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Oh boy. I'm glad this is in Culture War and not in Friday Fun, because Artemis isn't very fun at all. I'm sure there's a culture war angle here somewhere, though.
No, it's not. Because Artemis can't fucking reach the moon. NASA made Orion to heavy and/or SLS not powerful enough to get there. It simply doesn't have the delta v for a moon mission. And they did that knowingly, from the beginning. And they paid more than a $100B for the privilege. Let me say that again: NASA spent 20 years and significantly more than $100B of American tax payer money to use 2010 technology to build a rocket and a capsule a whole lot less capable than Apollo 8 was 50 years ago.
Really, it is hard to understate how bad the Artemis program was (and is) managed. At this point, it's not a program to return to the moon, it's a program to ram tens/hundreds of billions of dollars down the throat of Lockheed, Boenig, et al. in exchange for a
welfarejobs program in strategically chosen congressional districts. It's much more pork barrel than rocket.The best summary of the entire sad situation is The Lunacy of Artemis, and Casey Handmer has several nicely detailed rants on why the Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage, why cancellation is too good for SLSand why SLS is still a national disgrace.
The TL;DR (but really, you should read at least the first one if you care about the Moon mission) is: the rocket can only lift 27 tons to the moon (compared to Apollo's 49 tons). That's not enough for a moon mission, especially not if you make the new capsule so heavy. This is mostly because NASA has to reuse old Space Shuttle parts, e.g. the engines on the rocket. They pay $420M to take a single old existing engine out of storage and refurbish it, and then dump it into the ocean during the first flight evn though those are reusable engines. $420M is both more than an entire SpaceX booster (with 33 engines) and also more than those old engines cost to make in the first place ($40M). The capsule is a six seater designed for Mars. It now goes towards the moon with four astronauts instead. They didn't change the design much, so it is extremely heavy - a bad combination if you have to work with an underpowered rocket. This means NASA's plan had to change quite a bit. They can't make it to the moon, they can't even make it to a useful orbit around the moon (like Apollo 8), no, they have to make due with a more... 'lunar-adjacent' destination. It's called a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit, is really slow (and thus dangerous for manned missions since you can't really abort it if something goes wrong, you have to ride it out - for up to 11 days) and really not all that interesting since it's rather far away from the moon most of the time. NASA says they will fix all those problems before Artemis III by refueling the rocket at a new space station, something that will indubitably cost another $100B. Oh, and although they always wanted to do that, they forgot that the capsule doesn't have a docking hatch to dock at a space station in the specs. Changing the design to include that hatch has cost billions and billions of dollars, again. Also, the last time they tried to fly the capsule, they had catastrophic trouble with both the heat shield (of Columbia fame) and the batteries. They haven't flight tested both of those since, but are going to fly it with human guinea pigs on board next.
In the end, I'm mostly sad and angry because this clusterfuck has cost us the Mars sample return mission, and it might cost us manned space flight for the next several decades.
Now, for the culture war angle. I'm relatively far left-leaning. Universal healthcare appeals to me. But this entire story black-pilled me on universal healthcare in the US. There's just no way that a system that allows this much mismanagement in favor of Lockheed and Boenig would manage to drop healthcare costs when facing the healthcare lobby. Also, this seems entirely unfixable. This is a cancer that has long spread across the aisle, and it shows itself every single time the military industrial complex smells money. Feels like another real loss of state capacity.
If we go full Challenger Appendix F - what are the real odds of something going sideways during the mission? Polymarket prices that at 12% at the moment, but that is absurdly high.
Interesting, I was wondering the same thing while writing the comment and my gut reaction was "10%". And yes, that is absurdly high. But there's no margin for error with the heat shield, and as far as I understood the reporting at the time the battery failure would also not have been survivable. Years ago, I'd have said NASA knows the risk models, and they wouldn't send astronauts on a P(death)=0.1 mission. But man, have they squandered their technical integrity and credibility on this project.
And don't get me wrong, the mission with those constraints coming from congress was difficult. It might have been impossible. But I would have expected to see high level resignations at NASA left and right until they got something that could make the trip to the surface and back without failing during tests.
Interesting tidbit - an independent consultant estimated the chances of the shuttle blowing up to 1-2/100 . They lost 2 vehicles in 135 flights. He was quite right on the money.
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