I wish that every time some politician (and Bill Nelson is definitely one of those) says that “Safety is the highest priority,” someone would ask them, “What is safe enough? When are you going to fly? How safe will it be then? If safety is the highest priority, why would you ever fly? Not flying is the only way to make safety the highest priority.”
39 thoughts on “Another Artemis Delay”
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Let me be clear. After funding, safety is our highest priority.
So what if we apply the “perfectly safe” criteria to everything – but war. Does that not mean that _nothing_ is worth even the slightest risk of ultimate sacrifice, except killing others of our own kind? So no one would take the risk of doing anything except in order to kill the folks in the cave next door. And we would certainly be living in caves, having given up taking any risk for (almost) any objective. And, like the pre-humans in the “Dawn of Man” sequence of “2001,” we would be vegetarians. Except we wouldn’t accept the vision of eating meat and getting enough calories to think about anything except where the hell the wild grain or fruit might be. Or we might devolve into ruminants.
we would be vegetarians.
Well that doesn’t count the mushroom eaters. I”ve always wondered WTF, when it came to discovery of mushroom cuisine.
Well that one didn’t kill me, how about this one?
I think it’s more “This one made me feel funny. Let’s see if these other ones work the same way…”
Of note, humans may always have been fungivores, as bonobos and gorillas eat mushrooms (probably chimps too). Catarrhine monkeys not only eat mushrooms, but are immune to the toxins.
And even after we left east Africa, we could observe bears, deer, and pigs, which also eat mushrooms. That’s kind of how rats work. They can’t puke, so a rat eats something adventurous, and the more timid rats wait to see if he croaks before giving it a try. You can also try things out on dogs, who are really good at puking. “Fido puked and had convulsions. Better spit that out, Ogg.”
“Fido puked and had convulsions. Better spit that out, Ogg.”
After Ogg swallowed holding only the stem of an Amanita Ocreata in his hand.
Well it was nice knowing ya Ogg. BTW the immediate ER treatments are a real treat as well. Like activated carbon lavage. Something right out of a gang bang shooting ER episode. Of course there is always getting a liver transplant if the tube plunged down your throat whilst vomiting back out black liquid doesn’t work.
It’s worth remembering, of the 100,000 terrestrial fungi species, only about 100 are toxic to humans. Therre’s a species known as “Finnish Fugu” (no English common name, or I don’t remember it) that’s toxic raw, but can be eaten parboiled. I used to work in the med/pharma field.
There are so many reasons for the delay, including self inflicted regulatory ones, that I suspect safety was merely the straw they grasped.
Who can argue with “safety”? They probably decided that saying they were “doing it for the children” would be a bit much.
Well, the astronauts were minors when the program started. So yes! Safety first for the kids! Seems appropriate.
NA$A Plan$ to $ave Money: Wait until the elite crew is eligible for medicare before launch
“Need All Senior Astronauts”?
Artemis delay? Blame it on BO.
And when it’s SpaceX’s turn in the barrel? Expect guns blazing.
You gotta love NASA’s New Space strategy. One the EU is eager to emulate.
Reminds me of the days working ISS, when a new schedule would drop for the press that included all the delays everyone knew about months ago and none of the new delays everyone knew would delay things several more months.
I suspect the US has no intention of landing on the Moon (and note I mention no agencies nor any bureaucrats). I believe the intention is to continue floating in circles, with Axiom replacing ISS in the same orbit. Voyager may be able to function is a free-flyer, associated with Axiom Station or in other orbits (since there can be multiple Voyager single-module stations). Look for Gateway serviced by Orion in lunar orbit, as the “international” project, with at least one Voyager adjunct, possibly in LLO, so the Moon can be studied from close up. And, of course, placating money for Mr. Bezos, who may or may not build anything.
Whether SpaceX will be permitted to continue with Starship and Mars remains to be seen. Same for the Vast station of his proteges.
I’m betting the Lunar Gateway goes away as a manned platform due to the radiation risk.
A couple hundred tons of water, solves the radiation risk. And it’s orbit solves battery problem with solar energy, ISS only gets sunlight 60 percent of the time. And ISS has drag, because it’s still in Earth’s upper atmosphere. And ISS mainly has radiation problem because of it’s 51 degree inclination.
Polyethylene would probably do the job for less weight. If the Russians manage to put a station in SSO sometime around 2030, it’ll be interesting to see what works. (Okay, let’s hear a chorus of Neocon scoffing now.)
One of the things a space program could do instead of weirdly situated space stations, is to put a crewed module in solar orbit, with a Venus flyby, returning to a lunar DRO. After which, it would be a space station.
