in enclosed environments on
| Earth
|
| First of all, the environments are not the same - i.e. no
| unprotected humans will ever be around the fuel tanks or
| perform hazardous activities like smoking near them or
| operate valves. Secondly, in stark contrast to cryogenic
| fuels, we actually do have plenty of data points for long
| term use and storage of non-cryogenic fuels in space. Most
| satellites used hydrazine or its derivatives for station
| keeping and manoeuvring in deep space missions for decades.
| This is nothing new whatsoever.
|
| On the other hand no one has ever successfully performed a
| vehicle to vehicle fuel transfer in space, let alone
| cryogenic fuel or long term storage of said fuels in space.
| This is new territory that doesn't even have all of its
| physics fully understood.
| XorNot wrote:
| > Politics.
|
| You're saying "we need to be mission focused". If the
| mission is "politics", then hey, you're right - turn on
| the money faucet we're doing Apollo again. Developing new
| technology, doing science, whatever - all not actually
| happening.
|
| Of course...if it's not politics, then maybe the new
| technology _is_ the point? That a mission where you don
| 't fundamentally improve how you're doing it would in
| fact be the only waste of money, because it's just the
| same pointless thing all over again.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > The real lunacy is simply not being mission-driven. A true
| mission driven design would have used a simple, reliable
| option using proven and existing technology. Like non-
| cryogenic fuel for example.
|
| Are you talking about the lander? Because IMO, the lander it
| the _least_ objectionable part of the whole thing. Congress,
| in their infinite wisdom, decided that the lander budget
| would be $3 B - about 1 year 's worth of development costs of
| Orion + SLS, systems which have been in development for over
| a decade.
|
| The moon rover got more money than that.
|
| Any system that's going to squeeze into that constraint is
| going to need to be economically optimized and a bit...
| creative.
| qayxc wrote:
| > Are you talking about the lander?
|
| I'm talking about the entirety of Artemis. SLS was
| basically a job-saving programme initiated by Congress to
| appease senators that feared job losses in their respective
| states after the Shuttle programme was axed. Alternative
| designs that would use fuel storage in space and space tugs
| could've worked without an expensive new rocket.
|
| > IMO, the lander it the least objectionable part of the
| whole thing
|
| Then we have a disagreement :) The HLS requires the
| following in order work:
|
| * the development of a rapidly reusable, radically new
| rocket system with new engines that haven't been flight
| tested before; alternative options could've used existing
| systems
|
| * development of long term in-orbit cryogenic fuel storage
| - something that has never been tried before
|
| * development of safe and reliable cryogenic fuel transfer
| between vehicles in orbit - again, a capability that has
| never been demonstrated before
|
| * a lander with a single point of failure for
| exiting/entering the vehicle (on account of its ridiculous
| height)
|
| * a lander that relies on turbo-pump driven bi-propellant
| engines for ascend - something so risky that Apollo-era
| engineers didn't even consider it
|
| * a lander with a mass of around 100 tons for 2 crew
| initially - horrible weight to payload ratio, as this mass
| has to be launched from the surface
|
| * several (actual number unknown as of now, but certainly
| more than 4) required refuelling launches
|
| In conclusion we have 4 mission critical technologies that
| have never been demonstrated before, yet need to work
| flawlessly. We also have added risk due to the use of
| turbo-pump driven bi-propellant cryogenic fuel and the
| requirement of a 30+ metre crane for accessing the vehicle.
| I cannot comment on the stability during landing and ascend
| or the risks involved with dust and rocks from the exhaust
| plume on the moon.
|
| As far as the economics go, yeah, I agree that with such
| tight budget a mission like that is very challenging to say
| the least. Low-balling the cost, exaggerating the timeline
| and hiring the person who on her own decided to hand out
| the contract throws a bad light on the issue, though.
| XorNot wrote:
| This is a criticism rooted in viewing the problem the wrong way.
|
| You can't compare a modern attempt at a moon landing to the
| Apollo program. It's straight up invalid. The Apollo program was
| a national prestige program, so successful we stopped going to
| the moon for ~49 years and counting. At it's peak it consumed
| 2.5% of US national GDP. We will never, _ever_ , _nor should we_
| run a program like the Apollo program ever again.
|
| The second problem is, it's thoroughly dismissive of the
| political concerns which are the essence of the entire problem.
| NASA's budget changes every 4 years. It's priorities in fact
| change every year because the US has struggled to pass a yearly
| budget that didn't go to a government shutdown for multiple years
| at this point.
|
| In that view then, you get weird statements which are essentially
| arguments from increduality: i.e. the concern over how many
| launches you'd need to refuel an HLS in orbit. But it straight up
| doesn't matter how many, what matters is whether you can do it.
| SpaceX can launch multiple Falcons in a week, is there a reason
| to think scaling to the required number of launches is
| prohibitive? - who knows, because no one ever includes a failure
| expectation or cost expectation, they just throw the number out
| and gesticulate at it a bit.
|
| And that is the core problem of the arguments about the mission
| itself, because again, what is the goal? Getting to the moon with
| an Apollo style fully expendable, _enormously expensive_ rocket
| is obviously possible because it was done. We absolutely should
| not do it that way again. If we don 't get there with a more
| sustainable approach, then there's no point going.
|
| The SLS's deficiencies are accurately identified, but the reason
| for them is pretty obvious - NASA was ordered to build the SLS
| that way by Congress. NASA would _really_ rather pay SpaceX or
| Blue Origin to build them the rocket they need instead, but they
| 're not allowed to do that - by Congress.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> it 's thoroughly dismissive of the political concerns which
| are the essence of the entire problem_
|
| No, it is quite correctly pointing out that political concerns
| are _creating_ a lot of problems that _shouldn 't even exist_.
|
| _> If we don 't get there with a more sustainable approach,
| then there's no point going._
|
| But the article's whole point is that this is _not_ a "more
| sustainable approach". It's _less capable_ than Apollo, for
| more money, without _any_ compensating benefits. If that 's
| what "political concerns...are the essence of the entire
| problem" looks like, then I agree that "there's no point in
| going"--meaning we shouldn't be doing Artemis _at all_ if this
| is what it 's going to look like. But of course the "political
| concerns" won't let that happen.
| nerdponx wrote:
| The compensating benefits are jobs for constituents of key
| members of Congress and big contracts for their friends. But
| those are compensating benefits for the legislators
| specifically, not for the American people (who are paying for
| all of this) or the global scientific community.
| pdonis wrote:
| Yes, I understand that there are "compensating benefits"
| for certain people. But they're not compensating benefits
| to the mission itself. They're just political pork.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > NASA's budget changes every 4 years.
|
| NASA's budget is weird - from what I understand, Congress
| doesn't just cut NASA a check - they fund specific programs.
|
| That being said, NASA's budget (in inflation adjusted dollars)
| has been remarkably flat for decades.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
| boznz wrote:
| Did the American people really expect any other outcome from such
| a project ?
| ein0p wrote:
| Finally someone is saying it like it is. Sadly this someone isn't
| a bigwig at NASA. NASA still can't take humans to/from orbit on
| its own. To believe that in 18 months we're going to have a
| successful lunar landing is batshit grade insanity.
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| ein0p wrote:
| Realistically it takes us "10 years" to repair a bridge in
| this country nowadays, so I'm not sure what the multiplier
| should be. And no, Boeing cannot be "kept away" from a fat
| government contract like this one. Nor can all the other
| usual suspects
| nine_k wrote:
| It takes 10 years to have the bridge repaired not because
| the actual fixing takes 10 years, right?
| LargeTomato wrote:
| 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.
| ein0p wrote:
| Building capability is not insanity. Expecting to land people
| on the moon in 18 months when you don't have half the
| components already available for testing, however, is. Read
| the article. It's long, but worth a read.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| >NASA still can't take humans to/from orbit on its own
|
| They can buy seats on Crew Dragon though?
| lyu07282 wrote:
| This has been well known for years, it's just NASA operating
| for decades with it's hand tied behind it's back by neoliberal
| mandated public private partnerships embezzling it for tax
| dollars.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| > 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.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| 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).
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| Also Boeing, North American and Douglas built the Saturn V.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Up there with "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses."
| xt00 wrote:
| I think we all can understand the situation here unless people
| are really dense.. the Artemis program was setup at a time when
| the private space companies were still very new. SpaceX will soon
| be quite close to technically doing the entire mission themselves
| without Artemis at all. SpaceX took the money from NASA to help
| fund their Starship development and probably for other reasons as
| well. Net result is that by the time Starship can land on the
| Moon, they can basically do the entire mission without Artemis.
| So Artemis would be pointless.
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| I don't think there is any plan for a roundtrip Starship lunar
| mission. I think it is too heavy to get back.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > I don't think there is any plan for a roundtrip Starship
| lunar mission.
|
| There are currently no official NASA plans to do so. In part
| because if there were that would be NASA tacitly giving up on
| SLS and Orion, which Congress would never support.
|
| We'll see what happens if SpaceX ever advertises such a
| capability.
|
| > I think it is too heavy to get back.
|
| There are a number of architectures that have been proposed
| that should work. From what I recall, all of the involve
| using multiple Starship vehicles going to Lunar orbit.
| kemotep wrote:
| 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| SLS cannot get from the ground to the moon and back with just
| the one rocket. Orion is too heavy to land and return from
| the Moon. That's why the plan, even before Starship's
| involvement, was to transfer from Orion to the lander in
| lunar orbit, either directly or via the Lunar Gateway
| spacestation.
| kemotep wrote:
| I understand it didn't land on the moon but it flew to the
| moon and back (which is what my comment was saying) in
| 2021. The mission wasn't perfect but their half of Artemis
| was demonstrated. Starship has not yet shown to be capable
| of completing its half.
|
| Artemis 2 and 3 should be delayed until NASA can fix their
| shit.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > The mission wasn't perfect but their half of Artemis
| was demonstrated.
|
| Sort of.
|
| The first fully functional Orion will be debuted on
| Artemis III. As an example of the differences, the
| Artemis I Orion didn't have functional life support
| systems. And the Artemis II Orion won't be able to dock
| with anything.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| SLS does not fly "to the moon". To put it simply, it
| flies _near_ the moon and back. Saying it flies "to the
| moon" it like saying that getting on a plane that flies
| over Orlando FL, lets you take pictures out the window,
| and then flies back home to your starting airport is
| "going to Disney World".
| O5vYtytb wrote:
| 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.
| grecy wrote:
| You are confusing the issue here.
|
| Imagine a world where Space X does not exist - never did.
|
| Even still, Artemis is a terribly designed rocket that costs
| gobs more than Saturn V and performs much less.
|
| Would you be happy buying something today that costs more than
| it did in 1970 and performs worse?
|
| It doesn't matter what else is going on in the world, Artemis
| is shit.
| e_y_ wrote:
| SLS is the rocket. Artemis is the project that uses SLS,
| Orion, and Starship to land humans on the moon.
|
| There's also the dubious Lunar Gateway concept although that
| will likely get dropped as reality sets in. Maybe the same
| will happen to SLS. Wishful thinking.
| rob74 wrote:
| So the Artemis part of the program (the "pension plan") is just
| doing something that _pretends_ to be marginally useful for
| insane amounts of money to secure political support through the
| jobs it enables at various companies strategically spread
| across the US (plus support from the international partners
| involved), while the hope is that the HLS part of the program
| (the "lottery ticket") will eventually succeed in making the
| other part redundant?
|
| But still, I think the article has a point when it describes
| the difficulties of landing Starship on the moon and being able
| to lift off again several days later. Landing a rocket on its
| tail is cool when the only consequence of a failure is not
| being able to reuse the rocket, but when there are human lives
| in the balance, it starts to sound really scary. Not to mention
| the possibility of damaging an engine during the landing or of
| fuel loss preventing them from lifting off again...
| jlangenauer wrote:
| It's a fair point, but the only way _at all_ to land on a
| body that has no atmosphere is to use rocket engines that
| point down. The Apollo Lunar Module landed on its "tail",
| though it did at least have a separate ascent stage with its
| own engine, so might have had some chance of taking off again
| if the landing was damagingly hard.
| kqr wrote:
| I would argue plenty of lander designs (including LM) were
| tailless and landed on their butts! That should be easier
| than the balancing act of standing on the tail.
| rst wrote:
| The point is more that compared to prior landers, the
| Starship version at least has a uniquely high center of
| gravity over a narrow base, which makes it a whole lot easier
| to tip, and amplifies the consequences of, say, leg damage.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The center of mass should be pretty low relative to the
| height of the lander, the engines and propellant are the
| heaviest parts, the engines are obviously at the bottom.
| The heaviest component of the propellant is the LOX, which
| is also at the bottom.
| williamDafoe wrote:
| This is false most of the fuel is gone by the time it
| lands and most of the payload is up high that's why the
| latest designs for starship have diagonal thrusters 2/3
| of the way up the rocket so they can stabilize the top
| heavy part of the rocket without having to control it
| from a high moment arm
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Starship carries ~1200t of propellant, of which ~950t is
| LOX, and 250t is Methane. While yes, most of that will be
| burned off by landing, it'll still need enough to return
| to lunar orbit. Even if we assume that only 10% of the
| fuel is needed to return to orbit, that's 95t right on
| the bottom with another 10t of engines and most of the
| 100t of dry mass of the Starship itself (plumbing, tank
| domes etc).
|
| The thrusters you're (probably) thinking of are the
| landing thrusters that NASA thinks they might end up
| needing. Not to stabilize the rocket when on the ground,
| but because the Raptors might be too powerful and might
| dig out a crater underneath the vehicle when landing on
| an unprepared surface (such as the Moon, at least before
| a base is established or something is sent to prepare a
| proper surface). Placing weaker landing thrusters up top
| eliminates this issue, although at the moment they're
| still considered speculative in the sense that last we
| heard (which was admittedly a year or two ago), SpaceX
| are not convinced that this will be an issue.
|
| Thrusters would anyway be a crazy approach to preventing
| a crewed vehicle from tipping over, as you wouldn't want
| them to be firing when the crew are doing any of the
| things that would involve the ship becoming potentially
| unstable (eg unloading cargo). For stability they'd have
| to use the large self-leveling legs from the original HLS
| design.
| stetrain wrote:
| > 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| They also suppressed propellant depot work.
| stetrain wrote:
| Yep. Even taking SpaceX off the table, we could have built
| a lunar program based on existing launchers like the Atlas
| and Delta class of rockets, using smaller modules docked in
| orbit, and orbital refueling.
|
| Instead we have a giant rocket that costs billions per
| launch whose only purpose is to launch Orion to the moon in
| one shot, and it can't even deliver Orion to a conventional
| lunar orbit.
| xondono wrote:
| > the Artemis program was setup at a time when the private
| space companies were still very new.
|
| This is completely orthogonal. If it weren't, the lander would
| be in a better shape, but it's as much of a clusterfuck as the
| rest of the mission.
|
| SpaceX has never been outside of LEO, and I'm very unconvinced
| Starship can do it's part on Artemis, much less do all the
| mission by themselves.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| It's not really NASA that's building this, it's Lockheed Martin
| and other too big to fail defense companies. This is just a
| little something something to keep them in the game.
|
| As one person in NASA told me, they "fears NASA is becoming just
| a white collar jobs program"--artemis is clearly on mission.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Any sufficiently large acquisition is indistinguishable from a
| jobs program.
| dudinax wrote:
| "fears NASA is becoming just a white collar jobs program"
|
| That's 90% of US defense spending.
| LargeTomato wrote:
| We are going to The moon for two reasons. First, we want to set
| up a more permanent base. Nasa refers to this as "we're here to
| stay"
|
| The second reason we are going to the moon so that we can put the
| first person of color and the first woman on the moon. That is
| explicitly an Artemis mission purpose.
|
| Only time will tell if either of these two missions were actually
| worth it.
|
| One more point
|
| > Early on, SLS designers made the catastrophic decision to reuse
| Shuttle hardware, which is like using Faberge 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.
| idlewords wrote:
| Note that the first reason you give is tautological.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Possibly, but it's not unique to SLS. People were jesting
| twenty years ago about the purpose of the Space Shuttle being
| just a vehicle to get to and from the ISS. And the purpose of
| the ISS? So that the Space Shuttle would have somewhere to
| go.
| iamthirsty wrote:
| > And the purpose of the ISS? So that the Space Shuttle
| would have somewhere to go.
|
| I don't think this is accurate. ISS was conceived almost 10
| years after the Shuttle started launching, and the U.S.
| obviously had space station ambitions even before the
| Shuttle was on the drawing board (Skylab).
|
| Additionally the Soviets did the exact same, with Mir being
| launched prior to the Buran's first test flight -- heck
| Salyut 1 was launched in 1971.
| idlewords wrote:
| It's true for the post-Challenger Shuttle, which really
| didn't have a credible job to perform except for ISS
| assembly.
| iamthirsty wrote:
| Again, the Challenger disaster was 12 years prior to the
| launch of the first ISS module. ISS missions only flew 37
| times, out of 135 total missions for the Shuttle.
|
| The Shuttle had many other uses outside the ISS.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I first heard the saying I think sometime around the loss
| of Colombia. Maybe before, maybe after. By the return to
| flight, it was most certainly more true than false. By
| that time the shuttles performed very few non-ISS
| flights. I think that Atlantis flew a service mission to
| Hubble, other than that I can't think of any other
| shuttle flights that didn't go to the space station.
|
| Columbia was heavier than the other orbiters, so she was
| flying the non-ISS missions from about '98 until her
| demise. After that US satellites were launched on
| disposable, unmanned rockets like the Deltas and Atlas.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| ISS stems from Space Station Freedom[1], which itself has
| its roots in the the Space Transportation System's space
| station component[2]. The Space Shuttle was a part of the
| Space Transportation System and the only part to receive
| funding and see development.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Station_Freedom
|
| [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Transportation_System
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Also, the purpose of Earth is so the Space Shuttle has
| somewhere to launch from and the ISS has something to
| orbit.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Which is the explanation for some of the paradoxes rasied in
| the article.
|
| SLS was foisted on NASA by politicians. The design of Artemis
| seems set to take advantage of that political will to fund the
| private development of the next stage of space flight by
| pretending that funding supports a role for SLS instead of
| making it completely obsolete.
