It bothers me how far this has gotten being what is essentially a giant graft scheme between multiple companies and government entities. It is so on its face fucking stupid, and it bothers me that...
It bothers me how far this has gotten being what is essentially a giant graft scheme between multiple companies and government entities.
It is so on its face fucking stupid, and it bothers me that people have the gall to compare it to Apollo as if somehow being able to do one means they’ll be sure to solve all the problems on this one.
So much of this is blessed but the fundamental logic, approach, and handling of the entire enterprise is different. It’s sad to say that I hope it only wastes trillions and doesn’t actually kill some poor batards a half assed “see we did it” attempt
With Apollo, the objective was clearly beating the Soviets to the moon. With Artemis, the objective is I have no idea what the objective is. What is it? Another moon landing? Long term habitation...
With Apollo, the objective was clearly beating the Soviets to the moon.
With Artemis, the objective is I have no idea what the objective is. What is it? Another moon landing? Long term habitation of the moon? Mars with extra steps?
I've read so many different explanations for the why of Artemis. It seems to lack the clear focus of Apollo.
For almost any project, of almost any scale, when you cannot easily summarize the goal, everything else is going to be a muddled mess.
SLS, perhaps early on, may have made sense. Sure, let's reuse working components we already have. But when it costs more to reuse, I'm at a loss. There have evidently been many such moments as part of Artemis. All of them should have been wake up calls to revisit first principles.
Yet here we are. Such a disappointment.
Like you, reading this piece, I fear for the life of Artemis astronauts. Unit tests are great but if you can't perform top to bottom integration tests and you can't carefully test in prod without putting lives at stake, how are we not going to lose many lives along the way? How is Artemis not going to end with the first death due to this absurd approach? Has NASA and those funding Artemis become this nihilistic?
SLS really never made sense. We've known since challenger just how miserable reusing components is, and the entire "oh well it's a stepping stone to mars" thing was always bullshit. We'd have been...
SLS really never made sense. We've known since challenger just how miserable reusing components is, and the entire "oh well it's a stepping stone to mars" thing was always bullshit. We'd have been better off seriously trying to expand our orbital infrastructure.
Yeah but at least the space shuttle was, well, cool. Having a winged brick you can glide to a high-speed landing coming in with 24000km/h+ speed from space was cool. I can accept that. Sometimes...
Yeah but at least the space shuttle was, well, cool. Having a winged brick you can glide to a high-speed landing coming in with 24000km/h+ speed from space was cool. I can accept that. Sometimes you just need to go wild.
No kidding, if it wastes trillions with no deaths at least it added to the list of successful space travel, but if it results in deaths, which it probably will, it'll hobble future expansion into...
No kidding, if it wastes trillions with no deaths at least it added to the list of successful space travel, but if it results in deaths, which it probably will, it'll hobble future expansion into space for decades when it's used as a reason to be hyper cautious.
I'd rather see orbiting infrastructure, like a much bigger space station that's designed to have gravity, be spacious and house people working to expand farther into space and to the moon. It could have farms and production facilities to build new equipment and recycle used equipment, maybe even capture and recycle space trash. Only when we have something that doesn't rely on constant shipments from earth would I say we have reached a point where we should expand further (like to the moon). Having anything on the moon without a station close to earth made to handle things for people traveling further into space just doesn't seem feasible to me.
Everything that doesn't make sense about Artemis is entirely driven by politics. As mentioned in the article Gateway exists for the political purpose of making sure we don't end up with the Apollo...
Everything that doesn't make sense about Artemis is entirely driven by politics.
As mentioned in the article Gateway exists for the political purpose of making sure we don't end up with the Apollo situation of "we went to the moon a couple of times, everyone is bored now, we've proven our point and the Soviets can't keep up, so let's cancel the program and not return for 50+ years".
There are some powerful people in Congress with lots of SLS jobs in their district/state that demanded it be created and now demand that it be used. The head of NASA did for less than a day propose using Starship or some other commercial rocket instead of SLS for Artemis to keep the timeline on track and immediately reversed course after those Congresspeople heard about it.
But ultimately playing politics is what needs to be done if NASA ever wants to do anything without the threat of Cold War giving them a blank check. Artemis is far from the ideal way to do things, but if your ideal way can't get votes for funding in Congress it doesn't matter.
This is the big issue. As mentioned earlier apollo had a clear country wide objective/goal. From that goal there were positives side effects of new jobs and boosts to the economy. With Artemis the...
