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The Lunacy of Artemis

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Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#401
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems crazy to me they've managed to use shuttle parts to make a design that seems older and worse than the shuttle. People called the shuttle a truck, but they've used parts from it to make something that looks like a Ford model-T in comparison.

The moon has trillions of dollars in water, helium, and metals (rare earth, titanium, etc). It's an f'ing goldmine and controlling said resource will be something hostile authoritarian regimes (China) would seek out. There's simply no excuse that the US should be this bad at making a system to reach the moon. The Chinese have committed insane sins and dropped massive amounts of space hardware on the earth (luckily it…

None of the material on the moon is worth more than the cost of shipping it back to Earth.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it obvious? Starship, if it succeeds, could reduce launch costs per mass by two orders of magnitude over Falcon 9. For the cost of one SLS launch, Starship, if it meets its cost targets, could launch the mass of a nuclear supercarrier into low earth orbit. The cost to LEO would become similar to the cost of transport to the South Pole. You will notice we are not using robots at the South Pole.

It could be that for the sort of work we want to do on the south pole a human in a jacket outperforms our current robots, but for the sort of work we want to do on the moon a robot, or our future robot, will outperform a human in a spacesuit.

Sure, it could be. All sorts of things could be. Making that observation is not an argument that something is.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#403
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just skimmed it, but he mostly agrees with the criticisms right? ("Addresses" often suggests a rebuttal.)

I watched the whole thing but a bit ago when it came out. He did better than just that, he frankly humiliated the program in my eyes. The points I took away from his talk were: 1. Stop lying to yourselves and figure out the hard math (mostly in relation to the refueling question) 2. Learn from the past. Apollo kept excruciating notes (I'm still discovering new notes. For example, the lunar rover's manual is publicly…

The refueling risk and cost is being borne by SpaceX, not the taxpayer. The SpaceX HLS portion of Artemis (aka the refueling) is a fabulous deal for the taxpayer.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#404
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems crazy to me they've managed to use shuttle parts to make a design that seems older and worse than the shuttle. People called the shuttle a truck, but they've used parts from it to make something that looks like a Ford model-T in comparison.

The moon has trillions of dollars in water, helium, and metals (rare earth, titanium, etc). It's an f'ing goldmine and controlling said resource will be something hostile authoritarian regimes (China) would seek out. There's simply no excuse that the US should be this bad at making a system to reach the moon. The Chinese have committed insane sins and dropped massive amounts of space hardware on the earth (luckily it…

This sounds completely insane to me. Are people worried that China is going to mine out the moon before the US gets there? You're talking about trillions of tons of material, it won't be the limiting factor in your lifetime. And this assumes that lunar mining/refining is even practical.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#405
post #51
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…

SpaceX’s Starship allegedly needs up to 12 additional Starship launches to refuel the lander after getting into orbit so it can complete the mission. SLS can get from the ground to the moon and back with just the one rocket. I don’t think it’s clear that SpaceX can “do it by themselves” any time soon, they haven’t done an entire mission yet, of which the lunar lander Starship is only one small part of. Artemis is a d…

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Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cryogenic aspect seems much more distinct than whether it's rocket-to-rocket or rocket-to-ISS.

No, they're both pretty significant. In the ISS case you have propellant mass moving around that's just a tiny fraction of the total system mass, while in the rocket case a sizable portion of the total mass gets shifted. Moreover, in refueling ISS you can use something like a flexible bladder and pressure differential to simplify the job of moving liquid from container A into container B. But in the rocket-to-rocket…

> Moreover, in refueling ISS you can use something like a flexible bladder and pressure differential to simplify the job of moving liquid from container A into container B. But in the rocket-to-rocket case, you might be moving propellant from an almost-empty Starship into an almost-full depot rocket. In that case, you're trying to hunt around for liquid in an almost empty fuel tank, and push it into an almost full one.

> You can't use a bladder because Starship is too big, and it's hard to maintain a big pressure difference (unless you're willing to vent a lot of propellant in the process).

You just put a baffle in the tank so the volume with remaining propellant is small and close to full. Also eliminates sloshing issues that you'd need to deal with anyways.

In orbit fluid transfer is a reasonably solved problem, and there are many ways to do it. In addition to using bladders, you can also use ullage motors, centrifugal propellant settling, capillary tubes, etc. Cryogenics are harder because cryogenic pumps are just generally more challenging than standard pumps, but luckily the pumping requirements for propellant transfer are much less demanding than for engine restart - rocket engines need high flow rates and can't tolerate entrained gas, propellant transfer can use slower but more robust pumps.

I don't mean this to diminish the accomplishment of the engineers who spent quite a bit of time solving this problem, but rather to point out that people have been working on this for decades and have had significant success. Sure we haven't done a perfect 1:1 dress rehearsal in orbit where large quantities of cryogenic propellants are transferred between docked spacecraft, but we've done everything shy of that.

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#407
post #239

> Conversely, if SpaceX and Blue Origin can’t make cryogenic refueling work, then NASA has no plan B for landing on the moon. If SpaceX and Blue Origin can't. Then Nasa will find someone who can. Cryogenic refueling is the projects real engineering target. Landing on the moon in the twenty twenties just isn't that impressive anymore. The Artemis program is nominally about going to the moon, but it really isn't. It's…

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.

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Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#408
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They were required, by Congress, to use Shuttle engines and SRBs to build a vehicle capable of deep space transportation.

Yep. For reference regarding the budget stipulations: https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#409
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moon has trillions of dollars in water, helium, and metals (rare earth, titanium, etc). It's an f'ing goldmine and controlling said resource will be something hostile authoritarian regimes (China) would seek out. There's simply no excuse that the US should be this bad at making a system to reach the moon. The Chinese have committed insane sins and dropped massive amounts of space hardware on the earth (luckily it…

This sounds completely insane to me. Are people worried that China is going to mine out the moon before the US gets there? You're talking about trillions of tons of material, it won't be the limiting factor in your lifetime. And this assumes that lunar mining/refining is even practical.

Same, but if that kind of paranoia gets us back into space I don't mind it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: The Lunacy of Artemis

#410
> artisanally hand-crafted by a workforce that likes to get home before traffic gets bad.

Ouch, that's gotta hurt.. I'm not saying I disagree, but I do wonder if a project is going "right" only when it starts to hit excruciatingly long shifts and burns workforce like coals - especially if it is expected to safely carry humans to the Moon. I think it's more likely a sign of doing something that wasn't planned and budgeted properly (which may certainly be because it simply had never been done before - so it will often correlate with innovative projects). If you worry about your workforce being motivated, transparently tying compensation to company success does wonders.

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