Comment by bboygravity
Comment by bboygravity 3 months ago
So what does a rocket company need to do to be imrpessive in your eyes?
Comment by bboygravity 3 months ago
So what does a rocket company need to do to be imrpessive in your eyes?
A lot of people have been shitting on SLS for being too expensive over the last 5 years, but it's worth noting that the Artemis program has been completely fucked due to SpaceX massively missing its milestones on Starship. So many people believe that Elon Musk is going to bring humanity back to the Moon, but he is largely the reason that humanity is not back on the moon already.
The GAO put out a report on this a few months ago, pointing out the failures of SpaceX here (including massive cost overruns) much more than the supposed cost overruns of SLS. Incidentally, after this GAO report came out, Elon Musk became very interested in being in charge of managing "government waste."
This is a very partial telling of the current situation.
Orion is delayed due to a heat shield issue: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/nasa-identifies-cause-...
The first SLS launch was six years behind and massively over budget.
Lunar Gateway is almost certainly getting delayed.
None of these programs rely on SpaceX in any way thus far.
There was no heat shield issue, it was investigated and the resolved: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/nasa-delays-...
There is an issue with another dependency for Artemis 2 and 3, though - Starship is nowhere near where it needs to be.
"There was no heat shield issue" and "it was investigated and resolved" cannot both be true. There was a heat shield issue; they investigated for two years, and it has caused a delay.
Artemis II has no Starship dependency. It's entirely SLS/Orion.
Your own article agrees with me:
> Artemis 2 likely would've been delayed by a year or so, to late 2026, had a heat-shield replacement been required, NASA officials said today. But the mission team still needs more time than originally envisioned to get Orion up to crew-carrying speed, explaining the roughly six-month push.
> "The heat shield was installed in June 2023, and the root cause investigation took place in parallel to other assembly and testing activities to preserve as much schedule as possible."
Complete nonsense. There are many issues with Artemis timeline.
And of course its completely ridiculous to blame a program that received 2 billion $ and only really started a few years ago, vs things like SLS Orion that have been going for decades and absorbed 50 billion $.
Maybe match some achievements from 60 years ago, like having a rocket that can put someone on the moon, back when the largest supercomputer in the space program had less FLOPS than my watch.
Decreasing price of a launch by multiple orders of magnitude and increased cadence is also an achievement that hasn't been achieved previously.
Increased launch cadence is an operational achievement, not an engineering one.
And I'm not so sure that they actually decreased price to launch all that much. First of all, it's definitely not "several orders of magnitude", the best numbers quoted are maybe half price or so for a Falcon 9 compared to another contemporary rocket. And by my understanding, the US government at least is paying about as much for Falcon 9 as it was for a Soyuz to bring an astronaut to the ISS, at least.
NASA pays both Boeing and SpaceX less than Soyuz was.
> ...operational achievement, not an engineering one.
How would I distinquish between the two, esp wrt rocketry?
That's a 60billion government program I guess to match the program you need to match that as well, starship is doing what it's doing at a tenth of a cost so far.
Go to the moon, land a rover, wander about, come back with everyone alive... should be easy right?, I mean, it's already been done... RIGHT????
A Mars cargo mission, according to the timeline spacex set for themselves. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F2HFqsVkiZc/YT9bPpXSKDI/AAAAAAAAG...