The Lunacy of Artemis

> Now the technology has caught up, we can make small, highly efficient, powerful, reliable and restartable engines, and can control large numbers of them.

Can we? Starships keep exploding. I get it, great engines are built on heaps of blown up engines. But are we there yet?

> Okay but why does the mission exist?

Politics.

> People keep going "the mission is go to to the moon". Is it? Why are we doing that?

Again, politics. The US has to assert dominance in space and cannot allow parties like China to one-up them. It's also a great way for political leadership to score points with the public. A more rational approach for establishing a permanent human presence on the moon would have included a thorough requirement analysis like Apollo did. Just FYI, SpaceX to this day (i.e. less than 12 months before the initially planned first landing!) don't even known how many tanker launches are required...

> How much do the "proven technologies" cost?

Less than developing a set of radically new systems from scratch - if done correctly (i.e. no cost-plus contracts). Some ideas, just for pondering:

* Falcon 9 is a reliable, proven, and partly reusable system. Its capabilities are sufficient to put crew and cargo into LEO

* FH is a proven and partly reusable system. Its capabilities are sufficient even for Lunar missions.

* Designing a mission around these existing capabilities would eliminate the risk of developing two completely new rockets (SLS and Super Heavy/"Starship") while allowing for testing vital equipment basically from day one (i.e. autonomous docking with fuel tanks, long term fuel storage in orbit, etc.)

> Are they reusable?

There's no reason why a moon lander and transfer vehicles shouldn't be reusable. This is not a question of the engines or fuel used. Just a side note: the "Lunar Starship" isn't going to be reused either on its first missions. This is a medium to long term goal that hinges on quite a few factors (like the feasibility of long-term cryogenic storage in space).

> one might look at how the long term storage and handling of hydrazine has worked out in enclosed environments on Earth

First of all, the environments are not the same - i.e. no unprotected humans will ever be around the fuel tanks or perform hazardous activities like smoking near them or operate valves. Secondly, in stark contrast to cryogenic fuels, we actually do have plenty of data points for long term use and storage of non-cryogenic fuels in space. Most satellites used hydrazine or its derivatives for station keeping and manoeuvring in deep space missions for decades. This is nothing new whatsoever.

On the other hand no one has ever successfully performed a vehicle to vehicle fuel transfer in space, let alone cryogenic fuel or long term storage of said fuels in space. This is new territory that doesn't even have all of its physics fully understood.

So far the cost is at infinity dollars per ton, give or take a few billion.

The focus on launches is because a single launch failure has the ability to make all the rest go to waste.

Why would anyone think it is official when there is nothing indicating that on the image in question? To know that it is "official", as opposed to something which was just drawn to illustrate the article, you have to remember that it came from a nasa slide deck.

The article clearly makes the point that nobody seems to know how many Starship launches the lunar mission will take. It varies from 4 launches (by Elon) to high teens (by Lakiesha Hawkins) and 15 (by Kathy Lueders).

If you don't recognise the source of the original image then it just illustrates the text of the article. No harm, no foul. If you are so much into inside baseball that you recognise the resemblance to the nasa slide then you get the additional meaning: the plan changed. Not even the diagrammatic "concept of operations" is fixed properly here.

What do you think is useful for NASA to do? Do you think any form of spaceflight is useful?