I’m a bit of a space nut, but this project is an example of Congress throwing huge amounts of money behind a hodgepodge of old tech in order to save jobs in a specific district—and against the advice of NASA leadership. The reality is between Falcon Heavy and Starship this can be done for $10m (mostly reusable) per launch instead of $2bn (throw everything away on each launch). I will still watch it with interest, but even the leadership at NASA is wondering why they are doing this when there are better and cheaper alternatives.
Solid boosters? Again? In the age of recycleable rockets?
dutch_flyer wrote:
but even the leadership at NASA is wondering why they are doing this when there are better and cheaper alternatives.
Any references? There are always someone who claims they can do it cheaper, faster, better. When investigating though, there always seems to be an entire forest of “if’s” involved. Like the James Webb telescope. The only way to get it up there was to use an Ariane rocket. Other rockets could be used if…
LeSving wrote:
Any references?
There are plenty with a quick Google search, as the story has been widely reported for the last decade. Here are a couple examples:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/27/nasa-sls-moon-artemis-human-space/
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/legislation-requires-nasa-to-build-sls-test-article-after-initial-flights/
One can look at this in various ways.
The Apollo programme was also structured to distribute work around, and a lot of politics was involved. The result? America got to the moon – arguably mankind’s biggest ever achievement – and as the tens of thousands of engineers left the programme and went into industry, America ended up the technological leader of the world for decades, and still is in most relevant sectors. They are also the military leader, which is just as well since they are the sole guardian of peace in our world (all the other big players are variously crazy dictators, and the free world’s military outside the US is basically a joke which would fold up in the first few days). Europe has done rather well out of that too, being able to use the US to protect them while having its champagne socialists slagging the US off at every opportunity 
That’s not a bad outcome.
Some of the media coverage (re reusability) is disingenuous. The space shuttle was “reusable” but the thing had to be largely rebuilt after each flight. The cost of that was buried elsewhere… And a lot of compromises are made to achieve even that degree of reusability.
2BN per launch is peanuts for the US. And it will end up going into the US economy which is not a bad thing either. Better to use public money to develop engineering skills than to just chuck it around randomly.
There is also an order of magnitude cost premium on manned flight. Everything gets a lot more complicated.
Interesting but what I am more curious about is how they will solve getting astronauts on the surface and back. Just think of the challenges with the old LEM.
I don’t think the lunar module has been defined yet. NASA is going with two subcontractors (SPACE-X being one) for that part.
Peter wrote:
the free world’s military outside the US is basically a joke which would fold up in the first few days
Ukraine didn’t, did it?
Michael_J wrote:
Interesting but what I am more curious about is how they will solve getting astronauts on the surface and back. Just think of the challenges with the old LEM.
They will use SpaceX for this.