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| There's also the unstated purpose of beating China to setting
| up a base.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| And what if China gets there first? How exactly would that
| benefit them, in a geopolitical sense?
|
| Sorry, but if I have the choice of wasting that much
| resources just so I can brag about it a bit sooner than my
| opponent, or watch my opponent do so, while I use said
| resources more productively, I know what to do.
| adolph wrote:
| If China gets there first, they will accomplish half of the
| above stated number two reason, reproduced below.
|
| > The second reason we are going to the moon so that we can
| put the first person of color and the first woman on the
| moon. That is explicitly an Artemis mission purpose.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > And what if China gets there first? How exactly would
| that benefit them, in a geopolitical sense?
|
| If China gets there first, the enormous amount of
| international credibility _and resulting soft power_ that
| they will gain internationally, at the US 's expense, will
| be immense and will be worth the resources they spend
| several times over.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > the enormous amount of international credibility and
| resulting soft power
|
| You know what is giving China soft power? Funding
| projects around all of Africa.
|
| You know what is not giving western countries soft power?
| Burning Billions on Space Programs that serve zero
| purpose and could achieve more with much less
| investments, if we just continued sending robots.
|
| Again, I know where I would allocate my resources if I
| had a hand in this game.
| hifromwork wrote:
| I'm not a geopolitics expert, and I assume you're not
| either, so I'll just say what I feel. As an European,
| deep down my unconscious mental picture of the situation
| here is probably this: USA is a geopolitical and economic
| power, China is a far away country that assembles parts
| and devices for western companies. This mental picture is
| wrong and hilariously oversimplified (I _know_ rationally
| that it 's wrong), but this is the stereotype I've
| absorbed from my society.
|
| If both counties actively tried to win, and China managed
| to build a Moon base before the US that would probably
| make a huge blow to that (subconscious) mental picture.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > You know what is giving China soft power? Funding
| projects around all of Africa.
|
| I don't disagree.
|
| Are you suggesting that China will be satisfied with
| merely the amount of soft power that they are gaining
| from funding infrastructure projects in Africa and will
| not seek additional soft power through other routes?
|
| I would assert that between the amount of soft power
| gained, and more, the amount of soft power lost by their
| rivals (the US), if China had the capability to create a
| moon base it would be entirely worthwhile for them to do
| so.
|
| Thus, if the US wishes to _prevent_ that loss of its own
| soft power, then it needs to beat China to the moon base.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Afiak, the purposes are to begin to setup the infrastructure
| for permanent habitation, and to prepare for a crewed flight to
| Mars.
|
| > That is explicitly an Artemis mission purpose.
|
| Where does it say that?
| mathgeek wrote:
| > Where does it say that?
|
| First line of the official page at
| https://www.nasa.gov/feature/artemis/
|
| "With the Artemis campaign, NASA will land the first woman
| and first person of color on the Moon, using innovative
| technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever
| before."
| foobarian wrote:
| That seems like a side effect more than an explicit
| purpose. Down below is more to the point:
|
| > WHY WE'RE GOING TO THE MOON
|
| > We're going back to the Moon for scientific discovery,
| economic benefits, and inspiration for a new generation of
| explorers: the Artemis Generation. While maintaining
| American leadership in exploration, we will build a global
| alliance and explore deep space for the benefit of all.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| > 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.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| True, going to the moon would be an excellent way to get your
| Earth-scale weight down! And on prime-time TV no less.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| 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.
| thombat wrote:
| So long as they do a gag where the dummy's suit is
| depressurised and he continues to protest but now silently,
| then I'm all for it. If Man is truly to live along the stars
| then vaudeville humour shall be part of it
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It seems crazy to me they've managed to use shuttle parts to
| make a design that seems older and worse than the shuttle.
|
| People called the shuttle a truck, but they've used parts from
| it to make something that looks like a Ford model-T in
| comparison.
| pookha wrote:
| The moon has trillions of dollars in water, helium, and
| metals (rare earth, titanium, etc). It's an f'ing goldmine
| and controlling said resource will be something hostile
| authoritarian regimes (China) would seek out. There's simply
| no excuse that the US should be this bad at making a system
| to reach the moon. The Chinese have committed insane sins and
| dropped massive amounts of space hardware on the earth
| (luckily it landed in the ocean). We should be dunking on
| them but instead we've got this buffoonery?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| None of the material on the moon is worth more than the
| cost of shipping it back to Earth.
| jandrese wrote:
| This sounds completely insane to me. Are people worried
| that China is going to mine out the moon before the US gets
| there? You're talking about trillions of tons of material,
| it won't be the limiting factor in your lifetime. And this
| assumes that lunar mining/refining is even practical.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Same, but if that kind of paranoia gets us back into
| space I don't mind it -\\_(tsu)_/-
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I have never found any math that made trip to the moon for
| materials even remotely wortwhile, by like orders of
| magnitude, not just today with today's technology, but for
| any foreseeable future we can meaningfully discuss. Water
| in particular is an unfortunate one to start with, given
| its abundance and ease of extraction on earth, vs
| absolutely positively ridiculous efforts to obtain them
| from the moon. But everything else from metals to obscurely
| valuable versions of Helium, seems to fall apart as soon as
| we go from "Look! Up there in the sky! Minerals!!!1", to
| "let's do a back-of-the-napkin math along any of the
| materials, science, energy, or money axis"
|
| I enjoy using traditional cold-war bogey-men to scare
| ignorant politicians into accidentally sponsoring real
| science as much as any other person, I do, but... as long
| as we're not actually _buying_ into that sillyness,
| right?.... right?
| jandrese wrote:
| The only way mining and refining on the moon makes any
| sense is if you're building stuff to be used on the moon
| in your lunar colonies, and that's a long way off.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > Only time will tell if either of these two missions were
| actually worth it.
|
| No time required, we already know the answer: neither of these
| two goals is worth the enormeous pile of resources burned to
| achive it.
|
| 1. A permanent human presence on the moon serves what purpose
| exactly that Robots cannot do? If we want to set up shop there:
| Why not send robots and an automatic laboratory-repair-bay?
| It's the moon, we can even remote control the damn things with
| only 2 seconds latency! What excatly are humans supposed to do
| there, that robots cannot?
|
| 2. Go ask women in underpaid care work and people of color in
| underserved communities, what _they_ think would benefit them,
| and the general sense of equality, more: Hundreds of billions
| of dollars poured into improving social services like adequate
| pensions for carework, childcare, better supervision programs
| against discrimination in the workplace, better educational
| systems, etc. OR hundreds of billions of dollars burned by
| space-billionaires to let some old politician say "We did it!"
| at a press conference?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| People who get miffed at putting women and poc in space also
| don't want to spend more on social services, though, so its
| kind of a false dichotomy. It's not like if we could somehow
| convince the powers that be to cancel the space program they
| would put it all into education, jobs programs and basic
| income.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Money isn't burned when spent on space programs. resources,
| e.g. fuels are, but money is spent, it stays down here on
| Earth, employing people, boosting corporate profits (and
| therefore pension funds and other things which invest in
| them), employing people (who maybe women and people of
| colour).
| rurp wrote:
| You could make the same argument about any government
| spending program, no matter how wasteful it is. The money
| always goes into the economy. The question is how to get
| the most useful output from that spending.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _about any government spending program_ "
|
| "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.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| > _First, we want to set up a more permanent base. Nasa refers
| to this as "we're here to stay"_
|
| Perhaps I've not been following Artemis closely enough, but it
| doesn't seem to have anything actually in progress that would
| directly connect to the "permanent base" idea, beyond "Well, we
| need to go to the moon if we want a permanent base there". But
| that's sort-of like saying, "Well, I need to enroll in a
| university if I want a PhD".
| wpietri wrote:
| As a kid, mainlining Heinlein, I just assumed we'd have a
| moonbase by now and that it would be up to something important
| and useful. In my 20s, I assumed that our then-primitive software
| engineering techniques would be refined until we could make
| things that were simple, polished, cheap, and reliable.
|
| So it's a little wild to me to see software not only get more
| chaotic, but influence hardware as well. All in service to a
| creeping managerialism that runs on goals that, to the extent
| they can be articulated at all, get more detached from any sane
| human purpose.
|
| I know shit about Artemis and would love to believe Maciej is
| totally wrong here. But it fits with so much of my experience of
| the world that it seems very believable to me.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| > 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.
| eru wrote:
| Apollo wasn't exactly cheap.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| For sure. And to me that's related to the spread of
| managerialism and MBA thinking. One of the fundamental
| beliefs in that paradigm is that management is universal; an
| expert manager can manage anything. (This is in the contrast
| to the view that you need domain expertise to be effectively
| in charge of something.) I think this falls down because, not
| understanding the substance of the work, pure managers have
| to go by proxy indicators, like the polish of the
| presentations, the amount of confidence expressed, and the
| general wow factor.
|
| People with a lot of engineering experience are suspicious of
| complex solutions to complex problems. They know the value in
| iteration and testing. So even if an engineer is pushing a
| complex solution (for resume reasons or just love of the
| fancy stuff), they can be reined in by senior engineers. But
| in the MBA mindset, a complicated solution is an opportunity
| to have big budgets and lots of excitement. Slow feedback
| loops are even better, because they can produce shiny
| documents, get promoted, and move on before the problems
| become obvious.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Agree completely. Unfortunately it seems to be impossible
| to build large organisations without creating the sort of
| incentives that feeds this kind of thinking.
| just_steve_h wrote:
| I find this essay to be well-crafted and compelling.
| avmich wrote:
| 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Starship HLS can lift much more than 50kg, but since
| Congress/NASA requires Orion to be the return vehicle, the
| amount they can return is limited by that, which only has a
| 100kg payload return capacity (and presumably a chunk of that
| is going to be taken up by food, spacesuits etc).
|
| Same with why each stay is going to have to be just ~1 week.
| Starship can obviously carry more than enough stuff for 2
| people to live off for months. But Orion is only able to stay
| undocked for 21 days.
| avmich wrote:
| But that's not the lander's problem.
|
| I do agree NASA's Artemis program is strange. However it's
| enmeshed with Starship, and that's sufficiently different
| story.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| I actually was put off by the know-it-all nature of the whole
| thing as if nasa scientists had totally not considered any of
| this.
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| One minor quibble: on-orbit refueling _has_ been demonstrated,
| during the DARPA Orbital Express mission in 2006.
|
| Otherwise, if NASA issued stock, you should consider shorting it.
| idlewords wrote:
| 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.
| jessriedel wrote:
| The cryogenic aspect seems much more distinct than whether
| it's rocket-to-rocket or rocket-to-ISS.
| idlewords wrote:
| No, they're both pretty significant. In the ISS case you
| have propellant mass moving around that's just a tiny
| fraction of the total system mass, while in the rocket case
| a sizable portion of the total mass gets shifted.
|
| Moreover, in refueling ISS you can use something like a
| flexible bladder and pressure differential to simplify the
| job of moving liquid from container A into container B. But
| in the rocket-to-rocket case, you might be moving
| propellant from an almost-empty Starship into an almost-
| full depot rocket. In that case, you're trying to hunt
| around for liquid in an almost empty fuel tank, and push it
| into an almost full one.
|
| You can't use a bladder because Starship is too big, and
| it's hard to maintain a big pressure difference (unless
| you're willing to vent a lot of propellant in the process).
|
| The problem would be very hard even without cryogens.
| jessriedel wrote:
| The lack of bladder seems directly driven by the
| cryogenic temp. Whats stopping you from using large (or
| many) bladders for warm fuels?
|
| I don't see the hard problem of "hunting" for fuel in a
| rigid container. Yes you need ullage, but how is this
| worse than what you need typically to feed an engine?
| idlewords wrote:
| I'll defer to people who know more about rocket design
| about why you couldn't have a huge stretchy bladder
| holding RP-1 (for example) in a rocket stage.
|
| The problem with hunting is that a liquid/gas system
| forms a bunch of weird intermixed 3D blobs in
| microgravity. You either need to accelerate the docked
| rockets (so the liquids pool at one end) or you need some
| apparatus to separate liquid and gas in microgravity.
| Both are hard to do.
|
| Engines never have to worry about the microgravity case,
| there are always ullage motors or some other mechanism to
| accelerate the rocket before engine ignition so that
| fluid and gas separate.
| jessriedel wrote:
| > I'll defer to people who know more about rocket design
| about why you couldn't have a huge stretchy bladder
| holding RP-1 (for example) in a rocket stage.
|
| Do you mean you have a cite to this claim? Would love to
| read.
|
| > You either need to accelerate the docked rockets (so
| the liquids pool at one end)
|
| Right, this is what I was referring to as "ullage".
|
| > Engines never have to worry about the microgravity
| case, there are always ullage motors
|
| My point was that standard ullage motors can and will be
| used by SpaceX for the transfer. Why do you think this is
| harder than the fairly standard case of starting an
| engine in microgravity?
| idlewords wrote:
| > Do you mean you have a cite to this claim? Would love
| to read.
|
| No, I mean that I have a handwavy explanation for why you
| can't put 500 tons of kerosene in a big stretchy bladder
| inside your rocket, but I'm hoping that someone who knows
| more about rocket design than I do will comment here.
|
| > My point was that standard ullage motors can and will
| be used by SpaceX for the transfer. Why do you think this
| is harder than the fairly standard case of starting an
| engine in microgravity?
|
| Because the motors have to run for much longer (many
| minutes instead of a few seconds) and the mass
| distribution of the docked system is rapidly changing
| during that entire time.
| jessriedel wrote:
| I agree they have to run longer.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > Moreover, in refueling ISS you can use something like a
| flexible bladder and pressure differential to simplify
| the job of moving liquid from container A into container
| B. But in the rocket-to-rocket case, you might be moving
| propellant from an almost-empty Starship into an almost-
| full depot rocket. In that case, you're trying to hunt
| around for liquid in an almost empty fuel tank, and push
| it into an almost full one.
