There are some people saying that the onboard cameras are very bad and badly positioned. While the imagery is breathtaking to me, it's just a tiny taste of what's yet to come — most of the images/videos haven't been downlinked yet.
Orion is the most media consumption focused craft that NASA has ever sent out. There are 16 cameras on the mission, ranging from,
— 7 COTS GoPro Hero 4 Black derived cameras that shoot video in, 4k/30fps, 1080p/120fps, 720p/240fps. 4 of these are mounted on tips of the solar panel. Most of the pictures that you are seeing are from these cameras.
- Cameras around the service module and the Orion capsule that are (mostly, AFAICT) wired cameras derived from PixeLINK PL-D725, these shoot in color and B&W, and record at 75fps on a single channel.
- 3 internal Cameras that are a part of Callisto a Lockheed Martin thing.
On the ground, we've gotten used to fairly high bandwidth communications system, but Orion is using NASA's Deep Space Network. There just isn't enough bandwidth to downlink the kind of pristine imagery that people want.
We'll have to wait until the capsule comes back home to watch all of the 4k video that this machine is capturing.
We have come a long way though, when the Apollo missions were going on, all they had were grainy TV broadcasts. They had to wait for weeks to get those gorgeous images out.
On the ground we've also gotten used to soft lighting conditions. Light in space works pretty differently from that on ground. On Earth we have more diffuse lighting as the light of the sun gets spread out from the atmosphere. There are many (MANY) surfaces for light to bounce off of and reflect from, making a more full looking light. In space, on the other hand, light is more often like a point light source. Your background is (effectively) the blackest of blacks. Your foreground is extremely bright. Cameras have pretty limited dynamic ranges. This also contributes to the blurryness you see and why the shadows look "off" (there's actually conspiracy theories around shadows on the moon because of this misunderstanding).
So even after we get all that 4k video things will still be "off" but like areoform is saying, we've come an incredibly long ways. I for one am excited for all these images. But also don't expect them to look like what you're used to on Earth. (and take this message as a warning for incoming conspiracies)
> when the Apollo missions were going on, all they had were grainy TV broadcasts
This reminds me of a not-so-fun fact where the original Apollo 11 data tapes were presumed saved elsewhere and were likely erased and recorded over. [0] The video that still remains from "one small step" is essentially a recording of a recording. Since the 10 FPS raw feed wasn't compatible with the TV broadcast standards at the time, they essentially pointed a normal TV camera at a TV displaying the source feed.
However, some better quality broadcast recorded tapes were found, restored, and released in 2009. [1]
Wait, a GoPro works in vacuum in space? Even one derived from that? That's pretty cool. What did they do to it to make it work in such a crazy environment?
It seems likely that a lot of industrial grade hardware would work just fine in space, needing at most minor tweaks, especially for operating periods of weeks/months at most. Government contracting is just too used to the old model of burning billions on redesigning everything (because, of course, jobs). They've only barely gotten over that model for rocketry in general.
For instance, the footage on Perseverance's landing was also all from off-the-shelf hardware. The Ingenuity helicopter is also largely off-the-shelf gear, it uses a plain old Snapdragon 801 as its main processor running Linux. Perseverance also uses an Intel Atom processor (although it carries 2) to receive footage from all the cameras and compress them, compared to the main processor, which is an ancient PowerPC chip. IIRC there was also a cubesat which used a smartphone as its processor and several others which have used Raspberry Pis. A GoPro has also been to space earlier this year.
Space is inhospitable for humans, but not so bad for tech. With no need for a cushy room-temperature, you mostly need to think about increased radiation and temperature swings.
I can't find details on NASA's designs, but I suspect you'd mostly need a new casing. Something radiation-tolerant (most plastic degrades quickly) and maybe radiation-shielding if it messes with the electronics too much. For temperature you could just run it through a few cycles on Earth and see what breaks. Probably nothing, given the GoPro's lack of moving parts and general ruggedness.
The rugged, icy, salt-water environments the GoPro is designed for are, in many ways, a lot more demanding than space.
To add to that - vacuum can also mess up sealed components that were manufactured at 1ATM. This is mostly a problem with electrolytic batteries and capacitors which puff up when the atmospheric pressure is removed. For batteries mitigations include manufacturing at low pressures or constraining the expansion mechanically.
Pretty sure a GoPro underwater housing would be perfectly capable of maintaining 1ATM in space. They are designed to handle many times that in external pressure.
My GoPro won't work if it's too cold (lithium battery).
They're using GoPro 4's, which is somewhat interesting, as the 11 just came out. So, old tech (8 years old or so) that's been heavily modified to work in space. I'm reminded some janky PowerPC powers the FORTRAN code that runs the Hubble.
It is romantic to think that the Earthrise photo was taken with a Hasselblad medium format camera.
It seems unlikely that the GoPros in question are rad-hard (there is no rad-hard GoPro that I'm aware of); it's more likely that they chose them for some other reason (perhaps some sort of validation or testing), or that these have fewer heat dissipation issues than the newer models. Heat dissipation is a frequent cause of issues for electronics in space.
They are old because the design was locked long before launch.
If they found new cameras with better heat dissipation, they would still go with old ones, otherwise they would have to recertify the new ones, which would take ages.
SpaceX actually has used them on a bunch of Falcon 9 launches. But I'd worry about how well a GoPro would survive in the long run in the harsh radiation environment outside the Van Allen belts.
NASA has plenty of vacuum chambers that they can control the pressure and temperature. They even tested the entire JWST hardware in a massive vacuum chamber.
To be fair, NASA _is_ probably reviewing the high res imagery before releasing it, but for a much more mundane reason than any conspiracy theory. A lot of contractors worked on Orion. NASA is responsible for not accidentally leaking any trade secrets that may be visible in imagery.
If the fundamental delay to NASA releasing images is leak of proprietary data, that is a pretty good argument against the continued existence of NASA as a public agency.
There is an enormous spectrum between "we cannot release some proprietary data from COTS components" and "we cannot release images without approval from our vendors".
(Not that I am convinced that this is the real reason why NASA is not releasing images quickly.)
