Off Topic > General Discussion
The Artemis Program
Peter B:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU (about an hour)
Smarter Every Day video of a talk by Destin at the American Astronautical Society.
He seemed to be challenging NASA with awkward questions about Artemis, but I would be curious to know what the Brains Trust here thinks of his questions.
Cheers
Peter
jfb:
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.
sts60:
“ Fortunately Starship is almost flying,”
We’ll see. Artemis has had a successful flight with the crew vehicle operating autonomously for two weeks including lunar orbit and reentry. The system, including the entire ground segment from prelaunch to recovery, can plausibly support the manned mission planned for on the order of a year from now. Flight hardware for the next three missions is in various stages of readiness.
Starship has exploded twice without achieving orbit, let alone demonstrating the operational reliability of the crew vehicle.
I’m not saying that the rapid cycle approach isn’t a valid one, given the right context and the recognition it generally takes longer than expected (which is not unique to that approach). It worked for Falcon 9/Heavy. I’m not declaring it won’t eventually work for Starship. Nor am I giving a pass to the economics of the Artemis program (which I worked on before it was thus labeled). I’m just saying that “almost flying” is doing a lot of work here.
For calibration, back when Musk was touting the original Falcon (and back before I knew what an execrable excuse for a man he is), I thought that it would take longer than he thought, but it would work. It did, and it did. I think the same outcomes are plausible here.
bknight:
--- Quote from: sts60 on December 11, 2023, 10:00:46 PM ---“ Fortunately Starship is almost flying,”
We’ll see. Artemis has had a successful flight with the crew vehicle operating autonomously for two weeks including lunar orbit and reentry. The system, including the entire ground segment from prelaunch to recovery, can plausibly support the manned mission planned for on the order of a year from now. Flight hardware for the next three missions is in various stages of readiness.
Starship has exploded twice without achieving orbit, let alone demonstrating the operational reliability of the crew vehicle.
I’m not saying that the rapid cycle approach isn’t a valid one, given the right context and the recognition it generally takes longer than expected (which is not unique to that approach). It worked for Falcon 9/Heavy. I’m not declaring it won’t eventually work for Starship. Nor am I giving a pass to the economics of the Artemis program (which I worked on before it was thus labeled). I’m just saying that “almost flying” is doing a lot of work here.
For calibration, back when Musk was touting the original Falcon (and back before I knew what an execrable excuse for a man he is), I thought that it would take longer than he thought, but it would work. It did, and it did. I think the same outcomes are plausible here.
--- End quote ---
sts60 I have a question for you concerning the Orion capsule since you worked around the project. I have searched unsuccessfully on the makeup of the Orion "skin". I know from an old BobB web site that Apollo had various stainless steel, aluminum and some low-density material.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170821064300/https://www.braeunig.us/apollo/VABraddose.htm
Do you or anyone else have any information of the makeup of the Orion capsule?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page
Go to full version