After a remarkably smooth launch campaign, Artemis II reached its last stop before the Moon.
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NASA’s Artemis II rocket rolls to launch pad, but key test looms ahead
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
Despite the excitement of racing to the moon again, let's try not to forget that all this racing around isn't for the science and engineering of getting to the moon to do anything useful. It's a cynical political play to distract people from the very real problems here on Earth in this nation. A bragging point for a narcissist's ego that he's still Making America Great Again! because he got "us" back to the moon. Meanwhile, people are dying in the streets trying to protect the not-priviledged and powerless in our country from fascist attacks by our nation's own federal and (some) state agencies and far right groups. It's even more bald faced a propaganda ploy than Kennedy's original challenge to reach the moon by the end of the decade in his 1961 speech.
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Why would NASA make changes to retest at the pad without having the ability to reach the batteries as well?
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I think it's likely we'll have a period of time when no living human has walked on the Moon, but I'm not going to look down my nose at the consolation prize--god and engineering willing, we've almost locked down a continuous period of human history when at least one living person has "been to" the Moon.
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"It’s not unreasonable, but I do think it’s a success-oriented schedule.”
I'd say he has this old NASA document framed for easy reference. The very best twitter post:
View: https://x.com/People_Of_Space/status/1246926720160141312
I'd say he has this old NASA document framed for easy reference. The very best twitter post: View: https://x.com/People_Of_Space/status/1246926720160141312
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Why is the mission going to set a speed record?
I haven't been following the program very closely, so just wondering if there is a technical reason, if they are testing for something future, or just doing it so they could say they went faster then anybody else.
I haven't been following the program very closely, so just wondering if there is a technical reason, if they are testing for something future, or just doing it so they could say they went faster then anybody else.
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Politics and all the other stuff aside, I am really excited about this. I’m hoping that, for a few days at least, the world will marvel at what we are capable of as a species and maybe learn to think about the bigger picture. Or maybe that’s just naive.
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Sadly though two more things will happen. Trump will make a speech and Trump will take all the credit in the speech. As a bonus he'll also derail the speech spouting nonsense about politics.
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Think of it this way. If you want to orbit or land on the moon you want just the right amount of speed to barely inch over the crossover from earth-dominated to lunar-dominated gravitational attraction. Any excess of velocity would be that much more you need to cancel when you get to the moon. Likewise, you want just the right amount of speed to inch back over that same threshold. Why waste propellant on the return?
Artemis 2 is not going into orbit around the moon. It's got a massive excess of velocity past the crossover point to overshoot the lunar surface by a few thousand km. That's similar to the NRHO that will be used by Artemis 3 and beyond. If you're going to test life support, etc. you want similar thermals to what you're going to experience being far away from the moon for an extended period of time.
So the consequence of that excess velocity going past the crossover is that when you get back to the crossover point, you're going faster than is strictly necessary (as you would do lifting off the moon or leaving lunar orbit). And faster than previous crewed flights have done. So you're falling from the same height but you're starting at a higher speed. Therefore, you're going faster than otherwise when you reach earth's atmosphere.
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How long did it take to reach top speed?4 miles @ 1 MPH = 4-hour journey. What am I missing here?
Also, there's a ramp. I suspect the crawlers don't go full speed up the ramp.
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That's the top speed. It probably wasn't going at that speed for most of the trip.4 miles @ 1 MPH = 4-hour journey. What am I missing here?
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The word "top" in top speed.4 miles @ 1 MPH = 4-hour journey. What am I missing here?
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So a combination of 1 and 2. It matches the parameters of the future missions, so following the same parameters for full testing.
I got the physics of how they'd end up faster, just wasn't sure why they were doing that.
Thanks.
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If they end up lighting this candle, those astronauts are probably the bravest souls to climb into a capsule since Alan Shepard. So much unproven/insufficiently tested technology that has to work flawlessly for days. Ad lunam et retro per aspera indeed.
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For the average speed of 0.25 MPH I bet there was long acceleration, long deceleration, and a rocket that stayed vertical.4 miles @ 1 MPH = 4-hour journey. What am I missing here?
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Now I'm having a vision of the crawler catching some air after the top of the ramp...
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That’s actually the least objectionable part of his post. Kennedy didn’t care one bit about the moon. Some drafts of the same speech said they’d develop a desalinization plant to help the third world instead. All Kennedy wanted was a “moon shoot” of some sort. Same way Bush 1 promised Mars, Obama promised to cure cancer, Trump promised to go to Mars, Bush 2 promised to fix AIDS, etc. If you look carefully, nearly every state of the union address declares a moon shoot of some sort.
The unusual thing is that unlike a lot of presidential moon shoots, people took it seriously and got it done.
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1/3 MPH average and it doesn't take hours to change speed. It's all the crawler can do to climb the hill under that much weight. They actually damaged it last time.
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The bravest astronauts were Butch and Sunni for flying in a known defective Boeing product. Sadly, they were denied the astronaut medal which they very much deserved because they refused to tell the media they were “stranded” to further the Trump Musk narrative.