No conspiracy or funniness to be had. ITAR is the main limiting factor to releasing images/videos at this point. Next is the download rate and the high res images are not high priority since operations can be run using lower resolution. We all need to remember mission success is the highest priority. We will get the good stuff we want, just not immediately.
Okay, boss, this LTX-71 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo Moon landings. They had the astronauts broadcast around the world from a sound stage at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems.
I believe someone did the math and supposedly showed that it would have been cheaper to actually land on the moon than fake it with what they had available at the time.
One issue that I really don't understand is why the onboard cameras are so bad and are badly positioned.
A huge part of this program is to generate buzz and interest in the public about the human space program. A large part of that is pretty pictures, to be honest.
The onboard video quality looks like 720p at best and the exposure is for the Orion vehicle, not Earth or the moon. And the video seems horizontally distorted.
I'd have to look, but I'm guessing this is an engineering camera meant to primarily view the physical state of the craft.
That being said, after billions of dollars to get this thing into space, they should have accounted for the need and benefits of better footage.
While the mission is going on, they first send down low-res versions that are optimized for mission operations. That's why the exposure is for the vehicle and not the moon.
Higher res ones that are focused on the moon will come later.
The pink elephant here is that you have to try to be impressed by things like this. And try somewhat hard. It's a low quality picture of the Moon, the same body we had astronauts walking on and live-streaming footage from literally more than half a century ago. If we were coming from a background of zero, this would be amazing. But as we aren't it's really kind of a sad reminder that technological progress, or even stability, is not a given.
By contrast when one watches the Falcon Heavy land [1], it's enough to give you goosebumps. I've shown that video to quite a lot of people outside the space world, and the most common response has been "Is that real!?" Even look at the YouTube comments and it's suddenly enough to even turn the internet into a domain of hope and aspiration. The problem is almost nobody knows about that, let alone the major ongoing progress since, or the implications of things like Starship.
So I think, without much to be truly inspired by, people are (perhaps subconsciously) simply discounting the possibility of space going anywhere during their lifetimes. If Starship achieves even a fraction of its potential, I would expect views to change. Because that genuinely does create the possibility of an exciting sci-fi style future, as opposed to just trying to recreate the 60s.
You're describing marketing, and marketing of an idea is important - I agree.
However, you also need to have a population that cares about science, engineering, exploration, etc. I don't believe what gets people into engineering and science is because of how engineering and science are marketed. It certainly doesn't harm anything by marketing it, my opinion is that it is a small component of the overall picture.
>I don't think pretty pictures are going to sway public opinion all that much.
James Webb Space Telescope?
Personally, I'm not impressed by SLS or Orion, but that's because the whole project is pork and bull and not worth the money, time, and other irreplacable resources spent.
Would it? I don't personally know anyone who has an 8k display, and I don't know that many people who knew about the SLS launch attempt last week until after it happened
I'll admit up front it isn't the same thing, but go back and watch the video of Musk's car floating in orbit after the Falcon Heavy first launch. It's still impressive as hell to rewatch because its well lit and high quality
Could you: have an array of different satellites orbiting the moon. Have the spacecraft transmit different bits of video to different satellites which all buffer and send the data back when they have line of sight?
Never worked on this domain, so I might be wrong, but what I've heard is that usually for space stuff the hardware is chosen well in advance and "locked". So even if a new shinny thing is out probably it won't make it into the project
Probably because they want cameras they know will work and survive in a deep-space environment. Space is hard. Once you get out of the atmosphere and magnetosphere, it's an unkind environment for electronics. They're probably going to spend the money, effort, and mass on some nice cameras for manned missions, but these are little cameras that mount to the ends of the solar arrays.
It is also probably a data rate issue. They will have higher priority data coming back from the spacecraft, especially for a first iteration, and in the early stages of the mission.
It is quite possible that once things have stabilised that the video and pictures being sent back will improve. For the ispace lander we take much lower resolution images throughout the mission until we have landed and have the high gain antenna in a stable connection.
> A huge part of this program is to generate buzz and interest in the public about the human space program.
Perhaps this is an impossible task. Humans don’t care about space explorers. We continue to have fun with sci-fi, but when we actual humans going to space in real life, it turns out they are just rich ass-holes that we all commonly hate.
Compare this with actual useful robotic missions like the James Webb Space telescope, which sparked huge interests and a ton of excitement.
I think the era of human space exploration died in the 1970s, and any effort to try to revive it are futile.
Very few people who have gone to orbit (actual space) were anywhere near 'rich'.
The reason rich people are the ones funding current space companies is because they are literally the only ones that can do it, other than the largest governments.
SpaceX has generated more buzz than recent NASA work (except maybe Webb) and that will continue once Starship begins ferrying passengers into space.
The high profile cases of recent human space travel is the Blue Horizon which generated a ton of buzz, mostly from people complaining (justly) about how out of touch these people are. I think the sentiment of human space travel extends from there. People cringe from seeing Jeff Bezos spill his champagne after landing and then if they hear about some people going to the ISS they ask: “whats the point?” I think this is a just question and a logical extensions.
Now for the excitement around SpaceX. There was also a ton of buzz around Perseverance. And think people were also quite excited—though not as much—about the Parker solar probe. For future missions I think more people are excited about getting back mars samples from Percy the rover, and about a hypothetical mission to use gravitational lensing from the Sun to photograph surfaces of exo-planets. The hype around Starship seems to me to be inflated by marketing, when talking to space nerds around me there isn’t really that much excitement about what we can achieve with a SpaceX Starship that we can’t with a regular old robotic state funded mission.
Maybe you’re talking to the wrong space nerds? I, for one, am extremely excited for Starship being able to lift relatively huge amounts of mass to orbit per dollar.
> > Very few people who have gone to orbit (actual space) were anywhere near 'rich'.
> Blue Horizon[sic] ... Bezos
Blue Origin has never been to orbit. It's a glorified carnival ride and nobody who knows anything about space or rocketry could mistake it for anything else. Among rocket fans, these 21st century suborbital launches are a laughing stock. Even the 20th century suborbital Mercury-Redstone launches were arguably a pathetic response to Yuri Gagarin's pioneering orbital flight.
