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Artemis II Launch Day Updates

nasa.gov

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Re: Artemis II Launch Day Updates

#851

Post by jojobas »

prohobo wrote: post #843
pineaux wrote: post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just saying: he is good at vaporware on a large scale and kind of a fucked up person. It's not weird people are skeptical. But he also has basically an endless money supply so he can throw money at problems and make them go away eventually. But his timelines are basically all lies used to get venture and retail money into the game.

That describes basically all founders though, minus the endless money supply. That's how business/sales works: make promises, build product later. Also SpaceX, Tesla, PayPal, OpenAI, Grok and Neuralink aren't vaporware... The claim fundamentally doesn't make any sense.

Cybertruck, Semi, Hyperloop, robotaxi, point-to-point rocket travel, tunnels, the list goes on.

Making promises and "it's essentially ready, it's just about regulators" are quite different, if not for Trump he'd be done for securities fraud.

Re: Artemis II Launch Day Updates

#852

Post by mikkupikku »

SyzygyRhythm wrote: post #681
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #300

April 6: flyby April 10: splashdown After that, the exciting work will be in Starship making LEO and testing propellant transfer (a humanity first) [1] and Blue Origin testing its rocket and lunar lander [2], both scheduled for 2026, to enable Artemis II (EDIT: III), currently scheduled—optimistically, in my opinion—for next year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starship_launches#Futu... [2] https://en.wiki…

Starship "making LEO" is not a significant challenge--the existing flights have explicitly targeted a (very slightly) suborbital trajectory. They could have done otherwise at any point, but for now it's more important to guarantee that the stage comes down immediately. None of their current objectives require more than ~1/2 of an orbit. Starship v3 flying will be a significant leap, though. It's the first with the Ra…

How do they hope to make prop transfer work without a working heat shield to enable reuse of the tankers? Unless SpaceX pulls a hat trick, Starship is borderline useless.

Re: Artemis II Launch Day Updates

#853

Post by krapp »

dirasieb wrote: post #732
krapp wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're redoing things we did before most people in this thread were even born, how would any of this "push the frontiers of human technology?"

>We're redoing things we did before most people in this thread were even born oh really? show me a picture of the dark side of the moon then not a reconstruction, not touched up crap based on data like that black hole pic that went viral a few years ago, an actual photograph taken by an astronaut of the dark side of the moon

The first orbit of the moon by a manned spacecraft was Apollo 8 in 1968.

The first photos of the dark side of the moon were taken by the Soviet Luna-3 probe in 1959.

Nothing being done here is revolutionary.

Re: Artemis II Launch Day Updates

#855

Post by yodsanklai »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #603
yodsanklai wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement. Is that irony or plain naiveness? historically and technically, conquest of space is inseparable from warfare. As for climate change, one can argue that technology is one of the primary driver: aviation alone is estimated to 4% of global temperature rise.

Energy use is the driver. Fossil fuels happen to be cheap. It's effectively a coincidence, nothing inherent to technological progress itself except insofar as something like aviation would never have been a commercial success without an exceedingly cheap, dense, and portable method of energy storage. Solar-syngas and solar-battery would have eventually gotten there but we'd all have been taking trains and ships for t…

Energy and tech are two sides of the same coin

Re: Artemis II Launch Day Updates

#856

Post by pedrocr »

Rover222 wrote: post #825
bibelo wrote: post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for that precision "without continued propulsion", because when talking about rockets, physics teachers always talk about escape velocity, as if it was an absolutely necessary condition to escape earth's gravity. But can't you escape gravity slower, just by going higher and higher at lower speed? Like a plane? (ie not vertically, but at an angle)

No, the absolute minimum speed IS required. Anything below that and you’re just making your orbit elliptical.

That seems wrong. If you have a way to maintain enough propulsion for long enough you can escape the gravity well at any arbitrarily low speed. You "just" need to maintain that speed long enough for the escape velocity from the gravity well to go below it as it diminishes with distance from the mass.

