Archive Link: https://archive.is/4zsWu Older news now, but really big news: NASA, under the directive of temporary NASA Chief + Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, re-opened the contract for...
Older news now, but really big news: NASA, under the directive of temporary NASA Chief + Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, re-opened the contract for landing Astronauts on the Moon for the Artemis 3 Missions (planned optimistically for 2028 or so). Up until this point SpaceX had been guaranteed the contract.
This is really big news for a number of reasons: 1) SpaceX generally has a strangehold on the launch market, so diversity is good; 2) SpaceX's plan for Artemis 3 was, frankly, absurd: they planned to launch roughly a dozen Starships to re-fuel the human landing one enough that it can land on the Moon and return; 3) given that Chinese plans look increasingly likely to dramatically beat the Artemis team to the Moon, something had to dramatically shift if we hope to get a base there competitively.
I could go on at length for the many reasons that I think Starship for Artemis 3 was an awful idea beyond the starting point of re-fueling via dozen+ launches just to get to the Moon, but one that particularly stands out is that Starship is ENTIRELY unnecessarily big for the Artemis 3 plan of landing 3 astronauts on the Moon for an Apollo-style jaunt to test that we can do it safely and get some preliminary data before we seriously commit to building infrastructure from Artemis 4 onwards. I mean, look at SpaceX's own post defending their system design: it has a concept shot of a ENTIRELY EMPTY GIANT STARSHIP ROOM WITH 4 ASTRONAUTS IN IT. Why on EARTH would you want to risk human lives on an empty rocket that huge?! Nevermind the dust issues Starship engines are going to kick up...
And to be clear, I actually think Starship is an amazing feat of engineering already and a really intriguing development on the frontier of spacecraft. I just also think it's a terrible tool for the job of anything before Artemis 5.
That photo feels like a better concept for a modern-age Skylab than a lunar lander, but we already have the ISS for that... It's hard to see what the future will look like, and how SpaceX won't...
That photo feels like a better concept for a modern-age Skylab than a lunar lander, but we already have the ISS for that...
It's hard to see what the future will look like, and how SpaceX won't play some part in the process with their launch capabilities, but I'm very excited to see things get competitive again in the lunar landing program.
Archive Link: https://archive.is/4zsWu
Older news now, but really big news: NASA, under the directive of temporary NASA Chief + Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, re-opened the contract for landing Astronauts on the Moon for the Artemis 3 Missions (planned optimistically for 2028 or so). Up until this point SpaceX had been guaranteed the contract.
This is really big news for a number of reasons: 1) SpaceX generally has a strangehold on the launch market, so diversity is good; 2) SpaceX's plan for Artemis 3 was, frankly, absurd: they planned to launch roughly a dozen Starships to re-fuel the human landing one enough that it can land on the Moon and return; 3) given that Chinese plans look increasingly likely to dramatically beat the Artemis team to the Moon, something had to dramatically shift if we hope to get a base there competitively.
I could go on at length for the many reasons that I think Starship for Artemis 3 was an awful idea beyond the starting point of re-fueling via dozen+ launches just to get to the Moon, but one that particularly stands out is that Starship is ENTIRELY unnecessarily big for the Artemis 3 plan of landing 3 astronauts on the Moon for an Apollo-style jaunt to test that we can do it safely and get some preliminary data before we seriously commit to building infrastructure from Artemis 4 onwards. I mean, look at SpaceX's own post defending their system design: it has a concept shot of a ENTIRELY EMPTY GIANT STARSHIP ROOM WITH 4 ASTRONAUTS IN IT. Why on EARTH would you want to risk human lives on an empty rocket that huge?! Nevermind the dust issues Starship engines are going to kick up...
And to be clear, I actually think Starship is an amazing feat of engineering already and a really intriguing development on the frontier of spacecraft. I just also think it's a terrible tool for the job of anything before Artemis 5.
That photo feels like a better concept for a modern-age Skylab than a lunar lander, but we already have the ISS for that...
It's hard to see what the future will look like, and how SpaceX won't play some part in the process with their launch capabilities, but I'm very excited to see things get competitive again in the lunar landing program.