No household-name rich person has ever been to orbit.
Astronauts have spent >736,000 hours in spaceflight, risking their lives for humanity, but the parent believes a 10-minute stunt flight carrying an irrelevant passenger is all that matters. I suppose they also dislike the imaginary adorers, and yet they are no different.
Jupiter’s grand tack left us with an asteroid belt right in the middle of the solar system. All our civilizational wealth derives from matter and energy, both of which we find in our cosmic backyard. Billionaire space tourism is a blip on the path to space industry.
Weird interpretations from these results to say the least. “Space Dominance” is nowhere mentioned except in the headline, yet the headline claims that’s what people want (!)
Seeing the results though I see that human space exploration is in the lower tier, just like my previous post was suggesting. More people would rather prioritize normal robotic missions as it seems. More people seem to put some importance to Conducting research to understand space then don’t. This is reverse (i.e. more people don’t think it important to) Research space travels health effect.
I'm not an expert, but I think there's pretty much an infinite number of ways to execute space trajectories.
Just looking at it visually it seems Orion is (perhaps?) taking a more roundabout (slower) route, and it's also ending up at the moon in a different orbital configuration than Apollo.
Another factor, I am sure, is cost. The faster you want to get there, the more fuel you need to burn. I'm also going to guess it's not a linear equation, which means the faster you want to get there, the fuel requirements will increase in something like an exponential proportion.
Therefore slower is cheaper, to a point. If you go TOO slow, your astronauts will starve, or you need to bring more food and provisions, which will cancel the cost savings on speed reduction. So somewhere in there is going to be an optimal cost/fuel/food/provision trajectory for each mission.
So, in summary: different mission, different parameters for optimal execution.
Apollo 17 launched at 12:33am on Dec 7th 1972, and entered lunar orbit at 2:47pm EST on Dec 10th, so, roughly 3.5 days.
Artemis I launched at 1:47am EST on Nov 16 and entered lunar orbit on Nov 20th at 2:09pm ET so roughly 4.5 days. Remember too that Artemis I isn't meant for a landing, instead it entered a distant retrograde orbit which orbits at a considerably higher distance from the surface. Spacecraft move considerably slower at higher apogees, so I don't think there's anything suspect about Artemis I taking a bit longer to reach it's planned orbit around the Moon.
Also, maybe the original launch date a month ago was more optimal? I'm sure it's hard trying to time the perfect launch trajectory while also juggling weather and a bunch of other variables.
> Why won't the press report in real units instead of frankenunits
Probably because its an American focused news site, reporting to American people, who use and will understand miles as a measurement. It really isnt hard to understand.
Imagine commenting on an American media piece targeting an American audience about an American space agency launching an American spacecraft and complaining that the article uses American units. Wild.
To play devils advocate, most cooking does not require the kind of precision that warrants getting out a small scale to measure the weight of crushed peppercorns. Not just because these things are season-to-taste, but also, because the average person cooking a meal can instantly translate cranks of pepper compared to a small unit of weight. Most home recipes also measure ingredients by volume rather than weight, so I can understand this.
I love this argument. Americans are dumb because they can't understand metric!
Why is metric better?
It's easier to understand, of course!
American's don't have a very intuitive understanding of metric because we don't use it. But every numerical literate American understands how to apply the metric system since that is all that is taught in schools (so much so engineer school grads are often unfamiliar with units actually used in US engineering).
We all know 130 KM is 130,000 meters, but we don't think in KM or M.
That’s a blatant lie with an air of European “superiority.” Yea we do, every one of us learned it in our school math and science classes.
It’s arbitrary to convert between any two mathematical units in general (it’s one of the main exercises in junior high math.) Any discussion of Americans “just not getting it” or “doing it wrong” is a cope from societies who have done far less in the past century in terms of scientific and technological progress.
Again, every American does this in 6th grade. It’s required to pass high school which a majority of Americans do. This is a cope from less economically and technologically sophisticated societies who can’t compete with us.
I learned it in school, as did my class mates. I held onto it as I am technically minded and I appreciate the simplicity of metric. My class mates do not all agree that remembering metric conversions is useful.
Many if not most Americans have some concept of kilometers and meters, especially anyone who runs, or is involved in sports outside of the big 3 American sports. We just tend to prefer the imperial, as we grow up using and interacting with it. Inches and feet are just easy to reason about in physical space on a human scale, they're great when you aren't trying to do more complicated math.
Thank you, I really appreciate this constructive feedback.
I obviously get the metric system, and most Americans are pretty familiar. But inches and feet are rooted in physicality. An inch is roughly a finger width, four inches make the (now rarely used measure) hand, and 3 hands is a foot. You can step off roughly accurate feet. I long stride is about 6 feet, or 2 yards. All of these measures divide neatly by 2, 3, and 4. It makes most fractional measures, especially things like 1/16th of an inch easy to work with. I wouldn't use it for science, but for building a table or measuring a rough distance imperial units are super intuitive.
We have been busy doing other things more interesting (subjective) and useful toward improving human quality of life than walking on the moon again.
The moon is a bit of a luxury. We're going back because it has gotten a lot cheaper to do so (and China is going for it soon, which spurred the US to go back before China gets there). The sole reason the US is more recently in such a hurry to go back is because of China's progress.
There is very little value in merely going back and walking around again. The only good reason to go back is to begin building a long-term settlement/base of some manner, and we couldn't afford to hope to attempt it until recently. Starship is the only thing that can make that economically viable this decade.
For a little more context, there were Apollo flights planned out to 20, Nixon cut those. The Apollo Applications Program aimed at building a lunar base and observatories up through '76 but the Johnson administration declined to fund it partially to fund of Great Society programs but also partially because no one could adequately explain what a lunar base would be worth. We did get Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz project, so it's not like project ground entirely down to a halt but what we did eventually get was a far cry from the heady dreams of the mid-60s, that's for sure. And, as cool a vehicle as the Shuttle was the STS did not at all deliver on its promises, further sapping resources.
