We need a consistent vision from Congress and the president, but it changes every two or four years making long term planning very difficult.
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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You inspired me to look up List of space programs of the United States - Crewed government-led programs and a couple of things jump out at me:
- I'd completely forgotten about Ares I-X.
- I'd completely forgotten that Orion was supposed to go to the ISS, and:
- Orion EFT-1 was nine years ago today; two flights in nine years, just so sad.
There was a Smarter Every Day video just published where he gave a talk to some people from NASA, some of the things he revealed and how little the people in the room seemed to know were a bit shocking. Like, no one knows exactly how many Starship launches it will take for refueling everything to get Artemis and supported hardware to the moon (the latest paper says "at least 12"), and how the ways they're looking to do are very complex meanwhile the Apollo engineers literally wrote the book on how they did it - TL;DR keep it simple, build in a ton of redundancy.
The thing is, doing another Apollo isn't what anyone wants. We already went to the moon to say we could do it. The new program is aiming to do more with less.
Of course, trusting know liar Elon Musk, the man who couldn't deliver pizza on time, let alone a rocketship, was a massive fucking mistake. Starship will never meet the deadline, and I've got good money on Blue Moon being done before Starship.
Just a note for those keeping score, since Starship needs to do 2 test landings on the moon BEFORE Artemis 3, at 12 launches per mission, that requires 39 launches, 36 recoveries and 36 successful space docking and fuel transfer missions. They're currently at zero for all of those.
SLS/Orion, meanwhile, has done loops around the moon, meaning that apart from not having a crew, it's done everything it needs to.
SLS is made out of spare shuttle parts and has no reusability, it was also constructed in part by Boeing, known for being the worst of the govvie contractors at making a feasible product. They can't even make a reliable military aircraft and I worked on theirs so I've seen their modern engineering in action. It's a joke. They're newest attempt at spacecraft have failed even more miserably than starship.
SpaceX doesn't have the newer starship craft functional, but we've already used their falcon/dragon system to get off of using Russian spacecraft to visit the ISS and prior to crewed missions were sending them up all the time to restock.
The SLS is just a bigger and more wasteful version of Apollo, useful to get a group of people to the moon but without enough equipment to set up shop permanently. Not to mention the insane cost because you can't reuse the spacecraft. US taxpayers have saved so much from not having to fund NASA building their own spacecraft and leaving them to what they do best. Scientific research and mission planning/execution. Everytime a falcon lands successfully the cost per launch goes down, you'll see the same savings once the kinks get worked out with starship versus SLS's up front cost of throwing the thing into the ocean everytime.
SpaceX is to NASA what Lockheed Martin is to the Air Force, a platform manufacturer. The Navy doesn't build their own jets, they just put out the requirements and let the contractors do what they do best. This is the same concept here.
And this is a nice advertisement, but right now, SLS did exactly what it had to, completing it's mission entirely, safely and correctly.
Starship can't even get into space.
The promises sound great, but they're only promises so far. Worse, theyre Musk promises and you should probably have a look at all the things Musk promised and didn't deliver.
What do you call space? It got above the karman line.
That's a fair point. I stand corrected that Starship did indeed get into space briefly before exploding.
On its second flight in the most powerful rocket ever built. How many flights did it take SLS to get to where it is now - including all the space shuttle launches upon which it is based?
SLS is the project that is running over budget and behind schedule here. Starship won't be ready in time for the scheduled 2025 trip to the moon, but nothing else will be ready either - the moon landing schedule was always overly ambitious. Starship is doing pretty well along its own development timescale.
However Starship is still miles and miles away from being ready for Artemis. They need to get into space. They need to do cryogenic fuel transfers in orbit (never been done). They need to turn Starship into a human rated moon lander (SpaceX have no experience here). NASA are supposed to be working with them to provide their experience, particularly with human life support, however AFAIK they haven't even started collaborating in earnest yet.
Itβs hardly fair to include all shuttle launches in SLS development. Itβs virtually an entire new system, minus the engines.