As we approach the first flight on Monday (if it doesn’t turn out to be the second wet dress rehearsal that they probably should have run), Eric Berger has thoughts.
But whether the flight is successful or not, Artemis is not a serious program. I disagree with John Logsdon, though:
The lander will also require multiple refuelings en route to make the journey to the lunar surface. That will “require four or five or six launches to put the fuel into orbit,” noted John Logsdon, founder of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, adding that means “a lot of places for failure.”
If a propellant launch fails, you do another one. No big deal.
There are many more small launchers than there is demand for them. And if my idea about equatorial LEO happens (and I think it’s inevitable), there will be no market for them at all.
[Tuesday-morning update]
I’m both fascinated and amused at the degree to which intelligent commenters are having difficulty wrapping their heads around the ELEO concept.
I bought a bunch of November calls on ASTR at fourteen bucks each as lottery tickets after the most recent failure, when the stock price fell to a buck and a half, on the hope that the next launch this summer would be successful. Now they may expire worthless, and I’ll lose about three hundred bucks. But November is still three months away, and the stock could still rally on news.
Masten Space Systems filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Thursday. The company estimates $10-50M in liabilities to creditors that include SpaceX, Astrobotic, Frontier Aerospace, Agile Space Industries and Airbus Defence and Space, among others.
Masten was an alumni factory, resulting in a lot of other innovative companies. They were arguably the progenitor to SpaceX’s success at reusability. I hope they’ll be able to restructure.