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The Lunacy of Artemis

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Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#351

Post by usrbinbash »

lupusreal wrote: post #342
grecy wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine being born on an earth where millions of species have gone extinct, where there are hardly any old growth forests left, no bison roaming the central/western US plains and where thousands of water bodies around the world are so toxic they'll kill you if you fall in.

I feel strongly that I was robbed of my birthright to be a mammoth hunter in a caveman tribe. Man didn't evolve for this industrial society we've created, our machinations have already denied to us our natural condition.

If I could, I would go and be a watchmaker in the 18th century.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#352

Post by pdonis »

nerdponx wrote: post #67
pdonis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's thoroughly dismissive of the political concerns which are the essence of the entire problem No, it is quite correctly pointing out that political concerns are creating a lot of problems that shouldn't even exist . > If we don't get there with a more sustainable approach, then there's no point going. But the article's whole point is that this is not a "more sustainable approach". It's less capable than Apollo,…

The compensating benefits are jobs for constituents of key members of Congress and big contracts for their friends. But those are compensating benefits for the legislators specifically, not for the American people (who are paying for all of this) or the global scientific community.

Yes, I understand that there are "compensating benefits" for certain people. But they're not compensating benefits to the mission itself. They're just political pork.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#353

Post by mynotaccount »

hersko wrote: post #326
usrbinbash wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a stepping stone to being able to live in space long term in very large, permanently spaceborne crafts. That is not going to happen, without technology that currently only exists in Science Fiction, like artificial gravity, for the simple reason that we require 1g to live, let alone thrive. > because of immediate access to materials that’d need to be launched into orbit otherwise. 1. How does this "immediate access…

> That is not going to happen, without technology that currently only exists in Science Fiction, like artificial gravity, for the simple reason that we require 1g to live, let alone thrive. Artificial gravity is easily generated via rotation or thrust. > 1. How does this "immediate access" benefit the aforementioned "very large, permanently spaceborne crafts", which apparently won't be moored to planetary bodies? It…

You are living in fairytale land.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#354

Post by ryandrake »

mft_ wrote: post #340
ryandrake wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting piled on, but you're absolutely right. We don't even have the capability to permanently inhabit Antarctica, which has 1. an atmosphere of breathable air at the right pressure, 2. survivable temperature range, 3. abundant water, 4. a magnetic field and radiation shielding, 5. safe transit to and from. How does anyone think we can inhabit Mars, which doesn't have any of these? Build a city of 100K on the…

Not sure if that's a good argument. There are lots of places more hospitable and less remote than Antarctica that aren't inhabited either - the reasons why a large number of people would inhabit an area or not are complex. We have the technology as a species to be able to inhabit Antarctica; there's just no compelling reason to do so at present, so we don't.

That's my point, it takes more than technology to inhabit a place. We might barely have the technology to live in Antarctica (or the middle of the Sahara desert), but it's still not economically feasible, there are no resources there that we need, and there's no social/societal need to be there. Even if we had the technology to safely get to Mars and viably live there (like aliens arrived and handed the technology to us), there's no point to doing it.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#355

Post by idlewords »

jwells89 wrote: post #336
ryandrake wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting piled on, but you're absolutely right. We don't even have the capability to permanently inhabit Antarctica, which has 1. an atmosphere of breathable air at the right pressure, 2. survivable temperature range, 3. abundant water, 4. a magnetic field and radiation shielding, 5. safe transit to and from. How does anyone think we can inhabit Mars, which doesn't have any of these? Build a city of 100K on the…

It may just be a misunderstanding on my part but aren’t there treaties that make anything bigger than science outposts impractical in Antarctica?

There's a similar treaty that precludes human settlement on Mars (for planetary protection reasons).

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#356

Post by Teever »

z0r wrote: post #278
jwells89 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long-term habitation of surfaces of bodies other than that of Earth is a stepping stone to being able to live in space long term in very large, permanently spaceborne crafts. It’s easier to develop these things on the moon, mars, etc because of immediate access to materials that’d need to be launched into orbit otherwise. In the long term, it may make sense to build shipyards on the moon, on Mars, or somewhere in the…

Imagine being born in a habitat on another planet that is further away from Earth in travel time than one's lifespan, and being robbed of your birthright to experience the natural wonders and beauty of the cradle of humanity.

I guess that would be kind of like the life experience of the billions of humans who never had the opportunity to go to the cradle of civilization or whereever humans are thought to have evolved first.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#357

Post by thisaccount546 »

pfdietz wrote: post #310
usrbinbash wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This, and it never ceases to baffle me that there are people who still believe that there is some s…

To steelman the argument for human spaceflight: If launch becomes sufficiently cheap, then the cost of supporting humans in space also becomes cheap. The cost of developing space robots doesn't decline nearly as much. At some point, "why not robots in space?" has the answer "because on Earth there are plenty of applications where people are cheaper", and cheap space moves that argument to space as well. Note that thi…

That’s an argument argument that human spaceflight could, at some point in the future, make sense. Though it’s also likely that automation becomes cheaper in the future. When people are claiming that automation is going to replace many tasks for humans on earth, it’s not much of a stretch to think they would continue to perform better than humans in space, where humans are at a severe disadvantage.

We also have to consider what it is that we actually want people to do up there. A lot of people say “A human could do more science on Mars than a rover!” Leaving aside the fact that we could send multiple rovers for the cost and effort of sending a human, and those rovers would be on the planet much longer - “do science” isn’t a goal. Even the current rover missions have questionable usefulness, which is why there’s always a big celebration when they land, or a discussion about how impressive the engineering is, but extremely little discussion about any of the things they’re learning.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#358

Post by exe34 »

objclxt wrote: post #249
geertj wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is cryogenic propellant transfer any more difficult than other difficult things SpaceX have already done (eg landing a rocket, and building a full flow staged combustion engine)? They do this on earth every time they fuel the rocket. I understand it will be more difficult in space, but I don’t see why specifically this problem is the real engineering target over say, reuse.

> They do this on earth every time they fuel the rocket. I understand it will be more difficult in space, but I don’t see why specifically this problem is the real engineering target over say, reuse. The article goes into this in some detail. In particular: * You have to get the propellant into space. This is going to take a large number of flights (~15) at a pace that has not been done before for a vehicle of that s…

> There is no gravity: whereas on earth the propellant separates relatively cleanly into liquid and gas this isn't the case in space

can you use a plunger, instead of a pump? more like a syringe?

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#359

Post by dotnet00 »

rst wrote: post #313
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…

The point is more that compared to prior landers, the Starship version at least has a uniquely high center of gravity over a narrow base, which makes it a whole lot easier to tip, and amplifies the consequences of, say, leg damage.

The center of mass should be pretty low relative to the height of the lander, the engines and propellant are the heaviest parts, the engines are obviously at the bottom. The heaviest component of the propellant is the LOX, which is also at the bottom.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#360

Post by alexey-salmin »

dotnet00 wrote: post #339
throwawayffffas wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

'Starships keep exploding' is kind of like saying 'tests keep failing' in test-driven development. Yeah, the tests for the stuff you're actively writing or haven't written yet are going to fail until you finish working on them and to someone who doesn't have a debugger it's just going to look like a crash... People have forgotten how much destructive testing NASA used to do back in the Apollo era (eg with the Ranger…

> Starships keep exploding' is kind of like saying 'tests keep failing' in test-driven development.

Saturn V had zero failed launches

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