Picture NEM-1. UM-2, Gateway Airlock, 2x Progress, 1x Soyuz MS, Fregat stage and Briz-M stage. That’s enough to do the mission, eight launches (3 Angara 5 and 5 Soyuz 2.1b). All that hardware exists off th shelf. Of course, you’d need some balls to go for that ride.
That’s tantamount to saying you’re betting interplanetary travel will be impossible. In which case, why bother? Robots it is. On the other hand, Musk, NASA and Roskosmos disagree with you.
I’m saying unshielded travel outside the Van Allen belts is risky. NASA ran lots of calculations for Apollo and accepted that it was a dice roll that there wouldn’t be a major solar event during a mission. Lunar colony designers bury their habitats under regolith or in lava tubes because eventually there will be a major solar event that would kill everybody who isn’t shielded. And that gets into the usual radiation calculations that space folks have been doing for half a century.
So either the Lunar Gateway will very rarely have a crew (not continuously occupied) or it will need a small shielded area to get through a solar storm. The latter would be better because if they tried to return to Earth during a major solar storm then the return vehicle would need shielding, and that adds weight to every trip.
The facts are available. Gateway is only to be manned for short stretches (the duration of a lunar surface event, or a construction event), no more than a month or so at a time. ROSS, which will be heavily shielded, will have 2-month crew rotations while they see what’s what. Musk believes transits of 3 – 6 months will be okay. He plans to point the engine bay at the sun during transits, and to have a flare shelter aboard for emergencies. My Venus flyby pipe dream would also include a flare shelter aboard NEM-1.
Whatever Roskosmos thinks is irrelevant. The Russian “Federation” is approaching RUD fast.
Neocon FUD. What do you think it’ll RUD into? The Federal Subjects of Russia are much different than the ones of the Soviet Union, because they learned from Stalin’s mistakes. The Federal Districts were created by Putin, and their presidents are Putin-appointed cronies. The Districts have no machinery of government and exist only to facilitate TPS Reports. The Oblasts and Traditional Krais are like the tiniest US states (think Delaware, for example), and the Ethnic Republics are more like US Indian Reservations, most with a majority Russian population. The biggest one, Sakha, has a population of 900,000, only 55% Sakhas. The second biggest, Komi, is 70% Russian.
The US is more likely to dissolve in a general civil war next year than that Russia will RUD. And while a US civil war will be a long, bloody catastrophe, a Russian civil war will be a short, sharp shock. Then there’s China, which Neocons insist will collapse after being shredded by Japan and Taiwan. Good luck boys. I hope you don’t get us all killed!
Exploration has never been safe.
Nor is crossing a street, nor is getting older, which is certainty of pain and eventually, death.
The idea of redundancy, is mostly about preventing delay, but SLS alone is delaying NASA. And has lost NASA, decades, already. And whole idea behind SLS was something which could done as fast as possible.
Or that was the claim, but it was about rice bowls, and rice bowls have certainly been filled with something.
It appears to me, India is in more of a rush, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a lean machine nor getting there fast, though some hope, maybe.
I wonder , when India become more of a super power, how exactly the US will regard it as a threat? Will it be related to what India is doing in regards to space?
Will it be the turtle that wins it?
It seems to me, India has a lot reasons to lead in this regard and is in the right location in this world.
And China is more like NASA, but it’s like NASA which has more of a budget to waste.
China should build artificial gravity station if wanted to be leader, rather than a copycat thief.
I have my doubts AG stations are even possible. Somebody should try anyway, as if it did work, it would solve a lot of problems.
Tether two Starship’s in rotation, someday.
That’s just a big version of the Gemini test from 1966 and proves little. The more crucial test will be when Vast puts up its “sick.” If. But for it t work for long-range exploration, we have to have NautilusX and eventually Kalpana-1. Big ifs.
I was thinking it would better to smaller version. It may not prove much but you could learn how to drive it,
One aspect is moving around mass within the artificial gravity station.
You could pump water, and/or just have crew move tons of water. Inward and outward.
And flying it in terms having practice using thrust to spin and de-spin it.
And starting out testing the artificial gravity for a couple months and than 6 months.
To prove a lot, it seems one would have eventually test it for years.
But early testing, could give idea about building bigger artificial gravity stations.
Bigger stations would be expensive, so should test smaller ones, first.
And you might find out that artificial gravity as low as the Moon’s, is enough to eliminate most of problems with microgravity. Or might find out that higher than Earth is needed [or better].
So, small would be Falcon Heavy.
To make simple, build living quarter within it’s fairing, and keep the fairing {bring it to orbit}. Put lots of weight in bottom of fairing or bring lots of water, say around 10 tons. And
bring lots of air. Expell used air, to steer it, and add air to fresh air to breath air with less CO2 and water vapor [made by crew breathing}. Bring lots of battery power so it does not to deploy solar panel until later.
