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Artemis II is competency porn

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Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#51

Post by mrtksn »

matt_kantor wrote: post #47
mrtksn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s. The current space boom is a re-do with better tooling. We can put better computers in space and that’s what gives us anything more than what we had before. The moon and Mars are PR stuff and would be cool and maybe inspire engineers or scientists but its still slight incremental upgrade to what we had so far since 60s. Even the p…

> TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s. People could do backflips and write moving poetry and memorize thousands of digits of pi in the 60s too. Such things were impressive then and they're impressive now. I could understand someone thinking that the Apollo program was more impressive than the Artemis program, but to think that the Artemis missions are not impressive…

Doing it the second time is so less impressive that soviets cancelled their whole human moon landing and Americans stopped paying attention on Apollo 13 and cancelled the program after 17.

Obviously it is huge engineering achievement each time, just not as impressive as it was done before.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#52

Post by dingaling »

moffkalast wrote: post #50
eigenspace wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because the heat shield held up fine does not mean it was the right call. Nobody who knew anything was saying there was a 100% chance of catastrophic heat-shield failure, they weren't even saying there was a 50% chance. They were saying that there was a small chance of failure which was nonetheless unacceptably large. Quote from the blogpost about it being unsafe: "It’s likely—hopefully very likely—that Artemis…

Space travel is not safe and never will be, you can always get randomly sideswiped by a piece of debris in LEO and that's that, even if everything goes perfectly. If the astronauts understand the risks involved then I would say it's their call. Living on Earth isn't safe for that matter, driving has a 1 in 100 chance of death throughout your lifetime, so that margin isn't significantly more given that you get to go t…

There's a difference between quantifiable but unmanageable situational risk and predictable, manageable technical risk.

The heatshield issue is the latter.

$100 billion has been spent on this project. Ablative heatshield coatings have been used since the Atlas ICBM in 1957. Yet they still flew Artemis with significant technical risk on a political grandstanding mission that delivered no significant science.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#53

Post by wookmaster »

mrtksn wrote: post #34
ArcHound wrote: post #19

I can't believe the comments here. "I could have done it better, it's not a big deal, oh, they had women and non white people on board, what even is the shareholder value of this mission, oh it was almost done 50 years ago..." These people went literally to the moon and back. Furthest anyone has ever been. That's an achievement. I know things suck right now. Even more reasons to appreciate what is possible with techn…

TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s. The current space boom is a re-do with better tooling. We can put better computers in space and that’s what gives us anything more than what we had before. The moon and Mars are PR stuff and would be cool and maybe inspire engineers or scientists but its still slight incremental upgrade to what we had so far since 60s. Even the p…

"Even the photos are not that much better so far"

We have an incredible eclipse photos with multiple planets in the background. If you don't find photos like that incredible to see I'd guess you need to do some soul searching.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#54

Post by wookmaster »

ArcHound wrote: post #19

I can't believe the comments here. "I could have done it better, it's not a big deal, oh, they had women and non white people on board, what even is the shareholder value of this mission, oh it was almost done 50 years ago..." These people went literally to the moon and back. Furthest anyone has ever been. That's an achievement. I know things suck right now. Even more reasons to appreciate what is possible with techn…

We're in this mix of living in a time of mass hysteria and so many bots on the internet that it's tough to tell if the comments are real. I want to hope most comments I see aren't real people. It's sad if they are.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#56

Post by wookmaster »

newsclues wrote: post #46
nlitened wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you honestly care about these things so much, surely you’re a big Elon Musk and SpaceX fan

No, I care about the only planet I have to live on continuing to exist until I die.

Then you're probably concerned about the Falcon creating easy launches for mass numbers of satellites and the extra carbon footprint that new industry has. NASA here barely compares to the output of that of falcon.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#57

Post by mrtksn »

wookmaster wrote: post #53
mrtksn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s. The current space boom is a re-do with better tooling. We can put better computers in space and that’s what gives us anything more than what we had before. The moon and Mars are PR stuff and would be cool and maybe inspire engineers or scientists but its still slight incremental upgrade to what we had so far since 60s. Even the p…

"Even the photos are not that much better so far" We have an incredible eclipse photos with multiple planets in the background. If you don't find photos like that incredible to see I'd guess you need to do some soul searching.

They are impressive photos, the earthrise is my background on my phone and the eclipse is my background on my laptop but they are derivatives of what we had before.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#58

Post by rbanffy »

gaigalas wrote: post #18
rbanffy wrote: post #8

I will still wait for the heat shield analysis. Doing a crewed flight was not what I would have done - I’d use a Falcon Heavy to put one or more dummies through different trajectories to make sure we have enough experimental data to extensively model the shield behaviour, especially in non-nominal entries.

Falcon Heavy cannot carry Orion.

It can carry an Orion capsule to a suborbital trajectory and achieve the same reentry speeds the capsule experiences returning from the Moon. The trick is doing a second burn pointing down. If you don't use an actual Orion but just a mass simulator, you can even do some very off-nominal reentries to test limits.

There is ample delta-v for that.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#59

Post by gaigalas »

rbanffy wrote: post #58
gaigalas wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Falcon Heavy cannot carry Orion.

It can carry an Orion capsule to a suborbital trajectory and achieve the same reentry speeds the capsule experiences returning from the Moon. The trick is doing a second burn pointing down. If you don't use an actual Orion but just a mass simulator, you can even do some very off-nominal reentries to test limits. There is ample delta-v for that.

Can you elaborate more on that?

I don't understand how the coupling between Orion and Falcon Heavy would be done (can't just put it inside the fairing).

I also don't understand how you plan to re-light the engines on the 3 falcon cores for a second burn (required for the delta-v you propose) and the fuel economics.

I also don't understand the trajectory you envision. Even if you could re-light the FH engines and couple Orion to it, I don't understand how you would get the re-entry angle correct.

Regarding the mass simulator, it's not clear by your description how the shields would be tested in that scenario.

Let's not leave it to the reader's imagination. If you're seeing something that I'm not, please, lay out the plan in more detail.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#60

Post by thomasdziedzic »

jFriedensreich wrote: post #49

As a german, seeing you go to the moon under trump feels like celebrating the olympics in the dawn of the german reich, it cannot be taken for what it is. It does not matter what we feel, what we want to feel, we can enjoy it for a second and then swallow it down and not write an article like that.

> under trump feels like celebrating the olympics in the dawn of the german reich

Godwin's law...

> it cannot be taken for what it is. It does not matter what we feel, what we want to feel, we can enjoy it for a second and then swallow it down and not write an article like that.

As an American, I felt extremely proud seeing 4 astronauts (3 Americans, 1 Canadian) come back after 10 days in space and the amount of coordination it takes, regardless of politics.

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