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A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

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Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#111

Post by throwawayhhakdl »

Aloha wrote: post #69
mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind elaborating on that first point?

The people who did it are dead or dying, the tribal knowledge wasn't written down.

I don’t think that’s the right way to phrase it. Complicated things are probably written down somewhere, but it’s just not practical to assimilate the knowledge without having been involved in its creation.

The loss of this kind of thinking isn’t so much a failure of people to write documentation, but a natural consequence of things being hard.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#112

Post by throwawayhhakdl »

StillBored wrote: post #83
sandworm101 wrote: post #35

No chance. This isn't the 1950s. We don't just throw people atop rockets anymore. These are vehicles, aircraft. There is absolutely no way any of the current crop of space vehicles could be made ready for a trip to the moon anytime before 2024. Going beyond low orbit, away from the sub-45min return time, is something we haven't done in generations. The craft need to be tested, repeatedly. Each test flight then has to…

Yawn, space is dangerous. We would all still be living in trees with this attitude. I don't believe that we can actually design a system that is safe like this, so yes it needs a lot of testing and iterative improvement. In the meantime, we need to use it to launch equipment and a few brave souls that understand the risks. Actually to add to that, I think putting timescales in front of something like this as a tenden…

The problem with this approach is that you don’t get anything for the added risk. We could decide to keep trying. That is, build a rocket, put people on it, send it up, and repeat until one reaches the moon without exploding. That might get us to the moon faster, but it doesn’t improve our knowledge base much faster than carefully managed testing with carefully managed risks.

If we get to the moon while taking a big chance, that doesn’t mean we get to cross off the things that could have gone wrong, but didn’t, as solved.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#113

Post by unchocked »

redis_mlc wrote: post #104

Can somebody explain what the benefit of sending men to the moon is? I mean science or engineering. I don't mean PR or funding visibility - you can get that by sponsoring a NASCAR ride. Both the Space Shuttle and ISS have been huge money sinks with no benefit. How will another moon visit be any different?

Because we now know there is water at the Moon’s poles, from which rocket fuel and life support consumables can be manufactured. Because of this, the Moon can be our first permanent foothold in space and the stepping stone to the rest of the solar system.

Why humans? Not just because we aspire spread humanity beyond Earth. Humans also accomplish science objectives much faster than robots. A single human mission can accomplish more science and exploration than a decade-long robotic campaign.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#114

Post by gfodor »

chasd00 wrote: post #93

they should hold a press conference and get a reporter to ask about the possibility of SpaceX getting to the moon. Then they respond laughing saying "those amateurs? look, this is NASA, the big boys not some techies with a website". Then just get some coffee and wait. we'd be back on the moon by 2023.

SpaceX will beat them there regardless. Not out of a difference in skills, but NASA, let’s face it, is a political football. If Trump wants us to go to the moon, half the country will argue we should never set foot there again. NASA is basically gridlocked until the next administration, so SpaceX will get to the moon and Mars first.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#115

Post by mLuby »

The problem with creating custom spacecraft each time is it's expensive and takes a while. It's done to get the most out of a single rocket launch (and because it extracts the most money from the customer AKA Congress AKA taxpayers).

CubeSats have been revolutionary for standardizing small spacecraft launch. Next I want to see CubeLanders: standardized vehicles that land your payload on the Moon.

Also I wish we did more on-orbit spacecraft assembly. A lot of the mass limitations go away if you don't have to fit everything for a moon landing and return onto one superheavy rocket. Just scrap the SLS and pay for a bunch of smaller launches!

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#116

Post by gfodor »

btilly wrote: post #29

NASA's best bet is to bite the bullet, scrap the SLS already, and help pay for SpaceX's development. SpaceX has a publicly announced rocket design that is capable of getting men to the Moon and back. They are working on it for themselves. They are looking for every source of funding that they can get. They already are planning suborbital flights this summer, and already are looking for it to be human rated by NASA. T…

The only way to stop SpaceX is to convince the public they are affiliated with a political party, or that space exploration is a political issue. It’s one of the few arenas that hasn’t been enveloped by hyperpartisanship, so I suspect any actual help Trump may be giving SpaceX either doesn’t exist or is widely being kept out of the public spotlight.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#117

Post by taneq »

melling wrote: post #33
njarboe wrote: post #7

'"I am more interested in maximizing the odds of success for this bold undertaking and making it as safe as any human journey into the deep space can be, than I am in having NASA meet arbitrary deadlines," Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson — a Democrat from Texas and the chairwoman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology — said at a recent hearing.' Waiting to make a journey until it is "as safe as can be"…

Here we go again... Why I remember almost 6 years ago, after the Virgin Galactic crash, when we debated the merits of humans in space. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279 Anyway, I think I lost and people were confident that Virgin Galactic would soon be back. I’ll just repost one of my summary thoughts. The entire thread is worth reading. It’ll probably be repeated in some form today. “ Someone dying is dev…

> "Someone dying is devastating."

But it's not. We're more than happy to throw human lives at most things. Any sufficiently large civilian project (much less anything military) will have a greater-than-zero expected death toll from accidents, on-the-job medical issues, etc. And arguably this is the right way to make the omelette (although we've definitely improved in the past few decades: https://www.forconstructionpros.com/blogs/construction-toolb...).

It's only when we get to space travel that we suddenly become shy about the human cost of progress. It's big and dramatic and failures are very public. Arguably we should be willing to take much greater risks at this point to establish ourselves as interplanetary.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#118

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

sandworm101 wrote: post #35

No chance. This isn't the 1950s. We don't just throw people atop rockets anymore. These are vehicles, aircraft. There is absolutely no way any of the current crop of space vehicles could be made ready for a trip to the moon anytime before 2024. Going beyond low orbit, away from the sub-45min return time, is something we haven't done in generations. The craft need to be tested, repeatedly. Each test flight then has to…

We're gonna kill some astronauts, and blame it on Iran.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#119

Post by ardy42 »

teh_infallible wrote: post #82
Aloha wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who did it are dead or dying, the tribal knowledge wasn't written down.

Isn’t it odd that the most important political and military mission of a generation relied on “tribal information which wasn’t written down?”

> Isn’t it odd that the most important political and military mission of a generation relied on “tribal information which wasn’t written down?”

No. Figuring out how to accurately describe something in writing is hard, and then there are all the details you have to leave out to make the document readable, some of which may be more important than you realized.

Every project relies on tribal knowledge, and much of that knowledge will be lost unless is followed up by an equally massive project by a horde of technical writers to nail everything down.

Re: A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

#120

Post by sigstoat »

2dollars27cents wrote: post #94
Aloha wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who did it are dead or dying, the tribal knowledge wasn't written down.

I'm sure this is a valid point, but I think it is overemphasized. Much of that tribal knowledge would have been very esoteric and focused on technologies that are no longer critical. for example, fabricating magnetic core memory. I'm sure some of the required skill is gone, but we don't need to use that memory technology anymore.

having been involved in spacecraft operations, it has nothing to do with how the memory is wired up.

there would've been a huge amount of knowledge about how to operate apollo spacecraft in general. there is no way it is preserved.

and this thread is beneath a comment suggesting that we don't start from scratch, and reuse apollo designs. as you point out, we can make better stuff now. the only value to the apollo designs would be if we had operational experience to go with them.

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