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The Lunacy of Artemis

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Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#161

Post by 9dev »

causality0 wrote: post #76

NASA is excellent at its job. You just have to accept the fact that in 1969, NASA's job was putting astronauts on the moon, and in 2024 NASA's job is distributing taxpayer money to various places that don't deserve it. They're damn good at their job.

From what I can gather, they largely distribute money to lots of places in the USA, thereby pouring money into regions that wouldn’t have it otherwise, creating jobs that wouldn’t exist otherwise, and raise the baseline income overall. If anything, this should have a beneficial effect where more people can spend more, don’t require social services, slide into drug abuse or homelessness. Some part of the government has to do that; but instead of just handing the money out to poor people, they do it indirectly and keep folk in active employment. What would be bad about that?

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#162

Post by eru »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #66
wpietri wrote: post #27

As a kid, mainlining Heinlein, I just assumed we'd have a moonbase by now and that it would be up to something important and useful. In my 20s, I assumed that our then-primitive software engineering techniques would be refined until we could make things that were simple, polished, cheap, and reliable. So it's a little wild to me to see software not only get more chaotic, but influence hardware as well. All in service…

> until we could make things that were simple, polished, cheap, and reliable. That was the original Apollo mission. We went to the moon 6 times.

Apollo wasn't exactly cheap.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#164

Post by mlindner »

xarope wrote: post #124

This quote is a doozy too: "Visionaries at NASA identified a futuristic new energy source (space billionaire egos) and found a way to tap it on a fixed-cost basis"

I think that's reversing cause and effect though. NASA didn't "figure out" anything, they had to be forced kicking and screaming to do it. They may be embracing it now, but they did not cause it.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#165

Post by nativeit »

I’m seeing Starship discussed in terms that suggest I’ve missed something. When did it accomplish even the most base level demonstration of its required capabilities? How could anyone have any certainty in Starship at this stage, and how could anyone possibly compare it with anything?

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#168

Post by marcus_holmes »

wpietri wrote: post #83
marcus_holmes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simplicity as a feature. Like TFA says, if you want something to work reliably, keep it simple. But simple isn't impressive. Tackling complex problems in complex ways is what gets recognised and rewarded. Humans are weird.

For sure. And to me that's related to the spread of managerialism and MBA thinking. One of the fundamental beliefs in that paradigm is that management is universal; an expert manager can manage anything. (This is in the contrast to the view that you need domain expertise to be effectively in charge of something.) I think this falls down because, not understanding the substance of the work, pure managers have to go by…

Agree completely. Unfortunately it seems to be impossible to build large organisations without creating the sort of incentives that feeds this kind of thinking.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#169

Post by mlindner »

nativeit wrote: post #165

I’m seeing Starship discussed in terms that suggest I’ve missed something. When did it accomplish even the most base level demonstration of its required capabilities? How could anyone have any certainty in Starship at this stage, and how could anyone possibly compare it with anything?

What do you define as "most base level"? It's a development project. When something is in development you still have lots of bugs to be ironed out. However it was quite successful, even given that. It reached orbital velocities the last launch, which is all that a regular rocket is expected to do. It did fail to do a in-space relight of its engines, which eliminates some usages, but if it was just launching a regular payload it could've done that. And the next launch is happening sometime next month.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#170

Post by jlangenauer »

rob74 wrote: post #146
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 maki…

It's a fair point, but the only way at all to land on a body that has no atmosphere is to use rocket engines that point down. The Apollo Lunar Module landed on its "tail", though it did at least have a separate ascent stage with its own engine, so might have had some chance of taking off again if the landing was damagingly hard.
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