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The Lunacy of Artemis

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Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#181

Post by dudeinjapan »

LargeTomato wrote: post #26

We are going to The moon for two reasons. First, we want to set up a more permanent base. Nasa refers to this as "we're here to stay" The second reason we are going to the moon so that we can put the first person of color and the first woman on the moon. That is explicitly an Artemis mission purpose. Only time will tell if either of these two missions were actually worth it. One more point > Early on, SLS designers m…

I'd like to see us put the first ventriloquist on the moon, with a miniature spacesuit for their little buddy. "That's one small step for dummy-kind--", "Who ya callin' small ya big dummy!" This is why we go to space.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#182

Post by kqr »

jlangenauer wrote: post #170
rob74 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would argue plenty of lander designs (including LM) were tailless and landed on their butts! That should be easier than the balancing act of standing on the tail.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#183

Post by coldtea »

imiric wrote: post #176
bayindirh wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding, nobody is telling that "We should use Apollo as-is", but "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?". Everything made/designed in Apollo are no short of marvels. Today we can do much better with lighter, smaller electronics, and should be able to do weight savings or at least cost savings where it matters. Instead Artemis feels like "let's dig the parts pile and pu…

> From my understanding, nobody is telling that "We should use Apollo as-is", but "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?". The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to move space exploration forward. While arguably today there are comparable tensions, countries…

>The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to move space exploration forward.

Well, money wise they now spend much more budget (inflation adjusted) it seems. Technology wise, one would expect they have more of it now, than back then. So, what, they lack some mystery motivation factor?

I'd say it's rather general modern bureucratic incompetence, overdesign, plus losing the people who knew how to build stuff and had actual Apollo-era experience, with a huge period in between without Moon missions that meant they couldn't pass anything directly to the current NASA generation (a 40 year old NASA engineer today would be negative years old back then), which obliterated all kinds of tacit knowledge.

It's like they had the people who designed UNIX back in the 70s, and a room full of JS framework programmers in 2024, plus all kinds of managers "experts" in Agile Development.

>FWIW I don't think that's a bad thing. Space exploration is the most difficult human endeavour, and taking the time to do it right seems like the optimal way to go.

Isn't the whole point that they're not "taking time to do it right", but waste enormous amounts of money and time while doing it massively wrong?

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#185

Post by dash2 »

imiric wrote: post #176
bayindirh wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding, nobody is telling that "We should use Apollo as-is", but "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?". Everything made/designed in Apollo are no short of marvels. Today we can do much better with lighter, smaller electronics, and should be able to do weight savings or at least cost savings where it matters. Instead Artemis feels like "let's dig the parts pile and pu…

> From my understanding, nobody is telling that "We should use Apollo as-is", but "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?". The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to move space exploration forward. While arguably today there are comparable tensions, countries…

>The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to move space exploration forward.

I'd say the climate is as tense today, and it is getting tenser. NATO is now talking about putting "trainers" into Ukraine, and US-made weaponry is being used to kill Vatniks; China is using water cannon on Philippine ships in the South China Sea; Iran is shooting missiles at Israel and the Houthis are trying to knock international shipping out of the Gulf of Aden.

It's just that the US looks a lot weaker and less competent today. (But perhaps that is hindsight? In the 60s people were still worried that the USSR would overtake the West economically.)

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#186

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#187

Post by philipwhiuk »

People forget that NASA's portion of the federal budget during Apollo was more than an order of magnitude higher than today.

NASA does the most ambitious thing it can get funding from Congress for.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#188

Post by ssijak »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #187

People forget that NASA's portion of the federal budget during Apollo was more than an order of magnitude higher than today. NASA does the most ambitious thing it can get funding from Congress for.

If this article was correct, then what you said is not true. Seems like NASA went with a bad plan from the start to refurbish the old tech and made a costly, inefficient and risky tech-franken-zilla.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#189

Post by gibolt »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #187

People forget that NASA's portion of the federal budget during Apollo was more than an order of magnitude higher than today. NASA does the most ambitious thing it can get funding from Congress for.

NASA does the most ambitious thing modern, bureaucratic NASA can do with the funding, considering that each previously approved project is 4x over budget and 5-10 years late, eating into the feasibility of new projects.

Old NASA could do 5-10x as much, with the same amount of inflation-adjusted money and people. The motivation was to fail+learn and achieve a shared goal. SpaceX is the closest analog today, with a long term mission and the drive to make it happen.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#190

Post by mathgeek »

wolverine876 wrote: post #117
LargeTomato wrote: post #26

We are going to The moon for two reasons. First, we want to set up a more permanent base. Nasa refers to this as "we're here to stay" The second reason we are going to the moon so that we can put the first person of color and the first woman on the moon. That is explicitly an Artemis mission purpose. Only time will tell if either of these two missions were actually worth it. One more point > Early on, SLS designers m…

Afiak, the purposes are to begin to setup the infrastructure for permanent habitation, and to prepare for a crewed flight to Mars. > That is explicitly an Artemis mission purpose. Where does it say that?

> Where does it say that?

First line of the official page at https://www.nasa.gov/feature/artemis/

"With the Artemis campaign, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before."

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