cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/10372465
Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day recently gave a talk at the American Astronautical Society about the Artemis program and communication:
I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA… (But I said it anyway) - Smarter Every Day 293
In his talk, he points out some of the legitimate shortcomings in the Artemis architecture, but I’m not sure if the parallels he draws to the Apollo program necessarily hold up, given the vastly different political impetus for the two programs. I think his main points regarding the importance of voicing negative feedback are valid, though.
What are people’s thoughts?
I think Destin misses the point that the goal isn’t to be Apollo. Artemis will have longer surface stays and, eventually, a surface hab. Between that and Gateway, it’ll help develop tech for deep space exploration. Flags & footprings could’ve been faster and simpler, but it would’ve gotten cancelled.
It’s almost a miracle that Artemis still exists given the different administrations that started its different parts. That doesn’t excuse the architecture, but it helps explain it. We wouldn’t have any of it without the political power of SLS and Orion, but they limit the flight rate, require NRHO, drive up the budget, and lack payload availability that caused Gateway delays and led to the crazy HLSs.
The Starship architecture is pretty unprecedented. It’s huge. It’s overkill. It’s super underbid. It needs a lot of launches. Blue Moon is in the same boat. That being said, complaining about an unclear number of launches, lack of hypergols, and need to demonstrate refuelling feels disingenuous without talking about how much more you get vs. the Apollo landers. NASA doesn’t know what to do with the extra volume and payload.
Delays for designs as ambitious as Starship and HLS seem a lot more excusable than delays for SLS (first launch, EUS, MLs, RS-25s), or the suits that NASA was supposed to make but outsourced last minute. The landers and suits should have started way sooner.
Agree, but I think what he’s saying is that with Apollo they focused on the mission. They needed to get 2 people to the surface of the moon and back, everything else was just a bonus. This meant the program died out right away after it was done, you’ve done it and proven you can do it again and now there’s no point. But on the other hand, they got it done because they focused on the minimal viable product first and adding redundancies and procedures to fix removed when failures happened. This made sure whatever happened, the mission would still get done, they would get to the moon and back.
With the whole Artemis and especially the Starship they are taking risks, creating political favorable programs, tech demos and completely lost sight of the mission. I’d say they haven’t really defined an actual mission people can get behind. Destin did a good job at demonstrating the program doesn’t take failure into account, if something goes wrong there is very little anybody can do. And not knowing if cryogenic refueling in space is even viable or how many launches you need 2 years before launch shows how unprepared they really are. Everyone high fiving each other “We are going back!”, but in reality they are so far away from that goal it’s not clear it ever is going to happen.
As always with tech demos the argument is “Look at how cool this is!” “If it were to work, you get so much for so little”. Which agreed is true, if it were to work it’s awesome, you get so much more than with Apollo. But is it in line with the mission? NASA doesn’t know what to do with the extra volume and payload, so I would suggest it isn’t on mission at all. It’s also total vaporware until someone actually does it, and so far all we’ve seen is billions of dollars and very little actual results.
It’s a big pitfall everyone falls in every now and again. Someone pitches a product and asks for funding, the product is great if it were to work as advertised. And even if the prototype isn’t really there at the moment, it can get developed out to the real deal. But there needs to be a fact check to confirm if the product is even possible and what the exact cost and limitations will be. We expect the government and NASA to do this, but Destin pointed out politics is a huge deal and people are afraid to speak up. It wouldn’t be the first time a critical report at NASA got pushed aside, because of politics. Challenger anyone? The whole “Big if true” thing needs to be emphasized, yes if they deliver it would be great, but what is the chance they don’t actually deliver?
I feel like Destin was really hammering on the Apollo 6 Artemis 0 thing and he was totally right. If they keep pushing the way they are right now, they will continue to be at 0. If goals are set too high and it devolves into politics and tech demos, they will never get it done. And if they don’t have the redundancies, fallbacks and procedures in order, people are going to die.
My personal opinion: NASA should ditch Starship right away. It’s not the right tool for the job, SpaceX underbid to drive out competition and the whole thing is based on unproven tech. Delays are expected, cost overrun is expected and they will continue to waste money till the money runs out or somehow they get everything working. SpaceX also has a history of promising stuff which is awesome for a low price, only to massively overrun on cost and scale back on functionality. So the end result is something which isn’t that awesome at all, but only serviceable in best case and not at a low price. This way they push out the competition, but end up underdelivering compared to the competition. (Not only to bash on SpaceX, Boeing has huge issues as well, just highlighting a single SpaceX issue). Starship is in my opinion hugely complex, with way too much bells and whistles, the chances of failure are super high if they even get the thing to work in the first place. The super heavy booster is doomed to fail, the whole a billion engine thing sounds great, if one fails you’ve got so much backups it doesn’t even matter. This idea makes sense in principle, but it requires problems to be detectable and acted upon fast enough not to cause loss of mission. In reality rockets are some of the most energy intense machines and unexpected things happen. And when they do, they happen fast and with a lot of energy. If the engine isn’t shutdown in time, or the shutdown doesn’t solve the issue, you are looking at loss of mission. If the engine damages any part of the other engines or shared infrastructure, you are looking at loss of mission.
I fully support the arguments Destin was making and all of the stuff he wasn’t saying but was clear to everyone in that room. In reality I don’t know what anyone can really do. There is so much involved in a program of this size, it’s hard to change course. And anybody speaking up loses their job. It also isn’t clear what exactly can be done to fix all of the highlighted issues (which is a huge red flag in my mind). So they’ll probably keep pushing and I can only hope we don’t have a loss of crew over this.
Amen to this. Unforuntately, neither is Blue Origin, for basically the same reasons.
I disagree that this is “the wrong way”. I agree that the current program is an inefficient way to do the mission intended. But if the goal is to develop future technologies to make spacetravel cheap, easy and fast, you need to take a shotgun aproach at technology and figure out what works.
But if your goal is something broad like “Improve spacetravel”, you can’t set hard deadlines like for Artemis. The goals are mutually exclusive.
My only explanation on why it hasn’t been cancelled yet would be that China is well on their way to the moon too. And this time it isn’t about national prestige, or science, it’s about establishing a foothold on the nearest source of untapped resources.
Routine visits to and from the moon aren’t too far off and getting resources from the moon to the earth might even be easier than mining the ocean floor, because that’s arguably a more hostile and less forgiving environment than space itself.
Once the infrastructure is there (quite difficult, obviously) it’s theoretically pretty easy to transport stuff back to Earth from the moon. You could even shoot packages back using a railgun if you want to, if I recall correctly.