Why haven't we gone back to the moon? Funding dried up real quick once it was clear the Space Race could be won with the existing amount of money spent, new projects had to answer "why" in a concrete way to compete for limited resources and it was not at all clear what we'd go to the moon for compared to, say, building the ISS.
Space theorists in the 30s - 50s assumed that you would have to build up on-orbit Earth infrastructure before the moon could be sustainably reached, meaning you could go back whenever just because. That is, you need stable communication, transit hubs, refueling, space-based construction went the thinking. Both the US and the Soviets took big, expensive shortcuts in the Space Race but I find it hard to believe that the original analysis -- space is only as reachable as its infrastructure allows -- hasn't been showed true in the last 50 years.
And incredibly far, much further than I used to think - you can fit all planets in the solar system in the average distance between the earth and the moon!
Actual serious answer: It takes a lot of energy to get to the moon. Even more to land safely. Even more to take off again. Even more get back to Earth.
That energy costs a lot of money. It costs a lot more money to test all the things that use that energy. We are at the bottom of an energy and money hole, the moon is at the top.
As soon as the initial mandate was met, politicians did their thing and corrupted the space program to prioritize jobs (and thus votes) over space exploration.
Is it just me who can't muster any enthusiasm over it because the rocket is so wasteful? Not very Tintin to trash the entire booster and everything for every launch.
You are getting a lot of downvotes, but I agree with you. It's true that the rocket equation is unforgiving, and it's not surprising that our early ventures into space all involved a lot of disposable hardware. But SpaceX has definitively demonstrated that reusable first stage boosters are viable from both a physics and economics point of view, and there is little that they will soon succeed in demonstrating the same for a fully-reusable orbital launch system.
In contrast, SLS is predicated on taking actual engines (and boosters) from the Space Shuttle program—ones which were once at the very forefront of reusable spacecraft technology—and trashing them. Sure: reusing the Shuttle and its boosters turned out to be much (much) less economically advantageous than hoped, and it is great that NASA eventually retired it. But the remaining Shuttle hardware is a monument to the engineering talent and production effort that produced the most sophisticated spacecraft ever flown, and to take the surviving engines, each of which has flown on multiple shuttle flights and _intentionally_ send them to a watery grave in the Pacific (Atlantic, for the booster segments) is a total travesty, and a shameful destruction of historic artefacts.
Indeed, the whole program is a boondoggle. SLS is based on the Shuttle hardware not for compelling engineering reasons so much as because it keeps the contractors that built the shuttle in business, and that keeps money flowing into the campaign funds of the politicians in Washington. Its exploration goals are laudable, but the approach taken has been fundamentally an exercise in job creation and military R&D subsidy before all else.
> Is it just me who can't muster any enthusiasm over it because the rocket is so wasteful? Not very Tintin to trash the entire booster and everything for every launch.
If your instincts come from how SpaceX have done it, then I can imagine it feels extremely wasteful. But SpaceX needs to try and turn a profit, so they have a different set of incentives to NASA.
The space shuttle was too costly of a program to continue. So in it's place a disposable rocket was developed that costed some $20 billion to develop in spite of largely reusing technology from the space shuttle while costing $4 Billion per launch, twice the launch cost of the space shuttle. All while being extremely late. It is by every sense of the word wasteful and dissapointing.
It doesn't necessarily work like that. SLS is expensive in part because it scatters jobs around to various important Senators and Representatives' districts. It's in part a jobs program.
Jobs, I think, is part of it but not the whole story.
Imagine if NASA was solely located in Alabama where von Braun set up shop. I think it would have been defunded in short order and there would be no NASA and, by extension, no SpaceX (since they are so reliant on govt contracts)
That's the same story, isn't it? You'd only have two senators and a handful of reps really caring about maintaining NASA jobs.
Put JPL in California, mission control in Texas, launches in Florida, and a bunch of manufacturing at Boeing and you've got a much, much wider Congressional support base.
Look at https://www.nasa.gov/specials/ESDSuppliersMap/ - they've even managed to spread suppliers around to Alaska, Montana, and Hawaii. Every single state has at least some jobs that depend on SLS.
Yes, I just think calling it a “jobs program” misses some of the nuance. You could ostensibly have the same number of jobs but much more political risk by concentrating them in one geographic area.
The political risk is the more salient point to me, and jobs is just a way to mitigate it. (You could also, for example, mitigate it with less productive means like lobbying)
(Suppliers is a different story. A lot of time NASA is handcuffed by which suppliers actually want work with them. There’s a lot of hoops to jump through and many suppliers just don’t find it worth the hassle)
I don't think being that cynical is warranted here.
1) The requirements aren't levied by congress. They are created by NASA civil servants who are usually the technical experts in a particular field. These aren't people who have much of any interface with lobbyists.
2) A lot of the instances where it's not worth it to suppliers isn't because they are being boxed out by some industry giant clamoring for some giant contract. It's usually closer to "it's not worth our effort to overhaul our manufacturing process to meet requirements so we can sell NASA a $70 teflon seal." The giant corps have little desire here either. But being a big manufacturer is sometimes correlated with having a more mature manufacturing process that meets specific standards.
Those drive some of the main contractors (like Aerojet Rocketdyne) but not all those others in that protracted list. Those are selected by the supplier quality process defined by typical civil servants, not Congress.
This was about how that long list of suppliers gets selected, not about how they make money. If you look through my previous posts, you’ll see I acknowledged most of these suppliers aren’t on the list to make a ton of money from NASA, and that a lot of suppliers don’t even attempt to make the list for that very reason.
There’s already enough corruption in govt, we don’t have to make believe it’s in places that’s it’s not.
Thanks for sharing the map, that's pretty interesting. I wonder what NASA or their contractors got from Lowe's Home Improvement?
Is there any infrastructure there for the mission? My cynical side wonders if someone flew to Honolulu, went to a hardware store to pick up some JB Weld, and flew it back to Florida just so they could check off Hawaii on the list of states.
