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The Lunacy of Artemis

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Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#221

Post by mhandley »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #212
dotnet00 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F-1 was a design based around the limits of its time. The engineers were concerned about the challenges of controlling a large number of smaller engines, plus concerns about reliability with large numbers of smaller engines. It also had to be designed 'by hand', computers were not advanced enough to do much of the simulation driven refinement used nowadays. So, they traded off efficiency for large size, potential com…

> 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?

Yes, on the last flight both the first and second stages had no problems with the engines on ascent. If this were a Saturn V booster, it would have been a complete success. They did suffer failures with booster recovery, and with the RCS in orbit, but controlling large numbers of small powerful cheap engines seems to be a solved problem already.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#222

Post by dudeinjapan »

verticalscaler wrote: post #133
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…

[flagged]

True, going to the moon would be an excellent way to get your Earth-scale weight down! And on prime-time TV no less.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#223

Post by nordsieck »

qayxc wrote: post #41
fallingknife wrote: post #3

The real lunacy is using chemical rockets instead of nuclear thermal once the ship is in orbit. That could reduce the fuel requirements for an Earth - Moon transfer by 4x. And this isn't some sci-fi tech. NASA built a working engine in the 70s.

> NASA built a working engine in the 70s. Kind of. No NTR has ever been flown and tested in space. The program achieved many milestones and got pretty far into development, but was cancelled 50 years ago due to budget constraints. It's always the last 10% that are the hardest in engineering and while NASA (as well as the Soviet Union) got 90% there, it would still have taken a few years (maybe just two) of further de…

> The real lunacy is simply not being mission-driven. A true mission driven design would have used a simple, reliable option using proven and existing technology. Like non-cryogenic fuel for example.

Are you talking about the lander? Because IMO, the lander it the least objectionable part of the whole thing. Congress, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the lander budget would be $3 B - about 1 year's worth of development costs of Orion + SLS, systems which have been in development for over a decade.

The moon rover got more money than that.

Any system that's going to squeeze into that constraint is going to need to be economically optimized and a bit... creative.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#224

Post by skissane »

Dalewyn wrote: post #172
fastball wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with his criticism (and to some extent echoed by Maciej in this article) is that the main takeaway seems to be "we did it once, we can do it again, let's revisit the past instead of re-inventing the wheel". But I don't think anyone actively involved wants to revisit the past. Who wants to go back to the moon just because we can? Nobody. Assuming best intentions: - People at NASA want to go to the moon to b…

>SpaceX doesn't really care about the moon. SpaceX is a business, SpaceX doesn't care about the Moon because there are no customers interested in going to the Moon. If market forces shift and companies start wanting to go to the Moon, you bet SpaceX will care about the Moon because there's money to be made.

> SpaceX is a business, SpaceX doesn't care about the Moon because there are no customers interested in going to the Moon.

SpaceX claims to care a lot about going to Mars, but Mars has even less potential customers than the Moon has

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#225

Post by krisoft »

nine_k wrote: post #23
fallingknife wrote: post #3

The real lunacy is using chemical rockets instead of nuclear thermal once the ship is in orbit. That could reduce the fuel requirements for an Earth - Moon transfer by 4x. And this isn't some sci-fi tech. NASA built a working engine in the 70s.

But it would constitute nukes in space in a breach of international treaties! Certainly a NERVA-style rocket engine is not a nuclear bomb, and a few nuclear reactors with known and tightly watched positions won't constitute a threat of a sudden nuclear strike. But the treaties were made at times when the principal parties, the West and the Soviet bloc, did not trust each other one bit, and rightfully expected sabotag…

You are asserting that nuclear reactors are banned from space. Which treaty do you think does that?

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#226

Post by csomar »

9dev wrote: post #161
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 ha…

This is a dangerous path (assuming it is the case, I don't know about NASA internals). If you want to improve people's living or help them; just do that and help them by putting money in their bank accounts no strings attached.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#227

Post by rockemsockem »

imiric wrote: post #211
dash2 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> I'd say the climate is as tense today, and it is getting tenser. I think that all the examples you mentioned pale in comparison to the terror of global annihilation from nuclear weapons, a couple of decades after the bloodiest war in human history, during the peak of the Cold War. Conflicts exist today as well, and there is an increasing risk of a global conflict, but there is no urgency of beating an adversary ide…

I certainly agree with the lack of political support, but the American public never supported Apollo. There was a brief moment, right when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, when just over 50% of Americans thought Apollo was a good idea. The rest of the time it was a majority opinion that it wasn't worth it.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#228

Post by dudeinjapan »

dotancohen wrote: post #50
idlewords wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the first reason you give is tautological.

Possibly, but it's not unique to SLS. People were jesting twenty years ago about the purpose of the Space Shuttle being just a vehicle to get to and from the ISS. And the purpose of the ISS? So that the Space Shuttle would have somewhere to go.

Also, the purpose of Earth is so the Space Shuttle has somewhere to launch from and the ISS has something to orbit.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#229

Post by rockemsockem »

golol wrote: post #200
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…

Because the spirit of Apollo - unsustainable one off dlag planting missions - lead to human spaceflight stagnating for the subsequent half century.

Nixon cancelling Apollo early is what led to stagnation.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#230

Post by rockemsockem »

Dalewyn wrote: post #172
fastball wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with his criticism (and to some extent echoed by Maciej in this article) is that the main takeaway seems to be "we did it once, we can do it again, let's revisit the past instead of re-inventing the wheel". But I don't think anyone actively involved wants to revisit the past. Who wants to go back to the moon just because we can? Nobody. Assuming best intentions: - People at NASA want to go to the moon to b…

>SpaceX doesn't really care about the moon. SpaceX is a business, SpaceX doesn't care about the Moon because there are no customers interested in going to the Moon. If market forces shift and companies start wanting to go to the Moon, you bet SpaceX will care about the Moon because there's money to be made.

SpaceX doesn't make sense as a business without actually truly thinking space exploration is something worth doing.

Rocket companies are bad ways to maximize profits.

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