Part of the original promise of the Shuttle was that it would be able to turn around from landing to launching again pretty rapidly (160 hours, or two weeks, was, IIRC, the original premise), which would make Earth-orbit space travel routine. That turned out to be fantasy: the fastest that an Orbiter was ever turned around was 54 days, and after the Challenger disaster, the fastest was 88 days.
I agree that it’s a waste of tax dollars but the official line that I heard on the feed yesterday was that we are planning on going elsewhere after that and the Moon will allow us to iron out the kinks of habitats somewhere closer to Earth. I can see the point of that if we are indeed going to Mars. But we aren’t because hoo boy, talk about a waste of tax dollars.
It would be another story if our country wasn’t almost bankrupt, and wasn’t giving billions to billionaires legally and otherwise, and had a better health care system.
With a tiny fraction of the energy that it takes to transport anything off the surface of the Earth?
The big benefit to harvesting resources on the moon isn’t sending them back to Earth, it’s using them in space without having to lug them off the surface and through the atmosphere first.
I have to ask: using them in space for what, exactly?
Someone will always think the $ we spend on something would be better spent on something else. The $1B per day spent on Operation Epic Fury, vs. $7B per year spent on Artemis, vs. the $9B per year Americans spend going to a movie theater to watch a movie, vs. the $9B per year the NSF spends…
Of all the theoretical and fictional scenarios given to us before and during the moon landing, almost none of them speculated that going to the moon and just stopping there was going to be the end result.
I’ve seen links to online essays that say that the reentry craft isn’t safe. I assume that this is just the opinion of random cranks; anyone know anything different?
So we have some kind of geopolitical presence if/when resource extraction becomes viable? Also science and PR.
Artemis I had more damage to the heat shield that they expected. Probably due to manufacturing issues. If the damage had been a bit more (how much?), it could have failed. But it didn’t, and engineers made improvements.
So, click baiting and doomposting and stirring the shit, more than a “game over” fault. Space travel is always risky. There’s 300K things that can fail and ruin your day. This is just 1.
“Houston, we have a tech support issue.”
The cost of all Antarctic research stations put together is a rounding error compared to the cost of the Artemis programm.
Yeah, that’s how budgets work. Some things are worth it, other things are not, and the less money you have, the fewer things you can spend it on.
Now there’s a stunning defense of the money used for Artemis.
Building equipment that can be used to harvest the nearly infinite resources available off-planet. Things like orbital solar panel arrays to power the Earth, orbital greenhouses to feed billions without polluting the world with agricultural runoff, etc… the possibilities are, quite literally, limitless.
Sounds like the same reasons we should be in space (although geopolitical might be the wrong word there)
And that’s operational $ being pissed away, on top of the regular costs to maintain our military. The $9B spent on Artemis (and mind you, IMO the SLS system is something of a boondoggle and we could have done it for less) at least supports multiple tens of thousands of jobs across multiple hundreds of companies here in the US.
But I fear , at the risk of Jr. modding, we are starting to stray away from the point of this thread. It just annoys me that whenever there’s a discussion about space exploration, inevitably someone comes in and complains about how the money would be better spent doing something else. We’re here to follow the program itself, not debate whether it should exist or not. So no more comments along those lines from me.
I mentioned earlier about the minor problem about the space toilet. I found this on Instagram: Space toilet — verbal explanation on Instagram
➜ https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWT8uoMjrA3 
With launch vehicles it’s all about cargo lift capacity. The SLS Block 1 configuration currently used for Artemis can already lift approximately the same amount of cargo as the shuttle, and Block 2 is intended have four times the lift capacity, something the shuttle could never even come close to!
The unwieldy design of the shuttle was as dangerous as it looked, as we eventually found out. And as for “re-usable”, each shuttle in effect had to be practically rebuilt between flights, not least because the heat tiles kept falling off.
The sleek SLS and Artemis are reminiscent of the Saturn V and Apollo, and for good reason. I hope that it rekindles some of the excitement and optimism we experienced in the 60s. Long-term residency on the moon, complete with roomy habitats, is pretty darn cool!
You can scroll back to posts 512 and 519 above. There you’ll find both optimistic and pessimistic takes on the heat shield.
In short, everyone expects the Artemis II heat shield would behave pretty much as badly as the Artemis I heat shield did, under the same conditions. So NASA have changed the angle of re-entry to improve those conditions. Some don’t think that’s enough.
Trans-lunar injection coming in about 3 hours.
I assume from this that they allowed themselves more time than necessary to perform all the system checks, that they’ve now been completed, and unless something goes wrong they appear to be go for TLI. I thought the burn was supposed to occur arount 8:20 PM EDT but ABC says 7:49. Looking good!