This is the big issue. As mentioned earlier apollo had a clear country wide objective/goal. From that goal there were positives side effects of new jobs and boosts to the economy.
With Artemis the goal is almost the opposite. With politics making the jobs and economic effects are the goal and making it to the moon feels optional.
I do agree with some points the author made (primarily related to cost, and especially the reusing old components) but the sheer amount of wrong, subjective or deceptive information within this...
I do agree with some points the author made (primarily related to cost, and especially the reusing old components) but the sheer amount of wrong, subjective or deceptive information within this article is astounding to say the least
Combined with the fact that the entire thing is written to be inflammatory so as to bias readers into being “anti-Artemis” severely decreases the authors credibility in my eyes
Sorry for the delay! My fiancee is a NASA engineer on the Gateway team, which is where the majority of my direct insight comes from. First let me copy paste her own responses to the first few...
Exemplary
Sorry for the delay! My fiancee is a NASA engineer on the Gateway team, which is where the majority of my direct insight comes from. First let me copy paste her own responses to the first few sections, and then I'll add my personal commentary to the end:
“That proposed mission is called Artemis 3, and its lunar segment looks a lot like Apollo 17 without the space car. Two astronauts will land on the moon, collect rocks, take selfies, and about a week after landing rejoin their orbiting colleagues to go back to Earth.”
So yes and no… the goal with Artemis is to get to a point where we can do yearly missions. So the main goal of an early mission like Artemis 3 will be to collect samples and take photos of the terrain. But they will also fly with scientific payloads to run experiments some payloads will be conducted while in orbit and some will be taken to the lunar surface. So they will have multiple experiments going during that week they are up there. And they need to test the spacesuit systems, the airlocks, the elevator on the Human Landing System… we don’t know a whole lot about the South Pole region of the moon since that’s not where we landed during the Apollo missions, so the crew going there to “collect rocks and take some photos” is all in an effort to learn more about the area so that we can better plan for permanent infrastructure that will be needed for future missions. An early mission is going to mostly be for information collection and systems testing and if someone doesn’t get that then it makes me think that the person who wrote the article just must not be an engineer so they don’t know how these things work.
I’m going to go through these couple sentences piece by piece lol
“While NASA is no stranger to complex mission architectures, Artemis goes beyond complex to the just plain incoherent. None of the puzzle pieces seem to come from the same box. Half the program requires breakthrough technologies that make the other half unnecessary. The rocket and spacecraft NASA spent two decades building can’t even reach the moon. And for reasons no one understands, there’s a new space station in the mix.”
As someone who has reviewed the Gateway Concept of Operations many times, along with hundreds of other gateway technical document from NASA and partners, I have never read anything I would call “incoherent” (confusing sure, but incoherent like gibberish… no). I also have never read anything about relying on a new technology that doesn’t exist yet… I can only really speak for the inside of the Gateway vehicle though. But I’m not aware of new breakthrough technology we are hoping gets developed in the next 18 months 🤷🏻♀️ so to say that half the program is relying on that, seems like a false statement. There are a lot of components of Artemis, but this is at least 100% not true for the inside of Gateway. In fact it’s the opposite. A lot of people think we are using too much heritage design carried over from the ISS just to save money, when we should be trying to be more innovative.
“The rocket and spacecraft NASA spent two decades building can’t even reach the moon.”
This isn’t true. We had a successful Artemis 1 mission that did go to the moon.
“And for reasons no one understands, there’s a new space station in the mix.”
the reasons for building the Gateway are not being kept from the public so I don’t know how this author isn’t able to answer this one with a quick google search… But the reason for Gateway is to provide a place to run scientific experiments in lunar orbit and to prepare for future Mars missions. Gateway is how we will be able to establish a presence on the moon. We we have an opportunity to test things beyond low earth orbit in a way humanity has never had before. We are going to be able to do really cool studies on the sun, the earth, human health, general life science areas that we have never been able to do before. So now there is no reason to say “for reasons no one understands” lol because plenty of people more knowledgeable than the author do understand.
For some of their statements about Gateway:
“Despite this open admission that Gateway is unnecessary, building the space station remains the core activity of the Artemis program.”
