421–430 of 475 posts
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My friends and I have been deriving much amusement from the comms issues. We can fly people around the moon, talk with them, send back high res video, but talk to the boat that’s close enough to swim to? Forget about it! Note: next time, pack a walkie talkie. ;-)
They missed the chance to reply "Main screen turn on."
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Im not really convinced SLS and Artemis are best effort projects; we improve through refinement, and the only way to get there is cadence. More launches with the same general mission requirements. One launch a year is not even close to what we can manage with our current technology, to the point where the scope is too small to be legitimately worth doing. Its not solely a matter of energy; its about opportunity for l…
The value of a mission like this isn't only in the narrow technical data it returns. Its value is also institutional. Once you have an actual crewed mission orbiting the Moon, the program becomes concrete rather than aspirational. That creates momentum inside NASA and among contractors, strengthens the credibility of follow-on lunar missions, and accelerates work on the many parallel systems a sustained lunar program…
It doesnt matter if you are actually running missions, if the scale is so small and wasteful that its not meaningfully comparable to the aspirational future missions.
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We can look at what NASA did after the Columbia disaster; namely, redesign the external tank, employ stricter quality control of the foam across the board, better monitoring of the heat shield integrity, and adding contingencies for being stuck in space with a damaged shuttle. - They replaced the specific foam insulation that struck Columbia with external heaters, and redesigned other areas where foam was necessary t…
>Every mission from then on had a backup plan in case the shuttle wasn't in a state to return to Earth (this wasn't really the case before then, which is kinda wild). Another shuttle was always ready to launch, with a new configuration of seats to allow for sufficient crew space Actually the backup plan almost every time was to just stay on the ISS until another Shuttle could be prepared. They only had another Shuttl…
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The answer in the 60s was "to beat the Soviets". Today, we are partially doing it to beat China, but we really are gearing up for Mars. You can't just start from zero and fly to Mars. You need to build an entire workforce able to produce and operate fantastically complicated machines. And you need to fly regular missions, each more ambitious than the last, until finally we can land people on the Red Planet. Artemis I…
> but we really are gearing up for Mars. Which again is cool, but useless. And actually counter-productive, because we risk contaminating Mars with organic stuff coming from the Earth.
What is the alternative, not go to Mars?
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> but we really are gearing up for Mars. Which again is cool, but useless. And actually counter-productive, because we risk contaminating Mars with organic stuff coming from the Earth.
Landing on Mars is the artifact of all of the innovation required to get to Mars. We benefit from the innovations, not the landing per se. Memory foam, smart phone cameras, tech miniaturization in general, GPS, baby formula, cordless tools... just a tiny sliver of things we use daily that are directly attributable to the pursuit of space travel. It is far from useless
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> If I toss a coin four times and it comes up heads three and tails once, it doesn’t mean that there’s a 75% chance that this coin lands heads up. No, but it means that to ensure that I do better on my next set of coin tosses I need to beat 3 in 4, not 1 in 2.
But you doing better is independent of the risk involved. The chances of you getting 3/4 heads or better is around 31%, so theres ~69% chance you’ll do worse next time round. Doesn’t change the fact that each coin toss is still 50/50.
The public doesn't care if Apollo had a theoretical risk rate lower or higher than 1/12, what they saw was that 1/12 missions resulted in the death of the crew. The NASA administrator explaining that their estimated risk was only 1/1000 doesn't change the real-world perception or outcome.
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A diverse and inclusive crew, a publically-funded mission, an emphasis on science and discovery, and government investment in a long-term strategy, not a quick politcal win. This current administration has made sure these things never happen again, Artemis is very much the swan song of an America that has died. I am not interested in watching our corpse twitch and calling it life.
> an emphasis on science and discovery Sorry, what science and discovery is that bringing? I mean it's technically really cool , but I fail to see the science and discovery there.
>> Under Artemis, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly difficult missions to explore more of the Moon for *scientific discovery*, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.
Yeah fuck me for thinking this was about that that.
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Hilarious the the intellectual forum downvoted you for being absolutely right. Artemis II never escaped Earth’s pull. That video that NASA put out where the craft did a sling shop around the moon is extremely deceptive. The pull of the moon had very little effect. If they had missed, they would have eventually crashed back to earth in the worst case, and best case just re-adjusted and returned a little bummed.
"Artemis II never escaped Earth’s pull." Hmm. Maximum speed attained by Artemis II when they left their initial orbit was about 11.1 km/s IIRC. While this is somewhat less than true escape velocity from Earth (11.2 km/s) and you are technically correct, it is also enough of a speed that if you fly away in any random direction (and not a carefully calculated one), perturbances from the Sun and other massive objects wi…
Why is this so difficult to understand? Honestly I think that misleading NASA graphic did a lot of damage.
You throw in acceleration, which I never mentioned and doesn’t matter. The Artemis II never left Earth’s gravitional pull, the original issue was effectively what if it missed - and the answer is no big deal.
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I’m sorry that you feel so strongly about a position that is incorrect. I provided a source to help explain it to you.
I'm sorry that you disagree with the correct things I've said. Your "source" is a YouTube video--hardly a rigorous scientific or engineering treatment. And I posted upthread in another response about the limitations of the viewpoint the video takes. Have a nice day.
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I'm sorry that you disagree with the correct things I've said. Your "source" is a YouTube video--hardly a rigorous scientific or engineering treatment. And I posted upthread in another response about the limitations of the viewpoint the video takes. Have a nice day.
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I have no idea what you mean by this.
> It should be SO EASY for you to prove me wrong!
As I said, I've already explained upthread the limitations of the "source" you gave. Not sure what else you're looking for.