|
| > You can't use a bladder because Starship is too big,
| and it's hard to maintain a big pressure difference
| (unless you're willing to vent a lot of propellant in the
| process).
|
| You just put a baffle in the tank so the volume with
| remaining propellant is small and close to full. Also
| eliminates sloshing issues that you'd need to deal with
| anyways.
|
| In orbit fluid transfer is a reasonably solved problem,
| and there are many ways to do it. In addition to using
| bladders, you can also use ullage motors, centrifugal
| propellant settling, capillary tubes, etc. Cryogenics are
| harder because cryogenic pumps are just generally more
| challenging than standard pumps, but luckily the pumping
| requirements for propellant transfer are much less
| demanding than for engine restart - rocket engines need
| high flow rates and can't tolerate entrained gas,
| propellant transfer can use slower but more robust pumps.
|
| I don't mean this to diminish the accomplishment of the
| engineers who spent quite a bit of time solving this
| problem, but rather to point out that people have been
| working on this for decades and have had significant
| success. Sure we haven't done a perfect 1:1 dress
| rehearsal in orbit where large quantities of cryogenic
| propellants are transferred between docked spacecraft,
| but we've done everything shy of that.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| That was on-orbit refueling of hypergolic propellants, which is
| already done regularly on the ISS and is conceptually
| straightforward since you can just use bladder tanks to do the
| transfer without any special considerations.
|
| What hasn't been demonstrated is on-orbit refueling with
| cryogenic propellants, which involve more considerations
| regarding thermal and pressure management. Technically the most
| recent Starship flight test demonstrated on-orbit transfer of
| cryogenic propellants (between two internal tanks), but of
| course doing it with docking still needs to be done.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| "Demonstrated" is a strong word given what we all saw. I'm
| not sure there has been any document released that they
| actually proved that they successfully did a propellant
| transfer.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Last month NASA stated at a meeting that SpaceX had
| successful propellant transfer:
| https://spacenews.com/spacex-making-progress-on-starship-
| in-...
|
| "On Flight 3, they did an intertank transfer of cryogens,
| which was successful by all accounts,"
|
| It has admittedly been a weirdly quiet confirmation though,
| coming from a NASA official rather than from the usual
| sources (Elon/Gwynne/SpaceX official X).
| idlewords wrote:
| NASA always adds the caveat that analysis of the data is
| still ongoing. Something weird is going on with that
| demo.
| codewiz wrote:
| Unkind quotes, but hilarious and probably well deserved:
|
| "SLS looks like someone started building a Space Shuttle and ran
| out of legos for the orbiter"
|
| "But on top of this monster sits a second stage so anemic that
| even its name (the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage) is a kind
| of apology."
|
| "the minds behind SLS achieved a first in space flight, creating
| a rocket that is at the same time more powerful and less capable
| than the Saturn V."
|
| "And SLS is a "one and done" rocket, artisanally hand-crafted by
| a workforce that likes to get home before traffic gets bad."
|
| "The rocket can only launch once every two years at a cost of
| about four billion dollars--about twice what it would cost to
| light the rocket's weight in dollar bills on fire."
|
| "Early on, SLS designers made the catastrophic decision to reuse
| Shuttle hardware, which is like using Faberge eggs to save money
| on an omelette."
| codewiz wrote:
| 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"
| codewiz wrote:
| And a few more on on the Orion capsule:
|
| "Orion, the capsule that launches on top of SLS, is a
| relaxed-fit reimagining of the Apollo command module suitable
| for today's larger astronaut."
|
| "The capsule's official name is the Orion Multipurpose Crew
| Vehicle, but finding even a single purpose for Orion has
| greatly challenged NASA."
|
| "Where Apollo was built like a roadster, with a small crew
| compartment bolted onto an oversized engine, Orion is the
| Dodge Journey of spacecraft--a chunky, underpowered six-
| seater that advertises to the world that you're terrible at
| managing money."
| dotancohen wrote:
| 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).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > as Lunacy literally means "Looking at the moon" (via
| "Lunatic" which is someone who looks at the moon
|
| Literally? There is no "looking" element in the word. You'd
| need something like "lunavident". In the most literal terms,
| lunacy is the noun form of "lunate", which is a shape. ("C"
| is the "lunate sigma", the sigma in the shape of a moon.)
|
| Outside of the shape meaning, "lunacy" is just a relationship
| to the moon; the form of the relationship is not specified by
| the form of the word.
| dotancohen wrote:
| At the time that the word was coined, there was nothing
| that one could do with the moon other than observe it.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Considering the sense of the word comes from the idea
| that the phase of the moon affects people's minds whether
| they're looking at it or not, this is obviously false.
|
| You can look at the moon, you can look away from the
| moon, you can hide from the moon, you can worship the
| moon, you can love the moon, you can describe the moon...
| but the relationship actually being expressed was just
| "being affected by the moon". Looking at the moon is no
| more necessary to this process than it is for the ocean
| as it's drawn in and out by the tide.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Point being that Moon is the root of the word Lunacy as
| used in the title.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| 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?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I think the point they're trying to make is that it looks the
| same for the sake of looking the same.
| idlewords wrote:
| I was just trying to describe SLS visually. If you've seen
| a lot of Shuttle stuff then the initial resemblance is very
| striking.
| hamlsandwich wrote:
| Part of the reason is that there are plenty of reused and
| refurbished shuttle parts included!
| bandyaboot wrote:
| The initial resemblance really just comes down to 2
| fairly pragmatic design decisions. We'll use 2 side solid
| propellant boosters and we won't redesign them from
| scratch because they work. And, we'll use the same foam
| insulation on the rocket that we used on the STS liquid
| propellant tank because it also works...furthermore, we
| won't try to paint over the orange insulation because we
| know that that doesn't work very well.
| wpietri wrote:
| I think the argument is that it should look different for the
| sake of doing better. By, say, using modern tools and
| techniques rather than trying to resurrect some old parts
| designed in the 1970s. [1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Design_process
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > which is like using Faberge eggs to save money on an omelette
|
| I'm appropriating this!
| oefrha wrote:
| I guess you didn't reach the end, there are more choice quotes
| later on:
|
| > Where Apollo was built like a roadster, with a small crew
| compartment bolted onto an oversized engine, Orion is the Dodge
| Journey of spacecraft--a chunky, underpowered six-seater that
| advertises to the world that you're terrible at managing money.
|
| > To hear NASA tell it, NRHO is so full of advantages that it's
| a wonder we stay on Earth.
|
| > NASA likes to boast that Orion can stay in space far longer
| than Apollo, but this is like bragging that you're in the best
| shape of your life after the bank repossessed your car.
|
| And I'm only halfway through.
| cryptonector wrote:
| u/idlewords has a way with words.
| zefhous wrote:
| Destin from Smarter Every Day gave a talk that addresses a lot of
| these issues that I found pretty interesting too.
|
| https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU
| jessriedel wrote:
| Just skimmed it, but he mostly agrees with the criticisms
| right? ("Addresses" often suggests a rebuttal.)
| Neywiny wrote:
| I watched the whole thing but a bit ago when it came out. He
| did better than just that, he frankly humiliated the program
| in my eyes. The points I took away from his talk were: 1.
| Stop lying to yourselves and figure out the hard math (mostly
| in relation to the refueling question) 2. Learn from the
| past. Apollo kept excruciating notes (I'm still discovering
| new notes. For example, the lunar rover's manual is publicly
| online). Like this article, look at what worked and what
| didn't. Be better not worse.
|
| I've found in my own work I'm always terrified of failure.
| From what I've seen with the talk and this article, it's as
| if this program views failure as a selling point for more
| waste. /Rant
| nutrie wrote:
| I disagree that he humiliated the program, or the people
| behind it, which such a statement implies (although I do
| respect your conclusion). I've been following Destin for
| years and this guy genuinely cares. It's incredibly
| difficult to come up with a constructive criticism without
| offending people and he did a great job doing just that. He
| was humble, yet firm, well prepared and brought a fresh
| perspective to the table. Whether the stakeholders will
| acknowledge that is up to them. Hats off to the guy!
| Neywiny wrote:
| I respect your disagreement. It was certainly a word I
| debated a few minutes
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The refueling risk and cost is being borne by SpaceX, not
| the taxpayer. The SpaceX HLS portion of Artemis (aka the
| refueling) is a fabulous deal for the taxpayer.
| fastball wrote:
| My problem with his criticism (and to some extent echoed by
| Maciej in this article) is that the main takeaway seems to be
| "we did it once, we can do it again, let's revisit the past
| instead of re-inventing the wheel".
|
| But I don't think anyone actively involved wants to revisit the
| past. Who wants to go back to the moon just because we can?
| Nobody. Assuming best intentions:
|
| - People at NASA want to go to the moon to build a permanent
| base there. Maybe this is just to beat China, maybe it will
| actually be very useful to have a moon base. But that is the
| stated goal.
|
| - People at SpaceX want to go to the moon as a way to fund
| Starship development, so that they can go to Mars.
|
| - People at Lockheed Martin / Aerojet Rocketdyne / etc just
| want to get paid. I am going to ignore this cohort for the
| purposes of my argument.
|
| These motivations are not served by doing what the Apollo
| missions did. Can you get to the moon and back on a Saturn V
| with a single rocket launch, making for a much simpler mission
| plan? Absolutely, we did it 6 times. Can you build a moon base
| using a series of Saturn V launches? Absolutely not. Would
| SpaceX (clearly the most competent launch provider available in
| 2024) get anything out of building a much smaller HLS / not
| using methalox / anything else that would be more practical if
| your only purpose was to go to the moon? Also no - SpaceX
| doesn't really care about the moon. So a mission profile that
| is actually optimized for the moon does little for them.
|
| So while I think overall Artemis is a dumpster fire of
| spending, I don't think pointing at the Apollo missions is the
| gotcha that critics seem to think it is.
| bayindirh wrote:
| From my understanding, nobody is telling that "We should use
| Apollo as-is", but "why don't we use the same spirit when we
| were building these back then?".
|
| Everything made/designed in Apollo are no short of marvels.
| Today we can do much better with lighter, smaller
| electronics, and should be able to do weight savings or at
| least cost savings where it matters.
|
| Instead Artemis feels like "let's dig the parts pile and put
| what we have together, and invent the glue required for the
| missing parts", akin to today's Docker based development
| ecosystem.
|
| Yes, the plan might be to carry much more equipment in fewer
| launches, but if something looks like a duck, walks like a
| duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If this amount of
| people are saying that something is lost in spirit and some
| stuff is not done in an optimal way, I tend to believe them.
| imiric wrote:
| > From my understanding, nobody is telling that "We should
| use Apollo as-is", but "why don't we use the same spirit
| when we were building these back then?".
|
| The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than
| it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that
| forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to
| move space exploration forward.
|
| While arguably today there are comparable tensions,
| countries no longer have to prove anything to the world,
| and space exploration is mostly a scientific endeavour
| fueled by private companies that want to make a profit.
| There's less of an urgency to get to the moon, which can
| explain that difference in spirit that you mention.
|
| FWIW I don't think that's a bad thing. Space exploration is
| the most difficult human endeavour, and taking the time to
| do it right seems like the optimal way to go. The fact
| world superpowers achieved what they did in a couple of
| decades of the last century, a mere 60 years after flying
| machines were invented, is nothing short of extraordinary.
| But it was a special time, and we shouldn't feel pressured
| to repeat it.
|
| > Instead Artemis feels like "let's dig the parts pile and
| put what we have together, and invent the glue required for
| the missing parts", akin to today's Docker based
| development ecosystem.
|
| That doesn't seem like a bad approach to me. There is a lot
| of value to be gained by gluing existing technology
| together, and if anything, Docker is proof of how wildly
| successful that can be. Most scientific breakthroughs are
| effectively a repurposing or combination of previous ideas,
| after all. I don't think this is a valid criticism of
| Docker, nor of this approach.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense
| than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways
| that forced both sides to give their absolute best
| efforts to move space exploration forward._
|
| Well, money wise they now spend much more budget
| (inflation adjusted) it seems. Technology wise, one would
| expect they have more of it now, than back then. So,
| what, they lack some mystery motivation factor?
|
| I'd say it's rather general modern bureucratic
| incompetence, overdesign, plus losing the people who knew
| how to build stuff and had actual Apollo-era experience,
| with a huge period in between without Moon missions that
| meant they couldn't pass anything directly to the current
| NASA generation (a 40 year old NASA engineer today would
| be negative years old back then), which obliterated all
| kinds of tacit knowledge.
|
| It's like they had the people who designed UNIX back in
| the 70s, and a room full of JS framework programmers in
| 2024, plus all kinds of managers "experts" in Agile
| Development.
|
| > _FWIW I don 't think that's a bad thing. Space
| exploration is the most difficult human endeavour, and
| taking the time to do it right seems like the optimal way
| to go._
|
| Isn't the whole point that they're not "taking time to do
| it right", but waste enormous amounts of money and time
| while doing it massively wrong?
| xvilka wrote:
| >It's like they had the people who designed UNIX back in
| the 70s, and a room full of JS framework programmers in
| 2024, plus all kinds of managers "experts" in Agile
| Development.
|
| Does it mean Artemis is the Electron of space missions?
| p_l wrote:
| Apollo program got to the point that NASA budget was >4%
| of total federal budget.
|
| And Apollo program itself was, IIRC, over half of it.
|
| Never since NASA had such funding _and political will_ to
| just let them try to get a stated goal. History of
| projects since Apollo is full of every attempt at making
| things simpler and more reusable either getting canceled,
| blown with congressional requirements for pork-barrel
| (SLS), damaged by needing to beg for money from
| organizations with different goals (Shuttle is a great
| example), smothered by budget cuts resulting in reuse
| plans getting canceled skyrocketing per-mission cost
| (Shuttle, Cassini), and that with NASA being effectively
| prevented from doing iterative approach and ending having
| to gold-plate everything to reduce risks on the often
| "once in a lifetime" launch.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Apollo program got to the point that NASA budget was
| >4% of total federal budget_
|
| Given the figures in TFA, that points to a much smaller
| federal budget and much smaller government expenditures
| in general, than to less absolute (inflation adjusted)
| money for this over Apollo.
| Symmetry wrote:
| It's important to remember that Apollo was one of
| Kennedy's signature political projects at the time he was
| assassinated, which was an important factor in its
| political viability.
| p_l wrote:
| It had considerable impact on why it had so much leeway
| compared to pretty much any later work by NASA.
|
| When Apollo ended, "space race" ended for USA and it
| decided to stop on laurels.
| dash2 wrote:
| >The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense
| than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways
| that forced both sides to give their absolute best
| efforts to move space exploration forward.
|
| I'd say the climate is as tense today, and it is getting
| tenser. NATO is now talking about putting "trainers" into
| Ukraine, and US-made weaponry is being used to kill
| Vatniks; China is using water cannon on Philippine ships
| in the South China Sea; Iran is shooting missiles at
| Israel and the Houthis are trying to knock international
| shipping out of the Gulf of Aden.
|
| It's just that the US looks a lot weaker and less
| competent today. (But perhaps that is hindsight? In the
| 60s people were still worried that the USSR would
| overtake the West economically.)
| imiric wrote:
| > I'd say the climate is as tense today, and it is
| getting tenser.
|
| I think that all the examples you mentioned pale in
| comparison to the terror of global annihilation from
| nuclear weapons, a couple of decades after the bloodiest
| war in human history, during the peak of the Cold War.
| Conflicts exist today as well, and there is an increasing
| risk of a global conflict, but there is no urgency of
| beating an adversary ideologically because you can't
| fight them militarily. There was a nationwide competitive
| spirit back then that just doesn't exist today, which
| caused nations to accomplish things that seem impossible
| in hindsight.
|
| > It's just that the US looks a lot weaker and less
| competent today.
|
| I wouldn't say the US as a whole, since as a country it's
| still a leader in science and technology, and it has
| sufficient financial resources to invest in this project,
| if it wanted to. I think it boils down to the lack of
| urgency and political/public support, and perhaps
| managerial and competency problems at NASA itself.
|
| > (But perhaps that is hindsight? In the 60s people were
| still worried that the USSR would overtake the West
| economically.)
|
| By some measures, China has overtaken the US
| economically, and they have a space program with a focus
| on the moon, yet both sides are sloppy in their own ways.
| I think we'll get there eventually, but it will take more
| attempts, time and resources than we planned for. And, to
| be fair, it took 11 missions for Apollo to land on the
| moon, 10 Gemini missions before it, and many failures
| along the way. But if you take a look at the rate of
| progress, and time between missions, it's clear that
| getting to the moon was US' primary objective in the
| '60s, which is far from what it is today.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I certainly agree with the lack of political support, but
| the American public never supported Apollo. There was a
| brief moment, right when Apollo 11 landed on the moon,
| when just over 50% of Americans thought Apollo was a good
| idea. The rest of the time it was a majority opinion that
| it wasn't worth it.
| imiric wrote:
| You're probably right. I wasn't alive nor in the US
| during that period, so can only infer from what I've seen
| and read, but I would wager that even the staunchest
| opponents of the US space program back then couldn't have
| helped but feel pride of what their country accomplished
| in such a short time.
|
| And even if the majority opposed it, I still think that
| overall the amount of supporters then would've been
| greater than the amount of people who support it today.
| We're living in a time of ignorance and public
| disinterest in science that Carl Sagan predicted in the
| '90s[1], which didn't exist in the '60s. That spirit of
| optimism was partly what enabled such grand scientific
| projects, and I think most Americans were deeply moved by
| the words of JFK in that historic 1962 speech[2].
|
| [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/632474-i-have-a-
| foreboding-...
