I wish the program well but I’m disappointed that the program is so incredibly expensive, overdue, based on old technology and using the same old military industrial bureaucratic ways which are woefully inefficient and designed to drain money from government for years. The program will choke itself on high costs just like Apollo. SpaceX has given us a glimpse of what fresh thinking can achieve.
Well, wait a minute, hold on there — SpaceX has done marvelous things but do we know that they’re significantly more cost effective than NASA? I suspect they are but don’t know the actual answer.
What new technology are you thinking they’ll use exactly?
Reusable rockets are good, but I don’t doubt that NASA has done the math and figured out that for what they’re looking to do, reusable isn’t the way to go.
Artemis will apparently use much less fuel to get to the moon. Is this practice for a long Mars trip?
Indeed, this test trip taking so long can allow them to fit in more tests for everything including duration and distant-orbit performance. Every orbital spacecraft currently in service is nothing but a ferry to one or another station.
Also, the article states, SLS/Orion just does not have the raw delta-V that Saturn V/Apollo did. That system was overpowered because it had One Job: get 3 guys to the moon, get them back, in a hurry because consumables are limited and the more days you are out there the more days there are for something to go wrong.
This. Just like we keep making some weapons systems just for the sake of keeping the assembly lines/shipyards open and the skilled workers employed, so it had been for Ares/SLS. And I have to begrudgingly concede they may have something of a point given that clean-sheet proposals have a bad habit of never going past design, and the persistent phenomenon of a project ending and then the machines, dies, billets and even blueprints for whole systems or parts thereof being just plain and simply destroyed for security reasons or to preclude someone else reviving it or just to make room for whatever’s the next contract.
Artemis is the Goddess of the hunt — Greek mythology.
Here are two GIFs of the Artemis I mission profile:
● The Earth is the blue dot.
● Artemis is the purple dot and trajectory path.
● The Moon is the green dot and orbital path.
The first GIF shows Artemis’s launch and TLI burn to the moon, the trans-lunar injection. Note Artemis’s two slingshots at the moon. The first when it arrives at the moon with the LOI burn, lunar orbit insertion to slow it down to orbit the moon. The second bounces it back to the Earth with the TEI burn, trans-Earth injection.
The second GIF shows it from a reference frame where the moon and earth are essentially stationary.
If there is real science being done I tend to favour space exploration. If it is a political thing, I wonder about opportunity costs. But it seems interesting, and is definitely better than Project Arcturus.
Are we ready for mars? I don’t think so, not in a retuning them safely to earth type of way. If we had to plan a boot on the red planet, sure we could, but mars is going to require a mars base to get them home safely, and we are not there yet.
The moon however is a place we are ready and able to build a long term base. It would be a next step, going from a weekend camping trip, to constructing an orbital space station (ISS) to establishing something long term on the moon. It seems a very logical next step and progress from Apollo.
That’s not to say we can’t skip a step, and if we can figure out long term life support for mars, but I’m not seeing it.
I can’t see Apollo type missions being worth the billions they are spending. However, a Moon base on the far side with an observatory would be a huge boon to cosmic research. For that, you need the Lunar Gateway but with a new Earth-orbit station.
Space-X to Earth-orbit for supply and crew shuttles
Earth-orbit to Lunar Gateway transfers
Lunar Gateway landers to the Moon base
These re-useable components would provide several Moon landings a year at a cheaper cost than one billion-dollar Artemis launch.
New engines, new rocket designs, new avionics systems, new procedures.
Congress has done the math, and found that disposable systems provide more money for their donors and more jobs for their constituents, so has mandated to NASA that reusable isn’t the way to go.
The real disruption that SpaceX causes is moving away from guaranteed cost+ contracts and into actual bidding. There is no incentive for lowering costs when you are not only guaranteed profit, but actually get more profit the higher your costs.
There’s no reason the traditional NASA contractors couldn’t have lowered costs, they just had no incentive to do so.
Going to the moon in the late sixties as we did skipped some steps, and our space program suffered for it. We really should have build up orbital infrastructure, around the Earth and the Moon first.
Instead, we took technology that barely worked, crossed our fingers, and launched powered by burning a whole bunch of money.
If that had been spent on incrementally increasing our manned space capabilities, rather than shooting it all off in one go, we’d be much further along, and probably have semi-permanent lunar bases by now. IMHO.
But, it was a political decision, we wanted to get to the Moon first, and all other considerations were unimportant.
Irony is, the Soviet Union probably never would have made it to the Moon themselves, wouldn’t have tried if we hadn’t made it a priority, and seemed relived when they were allowed to give up their attempt at staying in the race.
ETA: back to the point I started making at the beginning of the post and lost track…
Going to the Moon and learning to live there is a necessary step before we send people to Mars. Skipping this step will put people in danger, and end up costing us in the long run.
Even if the “private sector” is more efficient, it still means a huge allocation of resources that could be used to deal with issues humanity faces, with the decision to appropriate and allocate those resources in the hands of a few people. Doesn’t seem very fair, somehow
Our congresspeople are making the decisions, so to some extent we all are making those decisions.
Not to thread poop, but “some very limited extent once every few years” at best. I wonder what a referendum on the issue would reveal. Of course much depends on who gets to choose the wording,
I think that the salient point is that the first time served no real purpose beyond the political one, exiting though it was. Assuming that this time is the beginning of a serious exploration/scientific effort, I can understand doing this in a careful, measured way including such things as lunar gateway. I could even envision a Mars gateway 10 or 20 years hence.
MHO: They can take as long as they want, because the spaceship won’t be manned.
Yes, but this is exactly the same tech that is supposed to be a test for an eventual crewed mission!
And Apollo’s twin sister, thus a referential symmetry. As the mythology evolved Apollo was associated with Helios and the sun, and Artemis with Selene and the moon, thus being a suitable namesake.
Thanks for that info!
I am a big time Apollo fan as I am proud that we made it to the moon those 9 times and landed those 6 times.
I am really looking forward to this Artemis program and I believe in my heart it will be a success. Maybe some of you think I am being too confident since space travel is risky but I feel positive about this program.
The moon only has 1/6 the Earth’s gravity so the landing there isn’t as brutal as here on Earth. The Earth’s gravity is about 32.17 ft/ seconds squared. The moon’s gravity is about 5.3 ft/ seconds squared. Sorry about this stupid way of writing this as I am too stupid to know how to type the 2 in the upper right corner of the S on these keyboards.
I understand the risk but I am feeling positive.