Since public perception and enthusiasm is pretty important for manned space programs, it might make sense for them to spend a little more on quality video.


Politics, and the speed of government.

To get SLS approved initially (it has evolved over the years) NASA had to keep some legacy shuttle hardware to preserve shuttle-associated government jobs in key districts. That precluded the clean-sheet design that probably would have been needed to fly the booster back.

Also when it started development, Space X had not demonstrated re-usability on the Falcon 9, and the only commercial launch vehicle remotely in the SLS lift capacity ballpark (Starship) was conceptual.

Today Starship can obviously be reused, but is still in development and not yet man-rated. Falcon 9 has obviously demonstrated re-usability many hundreds of times.

But when SLS kicked off, the established launch industry (NASA, commercial, and DoD) simply did not believe that re-usability was going to practical (it was a very big paradigm shift, visionary in fact).

Europe and China also came up short, and are now scrambling for re-usability as well to avoid getting caught with space economics an order of magnitude behind the US.

Assuming Starship succeeds (probably will, they've demonstrated most of the really hard stuff in flight), I'd imagine most manned exploration missions will shift to that over time. Even if Starship isn't perfectly optimized for a given mission, the fact that you get to use it again in many cases makes it an obvious economic winner.

Worth noting there are some missions where Starship itself would not be recovered to earth (ex modified versions to land on other planets). The first stage booster should be recovered in most cases, although I guess if you needed every last drop of performance, you could use what would normally be the return fuel and just let it splash in the ocean.

 

After watching some of the live feed of the crew in the module, I'll never complain about the size of a 737 cockpit again.

(It took NASA $4 billion to produce this video, so I'm glad it has some personal value to myself, the joe-blow taxpayer.)

 

4b to eject doo doo on the far side of the moon. Is there no simpler solution?

 

if you want to deposit fecal matter on the far side of the moon, I’d say no, there isn’t a more simple solution. There’s a wealth of other benefits to the mission too, besides the scatological, but I won’t denigrate your interests

 

Sure about that? At 4 billion, record setting lav service bill. Not to mention the yet to be flown LEM. Wars, hazmat, epidemics and grief. Outer space is uninhabitable for a reason. Besides, the final frontier ends same place for everyone. No matter how far we push an alloy cork. Raymond Chandler coined it, the big sleep.

 

I am, yes. Are you?

“The Apollo program has been described as the greatest technological achievement in human history.[154] Apollo stimulated many areas of technology, leading to over 1,800 spinoff products as of 2015, including advances in the development of cordless power tools, fireproof materials, heart monitors, solar panels, digital imaging, and the use of liquid methane as fuel.[155][156][157] The flight computer design used in both the lunar and command modules was, along with the Polaris and Minuteman missile systems, the driving force behind early research into integrated circuits (ICs). By 1963, Apollo was using 60 percent of the United States' production of ICs.”
Wikipedia

https://apollo11space.com/42-inventi...pollo-program/

It will be interesting to see how Artemis advances the course of human history. Maybe you should take up reading books

 

Do checkbooks count?

 

The plan is to establish a permanent base and human habitation on the moon. That would be historically noteworthy at least, if not as dramatic an event as Apollo 11.

 

Yet after years of development they had a capsule in which the FO was able to stow his overnight bag!

 

It feels like with space X this is nasa trying to stay relevant. Didn’t we basically already do this same mission like half a century ago?