House bill seeks to gut NASA’s Artemis plan, resurrect Journey to Mars

Lawmakers also appear to like cost-plus contracts.

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[shawnce]

1 costs MORE delta V to get to the lunar surface than it does to land on Mars.
2 see above as for financially add the fact that Ice processing infrastructure on Luna isnt free and hydrolox has horrible mass ratio,

Wait, what? I'm pretty sure I've seen stated "payload to moon" with bigger figures than to Mars. On a quick check, yes indeed you need some 3.2km/s for TLI and 3.8km/s for TMI, not to mention you've got twice as much gravity to handle in Mars as opposed to Moon.

What does to the moon mean here? In orbit? It will take more dV to get a payload onto the moon from the earth than it will to Mars since Mars has an atmosphere that you can dump all of that transfer dV into while in the case of the moon you need to have that dV onboard.

The following solar system subway map (not the most correct) but still helpful. Note the arrows denoting aerobraking, that means most of the dV needed for that segment could be avoided using the atmosphere.

Spoiler

 

[shawnce]

Why would you take lunar ice to LEO, it is far less costly in money and delta v to launch the prop from Earth where it is far cheaper and you have more useful options.

Getting it to LEO from Earth isn't less costly, if you need five launches to refuel Starship, you're spending vast majority of your fuel for lift, not payload.

You do realize you don't have to process the water in the moon? Just ship it as it is, you can do the electrolysis in LEO as needed, as a bonus you don't have a 2 week night to deal with. Space(X) orbital gas station now open for business with low low cost on water, oxygen and hydrogen..

Do you realize how inexpensive fuel is on earth? ...especially mundane methane / oxygen.

The SpaceX SH/SS architecture will be close to just spending the cost of fuel on every launch, not at first but I would expect within years of first operation for it to become fairly close (far far far closer then any other launch system in history).

If all you are “spending” is fuel to launch fuel into LEO for use in space then you will not find a cheaper fuel source then the earth for a long long time. Sure you are wasting a good amount of that fuel to over come earths gravity (atmosphere is much less of an issue at the size of these vehicles)... but the cost to produce that fuel is next to nothing on earth.

It would take likely 10s of billions of dollars to get even the most basic fuel production to take place off planet and it would be at a production scale very much limited to be useful in a true space economy. Now yeah some day ...but that day is a long way off.

 

[shawnce]

Do you realize how inexpensive fuel is on earth? ...especially mundane methane / oxygen.

The SpaceX SH/SS architecture will be close to just spending the cost of fuel on every launch, not at first but I would expect within years of first operation for it to become fairly close (far far far closer then any other launch system in history).

If all you are “spending” is fuel to launch fuel into LEO for use in space then you will not find a cheaper fuel source then the earth for a long long time. Sure you are wasting a good amount of that fuel to over come earths gravity (atmosphere is much less of an issue at the size of these vehicles)... but the cost to produce that fuel is next to nothing on earth.

It would take likely 10s of billions of dollars to get even the most basic fuel production to take place off planet and it would be at a production scale very much limited to be useful in a true space economy. Now yeah some day ...but that day is a long way off.

Cost of fuel is quite irrelevant to the discussion, it's more about how many launches you have to do to bring given amount of fuel (or water ice) to LEO. Elon's ideas notwithstanding, re-entry is pretty harsh business and you are also subjecting your craft to quite a lot of force, which adds up to periodic maintenance.

The cost of launch is fully relevant to this discussion and my point was that SS/SH launch costs will trend towards the cost of launch being close the cost of fuel involved (at least compared to all other alternatives in the near future). The reuse and refurb design targets for SS/SH will greatly exceed that of the Falcon 9s and the cost of launch will fully include what you outlined as a concern.

Again on orbit production of fuel from a precursor and shipping of those precursors, etc. ... is at this time mostly handwaving, often is talked about ignoring the R&D costs, the bootstrapping costs, the running costs, etc. that for the foreseeable future will make it more costly to purchase fuel made on orbit then simply shipping it up from the earth.

It also forces you into hydrolox unless you have a carbon/hydrocarbon precursor source and hydrolox in the case of Mars (and others to varying degrees) is an extra complexity in terms of vehicle tank volume, shielding, mass budget and a second engine tech.

Again longer term it may/will start to make sense ... when we start to have space tugs and cyclers involved that never deal with rentry or launch. ...and we wont get to that longer term reality without heavily leveraging earth launched materials and propellants so we WILL need to get launch costs down close to fuel costs.

Now should we start R&D on all of this stuff... heck yeah... that is what NASA should nearly 100% be focusing on at this point for its space flight aspects (tugs, propellant depots, propellant production, etc.)

 

[shawnce]

Artemis and its 2024 deadline was fanciful in a world where it did get funding, but in our reality it was clearly never going anywhere cus Congress clearly doesn't give a fuck about any President's desire for a space legacy who doesn't at least have the decency to be killed in office during a Cold War.