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZyRbnpGyzQ
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This Feb 1968 poll
|
| https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31107646/ques
| tio...
|
| asked of 58% of people who favored cuts in domestic
| spending, found 5% of people wanted cuts to "Space
| technology, Moon Shots, Scientific Research" (compared to
| 20% in welfare)
|
| However, this one
|
| https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31107534/ques
| tio...
|
| says 54% of people think the space program is "not worth
| it" in July 1967 and similar questions around that time
| get similar results. In April 1970 (after the 1969
| success) Harris asks the question
|
| https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31107574/ques
| tio...
|
| and gets 64% "not worth it".
| gcanyon wrote:
| For anyone interested in this, Apple TV's "For All
| Mankind" is a wonderful exploration of what could have
| happened if the space race never ended. It's not a
| historical treatise or anything, but it's still a
| fascinating take and makes me hope we see real progress
| in the coming years.
| imiric wrote:
| Thank you. From a more historical perspective, I would
| also recommend the 2018 movie "First Man".
| Zigurd wrote:
| There is a space race now, between the US and China. It
| is tempered by China being only a non-NATO regional
| security threat, especially in the form of forcibly
| uniting Taiwan with the PRC. The modern space race is one
| branch of a many-faceted technological rivalry. So it
| doesn't have to make business sense or scientific sense
| in any strict way. But it also can't consume a large
| fraction of the GDP, or blow up a crew if that can be
| avoided.
| anarticle wrote:
| Only difference is when the container is OOMKilled people
| die!
| golol wrote:
| Because the spirit of Apollo - unsustainable one off dlag
| planting missions - lead to human spaceflight stagnating
| for the subsequent half century.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Nixon cancelling Apollo early is what led to stagnation.
| thombat wrote:
| NASA had only contracted for 15 Saturn V stacks, and in
| 1968 declined to start the second production run. Nixon
| only assumed office in 1969, at which point the only
| question was how many of the remaining ten stacks would
| fly as part of Apollo. Under Nixon the final three Apollo
| lunar missions were cancelled, with one of those Saturn V
| stacks being used for Skylab instead. But even if all
| three had flown to the moon stagnation was inevitable as
| NASA's focus had already been directed to the shuttle.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I wasn't aware of those extra details! Very interesting.
| stetrain wrote:
| During the Apollo era NASA was receiving nearly 5% of the
| federal budget.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/09/N
| A...
|
| 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.
| mlindner wrote:
| > "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building
| these back then?".
|
| Isn't that just personal opinion? If anything, the current
| era of spaceflight has finally restored the Apollo ethos
| that had been dead for decades. So the answer to your
| question is "we're already doing it". Lots of people seem
| to be going nuts and saying "but not like that!" as they
| seem to have some alternative weird vision for what Apollo
| was. My dad grew up watching Apollo launches, he even got
| to work on the Apollo-Soyuz mission in a small part. He's
| one of the people more hyped for SpaceX's mission/goal and
| Starship than anyone I know.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building
| these back then?".
|
| What if we don't have the same spirit any longer? Nobody is
| going to acknowledge that publicly at NASA but they are
| acknowledging it by their actions. What if people who had
| "spirit" went to make youtube videos, work for Musk, Wall
| Street or Google? It takes some time to gauge the
| stickiness and depth of bureaucratic muck, but after a few
| years people can see it, and move on to other things. Guess
| who's left? Those who don't have much spirit left.
| lijok wrote:
| "Let's revisit the past instead of re-inventing the wheel"
| challenge was posed to the project management, not
| engineering.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >SpaceX doesn't really care about the moon.
|
| SpaceX is a business, SpaceX doesn't care about the Moon
| because there are no customers interested in going to the
| Moon.
|
| If market forces shift and companies start wanting to go to
| the Moon, you bet SpaceX will care about the Moon because
| there's money to be made.
| skissane wrote:
| > SpaceX is a business, SpaceX doesn't care about the Moon
| because there are no customers interested in going to the
| Moon.
|
| SpaceX claims to care a lot about going to Mars, but Mars
| has even less potential customers than the Moon has
| rockemsockem wrote:
| SpaceX doesn't make sense as a business without actually
| truly thinking space exploration is something worth doing.
|
| Rocket companies are bad ways to maximize profits.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| SpaceX is a _space exploitation_ business, Starlink being
| the foremost example but also commercial and governmental
| launches of Falcon 9 and eventually Starship. Even going
| to Mars is ultimately a mission of exploitation, not
| exploration.
|
| Space exploration is the duty of governmental space
| agencies such as NASA, who (assuming sufficient
| budgeting) can all literally afford to run red ink for
| entire projects and not have to give a damn.
| fastball wrote:
| SpaceX is a business controlled by a single man that is
| _really_ interested in making humanity multi-planetary by
| building a self-sustaining base on Mars.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It will stop focusing on Mars after Elon dies. This may
| take a while, admittedly.
| Zigurd wrote:
| SpaceX makes sense as a business in the way a mega-yacht
| makes sense as a ship. The valuation was set by a vanity
| investment by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. 2.7 million
| subscribers can't keep 4500 satellites in orbit and
| replaced every 5 years. It is a prestige investment.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| SpaceX is cash flow positive despite spending multiple
| billions each year on Starship and Starlink. The only way
| this is possible is if Starlink is profitable, and
| significantly so.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _My problem with his criticism (and to some extent echoed
| by Maciej in this article) is that the main takeaway seems to
| be "we did it once, we can do it again, let's revisit the
| past instead of re-inventing the wheel"._
|
| The problem is that this re-invention creates a square wheel
| made of marshmallow (with the road-trustiness one would
| imagine from the above design and materials), that costs 10x
| what a rubber wheel does.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Frankly I do think the whole point from the government's
| perspective is to beat China back to the Moon. And "Apollo
| style" short moon visit should be enough to give America a
| propaganda victory. SpaceX like Lockheed just wants to get
| paid (albeit so they can put that money into R&D instead of
| their shareholders.) The rank and file at NASA probably have
| some romantic notions of a Moon base but there are always a
| few dreamers to get disappointed by reality (Congress pulling
| funding once the propaganda victory is secured.)
| nordsieck wrote:
| > My problem with his criticism (and to some extent echoed by
| Maciej in this article) is that the main takeaway seems to be
| "we did it once, we can do it again, let's revisit the past
| instead of re-inventing the wheel".
|
| > But I don't think anyone actively involved wants to revisit
| the past.
|
| I think that's fair... but then we should make systems that
| are at least as good as the ones from the past.
|
| And SLS, even in the fully upgraded "Block 2" state is not as
| good a rocket as the Saturn V. One of the core problems is:
| we can't build Saturn V. It's Greek fire - we've lost the
| ability. There are schematics and plans, but apparently there
| was enough custom work and deviations by the actual welders
| and machinists that the plans are ... insufficiently
| specified.
|
| And needless to say, those same workers are either dead or
| have forgotten the necessary details.
| pixodaros wrote:
| That is not the problem. Its that a technology designed in
| the 1960s for a 1960s workforce and tool base can't be made
| in the USA today, for the same reason that you can't
| produce cost-effective Browning HPs in Belgium today
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-
| the...
| K0balt wrote:
| This is probably the most relevant take. "Going to the moon"
| is primarily a PR facade on "testing and development of
| technologies required to expand human space presence and
| begin the process of colonization of the moon and eventually
| mars"
|
| "Going to the moon" appeals to the Everyman ego.
|
| As for the obscene fraud/waste by the encumbent defense
| contractors, that is something we need to deal with. If we
| don't make them compete dollar for dollar with spacex we will
| never see them evolve back into functioning organizations
| that will deliver real value to US strategic dominance.
| Having them as fat, lumbering slop-hogs hobbles the strategic
| and economic progress of the US MIC.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| The problem is that Artemis is in many ways inferior to
| Apollo. It is less safe, more expensive (which is to say
| something!), less capable,... If the goal is to build a moon
| base, it should be able to do what Apollo did with ample
| margins, but from the look of it, it doesn't appear like
| there is much margin. It is complexity for complexity sake,
| it doesn't translate into more payload, more scientific
| potential, or lower costs.
|
| The only breakthroughs with Artemis is the part with
| Starship, the refueling in space part could change the deal
| for future mission, for the Moon, Mars, or elsewhere. And
| finding an excuse to write a blank cheque to SpaceX is, I
| think, not too bad an idea despite all the Elon Musk
| bullshit. SpaceX actually launches rockets, they are even
| pretty good at it, a rare thing. But do we really need all
| that baggage with SLS, Orion, and convoluted orbits? Just
| have SpaceX send a Starship to the moon (which is one of the
| last points in the article).
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > - People at NASA want to go to the moon to build a
| permanent base there. Maybe this is just to beat China, maybe
| it will actually be very useful to have a moon base. But that
| is the stated goal.
|
| > - People at SpaceX want to go to the moon as a way to fund
| Starship development, so that they can go to Mars.
|
| These seem to be inter-related, too. NASA seems to want
| Artemis to be a stepping stone to Mars as well (whether or
| not they are competing or cooperating with SpaceX to get
| there). _Some_ of the arguments for Gateway in NRHO and /or
| even a possible permanent base on the Moon from NASA seem to
| indicate that some of the engineers believe NRHO is a great
| "launch pad" to Mars.
|
| Some at NASA also clearly don't believe SLS as it exists is
| capable of getting to Mars and are pushing SpaceX and Blue
| Origin in the HLS stages of Artemis seemingly to try to get
| competition going today for whatever rockets can _actually_
| make it to Mars. SpaceX 's HLS plans being based on Mars
| plans looks like a feature more than bug, if Mars may be a
| shared end goal anyway. (Blue Origin also presumably is
| equally Mars-focused like SpaceX.)
| schoen wrote:
| > Imagine trying to pour water from a thermos into a red-hot
| skillet while falling off a cliff and you get some idea of the
| difficulties.
|
| Maciej has such a talent for picturesque metaphors.
| RyanShook wrote:
| Artemis is probably the best evidence moon-landing conspiracists
| have ever had.
| causality0 wrote:
| NASA is excellent at its job. You just have to accept the fact
| that in 1969, NASA's job was putting astronauts on the moon, and
| in 2024 NASA's job is distributing taxpayer money to various
| places that don't deserve it. They're damn good at their job.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| 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/
| lyu07282 wrote:
| 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.
| 9dev wrote:
| From what I can gather, they largely distribute money to lots
| of places in the USA, thereby pouring money into regions that
| wouldn't have it otherwise, creating jobs that wouldn't exist
| otherwise, and raise the baseline income overall. If anything,
| this should have a beneficial effect where more people can
| spend more, don't require social services, slide into drug
| abuse or homelessness. Some part of the government has to do
| that; but instead of just handing the money out to poor people,
| they do it indirectly and keep folk in active employment. What
| would be bad about that?
| csomar wrote:
| This is a dangerous path (assuming it is the case, I don't
| know about NASA internals). If you want to improve people's
| living or help them; just do that and _help_ them by putting
| money in their bank accounts no strings attached.
| 9dev wrote:
| Most governments of the world would disagree with you here;
| wealth redistribution programmes are a normal and proven
| way to organise a state. You can help people in a
| multitudes of ways, and just handing them out money is not
| always the best option--people also need maintained
| infrastructure, schools, entertainment, parks, municipal
| services, and so on; and they usually also need purpose,
| which many people derive from their jobs. So having a large
| employer, or a project that builds on many contractors that
| employee people, is a good way to distribute wealth and
| achieve something beneficial in the process, like GPS
| satellites, space science, or just plain power display to
| other nations. All the people that are employed in the
| process pay taxes, care about their neighbourhoods, send
| their kids to universities, go shopping, and keep the
| economy alive.
|
| I'm not to say this is the only true answer, other
| approaches exist, like the (so far unproven) unconditional
| basic income, or just social security services. But I would
| definitely argue that it has positive effects for an
| economy to keep people busy, to give them purpose and
| secure jobs.
|
| Edit: Having said all that, of course I'm neither an
| authority on NASA internals here, but the strategy would
| make sense and definitely is applied in other areas and
| countries, too.
| hi_hi wrote:
| Out of interest, what do people think is going to happen once
| humans can semi-reliably get to the moon?
|
| I don't often see this part talked about. I read lots about the
| astronomical (thank you!) cost and effort of getting there, often
| framed in a way that makes the whole endeavour appear pointless
| and dumb.
|
| Will they just potter about for a few days, grab a handful of
| rocks, take some jaunty selfies, have a cup of tea and then head
| home? Like Wallace and Grommit?
|
| No. They will prepare to strip mine it for all it is worth. Where
| is that discussion?
| philwelch wrote:
| Man, I wish. We need to catch up and build out the high
| frontier already.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| 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.
| avmich wrote:
| > There's nothing there we can't get on Earth, 10x cheaper.
|
| It's not too big a stretch of imagination to consider
| producing oxygen on the Moon from rocks and sending it to LEO
| for refueling Starships - this activity might get useful
| enough if we're going to use Starships to fly someplace more
| distant than the low Earth orbit. And Moon-originated oxygen
| has an energy advantage over the Earth-originated one.
| zzzeek wrote:
| hm what IS it worth ? There's some kind of valuable minerals
| there?
|
| Google: "Helium 3". well we do need that
| hi_hi wrote:
| Yes, exactly this. Helium 3 isn't naturally occurring on
| Earth, and is very expensive.
|
| Nasa are already running challenges for the best way for
| rovers to process/mine the moons surface.
| https://www.nasa.gov/learning-resources/lunabotics-
| challenge...
|
| And how do we deal with the boundary issues of who gets to
| mine where. Let alone the political issues I'm sure will
| arise.
|
| Theres so much fascinating discussion to be had, but I guess
| rockets win the cool badge.
| jcranmer wrote:
| 3He, aka the material whose primary envisioned use is for
| something we can't do and don't look able to do anytime soon
| (nuclear fusion), and which exists in comparable
| concentration on the moon as it does on Earth. That people
| run to it for the standard example of what can be feasibly
| mined from the moon should be a strong indicator of how
| little viability there is for space mining.
| carapace wrote:
| Fly.