Gateway is not necessary for simply putting astronauts back on the moon. Orion can dock to the HLS and crew can go to the lunar surface. But the goal of Artemis is not just to put people on the moon, but to establish the mission heritage to give us the foundation to go to mars. We need to have a well established lunar and deep space presence before we can go to Mars. The Gateway will be the first piece of that infrastructure and presence. That’s what it’s needed for.
“The station is not being built to shelter astronauts in the harsh environment of space…”
For this statement I’m sure the author is talking about radiation. Crew should never be on Gateway without Orion docked to it. And Orion was designed to be the “safe haven” for crew. So yes Gateway is not being built to shield crew from high radiation events (like a solar flare for example). But there is an established design and plan for Gateway crew when they will need to shelter, it’s that they will go to Orion and take shelter. That’s the planned operation that crew is being trained for. And Gateway is not that big. Going into Orion is going to be no different than going into any of the other gateway modules. This statement makes it seem like there is no plan for crew sheltering during Artemis missions and that’s just not true. So it’s true that gateway is not being built for crew sheltering but that’s just because Orion is handling that.
So that's the end of her commentary,
now for mine one thing I despised that this author mentioned is the "reliant on future technologies". She (my fiancee) did somewhat touch on this, but she did not finish the article because it was such a rant. I did want to see what the author was referring to and the only thing I could find was that he said as it stands no rocket has refueled another rocket in space. Please correct me if I'm wrong but that was the only feat that the author seemed to consider a "future technology" and it blows my mind they have so little faith in human ingenuity to think we cannot accomplish that lol. As it stands, rockets are refueling the ISS, and yes while we have never technically done a rocket-to-rocket transfer of fuel, why does the author truly think that will not be possible?
Thanks! Along with refueling, it’s my impression that the author considers the landers to be the “future tech” part: Also, he sometimes talks about time pressure - it’s not that new technologies...
Thanks!
Along with refueling, it’s my impression that the author considers the landers to be the “future tech” part:
The lunar lander is the most technically ambitious part of Artemis. Where SLS, Orion, and Gateway are mostly a compilation of NASA's greatest hits, the lander requires breakthrough technologies with the potential to revolutionize space travel.
Also, he sometimes talks about time pressure - it’s not that new technologies are impossible, but that they’re unlikely to work right on the first try.
I’m no rocket scientist, but it seems like it would be wise to test lunar landing and ascent without a crew a few times. SpaceX usually blows up rockets when they’re trying ambitious things.
I had seen that, but the author really didn't detail the specific technologies within the lander that pertain to being "breakthrough" though just landing on the moon is not in fact an easy feat....
I had seen that, but the author really didn't detail the specific technologies within the lander that pertain to being "breakthrough" though just landing on the moon is not in fact an easy feat. The author seems to not realize how close the apollo mission was to not successfully landing on the moon
Regarding the ascent testing, yes I understand how on the surface it would seem as though it makes sense to demonstrate a successful ascent, but technically the landing is the hardest part. Recall back to the Falcon rocket testing, where the initial launch was one of the first steps completed successfully but the landing took a few explosive attempts. I don't know that I personally would say that's sufficient reason to why an ascent demonstration is not needed, but I can see the argument being made
I think pulling off a maneuver like that could fairly be counted as a breakthrough, much like SpaceX landing its boosters on Earth was a breakthrough. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done. I do wish...
I think pulling off a maneuver like that could fairly be counted as a breakthrough, much like SpaceX landing its boosters on Earth was a breakthrough. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
I do wish that article was less of a rant. It raises lots of questions I’m curious about, but they’re probably better phrased as questions.
Like, why not leave behind part of the lander on the moon, like it was done before? Rockets have multiple stages because it improves performance.
I guess for me, I consider breakthrough to be something novel that hasn't been done before. This is more like a new technique in my eyes - something that's more of a modification to something else...
I guess for me, I consider breakthrough to be something novel that hasn't been done before. This is more like a new technique in my eyes - something that's more of a modification to something else that has been successfully done
Articles about Artemis often give the program’s tangled backstory. But I want to talk about Artemis as a technical design, because there’s just so much to drink in. While NASA is no stranger to complex mission architectures, Artemis goes beyond complex to the just plain incoherent. None of the puzzle pieces seem to come from the same box. Half the program requires breakthrough technologies that make the other half unnecessary. The rocket and spacecraft NASA spent two decades building can’t even reach the moon. And for reasons no one understands, there’s a new space station in the mix.
It bothers me how far this has gotten being what is essentially a giant graft scheme between multiple companies and government entities.