It’s important to note that being listed as a “supplier” doesn’t mean NASA has actually purchased anything. A lot of times, it’s preemptive as a way of ensuring all the quality checks have been put in place so an PO can just be issued when needed without the delay.*
It also doesn’t mean they want spaceflight material. It can just be something needed to support the project, like shelving to hold extra parts. But if the charge code is traceable to the program, it makes the list.
More importantly it's a capability program. People and organizations who can build rockets, execute space missions, and have regular work doing so is necessary if you want to maintain the institutional knowledge and manufacturing capacity to do so.
That was a good argument in 2009 but it's a bad argument now. There are currently over 100 rocket companies in the US. Having those people work on dead end technologies like SLS rather than forward looking technologies like Starship or RocketLab Neutron or Relativity Terran R or Blue Origin New Glenn etc hurts rather than helps.
They are getting fractions of that. NASA funds small missions across a wide variety of such companies. It’s how SpaceX started. It’s been one of the most effective NASA programs ever, IMO.
The commercial programs have seen significant expansion in scope and spending as their benefits have become clear. The lunar landing contract to SpaceX is a great example of such.
Astra, Rocket Lab, etc. have to demonstrate capability to move up the ladder.
Again, I doubt it. NASA funding doesn't really work that way. They don't get a big bucket of funds to distribute as they please. SLS was the pet project of a number of powerful Senators, to the point where the joke is it's the "Senate Launch System", and has been specifically appropriated for by Congress.
There are ALWAYS politicians who are happy to give the money to their project. The idea that NASA budget would go down by 5 billion $ without SLS/Orion isn't really credible in my opinion. Some projects would be done, because Senators in space states wouldn't want the budget to just get lost.
Technically, yes, SLS can send people around the Moon, but gotta remember that Starship is very much on the critical path to the actual goal of boots on the Moon.
So, 'currently' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, not to mention in general the idea of SLS being ready to send people to the Moon now is a bit of a stretch too since Artemis II will be ready to launch in 2024 if we're lucky, which is also when (if we're lucky), Lunar Starship should be starting its testing.
And high-end manufacturing capability is very important to have domestically from a defense perspective.
I recall some NPR story recently about war games the US runs about a hypothetical war with China -- it was said that the US loses most of the time in these simulations. Why? A lack of industrial capability.
NASA is optimizing for different capabilities than SpaceX. With SpaceX's Starship every launch will require them leaving fuel for landing. Every gram of fuel you don't burn is less velocity you impart on your vehicle.
To get to the Moon a Starship will require two launches. A manned vehicle and a fuel tanker. They have to dock in Earth orbit, refuel, then the manned vehicle transfers to a Lunar injection orbit. It's very likely a Starship will need a tanker waiting on the Moon to refuel a lander for the return trip and landing back on Earth.
Starship hasn't even flown let alone demonstrated in-orbit refueling. SpaceX hasn't even demonstrated that in the small scale with Dragon capsules. It's a hard problem with a lot of unknowns.
SLS can launch the manned element directly into a Lunar injection orbit. It doesn't require any refueling to get anywhere. It also doesn't need a fuel tank at the destination to allow a lander to return home.
In order to do that the launch stages don't save any fuel for landing. It's "more expensive" to use expendable stages but all of their energy is used for their payload and none is saved for landing (and landing safety margin). Overall SLS is mass optimized rather than cost optimized.
The NASA way involves a lot fewer moving parts and <unproven technology goes here>.
Starship has twice the thrust of SLS. It could do everything SLS or Saturn 5 can. It just chooses not to because it chooses to be fully reusable. If you stuck a third stage, Orion and an Apollo CM style lander on top of Starship you could do everything in a single launch Saturn 5 style. That's something SLS can't do because Orion is much heavier than Apollo was. But Starship could. It'd have to run expendable.
The difference is that Starship is getting $3B from NASA vs the $40B that SLS got. NASA could get a single launch moon mission using Starship, but they'd have to pay SpaceX more than $3B to get it.
> SLS can launch the manned element directly into a Lunar injection orbit. It doesn't require any refueling to get anywhere. It also doesn't need a fuel tank at the destination to allow a lander to return home.
SLS doesn't carry the lander nor the fuel for the lander. So yes, it does need something else to get the lander's fuel to the destination.
This was a frequent excuse back when SpaceX had just started landing Falcons, but both factors go hand-in-hand. If you have reuse, you can fly a bunch of missions.
SLS is going to have difficulty maintaining a 1 launch per year even without payload readiness, so of course it's expensive and therefore disposable. But if they had reusability, they might have been able to fly it more often, thus helping make it cheaper on average to fly.
With SLS this becomes stark in the sense that if SLS was reusable, it could fly more often and would have lower per launch costs, which would make the other lunar lander proposals more viable and would make it more realistic to fly science payloads on it. If SLS were reusable, establishing a long term lunar presence with it wouldn't be a joke that everyone pretends to take seriously because it wouldn't be a matter of choosing between sending over a crew or launching components for a base for a given year.
> But if they had reusability, they might have been able to fly it more often, thus helping make it cheaper on average to fly.
This is true, but the issue is that there just isnt the need for it really. Very, very few missions actually require a SHLV. There just arent enough payloads atm, and that probably wouldnt change a ton even if the rocket was cheaper
Plenty of the things needed for establishing the sustainable long-term presence on the Moon that Artemis claims to aim for would benefit immensely from a cheaper SHLV that can fly more often. That's entirely why Starship ended up being such a valuable deal for NASA. Even the NASA OIG has been saying for a few years now that SLS with its current cost structure and flight rate is not compatible with Artemis's goal of being sustainable.
Universal is a bit hyperbolic here. Maybe we can say maximizing utility is universal, but utility comes in a lot of forms with profit being only one of them.
For example, someone doing volunteer work usually isn't trying to maximize their profit. They may be trying to maximize something else, but that fact means the profit motive isn't a universal first principle.
Motivated by money isn’t the same as only (or even primarily) motivated by money.
We all intuitively recognize this. Why do people watch football or spend time with family on Sundays instead of working another job? Because they recognize there’s marginal utility and are more motivated by the increase in quality of life than the increase in money. So much so that we look at people who try to maximize profit at all costs as having sociopathy.