|
| On Luna a human being can fly. You need wings and a large air-
| filled cave and then you can fly like a bird.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menace_from_Earth
|
| That alone would surely be worth the price of admission?
|
| Also, it's the gateway to the rest of the Solar system, galaxy,
| and Universe.
| bnralt wrote:
| > What NASA is doing is like an office worker blowing half their
| salary on lottery tickets while putting the other half in a
| pension fund. If the lottery money comes through, then there was
| really no need for the pension fund. But without the lottery win,
| there's not enough money in the pension account to retire on. The
| two strategies don't make sense together.
|
| I don't think this analogy works, and it reflects a bigger issue
| with the essay. Unlike a pension fund, gateway and lunar landings
| don't actually seem to do anything or move us forward. Like many
| of NASA's human spaceflight programs (and a decent amount of its
| unmanned spaceflight programs), they seem to be doing something
| just to be doing it. So a better analogy might be using half of
| your money to buy lottery tickets, and setting the other half on
| fire. Buying lottery tickets might not be a great way to spend
| money, but it's at least possible you'll get some return from it.
| idlewords wrote:
| Personally, I agree with you that the whole program is useless.
| The point I'm trying to make with this analogy is that the
| effort is internally incoherent even if you grant the premise
| that moon landings and building Gateway are desirable outcomes.
| danpalmer wrote:
| They've essentially hedged, but in a way that gets the worst
| of both worlds rather than the best.
| davedx wrote:
| What do you think is useful for NASA to do? Do you think any
| form of spaceflight is _useful_?
| idlewords wrote:
| I'm a big fan of space exploration and would love to see a
| robotic exploration program on the scale of our current
| human space flight endeavors, sending rovers and landers
| all over the solar system, along with a major space
| telescope every 3 years or so (instead of once a decade).
|
| I feel like we're squandering an amazing chance to explore
| space by getting stuck on sending people instead of
| leveraging the enormous progress in microelectronics,
| robotics, and autonomy of the last 60 years.
| playingonline wrote:
| If we _did_ want to become a spacefaring, world-hopping,
| intergalactic, etc., species in the long term, we wouldn
| 't be sending humans into space right now, because robots
| are easier to keep alive and do more science with. That
| was the overall point I got from this and why not mars,
| which seems true for now.
|
| But, even though putting humans on the rockets makes them
| cost more, it also garners more funding. I don't know,
| maybe we could convince all American schoolchildren to
| aspire to be robot programmers rather than astronauts.
| But typing this out, it seems like:
|
| a) you could ask congress to fund robotic exploration,
| which maybe citizens care about and support, but if they
| don't then...
|
| b) you could instead set up a giant human space program
| that wastes tens of billions of dollars to do nothing,
| then quietly siphon off a few billion here or there for
| JPL or SpaceX to do valuable unmanned research.
|
| Maybe the former is possible, and you're fighting the
| good fight, but most voters don't read long blog posts
| comparing manned vs unmanned space exploration, and
| really when it comes to space are only excited by people
| standing on the moon. I do hope you convince more people,
| but fortunately whatever monstrosity we have now is at
| least a nice jobs program.
| thisaccount546 wrote:
| The weird thing about NASA's budget when you look at it[1]
| is that funding allocation appears to be inversely
| proportional to the benefit. Human spaceflight is the
| largest chunk, at 44.9% of the budget. Aeronautics and
| technology are at the bottom, with technology being
| allocated 4.9% of the budget, and aeronautics 3.5%.
|
| There were good reasons why people were interested in
| sending people into space in the early days of space
| exploration. Before automated systems were sufficiently
| developed, manned programs looked like the best choice. But
| once automated systems became sufficiently advanced, it was
| clear that they were the way to go.
|
| You can see this when it comes to reconnaissance satellites
| - both the U.S. (with the uncompleted Manned Orbital
| Laboratory) and the USSR (with Almaz, which was completed)
| began with the idea of having manned reconnaissance
| satellites, but as time progressed they realized autonomous
| ones were better.
|
| If we were sticking people in reconnaissance satellites
| just for the sake of sticking them in reconnaissance
| satellites today, it would obviously be farcical. But
| NASA's manned space program has being doing the equivalent
| for decades - blowing a huge part of their budget on
| sending people into space just for the sake of sending them
| into space (by the 80's this had reached the point where
| they had a program of sending teachers into space for the
| purpose of having them come back and tell students how cool
| it was to go to space). But since NASA has more open ended
| objectives than the military, it's easier to hide the fact
| that this isn't accomplishing much, or that these programs
| have diverted so much from many of NASA's core objectives.
|
| [1]https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasa-budget
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > There were good reasons why people were interested in
| sending people into space in the early days of space
| exploration. Before automated systems were sufficiently
| developed, manned programs looked like the best choice.
| But once automated systems became sufficiently advanced,
| it was clear that they were the way to go.
|
| This, and it never ceases to baffle me that there are
| people who still believe that there is some sort of
| actual, honest, technical reason to put people into
| things that go into space.
| pfdietz wrote:
| To steelman the argument for human spaceflight:
|
| If launch becomes sufficiently cheap, then the cost of
| supporting humans in space also becomes cheap. The cost
| of developing space robots doesn't decline nearly as
| much. At some point, "why not robots in space?" has the
| answer "because on Earth there are plenty of applications
| where people are cheaper", and cheap space moves that
| argument to space as well.
|
| Note that this implies the overriding importance of
| reducing costs vs. just sending people expensively for
| symbolic reasons. The latter is as idiotic as it has ever
| been.
|
| I seriously doubt NASA as it is currently funded and
| constructed can deliver this.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > The cost of developing space robots doesn't decline
| nearly as much.
|
| Developing Costs wouldn't, but deployment costs would.
|
| If launching becomes cheaper, then, sure, I _could_
| launch more space toilets and freeze-dried groceries. Or
| I could use that capacity to launch more and bigger
| robots, more often and further. Guess which of these two
| has a better ROI given the many many many limitations
| humans have once they leave our Planet, compared to
| robots.
|
| It doesn't matter how cheap a launch becomes. I have to
| support an astronaut with food. They have to exercise or
| their body breaks down in low gravity. I have to let them
| sleep.
|
| All this is time, payload capacity and energy wasted,
| that I could instead funnel into more, better, bigger
| more capable robots.
|
| And, finally: I have to bring astronauts back home
| safely, unless I want to risk a PR desaster (which is not
| good for funding). Once I am done with the robot, I can
| just leave it where it is and sell T-Shirts with its
| silhouette printed on.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > It doesn't matter how cheap a launch becomes. I have to
| support an astronaut with food.
|
| So, if it were to be as cheap to go into space as to go
| to St. Louis, sending a person would make no sense
| because of... food? This makes no sense.
|
| Obviously there is some breakpoint at which it _would_
| make sense. You can 't just handwave and say that
| universally without doing arithmetic.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > So, if it were to be as cheap to go into space as to go
| to St. Louis
|
| Obviously there is a breakpoint at which the cost
| differential would no longer matter, I agree.
|
| It's just as obvious however, that this breakpoint won't
| be reached in the near future, or even the forseeable
| future.
|
| It would require a radically new propulsion technology,
| which, and this is the sad truth, we don't have. The way
| we launch rockets today has remained pretty much the same
| for more than half a century: By burning chemicals in a
| tube.
|
| As long as that doesn't change, I can pretty much
| guarantee that the cost differential between doing space-
| exploration using humans, and doing it with robotic
| probes, will not look good for good 'ol humans any time
| soon.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Why is it obvious? Starship, if it succeeds, could reduce
| launch costs per mass by two orders of magnitude over
| Falcon 9. For the cost of one SLS launch, Starship, if it
| meets its cost targets, could launch the mass of a
| nuclear supercarrier into low earth orbit. The cost to
| LEO would become similar to the cost of transport to the
| South Pole.
|
| You will notice we are not using robots at the South
| Pole.
| playingonline wrote:
| It could be that for the sort of work we want to do on
| the south pole a human in a jacket outperforms our
| current robots, but for the sort of work we want to do on
| the moon a robot, or our future robot, will outperform a
| human in a spacesuit.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Sure, it _could_ be. All sorts of things _could_ be.
| Making that observation is not an argument that something
| _is_.
| thisaccount546 wrote:
| That's an argument argument that human spaceflight could,
| at some point in the future, make sense. Though it's also
| likely that automation becomes cheaper in the future.
| When people are claiming that automation is going to
| replace many tasks for humans on earth, it's not much of
| a stretch to think they would continue to perform better
| than humans in space, where humans are at a severe
| disadvantage.
|
| We also have to consider what it is that we actually want
| people to do up there. A lot of people say "A human could
| do more science on Mars than a rover!" Leaving aside the
| fact that we could send multiple rovers for the cost and
| effort of sending a human, and those rovers would be on
| the planet much longer - "do science" isn't a goal. Even
| the current rover missions have questionable usefulness,
| which is why there's always a big celebration when they
| land, or a discussion about how impressive the
| engineering is, but extremely little discussion about any
| of the things they're learning.
| pfdietz wrote:
| For human spaceflight to be ruled out, automation has to
| be superior for every worthwhile application of human
| labor in space, not just some of them. Here on Earth,
| automation is predicted to increase, but few are
| predicting it makes human labor useless.
|
| I think greatly advanced automation would improve the
| argument for humans in space, not refute it, by making it
| easier to support humans in space.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > For human spaceflight to be ruled out, automation has
| to be superior for every worthwhile application of human
| labor in space, not just some of them.
|
| This is the case right now. There is not a single
| activity in space exploration right now, that humans can
| do better than robots.
|
| > Here on Earth, automation is predicted to increase, but
| few are predicting it makes human labor useless.
|
| Because here on earth, humans can breathe, eat, drink,
| piss and poop, without millions of dollars of equipment
| required to do so.
| thisaccount546 wrote:
| For all of the things we want to do, automation
| outperforms humans in space. I pointed this out in my
| earlier post - this wasn't the case in the 50's and early
| 60's, so these satellites were planned to be manned (and
| actually were in the USSR's case). But automation made
| much more sense, so the plans changed to unmanned
| satellites.
|
| Perhaps this could change in the future. But at least in
| the present, unmanned makes more sense, which is why
| these things are unmanned. And historically, increased
| automation has lessened the need for something to be
| manned (which, is to be expected), so it's likely the
| same will be true when it comes to space.
| jcranmer wrote:
| There is _one_ benefit to human spaceflight over robotic
| spaceflight: the human body is a much more adapted tool
| to unknown situations than robots are. A human hand is a
| better manipulator than any robotic tool (look up videos
| of robots trying to turn a doorknob and open a door,
| e.g.), and our locomotion tends to be well-adapted to
| adverse terrain.
|
| But it is far from clear that such versatility is worth
| all of the costs of human spaceflight, principally the
| fact that humans are fragile bags of water that require
| fine-tuned environmental conditions to operate (and such
| conditions are difficult to provide in space).
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > : the human body is a much more adapted tool to unknown
| situations than robots are.
|
| Here on Earth, that is true.
|
| Everywhere else however, our body is confined to a bulky,
| heavy, unwieldy space suit, and has exactly as much range
| of movement as the air supply allows.
|
| And the thing is: We can make better robots. There is
| clear progress in terms of their capabilities. Not so
| long ago, [this][1] would only have been possible as CGI,
| today, it is technical reality.
|
| This rapid path to improvement, simply doesn't exist for
| biological systems.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ
| kqr wrote:
| I'm confused by this analogy also. Is the article saying that
| NASA is spending money on things that are negative EV? When it
| comes to these space exploration things that sounds like a
| subjective value judgment rather than an objective cost/benefit
| type thing.
|
| Are they saying this sort of lottery has positive EV, just that
| the expectation is small? Then the Kelly-optimal course of
| action is indeed to split one's salary between it and the
| pension fund -- the exact ratio takes a more ambitious
| estimation of the EV, of course. But the idea to split money
| between safe, sure returns and moonshots is not a flawed idea
| at all.
| mangecoeur wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| You are mixing things up. There's one part of the government
| that's spending this money, but they can't print money. They
| have to borrow it (or collect it as taxes).
|
| There's another part of the government, the Fed, that can
| print money. But by and large, they don't 'spend' it. And
| they are bound by an inflation target. If inflation goes
| above target, the Fed sells assets from its balance sheet to
| remove money from circulation.
|
| Borrowing or taxation just shuffles money around. If it has
| any impact on total nominal spending, that's nullified by the
| Fed adjusting the money supply to hit their inflation target.
|
| You are right, that the point of many government programs
| seems to be to distribute the pork. But that pork comes from
| current and future tax payers.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Loss of crew tolerance is not what it used to be. The Apollo
| astronauts were given about a 10% chance of not coming back. In
| Apollo 13 they very narrowly avoided. Which was considered
| acceptable for the time period.
|
| I'd argue that mission failure tolerance is also considerably
| lower, in todays political environment. Again, Armstrong said
| their chances of actually landing were maybe 50/50.
|
| So if they get there and have a frack up and can't land, calls to
| defund NASA, etc. will start to reverberate.
|
| So thats what we're paying double for. Which I'd think, is fairly
| cheap.
| boxed wrote:
| If you're paying double for it, why are you getting the SLS for
| that price? Which, as the article painfully shows, INCREASES
| risk. By a lot.
| p_l wrote:
| Because it's not called Senate Launch System without a
| reason.
|
| Just like with Shuttle, which was seriously technically
| compromised due to issues with budgeting, NASA can not
| operate according to their best knowledge as if they just had
| that money. The money has strings, many of them.
| idlewords wrote:
| According to NASA's own advisory panel, the chance of losing
| the crew on just the SLS/Orion portion of the mission (so not
| including the landing, Gateway, or the trip to and from the
| lunar surface) is 1 in 75. If you make the reasonable
| assumption that the landing is at least as risky as the trip
| over, you get a 1 in 30 chance the crew dies.
|
| The Shuttle towards the end of its life had an estimated chance
| of loss of crew of 1 in 90, and two administrations decided
| that was untenable. The standard for missions to ISS is 1:250.
| If a goal of Artemis is to meet modern safety standards, it's
| falling way short.
| gus_massa wrote:
| IIRC from the Feynman apendix, Nasa claimed in the official
| reports that the SLS had 1/10.000 or 1/1.000.000 chance of
| failures, but the real numeber was close to 1/100.
|
| If they now claim 1/75 in the official reports, I'm very
| worried.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| A good part of the article argues that we aren't getting that
| safety, though. Spending a week around the moon to make up for
| hardware shortcomings is not encouraging.
|
| It appears by and large that most of the components being used
| for this will be lucky to have been tested in action more than
| once before they have to carry astronauts...
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| Hey, just a note, there's a problem with the footnote numbering.
| Clicking on a footnote takes you to the right text, but often the
| numbers don't match.
| idlewords wrote:
| Never say problem. Say "opportunity".
| xarope wrote:
| This quote is a doozy too:
|
| "Visionaries at NASA identified a futuristic new energy source
| (space billionaire egos) and found a way to tap it on a fixed-
| cost basis"
| mlindner wrote:
| I think that's reversing cause and effect though. NASA didn't
| "figure out" anything, they had to be forced kicking and
| screaming to do it. They may be embracing it now, but they did
| not cause it.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| Does anyone has a theory why in 60 years no one beats the F-1
| engine? How is this possible?
| idlewords wrote:
| This video on what a modern Saturn V would look like goes into
| it a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNZx208bw0g
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| 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
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > decided
|
| That's putting way more control in NASA's wheelhouse than
| really belongs there.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| You're right, I should have said "the Senate".