It is so on its face fucking stupid, and it bothers me that people have the gall to compare it to Apollo as if somehow being able to do one means they’ll be sure to solve all the problems on this one.
So much of this is blessed but the fundamental logic, approach, and handling of the entire enterprise is different. It’s sad to say that I hope it only wastes trillions and doesn’t actually kill some poor batards a half assed “see we did it” attempt
With Apollo, the objective was clearly beating the Soviets to the moon.
With Artemis, the objective is I have no idea what the objective is. What is it? Another moon landing? Long term habitation of the moon? Mars with extra steps?
I've read so many different explanations for the why of Artemis. It seems to lack the clear focus of Apollo.
For almost any project, of almost any scale, when you cannot easily summarize the goal, everything else is going to be a muddled mess.
SLS, perhaps early on, may have made sense. Sure, let's reuse working components we already have. But when it costs more to reuse, I'm at a loss. There have evidently been many such moments as part of Artemis. All of them should have been wake up calls to revisit first principles.
Yet here we are. Such a disappointment.
Like you, reading this piece, I fear for the life of Artemis astronauts. Unit tests are great but if you can't perform top to bottom integration tests and you can't carefully test in prod without putting lives at stake, how are we not going to lose many lives along the way? How is Artemis not going to end with the first death due to this absurd approach? Has NASA and those funding Artemis become this nihilistic?
SLS really never made sense. We've known since challenger just how miserable reusing components is, and the entire "oh well it's a stepping stone to mars" thing was always bullshit. We'd have been better off seriously trying to expand our orbital infrastructure.
Yeah but at least the space shuttle was, well, cool. Having a winged brick you can glide to a high-speed landing coming in with 24000km/h+ speed from space was cool. I can accept that. Sometimes you just need to go wild.
Here we're redoing something we already did.
No kidding, if it wastes trillions with no deaths at least it added to the list of successful space travel, but if it results in deaths, which it probably will, it'll hobble future expansion into space for decades when it's used as a reason to be hyper cautious.
I'd rather see orbiting infrastructure, like a much bigger space station that's designed to have gravity, be spacious and house people working to expand farther into space and to the moon. It could have farms and production facilities to build new equipment and recycle used equipment, maybe even capture and recycle space trash. Only when we have something that doesn't rely on constant shipments from earth would I say we have reached a point where we should expand further (like to the moon). Having anything on the moon without a station close to earth made to handle things for people traveling further into space just doesn't seem feasible to me.
Everything that doesn't make sense about Artemis is entirely driven by politics.
As mentioned in the article Gateway exists for the political purpose of making sure we don't end up with the Apollo situation of "we went to the moon a couple of times, everyone is bored now, we've proven our point and the Soviets can't keep up, so let's cancel the program and not return for 50+ years".
There are some powerful people in Congress with lots of SLS jobs in their district/state that demanded it be created and now demand that it be used. The head of NASA did for less than a day propose using Starship or some other commercial rocket instead of SLS for Artemis to keep the timeline on track and immediately reversed course after those Congresspeople heard about it.
But ultimately playing politics is what needs to be done if NASA ever wants to do anything without the threat of Cold War giving them a blank check. Artemis is far from the ideal way to do things, but if your ideal way can't get votes for funding in Congress it doesn't matter.
This is the big issue. As mentioned earlier apollo had a clear country wide objective/goal. From that goal there were positives side effects of new jobs and boosts to the economy.
With Artemis the goal is almost the opposite. With politics making the jobs and economic effects are the goal and making it to the moon feels optional.
I do agree with some points the author made (primarily related to cost, and especially the reusing old components) but the sheer amount of wrong, subjective or deceptive information within this article is astounding to say the least
Combined with the fact that the entire thing is written to be inflammatory so as to bias readers into being “anti-Artemis” severely decreases the authors credibility in my eyes
Oh, it's definitely a rant. I don't know a lot about Artemis and I'd be interested in hearing what this article got wrong.