Being motivated by self-sacrifice is pretty rare, and so trying to build a system based on that simply doesn't work. On the other hand, a system built around people being selfishly motivated by money works pretty darn well.
> do you pick your spouse/friends or make a decision to have children based on their ability to maximize your wealth?
People marry for money all the time. If you're a man, and have no money and no prospects for money, what do you think your odds are of finding true love reciprocated?
As for children, the birth rate declines as the economics of having children changed from an asset to a liability. This happens in country after country. People most definitely historically have had children for their ability to produce for the family.
I know it's gauche to suggest that people are motivated by money, but it's a fact that they are, even in affairs of the heart, and especially in their professions and their behavior while working.
In what way is NASA implying self-sacrifice? I think you might be shoe-horning some personal commentary here. I’ve met some who became civil servants explicitly because they weren’t motivated primarily by profit. But it was still maximizing some other feature that added ton their well-being. It wasn’t self sacrifice.
>I know it's gauche to suggest that people are motivated by money, but it's a fact that they are, even in affairs of the heart
We probably fundamentally disagree here. Again, I’m not saying people aren’t motivated by money. I’m saying they aren’t only motivated by money. The people I’ve met that think human interactions can be distilled to such a simple principle tend to struggle in their personal relationships in my experience.
The fact that you’re willing to type away on HN instead of trying to make more money tells me you know it’s a balancing act.
Besides, I think people are more motivated by status (being the hierarchical primates that we are) and money is just a clumsy proxy for status. For example, status chasing men are more apt to date a beautiful but poor female than a rich homely one.
I never said only. I said it is a powerful motivator that motivates nearly all of us.
> status
is another path to getting money.
> status chasing men are more apt to date a beautiful but poor female than a rich homely one
What they'll do is marry the rich one and cheat on her with the beauties. Besides, having an elegant beauty on your arm gives a big boost to one's career. Just look at JFK and Jackie. There's no doubt Jackie was a big help. And there's no doubt JFK selected her with that help in mind.
You can believe what you like. But I (and many I know) have become a lot happier through recognizing how human nature actually is rather than believing in the fantasy. The unhappy people I know are the ones who still believe in the fantasy, and are constantly disappointed.
You have this inverted. Money is a path to status. Status is what really matters. For example, do you think a former less powerful than, say, a billionaire? Billionaire's use their money to get power, prestige, and status, but it doesn't always go as far as other means.
>I never said only.
You said universal. I'm saying it's common, but not universal. The problem with absolute statements is that it only takes one instance to disprove them.
Is Bezos marrying the richest woman he can find? I doubt it. Are you actively selling your organs for money? If not, maximizing money isn’t universal. It common, but still commonly constrained by other competing priorities. Some of which we hold more dear than money. To ignore that seems like it’s own oversimplified fantasy.
I don’t think it does. Maybe if you phrased it as “maximizing utility” but you constrained it to “maximizing money” as a universal truth. That’s demonstrably false.
In the 50s, my dad was stationed in Europe and was watching Italian TV. The press tracked down the guy who won the lottery, and cornered him at the entrance to his apartment building. The press asked him "now that you won the lottery, what are you going to do with the money?"
Another man pushed him aside, and answered "oh, he's a Communist Party member in good standing, he's going to give it all to the Party!"
The lottery winner shot back "Oh no, I'm not a Communist anymore!"
My dad always had a belly laugh when he recounted that story.
Or maybe the problem is you view it as hypocrisy. I don't. It's illustrative of perfectly normal and predictable human behavior. The surprise would be if he did give it all to the Party.
My dad wasn't laughing at him. He was laughing at the Communists with their inability to recognize their false god.
Perhaps I misunderstood. My take-away was that, if he truly believed in Communist principles, he would give his money away. The fact that he didn't, shows his party affiliation wasn't a principled stance. I can acknowledge there are other more pragmatic motivators for being a Communist/Ba'athist/[insert political party of choice here].
I'm certainly not making a case for Communism. Again, it's telling that that is the lens you view these discussion through.
This is true. My point is not everything should be shoehorned into that dynamic. It’s not unlike when someone twists any misgiving into evidence of their pet cause, whether it’s racism, statism, misogyny, etc. The existence of those doesn’t mean every bad thing in society should be attributed to them.
> How so? Surely if NASA can do something cheaper it should have more money to do other things or find it easier to get money for more things?
This touches on an important question in economics. When you take your 101 class, if you pay attention, you will see that there is no role for competition at all. The whole economy could be a single firm, and all the prices and quantities would be the same, because the firm drives down economic profit to zero on the marginal good as a result of maximizing their producer surplus all by itself. This comes from optimization of convex functions - with appropriate convexity assumptions, any economic profit is money left on the table for the firm because it would just produce more and sell more units up until the last unit sold would earn zero profits.
What this means is that there is usually not a difference between a planned economy managed by a social planner and a free market economy (there are some differences with more exotic models, but this isn't important here). That is the observation you are using.
This led economists to investigate what the difference would be, and one group focused on non-convexities, a small group jumped into the rabbit hole of disequilibrium economics, while another group -- the Austrians -- insisted it was lack of price information that thwarted the social planner. If everything was auctioned off and every task given a budget with a maximization goal, we would discover prices but administrative processes would not discover prices.
But what I believe is that many organizations are just bad actors -- they leave money on the table, both in the free market and in an administrative setting. What you need is competition to drive out bad actors. People do not act in their self-interest nearly as much as models predict -- they have to basically be forced into it with competition.
The first inkling I had of this was landlords in San Francisco letting their properties rot via water damage because they couldn't be bothered to fix the windows. Why would they commit economic sabotage? Because they could afford to lose the money and still make enough to meet their needs. And for others, it was just that they were bad at their job, but rising property prices/rents meant they would not be driven out of business. This is why monopolies suck so much -- there is no mechanism to get rid of those who are bad at their job, even the job of profit maximization. So rather than viewing an organization as maximizing efficiency, maybe view it as "minimizing effort subject to avoiding bankruptcy".
Once you adopt that view, you get different answers to questions such as why NASA isn't as efficient as possible (and neither is SpaceX). You are only as efficient as your competitors/shareholders force you to be.
