There will be a freakin’ elevator hanging from one side, to get people and materials down to the (distant) surface. So the centre of gravity will shift significantly after landing.
Why can’t they just jump down? With the minimal gravity and leg muscles still powerful because the astronauts came from a different colored sun planet; they should be able to leap tall rockets in a single bound.
/end weird supposition - back to our original programming.
75 feet? They would accelerate down a lot slower on the moon but they’d still hit the surface at like 20 miles an hour.
The whooshing sound of Kal-El of Krypton leaping over your head. 
They can use parachutes!
NASA has developed a brilliant solution to its hydrogen fuel leak problem: it relaxed its standards from 4% to 16%:
During the first WDR earlier this month, hydrogen gas concentrations in the area around the fueling connection spiked higher than 16 percent, NASA’s safety limit. This spike was higher than any of the leak rates observed during the Artemis I launch campaign in 2022. Since then, NASA reassessed their safety limit and raised it from 4 percent—a conservative rule NASA held over from the Space Shuttle program—to 16 percent. John Honeycutt, chair of NASA’s Artemis II mission management team, said the decision to relax the safety limit between Artemis I and Artemis II was grounded in test data.
“The SLS program, they came up with a test campaign that actually looked at that cavity, the characteristics of the cavity, the purge in the cavity … and they introduced hydrogen to see when you could actually get it to ignite, and at 16 percent, you could not,” said Honeycutt…
Normalising deviance.
Yeah, that looks like exactly the sort of thinking that led to Challenger.
Fuck.
Nothing bad has ever happened after lowering safety standards.
I’m trying to keep this non-political, but could it be that the current administration has put some people into NASA that take a very lax view towards safety just like the putting of incompetent leaders in other places as well?
I think they’re rushing, so that we can put people on the Moon while 45 is still president.
This would not surprise me in the slightest. It sure is looking like “get-there-itis,” which any skilled pilot would recognize as a very risky mindset.
This is not good.
I think it’s more of a JFK thing. They want to beat the Chinese.
From Time - one of the best articles I’ve read about the mission: After 54 Years, Astronauts Are Going Back to the Moon | TIME
Or while any of the men who walked on the moon are still alive, Buzz Aldrin in particular.
Good news:
Unlike the first attempt to load propellants into the SLS rocket on February 2, there were no major leaks during Thursday’s practice countdown at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Technicians swapped seals at the launch pad after hydrogen gas leaked from the rocket’s main fueling line earlier this month. This time, the seals held.
“For the most part, those fixes all performed pretty well yesterday,” said Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s exploration programs. “We were able to fully fuel the SLS rocket within the planned timeline.”
“No major leaks” meaning that this time, the leaks were within the (recently changed) acceptable tolerance levels?
From the article:
This time, the hydrogen sensors topped out at 1.6 percent, about one-tenth of NASA’s limit
.
I believe four of the twelve are still with us:
Buzz - Apollo 11
Dave Scott - Apollo 15
Charlie Duke - Apollo 16
Harrison Schmitt - Apollo 17
I got to interview Schmitt once. Talk about being in the right place at the right time… He was a geologist, and one of the first scientists accepted into the astronaut corps. They bumped another guy (Joe Engle) off Apollo 17 so they could send Schmitt to the moon. He later became a senator. Quite a career and life. He’s 90 now.