Sorry for the delay! My fiancee is a NASA engineer on the Gateway team, which is where the majority of my direct insight comes from. First let me copy paste her own responses to the first few sections, and then I'll add my personal commentary to the end:
So yes and no… the goal with Artemis is to get to a point where we can do yearly missions. So the main goal of an early mission like Artemis 3 will be to collect samples and take photos of the terrain. But they will also fly with scientific payloads to run experiments some payloads will be conducted while in orbit and some will be taken to the lunar surface. So they will have multiple experiments going during that week they are up there. And they need to test the spacesuit systems, the airlocks, the elevator on the Human Landing System… we don’t know a whole lot about the South Pole region of the moon since that’s not where we landed during the Apollo missions, so the crew going there to “collect rocks and take some photos” is all in an effort to learn more about the area so that we can better plan for permanent infrastructure that will be needed for future missions. An early mission is going to mostly be for information collection and systems testing and if someone doesn’t get that then it makes me think that the person who wrote the article just must not be an engineer so they don’t know how these things work.
I’m going to go through these couple sentences piece by piece lol
For some of their statements about Gateway:
Gateway is not necessary for simply putting astronauts back on the moon. Orion can dock to the HLS and crew can go to the lunar surface. But the goal of Artemis is not just to put people on the moon, but to establish the mission heritage to give us the foundation to go to mars. We need to have a well established lunar and deep space presence before we can go to Mars. The Gateway will be the first piece of that infrastructure and presence. That’s what it’s needed for.
For this statement I’m sure the author is talking about radiation. Crew should never be on Gateway without Orion docked to it. And Orion was designed to be the “safe haven” for crew. So yes Gateway is not being built to shield crew from high radiation events (like a solar flare for example). But there is an established design and plan for Gateway crew when they will need to shelter, it’s that they will go to Orion and take shelter. That’s the planned operation that crew is being trained for. And Gateway is not that big. Going into Orion is going to be no different than going into any of the other gateway modules. This statement makes it seem like there is no plan for crew sheltering during Artemis missions and that’s just not true. So it’s true that gateway is not being built for crew sheltering but that’s just because Orion is handling that.
So that's the end of her commentary,
now for mine one thing I despised that this author mentioned is the "reliant on future technologies". She (my fiancee) did somewhat touch on this, but she did not finish the article because it was such a rant. I did want to see what the author was referring to and the only thing I could find was that he said as it stands no rocket has refueled another rocket in space. Please correct me if I'm wrong but that was the only feat that the author seemed to consider a "future technology" and it blows my mind they have so little faith in human ingenuity to think we cannot accomplish that lol. As it stands, rockets are refueling the ISS, and yes while we have never technically done a rocket-to-rocket transfer of fuel, why does the author truly think that will not be possible?
I was hoping the author was referring to the super cool upcoming pulsed plasma rocket (PPR) propulsion technology that will be tested some time this or next year but alas I did not see it mentioned. And even though as it stands yes that tech is untested, it's not really a reason to not travel to Mars, it would just drastically reduce the time needed to get there and back.
Thanks!
Along with refueling, it’s my impression that the author considers the landers to be the “future tech” part:
Also, he sometimes talks about time pressure - it’s not that new technologies are impossible, but that they’re unlikely to work right on the first try.
I’m no rocket scientist, but it seems like it would be wise to test lunar landing and ascent without a crew a few times. SpaceX usually blows up rockets when they’re trying ambitious things.
I had seen that, but the author really didn't detail the specific technologies within the lander that pertain to being "breakthrough" though just landing on the moon is not in fact an easy feat. The author seems to not realize how close the apollo mission was to not successfully landing on the moon
Regarding the ascent testing, yes I understand how on the surface it would seem as though it makes sense to demonstrate a successful ascent, but technically the landing is the hardest part. Recall back to the Falcon rocket testing, where the initial launch was one of the first steps completed successfully but the landing took a few explosive attempts. I don't know that I personally would say that's sufficient reason to why an ascent demonstration is not needed, but I can see the argument being made
I think pulling off a maneuver like that could fairly be counted as a breakthrough, much like SpaceX landing its boosters on Earth was a breakthrough. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
I do wish that article was less of a rant. It raises lots of questions I’m curious about, but they’re probably better phrased as questions.
Like, why not leave behind part of the lander on the moon, like it was done before? Rockets have multiple stages because it improves performance.
I guess for me, I consider breakthrough to be something novel that hasn't been done before. This is more like a new technique in my eyes - something that's more of a modification to something else that has been successfully done
The rationale for the reusable rocket could be to bring costs down I think (assuming you're referring to HLS). Check out this cost comparison for super heavy launch vehicles and specifically see the cost for the SpaceX vehicles versus all others
SmaterEveryDay's take on this back in December: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU
Thanks for posting. Here's an AI summary
From the article: