For purposes of resource extraction, asteroids make more sense in the long term than mining the lunar surface. However, when we send drones out to bring asteroids back, it would be safer to park our big new resource pools in lunar orbit, rather than directly in Earth orbit. If we get reasonable transit stations up and running (so we can basically have a shuttle service going between LEO and lunar orbit), it might make sense to put the primary staging station there.
Large-scale exploration of space (and exploitation of space resources) is going to require a full processing chain in space. Ideally, we want mining, manufacturing, and recycling for nearly all necessary components to happen without landing on any bodies with major gravity wells. Vessels that are never meant to land (or enter an atmosphere) have far fewer constraints on their design, and they don’t need nearly as much bulk to be functional.
There’s a related melancholy note for me in that, as it makes it more likely that there may be no living moonwalker around to see and hear it happen again…
NASA is clearly sensitive about revising the Artemis plans because it is facing a budget cut, and also perhaps because this is a presidential election year. It seems probable that the space agency would not want to announce further delays or a change in Artemis plans until next year at the earliest. Sources told Ars that no final decisions have been made on whether to revise Artemis III.
It’s a good step forward. This demonstrates that the Lunar Gateway is useless and so it can be cancelled. Then they’ll realize that Orion is useless since it’s only going to LEO and a Dragon (or Starliner) would work just as well to shuttle astronauts to LEO, so that can be cancelled too. Finally, SLS can be cancelled since its only purpose is to launch Orion.
The final config will just be to launch Starship to LEO, fuel it up, and then a simple Dragon mission to get the astronauts onboard. Starship then has enough oomph to make it down to the lunar surface and back. Which is of course what Artemis should have been from the beginning.
I’ve been criticized in other threads for saying this, but I’m wondering if all these scrubs and failures are a sign that we really aren’t supposed to return to the moon.
The specific issue here, which we already knew about, is that the SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway are disasters of projects and never made any sense as part of a lunar program. Except, of course, in a political sense–in which case they made a lot of sense.
So all of that garbage has to be “digested” in some fashion. Either by powering through the problems with yet more time and more money, or cancelling the projects. I expect we’ll see a mix, but I couldn’t say what. You can imagine a chart with one line going up over time–that’s progress on the various programs. And then another line going down–that’s the complexity of the program as a whole, which (hopefully) will go down over time as things get simplified. The two lines intersect at some point in the future and that’s when we get a moon landing. But the lines are currently still very far apart.
Ahh, yes. Slipped my mind with so many other moving parts. To be honest, I’ve hardly followed the European Service Module development at all. I mainly recall that the only flight test of its life support system so far had a nitrogen-only atmosphere. Hope they get the kinks worked out before putting humans onboard…
For policymakers, there are two strategic aims at risk here. The first is losing the geopolitically important race against China, Russia, and their partners back to the Moon in the 21st century…
And this is why the show will go on. BUT if achieving that goal requires the abandonment of Artemis then we can wave it goodbye.
I haven’t been following the Artemis program very closely but ruminating on the big picture for a bit, ISTM deeply ironic that we’re running into so many problems trying to do with modern technology what we successfully did more than half a century ago with more primitive tech. Furthermore, after landing on the moon a few times, we were faced with the strategic question, “now what?”. That question to some degree is largely still relevant today.
One of the big differences between the space program of the 1960s and today is that back then both NASA and the general population were filled with enthusiasm about the mission. Every phase of the space program – Mercury, Gemini, and finally Apollo, was a first, blazing new trails in manned space travel and doing things that had never been done before. The enthusiasm and excitement was palpable, not to mention virtually boundless budgets. I wonder whether one of the underlying problems with Artemis is psychological, because it lacks that drive and excitement, which in turn affects its budget.
As for the Russians or Chinese being first in the 21st century to get to the moon, maybe we should just let them squander their resources if that’s their priority. I don’t care if they get to Mars first, either – there’s nothing there.
I’m a big fan of space exploration and of cosmology in general. But I think exploring our solar system is best done with robotics. Beyond our solar system, I think there are wonders beyond imagination, but for the foreseeable future we don’t have even remotely the technology necessary to travel to such places. What we can do, though, is build increasingly better and more sensitive observing equipment. The Hubble and James Webb telescopes (the latter really just getting started) have done more to add to our knowledge of the cosmos than all the moon landings, at a tiny fraction of the cost. The Voyager missions and Mars rovers and the orbiter (and the plucky New Horizons fly-by of Pluto) have immensely enhanced our knowledge of our solar system, again at a fraction of the cost of the manned space program. Maybe we should re-examine our priorities.