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 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.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| > Now the technology has caught up, we can make small, highly
| efficient, powerful, reliable and restartable engines, and
| can control large numbers of them.
|
| Can we? Starships keep exploding. I get it, great engines are
| built on heaps of blown up engines. But are we there yet?
| mhandley wrote:
| Yes, on the last flight both the first and second stages
| had no problems with the engines on ascent. If this were a
| Saturn V booster, it would have been a complete success.
| They did suffer failures with booster recovery, and with
| the RCS in orbit, but controlling large numbers of small
| powerful cheap engines seems to be a solved problem
| already.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 'Starships keep exploding' is kind of like saying 'tests
| keep failing' in test-driven development. Yeah, the tests
| for the stuff you're actively writing or haven't written
| yet are going to fail until you finish working on them and
| to someone who doesn't have a debugger it's just going to
| look like a crash...
|
| People have forgotten how much destructive testing NASA
| used to do back in the Apollo era (eg with the Ranger
| program, 9 were launched over 5 years, the first 5 were
| total failures, 6th was a partial failure).
|
| SpaceX has pretty rapidly improved in Raptor reliability,
| we've gone from seeing them routinely spitting out green
| flames (ie eating themselves) on the early tests, to now
| routinely firing them on the test stand without issue (with
| the exceptions assumed to be when they're trying to probe
| the limits). We've gone from them having trouble lighting
| them reliably, to lighting and maintaining all engines at
| launch on both vehicles in the most recent test flight.
| Similarly it's been a while since we've seen a static fire
| where an engine failed to light. This is despite the
| constant performance upgrades pushing its already world
| leading specs even higher.
|
| The most recent explosions were very likely not due to the
| engines. For the booster, iirc the theory based on the
| public data is that the oscillations due to some issue with
| the grid fin control system caused the propellants to slosh
| around very hard, damaging the plumbing, causing the
| engines to shut down and the booster to smash into the
| water. The Starship had a very visible leak under its skirt
| that caused it to be unable to maintain attitude, I think
| the theory with this is that it was a stuck or damaged
| valve in the RCS.
|
| And, of course, as the other poster mentioned, they're
| almost at the point where what's failing is the reusability
| rather than launch, the only launch related milestone left
| to prove out is engine relight in vacuum. While they will
| probably figure out reuse eventually, it is not strictly
| necessary for HLS, especially as it pertains to the
| Starship itself (which is a much bigger challenge than the
| booster). The booster is the most expensive part of the
| vehicle, so their priority is to get reuse for it working.
| If they encounter significant hurdles with reusing the
| Starships, they can throw them away for early HLS launches
| and still be cheaper than SLS.
|
| As far as controlling large numbers of engines and having
| them be cheap, restartable and throttleable, we have the
| Merlin in Falcon 9 and especially Falcon Heavy as an
| example. Heavy has to control 27 engines at liftoff. For
| powerful, highly efficient engines, we have the RS-25 in
| Shuttle/SLS and BE-4 in Vulcan/New Glen as additional
| examples.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| > Starships keep exploding' is kind of like saying 'tests
| keep failing' in test-driven development.
|
| Saturn V had zero failed launches
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 'test-driven development'
| tekla wrote:
| Apollo 6 was a partial failure due to engine failure of
| the 2nd stage.
|
| Also they blew up tons of F1 engines during testing. They
| never got the POGO issues fixed.
|
| I really don't understand why people make these
| arguments. SpaceX is explicitly saying they dont want to
| spend money proving everything works the first time.
| mlindner wrote:
| 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.
| perilunar wrote:
| When was this published?
|
| The heading says 1.1.2023 but the article URL says 2024/5 ?
|
| Also, in the first sentence "A little over 51 years ago"
| (referring to Apollo 17 of December 1972) would indicate that
| that the article was indeed written in early 2023. Yet some of
| the links in the footnotes seem to postdate this.
| idlewords wrote:
| It was published today. I've fixed the wrong heading date.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I wonder how much will it cost China to put people on the moon.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| _I_ wonder what it costs China to put batteries and other
| commodities on the global market.
| adolph wrote:
| _I_ wonder how China will keep the spigot flowing.
|
| _By one estimate, in 2023 China 's population stood at 1.409
| billion, down from the 1.412 billion recorded in the 2020
| census. By another, the population was likely 1.28 billion in
| 2020 and had been surpassed by India some years earlier._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
| oldkinglog wrote:
| > This is a remarkable situation. It's like if you hired someone
| to redo your kitchen and they started building a boat in your
| driveway. Sure, the boat gives the builders a place to relax,
| lets them practice tricky plumbing and finishing work, and is a
| safe place to store their tools. But all those arguments will
| fail to satisfy. You still want to know what building a boat has
| to do with kitchen repair, and why you're the one footing the
| bill.
|
| What is this? The essay is littered with these awkward family
| guy-esque jokes that do nothing to illustrate any point.
| pavlov wrote:
| 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.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Follow the money. Maybe Artemis is inneficient but it will still
| make some people a lot of money.
| jpk wrote:
| > Follow the money.
|
| Please do share what you've found.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| As a army general once said paraphrased "You fly with what you
| have". When will Starship and Glenn be ready to achieve trans
| lunar injection ???.
| mlindner wrote:
| 2025 or 2026 for Starship.
| mlindner wrote:
| Note that one of the images he uses is a doctored/edited NASA
| image. It's the 4th slide in this slide deck:
| https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220003725/downloads/22...
|
| That should probably be made more clear lest people be confused
| and think it's official.
| krisoft wrote:
| 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.
| mlindner wrote:
| > The article clearly makes the point that nobody seems to
| know how many Starship launches the lunar mission will take.
| It varies from 4 launches (by Elon) to high teens (by
| Lakiesha Hawkins) and 15 (by Kathy Lueders).
|
| That's expected when your rocket is under development. People
| over-hype on this for some reason. They either misunderstand
| engineering or they're intentionally trying to nitpick
| something.
|
| > the plan changed
|
| The plan hasn't changed in as much there was no plan at all
| yet, as we're still too early.
| nativeit wrote:
| I'm seeing Starship discussed in terms that suggest I've missed
| something. When did it accomplish even the most base level
| demonstration of its required capabilities? How could anyone have
| any certainty in Starship at this stage, and how could anyone
| possibly compare it with anything?
| mlindner wrote:
| What do you define as "most base level"? It's a development
| project. When something is in development you still have lots
| of bugs to be ironed out. However it was quite successful, even
| given that. It reached orbital velocities the last launch,
| which is all that a regular rocket is expected to do. It did
| fail to do a in-space relight of its engines, which eliminates
| some usages, but if it was just launching a regular payload it
| could've done that. And the next launch is happening sometime
| next month.
| Culonavirus wrote:
| 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 :) ...)
| rockemsockem wrote:
| They have certainly in the company.
|
| Also, one thing I'm not seeing mentioned is that Congress did
| not give NASA enough money to pay for any of the initial human
| lander system contract bids. SpaceX lowered their bid to
| accommodate this.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| 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.
| kqr wrote:
| I didn't live through the early space programmes, but having read
| about them recently, I'm surprised by how incremental they (and
| the Soviet Sputnik and Vostok counterparts) were.
|
| - The early Mercury flights developed the idea of putting a human
| in a capsule on top of an ICBM to see what happens at altitude
| and during re-entry.
|
| - Later Mercury flights experimented with de-orbiting techniques.
| (The early flights didn't need that because the ICBMs that
| launched the first people into space did so on a ballistic
| trajectory - they never achieved orbit.)
|
| - With Gemini we figured out things like endurance (what is it
| like to have humans in space for weeks), rendezvous and docking
| (incredibly difficult), and extravehicular activities
| (preparation for walking on another astronomical body.)
|
| - Early Apollo was focused entirely on solving multi-stage
| flights without humans on board.
|
| - With Apollo 7 we verified the command module was good enough to
| attempt to send a few laps around the moon, which happened with
| Apollo 8, while we were still waiting for a fully functioning
| lander.
|
| - Apollo 9 was a dry run of the entire moon landing sequence -
| except in low Earth orbit.
|
| - Apollo 10 repeated the same exercise from Apollo 9 except in
| Lunar orbit.
|
| - Apollo 11 is often considered the first moon landing, but from
| the perspective of the program, it was really just another
| experiment: can we repeat Apollo 10 except also make a brief
| touch-and-go anywhere on the lunar surface?
|
| - Even Apollo 12 isn't really a moon landing proper, but another
| experiment: can we repeat Apollo 11 but now also make a precision
| touchdown?
|
| It wasn't until somewhere around Apollo 14/15 where the main
| purpose of the missions started becoming scientifically exploring
| the moon.
|
| That's something like 25 crewed flights at various stages of
| development that had as their purpose to explore/learn about just
| one or two new aspects of the future moon missions, pushing the
| envelope a little further.
|
| Granted, many of these things we have fresh practise in thanks to
| the space station, but also many of them we don't. It seems a
| little weird to bet it all on a small number of big bang
| launches.
| mglz wrote:
| 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.
| kqr wrote:
| Sure, that's probably true.
|
| As the saying goes, the Apollo program was one of the
| greatest scientific accomplishments of the Soviet Union.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| The other thing you have to remember is that back in that
| era, the various military agencies all had a vested interest
| in rocket technology. Either for suborbital attack profiles
| or for orbital reasons like recon satellites (which at one
| point were assumed to be manned, but that didn't prove
| required).
|
| NASA wound up giving Congress a way to partially unify some
| of this. Saturn V obviously isn't an ICBM, but if we have the
| people and technology to make a man-rated rocket to get to
| the moon it's pretty safe to assume we can build ICBMs to any
| specification. The military wasn't thrilled with this early
| on because it meant rockets that were seen as weapons needed
| to be designed with huge safety margins.
|
| In the end a sort of uneasy truce arose from this and lead to
| the Space Shuttle. This was intended to create a civilian
| program with indefinite access to low earth orbit, servicing
| military and intelligence needs when required. Once it became
| apparent this was impossible, Congress gave the DoD the go
| ahead to resume spending on their own ride to space. This in
| turn lead to the absolute debacle that was the Titan IV. This
| lead to the EELV program which gave us Atlas V. By this point
| the US's capabilities had declined so much the best we could
| do was strap a US made fuel tank to a bunch of Russian made
| rockets.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >The space race likely necessitated NASA to show some
| improvement frequently.
|
| One could add agile + jira +standup = success
| leoedin wrote:
| Iterative development is the only way you can do R&D. That
| truth was clearly known by NASA leadership in the 60s in a way
| that clearly isn't today.
|
| I think it's probably a symptom of wider culture. In the 60s
| every major industry was in the middle of a massive improvement
| cycle, a lot of the engineers would have learned their skills
| during the R&D boom of the Second World War, and everything was
| still manufactured locally. It was the perfect environment for
| rapid engineering improvement.
|
| Most of that has gone today. The major physical technologies we
| use - vehicles, appliances, manufacturing technology, have
| largely been solved. Improvement is incremental. If you did a
| survey of 100 engineers across the aerospace industry you'd
| probably find a handful who had any experience of boundary
| pushing R&D - most of the work is in documenting changes and
| making slight tweaks. SpaceX is definitely an exception.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > That truth was clearly known by NASA leadership in the 60s
| in a way that clearly isn't today.
|
| Maybe the current generation grew up on way too many vivid SF
| movies. And their intuitions are that we should know it
| enough already to wing it on the large parts.
| adolph wrote:
| waterfall project, cost-plus contracting and congressional
| appropriations "report language"
|
| _On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones, a paper by Pete Worden
| about NASA 's bureaucracy, to describe the relationship
| between the Space Shuttle and Space Station._ [0, linked
| from 1]
|
| 0. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234554226_On_Se
| lf-L...
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-
| licking_ice_cream_cone
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Iterative (repeating) and incremental (additive). We
| sometimes forget that last part in software development, too.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Yeah, the risk appetite was much higher. Those are good
| reminders on Apollo 1/6/8, but the problems didn't stop
| there. The first 5 landing missions all had huge problems
| that nearly killed everyone, too. Only the last 2 landings
| were sort of OK.
|
| Apollo 1: burned all astronauts alive
|
| ...
|
| Apollo 10: POGO oscillations on launch (Saturn V still trying
| to tear itself apart), LEM tumbling
|
| Apollo 11: Computer kept crashing all the way down to the
| moon (it controlled the engines)
|
| Apollo 12: Brownout in the command module during launch, "Set
| SCE to Aux"
|
| Apollo 13: Oxygen tank fire. So rough they made a movie.
|
| Apollo 14: Shorted abort button almost killed everyone
|
| Apollo 15: Parachute failure
|
| ---------
|
| We have no shortage of people who would be willing to put
| their life on the line, but we do have a shortage of the
| political urgency/unity to tolerate actual problems. Just
| look at people dig into Elon Musk every time he explodes a
| prototype with his own money and nobody on board, and realize
| that accelerating a human program creates 10x the political
| sniping opportunity.
| kqr wrote:
| You're sensationalising a little.
|
| 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.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Apollo 13 also had severe pogo on launch. Obviously it's
| overshadowed by the unrelated oxygen tank issues later, but
| that mission actually got extremely lucky that the
| oscillations happened to occur in such a way that the
| computer noticed the issue and shut down the affected
| engine. That could easily not have been the case, and if
| the oscillations had continued for a few more seconds it
| would have destroyed the vehicle.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Counterpoint: all of those incidents, except Apollo 1 are
| proof that the engineering was great, because nobody died.
|
| For example, you mention the computer on the Apollo 11
| lunar module crashing. In fact, it was recovering and
| working properly. The astronauts had left the rendezvous
| radar on during descent, in case it was needed for abort.
| That was not a nominal configuration, and the radar kept
| stealing cycles and causing the guidance computer to be
| overloaded with tasks. Remember, it was a hard real time
| system. What did the computer do? Reset and prioritize the
| key task: landing.
|
| Apollo 12: Got hit (twice) by lightning. The electrical
| system wasn't fried, it survived it, in a protective mode.
| Importantly, the computers in the Instrument Unit, placed
| on the third stage, were completely unaffected.
|
| Apollo 15: One lost parachute, still landed safely (if a
| bit hard) because of redundancy.
|
| I could go on, but you get the point. It was a well-
| engineered system backed by a team of engineers.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| Maybe. But it's hard to tell whether nobody died because
| the system was robust vs. nobody died because we got
| lucky.
|
| For example, there were several cases of burn-through on
| the O-rings before Challenger. The engineers thought
| there was enough margin to not worry about it, so they
| didn't
|
| Similarly, when Columbia was hit by foam-ice on ascent no
| one worried because it had happened before and nobody had
| died.
| twh270 wrote:
| Correction -- at least for Challenger, engineers did not
| think there was margin, and argued against the launch.
|
| At the technical level, both tragedies were caused by
| design flaws. Organizationally and culturally, multiple
| factors contributed, but an attitude of "nothing has
| happened yet, so this is fine" (normalizing risk) was a
| major one.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| We don't disagree about the engineering being excellent.
| I was commenting on safety culture. A few days ago I saw
| Tory Bruno explain with visible frustration how they
| canceled the launch due to a valve that had to be cycled
| before it behaved. In that environment, the Apollo risks
| would not have been tolerated, even though they turned
| out to have been good bets.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm interested in what we committed enormous effort to
| researching and testing and discovered it's simply not
| something to worry about or be bothered with.
| phoe18 wrote:
| Would you recommend any books to read on this history?
| grecy wrote:
| From the Earth to the Moon is a brilliant TV series that
| shows it all really well.
|
| I love the episode where they sit down and list out the ~10
| things they'll have to figure out how to do in order to
| achieve Kennedy's promise of landing within the decade.
|
| Then they just assign teams and get on it, working on each
| item until they can actually do it.
| trollerator23 wrote:
| They were incremental but they were incredibly accelerated and
| ambitious. From nobody ever been in space to landing on the
| Moon less in 10 years. It's mind boggling how fast they were,
| and how many projects were running in parallel that all had to
| work when integrated or no "landing on the moon before the
| decade is over".
| KasianFranks wrote:
| This person is forgetting the entire operation is based on space
| biosciences, not just space. Vector Space Biosciences presents at
| DeSci London March 2024 - Min: 4:27:33
| https://youtu.be/fbnFEvfKRO8?t=16052
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| This is just a pitch for your company hamfisted into unrelated
| content.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| People forget that NASA's portion of the federal budget during
| Apollo was more than an order of magnitude higher than today.
