If you've never seen a gator then looking in the ditches by the road during the bus tour is a good bed.
(I don't know what the current policies are but you used to be able to apply in advance for VIP tickets, or buy them on the secondary market, which gives you much closer viewing of the launch)
We unanimously agreed KSC was by far the best of all. If you only do one thing in Florida, that would be it.
Godspeed to them, hopefully I'm being overly dour.
Good thing we have a large number of CRUD SaaS experts to tell us what's wrong with the space program
Then you had Challenger, when experts were not listened to, and people died when they shouldn't have.
I don't understand the hostility.
But even assuming we do view it as a deadline, the Apollo 1 losses are a pretty good argument that maybe we shouldn't repeat that.
The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.
I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
(It seems that Artemis cost is $92B, where as SpaceX's Starship costs are less than $10B so far, give or take. So it seems that SpaceX is a more efficient approach.)
And don't compare costs because Starship does not and may never work so I dont care how much cheaper it is. If we are comparing fictional rockets I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.
They purposely were not trying for orbit from my understanding. The last one did orbit the earth at suborbital heights and release satellites. It did seem to do what they wanted it to do, it wasn't a failure.
And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.
But everything that didn't blow up has been tested 11 times already. Things that did fail have had more than one design iteration tested. One approach has gains more real-world test experience.
JPL would blow up a rocket every week, if the budget had room for it. Alas, we don't see that testing pace outside defense procurement.
NASA and SpaceX are fundamentally incomparable, considering how these two organizations are established and the motivations that drive all the actors within. Sure, NASA could start to adopt certain approaches but I don't imagine it to work in a way anyone else would imagine it to.
The question is whether you have the appetite for killing three astronauts on a test run like the Apollo team did.
EDIT: Fine, I’ll clarify. By “SpaceX like approach” I mean iterative design. By “more aggressive” I mean risk tolerance much greater than SpaceX to the degree that they do things that SpaceX wouldn’t do.
Terming it a "SpaceX like approach" and connecting to Apollo 1 is a neat trick, but SpaceX wouldn't (and doesn't) adopt a risky approach during manned flights.
inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development, but they kept doing it. After that R-7 derivatives became the most reliable launch vehicle.
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...
that would be such a culture change you'd have to disband NASA and start it over.
This seems so ridiculous in the abstract. Like, what is that exactly supposed to entail in the context of launching rockets?
The cost of going from "I think this will work" to "I know this will work" is really expensive. It might be cheaper/faster to fail a few times and fix those problems than it would be to verify everything up front.
SpaceX hasn't even had the confidence to put Starship in LEO yet, and has not carried 1kg of real payload (and barely a few kg of test payloads) - while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.
To OP's point, Artemis has cost $92 billion over 14 years. This has produced exactly one launch.
It's hard to put an exact timeline on Starship since a lot of its development overlaps with Falcon 9 using the same components, but it's inarguable that it has cost one tenth Artemis so far.
I agree that Starship has been plagued by delays and the capabilities are so far mostly just talk. However, it has flown a number of times, and I would be willing to make a strong bet that it will orbit the moon with real payload long before it catches up to Artemis in budget.
The risk profile is very different.
They should not adopt spacex practices, they should adopt spacex lift vehicles (once proven).
Regardless, first thing it reminded me of was that interview quote about how if nasa had SpaceX track record they would have lost funding long ago. Is there a US political landscape, even back to 2008-2016, where that isn't the case?
I have no skin in this game other than to say the old school methods resulted in a janky ship that stranded two astronauts in space for months a minute ago until they could catch a ride home on a SpaceX ship.
Explaining Why NASA's Starliner Report Is So Bad > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L96asfTvJ_A
Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.
Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.
Artemis objectives are less well defined, more ambitious and with way less money. The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor. The difference in importance between the two is the cause of all the failures.
But there's no lack of huge achievements. The Mars rovers are amazing: super-sonic parachutes, retro rockets, deploying a little helicopter with no real-time control is huge. So is planting JWST at the L2 point and unfolding it a million miles from earth.
Also, the NASA budget in the 1960's was 10 times higher.
If you look at the unmanned side of NASA, that's going great. NASA can get amazing stuff done.
The manned side gets political attention, and the nature of current politics makes it a bad kind of attention. Results are essentially irrelevant. Jobs and cronyism are the point.
The overall design of the Space Launch System makes very little sense. We know all too well that solid rockets are a bad idea for crewed spaceflight. Hydrogen is a bad fuel for a first stage. It's horrendously wasteful to use expensive, complicated engines designed to be reused, and then throw them away on every launch. Early estimates were over $2 billion per launch, which in the current age is total clownshoes. The actual costs will be much higher still.
So why are they doing it? Because using all this old, rather inappropriate tech allows them to keep paying the contractors for it. If you gave NASA a pile of money and told them to build a moon program, they wouldn't build this. But it's not their choice.
SLS, a rocket derived from Shuttle tech, takes astronauts on the Orion spacecraft to the vicinity of the moon. From there, a lander built by either SpaceX or Blue Origin will take the astronauts to the surface and then back to Orion. The astronauts will then return to Earth in Orion.
Artemis I flew a couple of years ago and took an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the moon and back to Earth.
Artemis II, which should hopefully fly in April, will take 4 astronauts around the moon--the first time humans have been that far in space in 50+ years.
Artemis III was going to be a crewed moon landing, planned around 2028, but between delays in the lander development and the complexity of this mission, no one expected it to happen on time.
The major change that NASA has announced is to launch SLS more often--ideally once every 10 months. There are two major advantages to this:
1. More frequent launches will improve reliability because the team/engineers will understand the system better. There will be more commonality between launches.
2. With more launches before the end of the decade deadline there are more opportunities for intermediate milestones. In particular, Artemis III will turn into an Earth-orbit mission in which Orion will dock with one or both of the landers. This will test out the system before heading to the moon. Moreover, NASA plans to have at least two lunar landing attempts in 2028, which means that even if the first attempt is scrubbed, they will still have a chance to land before the end of the decade.
Launch cadence across NASA programs:
https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2027456699175497741
An infographic showing the new architectures:
https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2027456713507356713
It's interesting how Artemis III (the new one) will try to prove out both HLS landers in one LEO mission.
kwertyoowiyop•2h ago
cratermoon•2h ago
mandevil•1h ago
lukeschlather•59m ago
mandevil•20m ago