The Lunacy of Artemis

The weird thing about NASA's budget when you look at it[1] is that funding allocation appears to be inversely proportional to the benefit. Human spaceflight is the largest chunk, at 44.9% of the budget. Aeronautics and technology are at the bottom, with technology being allocated 4.9% of the budget, and aeronautics 3.5%.

There were good reasons why people were interested in sending people into space in the early days of space exploration. Before automated systems were sufficiently developed, manned programs looked like the best choice. But once automated systems became sufficiently advanced, it was clear that they were the way to go.

You can see this when it comes to reconnaissance satellites - both the U.S. (with the uncompleted Manned Orbital Laboratory) and the USSR (with Almaz, which was completed) began with the idea of having manned reconnaissance satellites, but as time progressed they realized autonomous ones were better.

If we were sticking people in reconnaissance satellites just for the sake of sticking them in reconnaissance satellites today, it would obviously be farcical. But NASA’s manned space program has being doing the equivalent for decades - blowing a huge part of their budget on sending people into space just for the sake of sending them into space (by the 80’s this had reached the point where they had a program of sending teachers into space for the purpose of having them come back and tell students how cool it was to go to space). But since NASA has more open ended objectives than the military, it’s easier to hide the fact that this isn’t accomplishing much, or that these programs have diverted so much from many of NASA’s core objectives.

[1]https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasa-budget

> It's about building and living in habitats beyond low orbit

And what for if I may ask?

And please don't say "technological development" or "colonizing space".

ad Development): Most of the tech that needs to be developed for this, is what is commonly called space plumbing: Figuring out ways to make human bodily functions not immediately fail in space. Next to none of these technologies benefit humanity at large in any way. Also: We keep coming up with amazing new tech all the time, without the extra cost of strapping it to a human and shooting that package into orbit.

ad Colonization): There is nothing in our solar system to colonize. Period. Everything other than Earth is less hospitable than Earth would be after a thermonuclear war, by a huge margin. Terraforming another planet is practically impossible fora species that still has to count the kilos for every launch.

And as for the one goal that makes sense, which is exploration: We have a perfectly reliable form of space exploration: Robots. And they are much better at it than we are, for one simple reason: They don't require space plumbing.

There is exactly ONE reason why Apollo was manned by people instead of robots: Because computers, electronics and robotics in the 60s were not up to the task. If todays tech existed back then, I would bet the Apollo rocket would have had exactly one passenger, and that would have been the Lunar Roving vehicle.

It's easy to miss how clever the Apollo mission architecture was.

The moon is not so far away in terms of distance but it is very far away in terms of Δv because, not least, you have to land propulsively because there is no atmosphere to slow you down.

Trips to some near-Earth asteroids are easier than the lunar surface, Mars and Venus aren't that much harder because in any of those cases the Moon's gravity can be helpful.

Werner von Braun's early plans to go to the moon

https://www.scribd.com/doc/118710867/Collier-s-Magazine-Man-...

involved multiple launches, space stations, etc. The recognition that you could get there and back with 7 "stages"

* Saturn V 1 * Saturn V 2 * Saturn V 3 * Service Module * Command Module * Bottom half of Lunar Module * Top half of Lunar Module

was the key to realizing Kennedy's dream to do it in a decade.

> Only time will tell if either of these two missions were actually worth it.

No time required, we already know the answer: neither of these two goals is worth the enormeous pile of resources burned to achive it.

1. A permanent human presence on the moon serves what purpose exactly that Robots cannot do? If we want to set up shop there: Why not send robots and an automatic laboratory-repair-bay? It's the moon, we can even remote control the damn things with only 2 seconds latency! What excatly are humans supposed to do there, that robots cannot?

2. Go ask women in underpaid care work and people of color in underserved communities, what they think would benefit them, and the general sense of equality, more: Hundreds of billions of dollars poured into improving social services like adequate pensions for carework, childcare, better supervision programs against discrimination in the workplace, better educational systems, etc. OR hundreds of billions of dollars burned by space-billionaires to let some old politician say "We did it!" at a press conference?

> 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.

SLS's design and shuttle-derived components were basically stipulated by Congress, specifically representatives from states where these shuttle-derived components are built and tested.

The goal here is to achieve something, yes, but doing so with billions spent in specific states is a large part of it as well. These representatives and senators also tend to still be loudly skeptical of commercial launch providers like SpaceX despite their successful track record, likely for the same reasons.