Meanwhile the two guys who flew in Dragon 2 got the medal, even though SpaceX had an excellent record at that point and they were in to real danger at all.
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What's this? First I've heard of it and a quick search finds nothing about it.
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That is somewhat irrelevant. No one is a sinless saint. Yeah, JFK was pushing this program to fulfill a campaign promise, but he also was doing it to return the US to eminence in the field of space flight, rocketry, and technology. We were behind the Soviets at the time. And the side benefits from the technology created to make this happen have been immense.
Conversely, despite that I love the fact that money has flowed into NASA for Artemis, I just don't see the same side benefits as with Apollo. Artemis is not using anything near the kinds of cutting edge technological achievements to achieve its mission that Apollo did. Other than being a feather in Trump's cap and yet another in his long list of items to make it feel like we're back in the 1960s, I can't really see what the over-arching benefits will be of this program. Certainly, nothing like what the Apollo program delivered.
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They might be talking about the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, which was awarded to Bob and Doug for their participation in the first crewed orbital flight of a commercial spacecraft.
Other recipients include John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, and the crews of Apollo I, STS-51L, and STS-107.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Space_Medal_of_Honor
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At least among old-timers (who knows what 22yo SpaceX hires think), it is not a fringe view to believe that there's no way we would have actually finished what we started and gone to the Moon on Apollo if JFK hadn't been shot. That turned it a national blood oath and debt of honor.
Not a viewpoint anybody loves, or celebrates, or mourns, or chastises. Just how a lot of people think the sausage got made.
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SLS/Orion has been an Obama policy, then a Trump policy (rebranded as Artemis), then a Biden policy and now once again a Trump policy. Like all politicans he's going to take credit but it's not particularly MAGA-branded and even if it was it's still money for literal rocket science, of all the things I could give him shit about this really isn't one of them. And quite frankly to add some of my own cynicism, not nearly significant enough to distract anyone from anything. Only a very few space nerds are excited about going to the vicinity of the Moon but not actually touching down.
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I'd go with STS-1, the maiden flight of the space shuttle, crewed by John Young and Bob Crippen, as the single most dangerous space flight. The shuttle couldn't be flown without a crew, so that first flight tested many unknowns. And as often happens, it's the unexpected things that are most dangerous. Upon launch, the solid rocket boosters produced an intense shock wave which came close to significantly damaging the shuttle.
Other flights I would deem much more dangerous than Artemis II are the first U.S. orbital mission by John Glenn in the Mercury Friendship 7, both Apollo 8 and Apollo 11, and probably all of the subsequent Apollo lunar landing missions.
In my opinion, Artemis III -- as currently envisioned -- will be far more dangerous and risky than Artemis II. NASA's current requirement is for a single successful uncrewed Starship HLS lunar landing. However, I hope other pre-requisites will be added, such as uncrewed HLS landing tests that check out various contingency and abort modes. Forget cost and schedule; not doing so is recklessly risking human lives.
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Not exactly. Obama tried to kill the SLS entirely so NASA could start with a clean sheet, but Congress overruled him.
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I don't see how it was even controversial. Of course it was propaganda, in that it was "deliberate communication to influence attitudes, beliefs, or actions, often by presenting facts selectively or using loaded language to provoke emotional responses rather than rational thought." The space race was entirely in the heads of Americans and Russians, especially their leadership. The need to to to the moon, no less so. The leadership of both countries used it as a mostly-peaceful proxy war for the great power competition they were deeply invested in.
Even those defending him frame his speech in the nationalist, propagandistic way it was intended:
"Returning the US to eminence in the field of space flight, rocketry and technology" is propaganda, designed to provoke an emotional response of nationalist pride. "Behind the Soviets" was propaganda, designed to provoke an emotional response of urgency and emergency. That doesn't make it not a worthy goal, that doesn't make it bad, but I can't really see how announcing a superpower competition to get to the moon is anything but propaganda. There was a bit of good science done as an afterthought, but we weren't going to the moon for science.
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Anti Jimmy
Ars Centurion
I was born just after the last of the manned moon landings, so I missed all that. Since then, i've been eagerly awaiting a return.
Even though I'm now middle aged and jaded no thanks to * gestures vaguely around * everything, I'm still excited about this launch, whatever it's value might or might not be.
The little kid in me really, really hopes this mission goes well!
Even though I'm now middle aged and jaded no thanks to * gestures vaguely around * everything, I'm still excited about this launch, whatever it's value might or might not be.
The little kid in me really, really hopes this mission goes well!
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From what I've read there was substantial opposition so not so much a national sentiment but more of a career suicide for the politician who'd champion killing JFK's legacy. Nobody wanted to take point and be the fall guy so they just kicked the can down the road until the Moon landing was a reality.
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I think its because this is the farthest from Earth we have ever gone. You could think of it as falling from a greater distance than we have ever fallen.
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