I think even the Kennedy thing gets vastly overestimated in people’s minds. His strong public support for the moon shot, and his death, sure made it politically easier to support throwing massive amounts of money at the Apollo Program. But Kennedy’s death or no, the military wanted to dominate outer space. They couldn’t justify the massive Manhattan Program-class expense needed for a manned program themselves, and just nuking the moon as a display of American power got shot down before Kennedy even took office.

We were going to the moon because the Russians were going to the moon, and that was it. Doing it as a civilian mission was good PR, so we could condemn them for militarizing the moon if they got there first. And once they weren’t going anymore, we didn’t need to anymore either. Once the military figured out how to recover film capsules from orbital spy satellites, they didn’t really even need a manned space program anymore. Why have a single manned spy observatory, when you can have a number of unmanned ones for the same price?

NASA sweet talked the USAF and NRO into supporting the Space Shuttle with promises of cost effective satellite deployment and servicing, but that never materialized and they abandoned the Shuttle program after Challenger.

The Kennedy connection was important for selling Apollo to the public. But it was always about control of lunar territory, and the belief technology would advance fast enough that it would quickly matter who controlled the moon. In 1960, they basically believed we’d have Elon Musk Starships by the mid-1970s—and the Russians would too. Apollo was necessary to defend American interests, until it proved so expensive and difficult that the Russians dropped out and we knew they weren’t a threat, and then we dropped out too.

It was likely always going to be that way.

Looking back, I find it difficult to find any American long-term project that was not defense-related in some way. The interstate highway system was created under Eisenhower as a way to quickly move troops and equipment around the country. The Apollo program was not just to beat the Soviets to the Moon, but the tech developed to get there certainly had a lot of defense applications, as well as showing unaligned nations that the US was the side you wanted to be on, not the second-rate Soviets who couldn't accomplish the same thing.

If anyone can think of an infrastructure type long term project that the US has proposed and accomplished, please let me know, because I am still trying to find one.

The US finished Panama Canal, but that was started by the French, who abandoned the project. That was a huge undertaking at the time. If you include the many decades that the US controlled and maintained the Panama Canal, it definitely qualifies as a long term project.

Edit: Obviously the Panama Canal has military applications for the US Navy, but like the interstate highway system, it is primarily used for commercial transportation these days.

You can make a strong argument that a stronger economy means you can better equip your military, Granted I am not sure that we can still send all our naval vessels by way of the Panama Canal, I think the CVNs might be the some of the only vessels in the world that are too big to do so, the Interstate highway system always had more direct application to commercial use, especially as we have friendly boarders to the north and south and ocean borders everywhere else, militarily because of the vast distance it bypasses the Panama Canal is a point of immense strategic value, without it in order to get from one side of the Americas to the other by sea, you have to go around South America, it is essentially a gate in the middle of the world's largest wall. GPS while the enhanced positioning is still restricted to military likely sees more civilian use than otherwise. Internet, began in the military.

The thing about all these projects isn't necessarily that they are military its that they all had a clear goal and it was more about the goal than how the goal is accomplished. COTS and CRS had the goal of supplying the ISS with American rockets from American soil, resulting in 2 new rockets, and 5 spacecraft at a bargain price in development

At the waterline even a Ford-class carrier can actually fit in the new canal.

I'm pretty sure there's at least one bridge that isn't tall enough though. And I'm not sure everything else is set back at least 19m from each side of the canal.

Edit: Little hard to see in the photo but the light poles look like they're too close to the canal.

To be fair the carrier wouldn’t notice the light poles at all.

 

[shawnce]

What is there on the moon that is so valuable for there to be a land rush? I've always been under the impression that the moon's most useful feature is its gravity.

IF you think we are even close to sending humans to mars without killing them off your wrong. Lets at least practice keeping are astronauts alive by going to the moon and trouble shoot there? Right?

A lot of preparing / practicing for Mars can be done and will be done here on earth, in high/low earth orbit, with at least one synod of sending prototype unmanned craft and probes to Mars and another synod at least sending supplies and components to the surface of Mars, long before we attempt to send any manned mission to Mars. All of that can be done without involving the moon and in many ways more realistically then involving the moon.

Now can the moon be involved in all of this sure... it may make sense for some things but it makes most sense if you want to have a presence on the moon for some reason (more then just flags and footprints), not so much for preparing you that well for Mars.

 

[shawnce]

Looking at the bill, it is sponsored by a Democrat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendra_Horn

And the committee it seems to have come out of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_St ... eronautics

Just so who you know exactly Boeing has bought and paid for.

There are 3 California members, and one from Colorado for the Dems + a Texas GOP member. Are those 5 members idiots? This hurts their states.

There's a reason SLS uses parts from nearly every state. Every state 'benefits' from it. The rocket doesn't benefit, of course, but Congress gets to point to the jobs supporting it.

Texas most certainly benefits though - because SLS keeps Johnson Space Center in the loop.

Why not just fix the bad roads/bridges, in EACH STATE, using their local people, thats a better way to create jobs in each state, that benefit each state.

Hugely better... that and investing in the power grid and internet deployment... would provide a lot of useful jobs and a lot of supply chain jobs. I would also however throw money into NASA R&D program focusing on farther out future things as well.