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I understand that sending Artemis up and around the moon was something that needed to be done to confirm that the equipment worked...
It's the same mission that Apollo 8 did.
All the "ground breaking" is 58 years old.
We're retracing our old steps, and I'm OK with doing it, but I refuse to act like it's never been done before.
We have done it before.
Do we even have a vehicle for the Apollo 9 and 10 analogs?
Do we have a lander for those mission analogs?
Are we even going to use this same capsule past the next Artemis launch?
There's only one more SLS stack, right?
I am excited we're going back to the moon, but...
There's only one instance of Kitty Hawk. There's just one Blériot flight that matters. There's just one Spirit of St Louis flight that crossed the Atlantic. There's just one Apollo 8...
The firsts matter.
Who made the second powered flight?
Who was the second person to cross the English channel in the air?
Who was the second person to make a trans-Atlantic flight?
Hell, who was the crew of Apollo 8? Because their absolutely essential mission to prove the gear pales to insignificance against the Apollo 11 mission.
Nobody was watching the Apollo 13 mission until everything went wrong.
I have the newspaper clippings for Apollo 17... It's not first page news.
I want to participate in the hype, but I worry that if we don't get back to the Moon before Trump leaves office, we're not getting there until SpaceX ignores the FAA and launches his mission that doesn't come back; but establishes a base.
So, goody for the crew of Artemis II and I wish the program all the luck in the world.
But we need to get on with it and stop with dead ends like SLS.
This mission pales in comparison to Apollo 8. Apollo 8 did like 10 orbits of the moon, this didn't go into orbit. This was sent on a guaranteed return trajectory. The most impressive thing to me is the most expensive POS in history, the SLS, didn't screw up. SLS is over $4 billion per launch. I think it was when Sean Duffy was temporary head of NASA before Isaacman that someone said there can be no space program at $4 billion a launch. $4 billion here, $4 billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.
ReplyDeleteIsaacman is trying to kill SLS off and congress keeps ordering more because it's an easy way to buy votes in their district.
SLS is "the most powerful rocket ever built" only until they go orbital with Starship. It can put more into orbit than Falcon Heavy, but not much more - like 25% more. So do some R&D spend some NRE (Non Recurring Engineering) and then you launch more than one SLS can carry for about 8% of what an SLS costs.
It's billed as the most powerful rocket ever built to carry man. But it's a sluggish turd compared to what the Saturn V could do, thanks to the overweight chunk called Orion.
DeleteThe only really neat thing from the whole mission was high definition pictures of what the various Apollo missions gave us. Seriously, that's it. $4 Billion for what we've already gotten from the various recon satellites around the Moon already. Whoooooooo.... pie..
All for something that's cancelled as of this moment after SLS 5.
SLS was supposed to be a temporary quick and cheap way to keep going into space after the shuttle until they developed the real rockets we were going to use to establish a moon base. It uses space shuttle engines, except they throw them away after one use. It uses space shuttle solid boosters with an extra segment spliced in, except they throw them away too. It uses a highly modified shuttle-style fuel tank. This is nothing we haven't been doing for decades. How they managed to take so long and make it cost so much is beyond me.
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