There is no reusable rocket available with 8.8 million pounds of thrust. And there certainly wasn't anything available when SLS was started. Falcon Heavy is about half the thrust of SLS. I agree that reusable would be much better, but reusability is a relatively recent innovation by SpaceX. SLS will get there. SpaceX is forcing everyone to up their game. In the meantime, no need to condemn them for not getting there yet during these transition years.
SLS has just put a capsule into orbit around the moon, however, while Starship has yet to embark on its first orbit of the Earth, with no date in sight. Additionally, pinning the entirety of the American space program on a single private company seems like a recipe for disaster.
SLS put a capsule into orbit for an absolutely princely sum of $4.1 billion per launch. That's after the over $20 billion program cost. All using technology largely designed in the 70's. But at least those the designs of the 70's were meant for reuse were as SLS is completely disposable. The entire program makes the space shuttle seem like a bargain. Now that's an accomplishment.
> Additionally, pinning the entirety of the American space program on a single private company seems like a recipe for disaster.
That's exactly what happened here. America pinned the entire project on Boeing Space. With disastrous results.
In fact, it's less wasteful in terms of absolute mass to trash the rocket.
Carrying fuel, parachutes, etc. to booster separation that you don't use to boost the rocket, or worse, carrying fuel, heat shields, aerodynamic surfaces, etc. to LEO for re-entry in addition to your payload, are wasteful. Non-critical mass to lunar orbit is even more extravagant.
When your rocket engine is constructed by the the best TIG welders you can find carefully fitting Inconel parts together, or your tanks made by composite experts hand-laying carbon fiber in cleanrooms, yeah, it feels a waste to see that work crash and burn (or, I suppose, the other way around - first the burn, then the crash).
If your booster is as disposable as a paper cup, with new ones flying off the assembly line faster than you could hope to rework anything, perhaps either the materials or the fuel are wasted but not so much work is wasted.
> When your rocket engine is constructed by the the best TIG welders you can find carefully fitting Inconel parts together... it feels a waste to see that work crash and burn
Note that the rocket engines used by SLS (RS-25, and to a lesser extent the solid rocket boosters) were explicitly designed for reuse, as part of the Space Shuttle program; all the way back in the 1970s.
The four RS-25 engines that Artemis 1 dumped in the ocean had previously flown on Space Shuttles. IIRC they first flew in 1999 (although Shuttles only used 3 engines).
> If your booster is as disposable as a paper cup, with new ones flying off the assembly line faster than you could hope to rework anything, perhaps either the materials or the fuel are wasted but not so much work is wasted.
Also note that the marginal cost of an SLS launch is 4.5 billion dollars. That doesn't include all the one-off costs, like R&D; certification; restarting production lines; etc. Famously, it cost over a billion dollars to restart the RS-25 production line (so they can replace those engines being dumped in the ocean); despite claiming that the use of existing tech would save money!
In fact, refurbishing & upgrading those existing Shuttle engines cost more than producing brand-new RS-25s. Again, it was claimed that reusing the existing Shuttle engines would save money...
Despite the cost of these assembly lines, SLS rockets aren't "flying off" them. The (few) scheduled Artemis launches are separated by years.
When what you're really selling is a jobs program for your constituents, perhaps consuming these rocket engines for each launch is not wasteful but good business!
Yeah why don't we just place an order at the first available orbital facto...oh no such thing exists. Well we can order some aluminum from an asteroid mining smelt...oh that doesn't exist. Well I'm sure the useful payload entirely built in orbit is...oh.
There's no infrastructure in space to do anything. Even if you built a rocket in orbit that doesn't do you any good if the payload in sitting on a pad on the ground.
In my opinion the ground is the best place to make them. It's much harder to do independent inspections of the work when you have to fly the expert who wants to look at the assembly into space and train them how to do EVAs.
The two things I think would be interesting to demonstrate in space is aluminum extrusion production (standardized framing) and fuel production. To do either of those sustainably in space would be an impressive accomplishment.
I think you are right, but on a more abstract level. I don’t think it is the rocket per-se (people don’t care about the specifics of technology), but a lot of people are asking: “whats the point”.
We know what the point is with James Webb Space Telescope, we know that the point is with each successive Mars rovers. But the moon seems just so pointless. We’ve been there, there is nothing there. We’ve also seen how capable robots are in space, and we continue to be excited to see each generation of robots outperform the previous, bringing in new and exciting discoveries and confirmations. For the moon, there is nothing to be excited about.
You’re making the common mistake of thinking that because you don’t see any good reasons, there are no good reasons.
One good reason is that the moon is a relatively close jumping off point for other operations and missions to other destinations. It has a great combination of ample space and very low gravity, so it’s (relatively, compared to earth) easy to get off of. So a fantastic choice for future bases, mining operations, labs, materials storage, and possibly manufacturing. It also has problems of course, which is well known.
You don’t have to accept this for it to remain a good reason to people in the know about the opportunities of developing beyond earth and the dangers of not doing so.
I would like to point out that if United States won't do it then other countries and large companies will take the lead. And in fact they are already doing it. And while it might not be bringing a lot of tangible returns for US citizens right now, it is projected to overtake practically every single other industry including electronics at some point in the future.
Even without returns, it is simple matter of security. With another country like China taking absolute control over space US would be quickly incapable to take care of its interest here on Earth. Just imagine China deciding to incapacitate all US satellites and US having no way to respond to it.
So it is same old weapons race, it is just trying to score some extra side quests a bit outside of the main quest. Haven't you ever tried to do side quests to get some extra exp to help you with main quest line?
Presumably because somebody pointed to an asteroid somewhere and calculated that it contains a volume of platinum/gold/unobtanium that would be worth a hundred zillion kajillion trillion dollars, without taking into account that if you actually brought that much of a given precious metal into the market the price would crash to zero and we'd all be drinking Coke out of disposable platinum cans.
On the one hand, this is technically true. On the other, this is effectively because the gains to such a large windfall cannot be captured by a single entity: Aluminium becoming so cheap as to become a nearly disposable material is a massively _good_ thing.