|
| NASA does the most ambitious thing it can get funding from
| Congress for.
| ssijak wrote:
| 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.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| They were required, by Congress, to use Shuttle engines and
| SRBs to build a vehicle capable of deep space transportation.
| seastarer wrote:
| They should have refused
| ikeashark wrote:
| Congress: Use Shuttle engines and SRBs to build a vehicle
| capable of deep space transportation.
|
| Nasa: No that's too costly.
|
| Congress: lol ok we'll slash funding + you legally can't
| refuse.
| pfdietz wrote:
| If the customer demands it they'll sell their integrity,
| and damn the taxpayers. I have little sympathy for this.
|
| If this sort of continued honesty-free space program is
| what Congress + NASA are going to give us, we'd be better
| off without a manned space program.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| Yep. For reference regarding the budget stipulations:
| https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls
| gibolt wrote:
| NASA does the most ambitious thing modern, bureaucratic NASA
| can do with the funding, considering that each previously
| approved project is 4x over budget and 5-10 years late, eating
| into the feasibility of new projects.
|
| Old NASA could do 5-10x as much, with the same amount of
| inflation-adjusted money and people. The motivation was to
| fail+learn and achieve a shared goal. SpaceX is the closest
| analog today, with a long term mission and the drive to make it
| happen.
| p_l wrote:
| NASA could do the same, but it's tied up by Congress and
| jockeying for any money, with funds allocated by Congress on
| a per-project basis.
| Perseids wrote:
| Given that the Artemis program is motivated by space settlement,
| I'm surprised nobody has referenced "A City On Mars" by Kelly and
| Zach Weinersmith (of https://www.smbc-comics.com/ acclaim) yet. I
| went into the book with lots excitement for extraterrestrial
| colonies, and finished it being convinced to better wait.
|
| They argue that if you actually look into the details, especially
| into the "dry" political, legal and social ones, trying to settle
| mars or the moon likely actually increases our risk of
| existential crises (at the current point in time at least). Think
| conflicts between nuclear powers over the (surprisingly few) good
| spots on the moon, or rocks (=asteroids) flung to earth by space
| settlers (there is a lot of deadly potential energy floating
| above all our heads).
|
| Furthermore, there are loads of open space biology questions that
| quickly become _ethical_ questions when permanent settlements are
| considered. _Can_ you have babies in low /micro gravity? _How_
| can you do it without too much harm to your child? The
| responsible approach is to do a few more decades of targeted
| research _first_.
|
| Regardless of the downers it delivers, it's actually a fun read
| and I can recommend it wholeheartedly.
|
| [1] http://www.acityonmars.com/
| delusional wrote:
| 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.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| > Conversely, if SpaceX and Blue Origin can't make cryogenic
| refueling work, then NASA has no plan B for landing on the moon.
|
| If SpaceX and Blue Origin can't. Then Nasa will find someone who
| can. Cryogenic refueling is the projects real engineering target.
| Landing on the moon in the twenty twenties just isn't that
| impressive anymore.
|
| The Artemis program is nominally about going to the moon, but it
| really isn't. It's about building and living in habitats beyond
| low orbit, in orbit refueling, building habitats on the surface
| of another planetary body, and obviously in the future in situ
| resource extraction and surface refueling.
|
| If the mission was to land on the moon, a carbon copy of the
| Apollo program would do. But the mission is to prove they can do
| what it takes to go to and return from Mars.
| geertj wrote:
| 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.
| K0balt wrote:
| I wouldn't go so far as to say it is the "real" engineering
| target, but it is a foundational capability that underpins
| the ability for humans to explore beyond the earth-moon
| system, and it is fraught with difficulty and uncertainty.
|
| Fuel transfer and storage in orbit is problematic in many
| respects.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Like a lot of space technology, orbital refueling sounds
| simple, has never been attempted, and can't be adequately
| simulated on Earth.[18] The crux of the problem is that
| liquid and gas phases in microgravity jumble up into a three-
| dimensional mess, so that even measuring the quantity of
| propellant in a tank becomes difficult.
|
| And for cryogenic propellents specifically:
|
| > Getting this plan to work requires solving a second
| engineering problem, how to keep cryogenic propellants cold
| in space. Low earth orbit is a toasty place, and without
| special measures, the cryogenic propellants Starship uses
| will quickly vent off into space.
| objclxt wrote:
| > They do this on earth every time they fuel the rocket. I
| understand it will be more difficult in space, but I don't
| see why specifically this problem is the real engineering
| target over say, reuse.
|
| The article goes into this in some detail. In particular:
|
| * You have to get the propellant into space. This is going to
| take a large number of flights (~15) at a pace that has not
| been done before for a vehicle of that size (a launch every
| six days)
|
| * You need to launch at pace because otherwise the propellant
| will boil off, which is another issue - you need to shade or
| insulate the propellant for a much longer period of time in
| much harsher conditions
|
| * There is no gravity: whereas on earth the propellant
| separates relatively cleanly into liquid and gas this isn't
| the case in space
| exe34 wrote:
| > There is no gravity: whereas on earth the propellant
| separates relatively cleanly into liquid and gas this isn't
| the case in space
|
| can you use a plunger, instead of a pump? more like a
| syringe?
| imglorp wrote:
| Yeah, a 9 meter diameter one, which adds mass and volume
| and complexity and detracts from the payload.
|
| Instead what they do is use thrust to accelerate the
| whole vehicle a little, which presses all the liquid into
| one end of its tank where it can be pumped out. Instead
| of carrying special settling thrusters, they originally
| planned to use ullage gas for this but it's not clear
| that can work.
|
| deeper discussion with math: https://forum.nasaspacefligh
| t.com/index.php?topic=60124.60
| exe34 wrote:
| plastic balloon?
| pantalaimon wrote:
| What plastic is elastic at those temperatures? (-182
| degC)
| Qworg wrote:
| Something much like this is used for wells - both simple
| and effective. I wonder why it wouldn't work here (or if
| just hasn't been tried).
| tyjo99 wrote:
| Cryogenic temperatures make most materials more brittle,
| hard to get a material that works at a wide enough range
| of temperatures to make a balloon to work correctly.
|
| If you go for a narrower range of temperatures (ie. not
| structurally stable above 0C), it would need to be
| manufactured, transported, stored, tested and installed
| at seriously low temps which probably negates the
| possible advantage with the added technical complexity.
| tyjo99 wrote:
| Most plastics are very brittle at the cryogenic
| temperatures. Also if you are using that method for a
| liquid oxygen tank, you need to make sure that the
| plastic you choose doesn't spontaneously combust on
| contact with LOX.
| imglorp wrote:
| Yes and they would be called bladders, but then you need
| to carry a gas to compress the bladder.
| chasd00 wrote:
| pretty much everything, including and especially plastic,
| becomes a fuel when it comes into contact with liquid
| oxygen. With liquid oxygen in contact with a fuel you're
| virtually guaranteed a fire at some point as it takes
| very little heat to start the combustion. This is why
| when rockets tip over it's an explosion and not just a
| broken airframe with fuel/oxidizer leaking out.
| preisschild wrote:
| Landing/reusing a rocket isn't new and has been done before.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > Then Nasa will find someone who can.
|
| Who's even left? Northrop? Lockmart? Adds an extra 10 years to
| the timeline at the most optimistic.
| spiritbear14 wrote:
| I think they should give it to Boeing
| moffkalast wrote:
| Ha I was just thinking how after the recent QA
| whistleblower fiasco and MCAS, one can't really look at
| Starliner's ongoing list of problems without a sensible
| chuckle. It truly is the 737 Max of space capsules.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > 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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _There is exactly ONE reason why Apollo was manned by
| people instead of robots: Because computers, electronics and
| robotics in the 60s were not up to the task. If todays tech
| existed back then, I would bet the Apollo rocket would have
| had exactly one passenger, and that would have been the Lunar
| Roving vehicle._
|
| The Soviet Union did send a rover. Anyway, the science wasn't
| worth it and the project was driven by romantics who thought
| that it was the duty of mankind to explore. Putting men on
| the Moon was the real point of it.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Long-term habitation of surfaces of bodies other than that of
| Earth is a stepping stone to being able to live in space long
| term in very large, permanently spaceborne crafts. It's
| easier to develop these things on the moon, mars, etc because
| of immediate access to materials that'd need to be launched
| into orbit otherwise. In the long term, it may make sense to
| build shipyards on the moon, on Mars, or somewhere in the
| asteroid belt where large ships can be built and launched
| without having to fight Earth's strong gravity well.
|
| As for why to do that, I like to think of Earth as a very
| cozy cave that humanity's caveman would serve itself well to
| venture beyond, if only to increase the number of
| possibilities for the species. In a universe where there are
| large human civilizations not just throughout the solar
| system but also scattered amongst other star systems, there
| are numerous paths that each branch will take that Earth's
| branch in its lonesome may never have trodden.
|
| It also just seems a bit cruel to be able to see the vastness
| of the universe and never be able to touch any of it in
| person. At the risk of being dramatic, only sending rovers
| and probes while we remain on earth feels a bit like being
| stuck in a gilded cage piloting around drones and RC cars to
| explore what lies beyond.
| z0r wrote:
| Imagine being born in a habitat on another planet that is
| further away from Earth in travel time than one's lifespan,
| and being robbed of your birthright to experience the
| natural wonders and beauty of the cradle of humanity.
| grecy wrote:
| Imagine being born on an earth where millions of species
| have gone extinct, where there are hardly any old growth
| forests left, no bison roaming the central/western US
| plains and where thousands of water bodies around the
| world are so toxic they'll kill you if you fall in.
| lupusreal wrote:
| I feel strongly that I was robbed of my birthright to be
| a mammoth hunter in a caveman tribe. Man didn't evolve
| for this industrial society we've created, our
| machinations have already denied to us our natural
| condition.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| If I could, I would go and be a watchmaker in the 18th
| century.
| jhbadger wrote:
| There are times and places (including the 18th century)
| that seem like they could be interesting to live in, but
| then I consider the lack of indoor plumbing. It's not
| just the convenience -- the lack of hygienic facilities
| was a major reason why cholera and other water-
| transmitted diseases was such a problem even in the West
| until the late 19th century.
| grecy wrote:
| Move North. I spent years up there hunting bison & moose,
| catching salmon so big my arms hurt, cutting my own
| firewood to heat my home, helping friends build their log
| cabins with our bare hands (never got around to building
| my own...).
|
| You can live that life if you want, plenty of people up
| there live off grid and only come into town once a month
| or so.
|
| -48 is a hell of a thing. The most beautiful place I've
| ever been.
| z0r wrote:
| I am an advocate of wildlife conservation efforts, and
| regularly donate to charities that work to conserve
| species and their habitats.
|
| I am just replying to a single comment, so forgive me for
| addressing everyone else as well as you here. I think
| it's very funny that people are making obvious replies to
| my comment to defend against (the also very obvious)
| observation that perhaps being born and dying in a tin
| can on another planet might be an undesirable fate for
| the vast majority of the human race.
| grecy wrote:
| Oh, I agree with you 100%, and I'm just pointing out that
| people probably said exactly the same thing a few hundred
| years ago about living in 2000 (if they knew what it
| would be like), and likely will say it again in a few
| hundred years about living in 3000.
| Teever wrote:
| I guess that would be kind of like the life experience of
| the billions of humans who never had the opportunity to
| go to the cradle of civilization or whereever humans are
| thought to have evolved first.
| deadbabe wrote:
| You don't have to imagine too hard. Imagine being born
| right here on Earth in some shitty country never being
| allowed to really venture beyond the same 14 mile radius
| you were born in because you just have to slave away at a
| job all day and night just to survive. For some, it is
| life.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > a stepping stone to being able to live in space long term
| in very large, permanently spaceborne crafts.
|
| That is not going to happen, without technology that
| currently only exists in Science Fiction, like artificial
| gravity, for the simple reason that we require 1g to live,
| let alone thrive.
|
| > because of immediate access to materials that'd need to
| be launched into orbit otherwise.
|
| 1. How does this "immediate access" benefit the
| aforementioned "very large, permanently spaceborne crafts",
| which apparently won't be moored to planetary bodies?
|
| 2. There is no "immediate access". Having rocks next to me,
| and having the sort of highly refined materials that go
| into building the tech required for spacecraft, are 2
| _VERY_ different things. But, I am always happy to be
| proven wrong: Let 's take a very simple task, like ISRU'ing
| LOX & Methane, and let's do it, at scale, here on Earth,
| where there is no lack of energy, breathable atmosphere,
| building materials and labour. Strange, isn't it, that no
| one seems to be doing that.
|
| > In a universe where there are large human civilizations
| not just throughout the solar system but also scattered
| amongst other star systems, there are numerous paths and
| discoveries that each branch will take that Earth's branch
| in its lonesome may never have trodden.
|
| I agree. But given that, what evidence supports the idea
| that the branch that eventually allows us to leave our
| solar system requires us to first waste tons of resources
| on trying to send people to inhospitable, irradiated rocks
| for no good reason?
|
| Especially since we have a perfectly good alternative to
| this waste of time: Sending robots.
|
| > It also just seems a bit cruel to be able to see the
| vastness of the universe and never be able to touch any of
| it, in person.
|
| Unless we discover a way to do FTL travel, it doesn't
| matter if that feels cruel or not, it is reality.
|
| And I can pretty much guarantee that the person discovering
| the means to cheat physics in such a way won't be doing so
| while constantly worrying about his habitats airlock
| malfunctioning, or the piss-regeneration system giving out,
| or the supply ship getting canceled in the next
| congressional-bickering about the budget.
|
| It will happen here on Earth, likely by someone who never
| visited even LEO, someone who works and lives in a stable
| environment with books, people to talk to, air to breathe
| and delicious non-freeze dried food to eat, who never has
| to worry whether there will be enough recycled piss to make
| his next cup of coffee.
| hersko wrote:
| > That is not going to happen, without technology that
| currently only exists in Science Fiction, like artificial
| gravity, for the simple reason that we require 1g to
| live, let alone thrive.
|
| Artificial gravity is easily generated via rotation or
| thrust.
|
| > 1. How does this "immediate access" benefit the
| aforementioned "very large, permanently spaceborne
| crafts", which apparently won't be moored to planetary
| bodies?
|
| It will be far easier to get materials into space from
| the moon than from the much deeper gravity well of earth.
|
| > I agree. But given that, what evidence supports the
| idea that the branch that eventually allows us to leave
| our solar system requires us to first waste tons of
| resources on trying to send people to inhospitable,
| irradiated rocks for no good reason?
|
| How do you see us developing the technology for humans to
| leave the solar system if we never develop the technology
| to visit the moon?
|
| Technology is generally driven forward by increments, and
| having smaller goals leading to the larger one is pretty
| normal. Also, you don't need to "cheat physics" to
| explore space.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > Artificial gravity is easily generated via rotation or
| thrust.
|
| 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.
| echoangle wrote:
| Just to nitpick the gravity argument: I think a major
| reason there currently is no spacecraft with artificial
| gravity is that microgravity is the whole point of space
| currently. You could probably build a spacestation with
| two sides and a long tether, but you don't want that
| because you couldn't do the interesting research anymore.
| hersko wrote:
| >https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1308/why-are-
| there...
|
| > 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.
| mynotaccount wrote:
| You are living in fairytale land.
| ryandrake wrote:
| You're getting piled on, but you're absolutely right. We
| don't even have the capability to permanently inhabit
| Antarctica, which has 1. an atmosphere of breathable air
| at the right pressure, 2. survivable temperature range,
| 3. abundant water, 4. a magnetic field and radiation
| shielding, 5. safe transit to and from. How does anyone
| think we can inhabit Mars, which doesn't have any of
| these?
|
| Build a city of 100K on the northern-most habitable tip
| of Antarctica and have it (physically, socially, and
| economically) last 10 years, and I'll be convinced that
| we are ready to at least attempt Mars.
