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I have to admit, I've been an Artemis hater ($4 billion per launch lol) but the experience of watching people go back around the Moon has been incredibly inspiring, and it proves to me that maybe we can still do hard things
$1.3 billion for the mission hardware.
$2.2 billion for the single use SLS.
$0.5 billion for the launch pad.
> watching people go back around the Moon
Two of the missions were actually meant to land. One of them still may.
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I was hoping that they used a medium format camera like Hasselblad or something for the larger pics... but no such luck. I guess weight might have been one factor. Still, the pics are mind blowing. Out of this world, tbh
A 20.8 megapixel 5568 x 3712 pixels is not a shitty image. When we get to see those images, they will be much better than the GoPro images we're seeing
Then I read about the NASA administrator being some sort of “charisma” bravado guy and the government pressures to get to the moon during Trump presidency.
How NASA safety standards are somehow 1/10 of the ones they impose on external private companies who would never be allowed to do crew launch with that kind of level of risk.
I think I am just going to forget about it for now until I hear about hopefully safe return in mainstream news so I don’t end up with heart attack. They really should take mainly single people without families on these missions imo.
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> $4 billion per launch lol The US spends almost that much on net debt interest each day (~$3 billion/day[0]). Not that adding to the debt helps at all, but the old proverb about being penny wise and pound foolish seems relevant 0. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61951
The absolute cost isn't the problem, it's the value that we're getting from it. SLS and Artemis are both incredibly expensive and ramshackle programs, and regardless of how bad the rest of the USG might be in terms of their cost, or value, if you are a true space fan and a true American space fan, you should want this little corner of humanity to hold itself to a higher standard. Acceptance of over costing and under…
If they’d wanted to they could have launched an empty Orion crew module into LEO on another, cheaper, rocket and tested re-entry. The crew module by itself is less than ten tonnes.
Was there any writeup on the actual goals and accomplishments of this mission. I'm sure there is some very valuable scientif8c data and observations done, but what exactly are those (other than 'wow' media)?
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This is about to change. New NASA administrator Isaacman has redone the Artemis program. The changes were announced at the Ignition event a few weeks ago: https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/ If you read one thing, read the sides on building the moon base: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2-building-t... The goals it to fly often - adding a SLS launch to 2027 and a second launch to 2028. This drops the cost-…
There's a lot of potential in the announced changes and what SLS/Artemis might be able to become. This shouldn't prevent us from being critical of what SLS/Artemis most definitely has been for the previous 10-15 years. And don't be fooled about the SLS launch cadence. As recently as summer 2025, Artemis III was still a nominally a 2027 manned lunar landing ( https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2025/08/18/nasa-begins-…
SLS will never be worth it. But I'd discount from that price tag the continuity benefits of keeping the Shuttle folks around, and aerospace engineers employed, across the chasm years of the 2010s.
There is something uncanny about the bandwidth and quality of all the artifacts coming from this mission. I've subsisted on photos from the Apollo missions and artistic renditions for so long that seeing the modern, high resolution real thing to be quite stirring in a way I didn't expect. It actually does make me believe that the future could be quite cool.
Back in 2019, Robert Zubrin suggested using rovers "to do detailed photography of the [Moon] base area and its surroundings" to "ultimately form the basis of a virtual reality experience that will allow millions of members of the public to participate vicariously in the missions" [1].
[1] https://spacenews.com/op-ed-lunar-gateway-or-moon-direct/