It's not inconceivable that having platinum become plentiful might also be such a boon.
Sure, but using aluminum as an example, if we take the modern production of aluminum (as a proxy for underlying demand) and multiply by the price of aluminum in the 1800s (when it was so incredibly precious that it was chosen to cap the Washington Monument), we would expect the modern aluminum industry to have revenues of around $100 trillion, or about 1000x what it actually has. The point is just that one cannot assume a resource extraction industry's future profitability without taking into consideration how increased supply will also lower the price of the product.
Isn't that the goal? If we can get rid of scarcity in materials and energy then everyone's living standards can go up. If we can move metal smelting off world, pollution goes down at the same time. Am I ignorant to think that would be a big positive for human kind?
I'm not saying it's not a potential positive for society, rather I'm saying that the economic calculations shown so far are exceedingly simplistic and merely extrapolate from the current market price of these metals, so we cannot use these numbers to conclude that this will be the most profitable endeavor in human history.
It will costs trillions to bootstrap that industry in space. It would cost mere billions to make that industry on Earth cleaner. The Earth is fucking gigantic. It's literally filled with raw materials. Access to those materials is downright cheap compared to attempting to access the same material in space.
I'd argue that the goals of manned space flight and meeting those goals are what put the USA on the path to be #1, so it seems to be to have something to do with manned flights.
Experience shows that the path to being #1 is usually to some extent doing a lot of stuff around the topic, throwing a lot of darts at the board and seeing what sticks.
If we don't experiment with getting off of this rock, we're dooming the lives of all known living organisms in the known universe.
An entire universe, void of all life, that doesn't get to experience itself deeply saddens me. Though that might just be the fitness-function within me talking.
It's critical that intelligent life on Earth learns to adapt and survive in the greater universe. Staying on this one planet is a virtual guarantee of extinction in the long-term.
Critical for the species on the universal timescale maybe, humans as we know them have been fine without it for ~300,000 years. Horseshoe crabs have been around for over 400 million years.
We might be better off spending the next couple hundred years focusing on making sure we don't destroy our own home before trying to move on to the next (or at least more comprehensive threat detection). There's a very good chance we'll off ourselves before we have to start worrying about anything at even a solar system scale, let alone galaxy or universe.
> There's a very good chance we'll off ourselves before we have to start worrying about anything at even a solar system scale, let alone galaxy or universe.
That's precisely the reason why we will be better off by investing into space exploration now.
Even if Mars or another planet were to survive the destruction of Earth, a stand-alone colony or space station would be doomed. At best I think we're at least 100 years off for any long-term self-sustained space colony... and it's quite possible we'll be sidetracked significantly if the climate causes widespread migration and famine as expected.
If we can't solve exponentially simpler earth-based problems, then I think we have no business in expanding, and would be unlikely to succeed regardless.
I support space exploration and development, but putting more resources outward when we have so many inward problems feels like a fool's errand.
We can work on both, but one's a much more imminent danger.
Your mistake is to prioritize climate change over space exploration and not some other industry. Spending on space exploration is tiny compared to, for example, consumer electronics or entertainment. Imagine how much we can save if phone lifecycle is five years instead of two; or if video games playing time is reduced by half, etc. So many candidates, yet you choose to target space exploration, an industry that has historically been responsible for so many science and technology innovations.
I'm not targeting the industry, I'm assuming that nothing will change when it comes to the space industry's current funding. No one's going to gut consumer electronics for space, it will never happen.
Given the current low-level of funding we should be focusing on defense (climate reliance, threat detection) rather than colonization. I'd be over the moon if space industries were better funded to do both... but more often than not total funding as a percentage of GDP has been decreasing, not increasing.
> At best I think we're at least 100 years off for any long-term self-sustained space colony
We think alike - but IMHO that's going to happen only if we begin now. That's why we shouldn't hold off.
> If we can't solve exponentially simpler earth-based problems, then I think we have no business in expanding, and would be unlikely to succeed regardless.
It's not like there's a single "we" that can keep attention at one thing at a time only. There are a lot of great engineers excited about space stuff, who don't care about ecology/whatever else at all. It makes sense to use their skills and enthusiasm while other engineers excited about that work on solving our Earth-bound problems.
Another point is - whatever helps us survive on Mars and the Moon will help us greatly to reduce harm done to Earth.
> Even if Mars or another planet were to survive the destruction of Earth, a stand-alone colony or space station would be doomed.
> We can work on both, but one's a much more imminent danger.
For sure, but there are also dangers other than climate change - war, asteroid impact, pandemics, rogue AI takeover... It's not that either Earth gets destroyed and the Martian colony will die anyways or nothing has happened and we don't need the backup.
Perhaps there will be another pandemic and the people on Earth will die off but the Martians survive. Perhaps asteroid impact will make Earth uninhabitable for 10-50 years but no more. Etc
I agree - 'critical' is sorta meaningless in this context. But the general response is - because organisms adapt for their own survival and our genes are selfish.
That's easy: because literally everything else is contingent on it. Either we survive and flourish allowing any of our other actions to matter, or we doom ourselves to extinction, in which case literally nothing we do matters.
We're already all individually doomed to extinction, yet this doesn't prevent most of us from finding meaning in our lives. And in the long run, any civilization, no matter how flourishing, is doomed. Conditioning whether anything we do matters on the existence of an infinite chain of future progeny is a losing game.
>infinite chain of future progeny is a losing game.
There's no need to take it to infinite extremes. There are always plenty of values in the slider between short-medium-long term to choose from to find meaning in life… whatever floats someone's boat.
Orion is the most media consumption focused craft that NASA has ever sent out. There are 16 cameras on the mission, ranging from,
On the ground, we've gotten used to fairly high bandwidth communications system, but Orion is using NASA's Deep Space Network. There just isn't enough bandwidth to downlink the kind of pristine imagery that people want.We'll have to wait until the capsule comes back home to watch all of the 4k video that this machine is capturing.
We have come a long way though, when the Apollo missions were going on, all they had were grainy TV broadcasts. They had to wait for weeks to get those gorgeous images out.