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General Discussion / Re: The Artemis Program
« Last post by jfb on December 06, 2023, 11:29:00 AM »Definitely not part of the brain trust, but ...
I kinda wish he'd twisted the knife a little harder with respect to why Orion can't get to LLO; that is the reason for this whole Rube Goldberg-esque architecture with the Gateway in NRHO and a dozen Starship launches and and and...
I mean, we all know why; under the Constellation conops Orion would launch on Ares I, the Altair lander and EDS would launch on Ares V, they'd dock in Earth orbit and the whole stack would do a TLI burn directly to LLO. Orion was always part of a distributed lift program, but the parts that would make it useful were cancelled. SLS can't do distributed lift; we can't build the boosters quickly enough or cheaply enough. We can build one unit every 2 years at > $4 bn a pop. That's not sustainable or useful.
Fortunately Starship is almost flying, which will add significant lift capability for not that much money. We could likely design a much simpler mission architecture around Starship.
But we spent all this time and money on Orion, so we're going to use it, even though it drives this complicated architecture. We're designing the mission around the equipment, not the other way around, and we're doing it because of the sunk cost fallacy. That's something that everyone really needs to understand.
But Destin rightly points out that's all spilt milk under the bridge; this is the architecture going forward, so we have to make it work. But to make it work we have to be honest and clear-eyed about the effort it's going to take and communicate that information clearly and completely to all stakeholders, and so far we haven't done either of those things.
I kinda wish he'd twisted the knife a little harder with respect to why Orion can't get to LLO; that is the reason for this whole Rube Goldberg-esque architecture with the Gateway in NRHO and a dozen Starship launches and and and...
I mean, we all know why; under the Constellation conops Orion would launch on Ares I, the Altair lander and EDS would launch on Ares V, they'd dock in Earth orbit and the whole stack would do a TLI burn directly to LLO. Orion was always part of a distributed lift program, but the parts that would make it useful were cancelled. SLS can't do distributed lift; we can't build the boosters quickly enough or cheaply enough. We can build one unit every 2 years at > $4 bn a pop. That's not sustainable or useful.
Fortunately Starship is almost flying, which will add significant lift capability for not that much money. We could likely design a much simpler mission architecture around Starship.
But we spent all this time and money on Orion, so we're going to use it, even though it drives this complicated architecture. We're designing the mission around the equipment, not the other way around, and we're doing it because of the sunk cost fallacy. That's something that everyone really needs to understand.
But Destin rightly points out that's all spilt milk under the bridge; this is the architecture going forward, so we have to make it work. But to make it work we have to be honest and clear-eyed about the effort it's going to take and communicate that information clearly and completely to all stakeholders, and so far we haven't done either of those things.