| jwells89 wrote:
| It may just be a misunderstanding on my part but aren't
| there treaties that make anything bigger than science
| outposts impractical in Antarctica?
| idlewords wrote:
| There's a similar treaty that precludes human settlement
| on Mars (for planetary protection reasons).
| mft_ wrote:
| Not sure if that's a good argument. There are lots of
| places more hospitable and less remote than Antarctica
| that aren't inhabited either - the reasons why a large
| number of people would inhabit an area or not are
| complex.
|
| _We have the technology as a species_ to be able to
| inhabit Antarctica; there 's just no compelling reason to
| do so at present, so we don't.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| There is also no compelling reason to build a manned base
| on the Moon, or try to build a city on Mars.
| ryandrake wrote:
| That's my point, it takes more than technology to inhabit
| a place. We might barely have the technology to live in
| Antarctica (or the middle of the Sahara desert), but it's
| still not economically feasible, there are no resources
| there that we need, and there's no social/societal need
| to be there. Even if we had the technology to safely get
| to Mars and viably live there (like aliens arrived and
| handed the technology to us), there's no point to doing
| it.
| mft_ wrote:
| You wrote _" We don't even have the capability to
| permanently inhabit Antarctica"_ - this is what I was
| disagreeing with.
| lupusreal wrote:
| We definitely have the capability to permanently inhabit
| Antarctica, except there's nobody who's both willing and
| permitted to do it. This is also the main problem with
| Moon/Mars colonies; it could be done but who will pay for
| it? It's not an economically sound proposal.
| jhbadger wrote:
| The Argentinians claim they have a right to (part of)
| Antarctica and have made some attempts to create
| settlements there, not very successfully.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_Antarctica
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _we require 1g to live, let alone thrive._
|
| 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.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| "the vastness of the universe and never be able to touch
| any of it in person."
|
| No matter how much of the universe we touch it will always
| just be a vanishing sliver.
| PopePompus wrote:
| And the flip side is that the resources available in the
| universe are practically inexhaustible. A few quadrillion
| humans wouldn't strain it.
| preisschild wrote:
| > There is exactly ONE reason why Apollo was manned by people
| instead of robots: Because computers, electronics and
| robotics in the 60s were not up to the task. If todays tech
| existed back then, I would bet the Apollo rocket would have
| had exactly one passenger, and that would have been the Lunar
| Roving vehicle.
|
| But a manned outpost beyond earth would make the logistics
| for large scale space exploration (even with robots) much
| more feasible, no?
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > But a manned outpost beyond earth would make the
| logistics for large scale space exploration (even with
| robots) much more feasible, no?
|
| How would it do so exactly? Please give me a technical
| reason for this assumption.
|
| Because, I predict it would do the exact opposite: Keeping
| humans alive away from Earth eats up an enormeous amount of
| resources all on its own. Resources that could instead go
| into building better robots, building more robots, building
| more rockets.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| We covered more ground in a lunar rover in a week than any of
| our mars rovers covered in a year.
| idlewords wrote:
| But that week was fifty-two years ago.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| That is a further endorsement of human exploration.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > We covered more ground in a lunar rover in a week than
| any of our mars rovers covered in a year.
|
| And this counters my argument...how exactly?
|
| Even forgetting the fact that scientific progress isn't
| measured in "kilometers driven" (just count the number of
| experiments that Perseverance carries, and compare the
| amounts of data produced(, there is no technical reason a
| robot cannot drive as far as a vehicle carrying humans.
|
| In fact it's the opposite: One of the most important
| restrictions regarding the LRVs driving distance wasn't
| technological in nature, it was due to the the fact it had
| to carry humans:
|
| 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.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| If our world-wide herculean efforts towards building a
| self driving robotic car have yielded mediocre results, I
| have low expectations for a robotic field geologist built
| on a NASA budget.
|
| Also note that even with the limitations, the humans
| surveyed more ground. Remove the limitation by making the
| rover a mobile habitat and now the humans can have an
| even more expansive and productive mission.
|
| Ultimately we're going to colonize space, why take 50x
| the time to gather the science needed for that goal, when
| worst-case we can spend 50x the budget and just put
| humans there to incidentally also gather knowledge on how
| to live in space.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > I have low expectations for a robotic field geologist
| built on a NASA budget.
|
| And yet they have put one on Mars. https://en.wikipedia.o
| rg/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.
| billbrown wrote:
| This is why nearly all ocean exploration is done via
| remotely-piloted vehicles instead of the massive yet cramped
| submersibles they started with. The explorers still get to do
| the science they love but they do it from a comfortable
| surface ship in shifts.
| botro wrote:
| I think if we follow your logic exactly, and make
| mathematically optimal decisions in every instance, leaving
| no space for the human spirit - we're robots anyway and may
| as well go to space!
| wtetzner wrote:
| > Figuring out ways to make human bodily functions not
| immediately fail in space. Next to none of these technologies
| benefit humanity at large in any way.
|
| What a weirdly confident statement. I could imagine all kinds
| of technology coming from that that would benefit life on
| Earth.
| wffurr wrote:
| The advanced technologies you're describing are part of
| Artemis. The other part is a huge pork barrel jobs project for
| the SLS workforce across the country, in as many states as
| possible.
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| Nobody in congress will vote to kill jobs in their district.
| The military industrial complex figured that out a while ago,
| which is why at least one screw for some weapon or aircraft
| is produced in every state.
|
| If NASA is going to use the same playbook to be benefit space
| exploration, I'm not remotely upset.
| mcswell wrote:
| It's not called the Senate Launch System (SL) for nothing!
| api wrote:
| 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.
| xondono wrote:
| > 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".
| moffkalast wrote:
| "Hey man how's it going?"
|
| > replacing the asbestos lining in the boosters with a greener
| material, a project budgeted at $4.4M, has now cost NASA a
| quarter of a billion dollars
|
| "... Jesus Christ."
| javier_e06 wrote:
| The premise gives good material for writing an article and yet we
| are not comparing apples to apples. A cargo rocket main use would
| be for building a moon space station, transport materials. Hence
| its size.
| amai wrote:
| ,,And though the Shuttle engines are designed to be fully
| reusable (the main reason they're so expensive), every SLS launch
| throws four of them away."
|
| Using reusable engines on non-reusable rocket? That alone doesn't
| make sense at all.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I think there's only one part of that essay I disagree with:
|
| That SpaceX knows "How much propellant a Starship can carry to
| low Earth orbit". They're iterating on Starship. Falcon 9 started
| out with an LEO payload of 10.4 tons and they managed to get it
| up to 22.8 in its current iteration. By all accounts Starship's
| payload isn't up to expectations right now but SpaceX has lots of
| knobs they intend to turn to get it up. They'll try them and see,
| but there's no way to know what will work and how much right now.
| So really nobody knows at this point how many refueling launches
| it will take.
|
| Should NASA have committed to this design before the kinks were
| worked out. No really but Congress had put them in an impossible
| position so I think they didn't have a choice. But this is risk
| that happens at the start of the mission before any astronauts
| board. If things go badly here they can always abort. Unlike the
| landing on the Moon. And rapid launches and orbital refueling are
| something SpaceX is going to be working on a lot anyways
| regardless of the Artemis program. Unlike the landing on the
| Moon.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's easy to miss how clever the Apollo mission architecture was.
|
| The moon is not so far away in terms of distance but it is very
| far away in terms of _Dv_ 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| 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?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Yes, but the right way to think about it is
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo.
| ..
|
| and Luna is just the first stop on the way from Earth. That
| Wikipedia article doesn't explain the concept as well as I'd
| like but the papers it references do.
| kqr wrote:
| > The moon is not so far away in terms of distance but it is
| very far away in terms of Dv 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?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You gotta get off Earth no matter where you go in space. It's
| almost free to come home from LEO, you get a huge amount of
| free velocity change returning from the moon. (At the cost of
| rejecting the heat)
|
| In the rocket equation
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
|
| the required mass ratio is an exponential function of the
| velocity change so adding another 2.5 km/sec for this and
| another 2.5 km/sec for that you are making the mission much
| more difficult.
|
| It's bad enough that it takes two stages to get to LEO
| comfortably but going beyond that adds cost and complexity
| pretty quick, for instance the large number of Starship
| launches required to get a Moon mission into the right orbit.
|
| I like to think about what interstellar travellers would do
| if they wanted to land on the Earth on the assumption that
| they are accustomed to life in deep space and have spent
| 1,000 to 10,000 years "living off the land" off comets and
| rouge planets and are used to a lifestyle like cutting up a
| planet like Pluto and building a number of small ringworlds
| powered by D-D fusion.
|
| I'd conjecture that despite having advanced technology they
| would still find the "reverse space shuttle" problem where
| you land with a full load of fuel and then take off from the
| ground to be difficult. It's not like they are going to haul
| a space shuttle along with them and would probably find it
| non-trivial to 3-d print one from plans that old. My take is
| that it would probably take them a decade to figure it out
| and that they might well come up with an alternative answer
| like
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure)
|
| which depends on in-space infrastructure that they'd be
| experience with although it could work together with an air-
| breathing aircraft which would be something new for them.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Everything is on the small order of magnitude when compared
| with getting into Earth orbit. As the quote goes, "Once you
| get to earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the solar
| system."
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| > Not least, but certainly the requirement to brake before
| you land must be on the small order compared to achieving
| escape velocity from the much bigger rock I'm on?
|
| The problem is all the fuel you use to break before landing
| also has to achieve earth escape velocity at first. And it
| makes the original problem much harder because the total mass
| that needs acceleration grow exponentially with delta speed.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _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
| flerchin wrote:
| IMO the only "lunacy" with the current plan is regarding schedule
| and budget slip.
| preisschild wrote:
| > It's not clear how many Starship launches it will take to
| refuel HLS. Elon Musk has said four might be enough
|
| Has Musk once NOT lied about such figures?
| ralfd wrote:
| Elon often makes relative statements even if it is reported in
| an absolute way. In this example he called 16 refuel launches
| ,,extremely unlikely" (but possible) and ,,may only need 4
| launches" should be read also as an unlikely possibility
| presented by him.
|
| https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1425474903436939266
|
| Anyway that was 3 years ago and the 150 ton payload Starship 3
| won't likely be ready for HLS. Maybe if Artenis is delayed
| because of Orion reasons.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > Articles about Artemis often give the program's tangled
| backstory. But I want to talk about Artemis as a technical
| design, because there's just so much to drink in.
|
| You can't separate one from the other. Artemis seems like a
| hodgepodge of mismatched and poorly thought out subprojects
| cobbled together by people who neither know how to make a rocket
| fly nor really care if it does because that's exactly what it is.
|
| All the design decisions make perfect sense if you stop looking
| at the mission as "design the best moon rocket" and start seeing
| it as "turn these things into a moon rocket," and frankly that
| NASA engineers could take all the absurd requirements that
| congress and top level leadership had placed upon them and still
| found a way to salvage a technically viable system is a testament
| to their skill.
| 8bitme wrote:
| *The Lunarcy of Artemis
|
| !_!
| jodrellblank wrote:
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/lunacy - lunacy (n.)
|
| 1540s, "condition of being a lunatic," formed irregularly in
| English from lunatic (q.v.) + -cy. Originally in reference to
| intermittent periods of insanity, such as were believed to be
| triggered by the moon's cycle.
|
| ->
|
| lunatic (adj.)
|
| late 13c., "affected with periodic insanity dependent on the
| changes of the moon," from Old French lunatique "insane," or
| directly from Late Latin lunaticus "moon-struck," from Latin
| luna "moon" (see luna).
| twothreeone wrote:
| > artisanally hand-crafted by a workforce that likes to get home
| before traffic gets bad.
|
| Ouch, that's gotta hurt.. I'm not saying I disagree, but I do
| wonder if a project is going "right" only when it starts to hit
| excruciatingly long shifts and burns workforce like coals -
| especially if it is expected to safely carry humans to the Moon.
| I think it's more likely a sign of doing something that wasn't
| planned and budgeted properly (which may certainly be because it
| simply had never been done before - so it will often correlate
| with innovative projects). If you worry about your workforce
| being motivated, transparently tying compensation to company
| success does wonders.
| strangattractor wrote:
| More likely the problem is DBC (designed by congress). Where
| are those old Shuttle Boosters made? The Orange tank? There are
| 535 member of Congress of which 10 are engineers of any kind.
| Probably even less Scientist.
| twothreeone wrote:
| That's not on congress though. If a budget for the agency
| only comes with those kinds of political strings attached,
| the right thing for the agency would be to say "please keep
| your money, the US won't be going to Moon or Mars".
| hifromwork wrote:
| I'm not very familiar with how US politics works
| internally, but how would it play out in practice? My
| experience with my (admittedly flawed) government is that
| the head of such agency would be dismissed from his
| position, and a new - more amicable - one appointed not
| long after. Are the US different?
| strangattractor wrote:
| It usually plays out like this.
|
| 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.
| concordDance wrote:
| > If you worry about your workforce being motivated,
| transparently tying compensation to company success does
| wonders.
|
| That works only if the company is small, otherwise the worker's
| compensation isn't really tied to the success. And once the
| direct link is broken all you have is KPIs.
| Animats wrote:
| Meanwhile, China's moon program keeps plugging along. There's
| already been a robotic landing and return with samples. Chang'e
| 6, the second land and return vehicle, is in lunar orbit now,
| being prepared for landing.[1] This one has a robotic lunar
| rover.
|
| China plans a manned moon landing around 2030. Then, on to the
| lunar base.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_6
| hifromwork wrote:
| Interesting name! At first I assumed it's a pun on "Chang"
| (which looks like a romanized Chinese word) and English
| "Change". Instead:
|
| >the spacecraft is named after the Chinese Moon goddess
| Chang'e[1]
|
| What a great name for a Chinese Lunar spacecraft!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| The Chang'e 3 lander released a small rover called Yutu,
| which means "jade rabbit." In Chinese mythology, the moon
| goddess has a pet rabbit.
|
| Westerners think the dark pattern on the moon looks like a
| face, but Chinese people think it looks like a rabbit.
| Wingman4l7 wrote:
| A robotic moon landing with sample return? Luna 16 called, it
| wants to remind you that the Russians did this in 1970.
| chasd00 wrote:
| when the drama of Artemis started unfolding i remember thinking
| SpaceX ought to just go to the moon themselves. Iirc Falcon Heavy
| in a full thrust config already has the capability to get there
| they just need a lander and return. On the other hand, that
| effort doesn't get SpaceX closer to Mars and would be a pretty
| big distraction. Also, I imagine they want to play ball for
| funding purposes.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| If SpaceX wants to put people on Mars, and get them back, then
| the moon seems a pretty good proving ground for things like a
| lander and ascent module, orbiter, etc, not to mention for any
| kind of habitat/etc they're planning for Mars.
|
| SpaceX planing to land Starship on the moon (and take off
| again) seems like a complete non-starter. I expect NASA can get
| the rest of their useless program built given enough money, but
| if Starship needs arms to catch it even when landing on a
| smooth concrete surface, then how the hell does it expect to
| land on an uneven pile of soft lunar regolith, much less take
| off again?
| gnarbarian wrote:
| this is how our entire federal apparatus works these days. our
| government is profoundly broken but we lack the will to
| acknowledge it.
|
| I have about 20 years of experience in Federal contracting.
|
| we have nothing but process and zero accountability. It's
| literally a miracle anything ever gets completed.
|
| we sink billions of dollars into projects that are forecast to
| have dubious economic benefits and then we never bother to see if
| it actually worked out the way the economics were justified.
|
| empower programs and leaders to buck policy and regulations but
| make them accountable for failure of their core mission.
|
| compensate leaders who save money by doing more with less.
|
| etc.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Money used to be how things got done.
|
| Now it's why.
| JohnCClarke wrote:
| Seems to me that the actual, albeit unstated, goal of the Artemis
| program is to preserve the US's defence industrial base. In that
| light slow, expensive, progress is not a bug - slow and expensive
| are features.
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