Re: Artemis II Launch Day Updates

#857

Post by IshKebab »

gregdeon wrote: post #382
birdsongs wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted. The camera work was atrocious. It's not just frilly video, it's how the world sees it, emotionally connects to it, and grows up loving it, and wanting to support more. We had black screens as it left the pad, they didn't know what camera to switch to and kept changing feeds every 2-3 seconds, they switched to a grainy feed of the crowd just looking up while booster separatio…

I suspect that they might have switched away from the booster separation on purpose. That's probably a risky moment of the launch, and they may have wanted to avoid televising a disaster like in the Challenger launch. Aside from that, agreed that the camera work was awful.

> I suspect that they might have switched away from the booster separation on purpose.

I don't think so. Just before they switched away the camera panned wildly and lost track of the rocket. They were pretty clearly switching away because of that.

Re: Artemis II Launch Day Updates

#858

Post by prohobo »

jojobas wrote: post #851
prohobo wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That describes basically all founders though, minus the endless money supply. That's how business/sales works: make promises, build product later. Also SpaceX, Tesla, PayPal, OpenAI, Grok and Neuralink aren't vaporware... The claim fundamentally doesn't make any sense.

Cybertruck, Semi, Hyperloop, robotaxi, point-to-point rocket travel, tunnels, the list goes on. Making promises and "it's essentially ready, it's just about regulators" are quite different, if not for Trump he'd be done for securities fraud.

All of those exist or are being worked on, so I don't get it. Except maybe hyperloop, which was abandoned afaik.

What are you even trying to say? That these projects are totally fake? AI generated or something? Like the Moon landing was fake?

Re: Artemis II Launch Day Updates

#859

Post by krapp »

Larrikin wrote: post #675
krapp wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually should. By "we" I mean just Americans, though. Leave the hard science to cultures that still have an educated populace and a government that believes in it. Americans are going to need that money to fund the holy war in Iran over the next decade and to build out Trump's Epstein Memorial ballroom. All that gold filigree is expensive. If I were a Real Scientist working for NASA I would have seen the writing…

Meh, sounds like you are not American so telling people in the US to just give up on everything is boring and self serving. If you do have a vote in the US, then you have options to try to make things better. Complaining about pedophiles and people on ketamine in the government is a valid (but extremely small) form of affecting change, but the doom and gloom of everyone should just give up helps no one.

I am an American, I do vote to make things better. I have a whole life outside of Hacker News. But if it's valid to express naive, wide-eyed optimism about how space travel will usher humanity into a utopian era of peace and love it's valid to express the opposite. This is an internet forum so neither the cynicism nor the optimism really helps anyone. Pointing out that that doing so doesn't lead to meaningful change is tautological. No one here is affecting change about anything. I'll get downvoted and flagged, the optimists will get upvoted and cheered, the invisible internet points will be tallied and our accounts weighed in the balance and everyone will move on to the next shiny thing.

But yes, for me, all of this is tainted as it must inevitably be seen against the backdrop of the current administration. American space travel, American science and technology, the "American spirit." I can't feel anything but disgust about it and pity for the astronauts and scientists trying to do real work in the context of an administration that only sees them as tools for propaganda.

There was plenty of (I think valid) cynicism about Apollo at the time and JFK had his faults God knows but he didn't rape children as far as I know.

Re: Artemis II Launch Day Updates

#860

Post by dbdr »

healthworker wrote: post #667
mcmcmc wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Do you prefer that we not even try to spread beyond our one planet, when an entire galaxy, or maybe even the neighboring ones, might be in reach if we try? What if someday at the very end of the lifetime of our sun and similar stars, we look back, and regret not trying?

> Do you prefer that we not even try to spread beyond our one planet, when an entire galaxy, or maybe even the neighboring ones, might be in reach if we try? What if someday at the very end of the lifetime of our sun and similar stars, we look back, and regret not trying?

The timeline you are speaking of is in billions of year. Yes, in that timescale, it definitely makes sense to try.

This very century, there are very serious scientific concerns about the continued comfortable habitability of Earth and the ensuing geopolitical instability caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the sixth mass extinction event, etc. We have solutions to mitigate those to some degree, but this requires very significant resource allocation to that goal, and so far it seems possible that we would fall short.

I don't think there should be zero resources allocated to space exploration, but it's at least reasonable to question whether we have our priorities set right.

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