If not enough radius, then use a rope attached to Dragon to increases it’s radius. Or crew would need to be in Dragon.
So, like any station, launched uncrewed, and need second launch to bring crew to it, and dock with it. So this first mission, could be a short as a month or two.
And mostly testing how to drive it, and have later crew, spend 6 months on it.
I was justing thinking you would have different floors, it’s 11 meter high, floors could be 2 meter high, with more gravity the higher you are. But was thinking could have different pressures on different floors.
Now don’t problem going from low pressure to higher pressure, it’s going from higher to lower pressure, where get bends. so it seems the lower rooms could have higher pressure. And lowest room would be solar flare shelter. So could go quickly into higher pressure, but have to take more time, going to lower pressure.
I think what you describe is too small to be meaningful. In a discussion a while back, you favored a baton/stick type rotating station, and that is exactly what Vast opposes to build. It does seem like an ideal test case, so maybe we’ll see. My idea for a Kalpana equivalent is as a dirigible worker hab for the outer solar system. Saturn would be perfect, with relatively low radiation, lowering the shielding necessary for the hab.
Right now, our space technology could access the Moon, Mars, and Callisto, as well as some main belt asteroids, and the Jovian Trojans. That will make a good start. 30 years ago, there was book by Wendell Mendell that’s still viable, called “The Resources of Near-Earth Space.
“…you favored a baton/stick type rotating station, and that is exactly what Vast opposes to build. It does seem like an ideal test case, so maybe we’ll see.”
I favor it, because it’s cheap. And NASA should done decades ago. But NASA wants expensive programs. They also don’t like things which could be dangerous.
So there is danger and unknowns with what I talking about, and I would take baby steps build from it.
One thing about ISS, is it was done in steps, it was built in space, and I would continue in that direction. So, the long term plan it is not to de-orbit it, but after testing it, one might de-orbit it, because learned how to make something better with testing it.
It is small, and can easily be de-orbited, but if works out you want to keep it, you wouldn’t keep it in LEO.
Or you put in LEO because easier and cheaper, but it’s got engines which can get it out of LEO though it might take a couple years to get it to the point of putting in a higher orbit.
Anyhow, you have plan for first couple trips to it, and has value in terms of testing more than just the artificial gravity part.
One thing about it is making team, and with microgravity it disables the team, so artificial gravity could allow one have a real team. And it will be private sector astronauts who could spent more there lifetime in space.
Not surprising and SpaceX will have delays of their own that aren’t due to angry Democrats but the situation will continue to highlight differences in the two different methods in developing technology.
Did we all watch Musk’s hour-ling update? IFT-3 will be very interesting indeed.
–Today’s debut of NASA’s X-59 low-boom supersonic jet brought not even a whisper of a sonic boom — because it stayed on the ground at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, Calif.
But later this year, the long, pointy plane is due to test out technologies aimed at reducing the noise that’s associated with supersonic aircraft — and removing obstacles to routine super-high-speed air travel.
At today’s rollout ceremony, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said the X-59 is designed to produce a “gentle thump” rather than the thunderous boom created when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier.–
https://cosmiclog.com/2024/01/12/super-quiet-supersonic-jet-rolls-out-for-a-preview/#more-28665
Super-quiet supersonic jet rolls out for a preview
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By Alan Boyle Post date January 12, 2024
We Finally Know The Full Extent of Space Destroying Astronauts’ Red Blood Cells
Space
12 January 2024 By Carly Cassella
https://www.sciencealert.com/we-finally-know-the-full-extent-of-space-destroying-astronauts-red-blood-cells
Linked from: https://instapundit.com/
So would artificial gravity solve this problem.
How years before we can determine whether it does and does artificial gravity cause different problems?
Musk wants to get to million tons to orbit, but we should to determine how we can live in space.
And at this point, it seems a goal of third Starship test is to avoid another FAA delay.
How about not trying to recover any of the stages and have Starship be a bunch of different rockets, FAA can delay one kind of Starship rocket, while SpaceX can launch other kinds of Starships?
That’s not how it works. The FAA can deny a launch license to anything it wants, any time it wants (subject to POTUS and/or SCOTUS). So, if SpaceX had 75 LVs, it could allow Falcon and disallow the other 74, unless overruled by one of those higher authorities.
But SpaceX determines the mission, and gives the report on that mission.
What is known is tiles going to fall off starship- but it might survive it.
Why allow FAA to assess it?
How about leave it in orbit, and assess the tiles when it’s in orbit.