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The Lunacy of Artemis

idlewords.com

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Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#141

Post by dotnet00 »

avmich wrote: post #122
just_steve_h wrote: post #33

I find this essay to be well-crafted and compelling.

I'm strongly disagreeing with some qualifications there, to the point it's hard to find where to start. E.g. what this passage mean - "...this single-use lander carries less payload (both up and down) than the tiny Lunar Module on Apollo 17." ? Can't Starship HLS lift more than 50 kg of rocks from the Moon?.. I'm intentionally simplifying the question.

Starship HLS can lift much more than 50kg, but since Congress/NASA requires Orion to be the return vehicle, the amount they can return is limited by that, which only has a 100kg payload return capacity (and presumably a chunk of that is going to be taken up by food, spacesuits etc).

Same with why each stay is going to have to be just ~1 week. Starship can obviously carry more than enough stuff for 2 people to live off for months. But Orion is only able to stay undocked for 21 days.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#142

Post by [deleted] »

asmithmd1 wrote: post #2

IDK why 81 year old Poli-sci major, attorney, and ultimate NASA executive decision maker Bill Nelson wasn't forced out of office after he incorrectly explained to Congress that the far side of the moon is always dark https://youtu.be/daZyPwCQak8?si=n9KXH-LJFBlpKXUp&t=153

[deleted]

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#143

Post by pavlov »

oldkinglog wrote: post #136

> This is a remarkable situation. It’s like if you hired someone to redo your kitchen and they started building a boat in your driveway. Sure, the boat gives the builders a place to relax, lets them practice tricky plumbing and finishing work, and is a safe place to store their tools. But all those arguments will fail to satisfy. You still want to know what building a boat has to do with kitchen repair, and why you’r…

I felt this little story did a good job of illustrating why a tiny space station around the Moon might not be very useful at this stage of the program, even though it sounds cool.

I’m assuming the article is not written for experts but for laypeople like myself who haven’t read much about Artemis beyond NASA’s hype. For that audience it’s useful to explain with real-world analogies why these program goals might be problematic. But If you have a better analogy in mind to describe the purpose of Gateway, I’d be interested to hear it.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#146

Post by rob74 »

xt00 wrote: post #15

I think we all can understand the situation here unless people are really dense.. the Artemis program was setup at a time when the private space companies were still very new. SpaceX will soon be quite close to technically doing the entire mission themselves without Artemis at all. SpaceX took the money from NASA to help fund their Starship development and probably for other reasons as well. Net result is that by the…

So the Artemis part of the program (the "pension plan") is just doing something that pretends to be marginally useful for insane amounts of money to secure political support through the jobs it enables at various companies strategically spread across the US (plus support from the international partners involved), while the hope is that the HLS part of the program (the "lottery ticket") will eventually succeed in making the other part redundant?

But still, I think the article has a point when it describes the difficulties of landing Starship on the moon and being able to lift off again several days later. Landing a rocket on its tail is cool when the only consequence of a failure is not being able to reuse the rocket, but when there are human lives in the balance, it starts to sound really scary. Not to mention the possibility of damaging an engine during the landing or of fuel loss preventing them from lifting off again...

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#148

Post by danpalmer »

idlewords wrote: post #107
bnralt wrote: post #82

> What NASA is doing is like an office worker blowing half their salary on lottery tickets while putting the other half in a pension fund. If the lottery money comes through, then there was really no need for the pension fund. But without the lottery win, there’s not enough money in the pension account to retire on. The two strategies don't make sense together. I don't think this analogy works, and it reflects a bigg…

Personally, I agree with you that the whole program is useless. The point I'm trying to make with this analogy is that the effort is internally incoherent even if you grant the premise that moon landings and building Gateway are desirable outcomes.

They've essentially hedged, but in a way that gets the worst of both worlds rather than the best.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#149

Post by jojobas »

O5vYtytb wrote: post #60
xt00 wrote: post #15

I think we all can understand the situation here unless people are really dense.. the Artemis program was setup at a time when the private space companies were still very new. SpaceX will soon be quite close to technically doing the entire mission themselves without Artemis at all. SpaceX took the money from NASA to help fund their Starship development and probably for other reasons as well. Net result is that by the…

People seem to miss the forest for the trees here. The goal is to get a base on the moon, and this is the first step. Starship will eventually be bringing lots and lots of cargo to the moon for this purpose. Bringing people there for a few days and then bringing them back is a very short term goal.

[flagged]

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#150

Post by hamlsandwich »

idlewords wrote: post #79
dotnet00 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point they're trying to make is that it looks the same for the sake of looking the same.

I was just trying to describe SLS visually. If you've seen a lot of Shuttle stuff then the initial resemblance is very striking.

Part of the reason is that there are plenty of reused and refurbished shuttle parts included!
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