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I feel like over the past few decades I have seen tons of news like this or that at least feels like this where there is some announcement about tangible progress that is made towards our returning to the moon -- some new prototype capsule announcement, a new unveiling of a rocket plan, the new suits, the "biosphere" stuff, etc. -- only to then see a published time horizon for the moon return which seems to always be "five years out." Any reason to expect THIS time around is different?
NASA's Artemis program is generally on track - Artemis 1 (uncrewed test flight into lunar orbit which then returned to Earth) was successful in 2022. Artemis 2 (humans going into lunar orbit) is scheduled for next year, and indications seem to be that it's on track. Artemis 3 (humans landing on the moon) is scheduled for 2025.
So there has been very tangible progress in the form of Artemis 1, plus the schedule is to get people back on the moon in two years. Obviously it could be delayed, but we're pretty clearly out of the realm of a theoretical moon landing and into planning/implementation for a specifically planned and approved NASA mission. I would definitely put money on humans on the moon in well under 5 years.
Starship will be the rocket delivering them to the surface. It is likely to have a first orbital test within the next 3 months. That will be a major milestone, approaching the capability to once again land and return humans from the lunar surface.
What I don't understand is why is the SLS being used to transport the humans to lunar orbit but the Starship HLS is supposed to take them to the surface? Why not just ride the Starship the whole way?
When I visited the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL a couple years back, it was full of stuff promoting the SLS as the future of space flight, without any mention of other, non-NASA platforms. It felt like the kind of propaganda-driven alternative reality one might encounter in the Soviet Union—it's been plain for years that, at best, it's gonna be obsolete by the time it's ready, but here are all these pieces of marketing pretending it's not a giant waste of money and carefully avoiding mentioning any more-promising rockets. If a person came in without any idea what was going on in modern space flight, they'd have left the place having gotten entirely the wrong impression. It was the opposite of educational.
Then again, most of it that wasn't run-down and/or broken just felt like a big, ugly, defense contractor trade show (complete with the kind of hilariously-terrible graphical collages & infographics that end up in military powerpoint slides), so that's in keeping with the rest of the vibe. Gross, definitely do not recommend. If you can convince them to let you into just the Saturn V hangar at half-off the normal ticket price, that'd be worth it.
SLS is not obsolete until Starship flies. That's probably coming soon, but it hasn't happened yet. If the delays hadn't happened it would have been around a few years before Starship and gotten some good use.
Despite the unfortunate presence of Apartheid Clyde, SpaceX has established a track record of actually building sustainable, reusable, reliable rockets at a reasonable cost and the traditional NASA contractor base represented by the other group has not.
The lander won't be a regular starship. It doesn't have a thermal protection system or the wings since they're just non-functional dead weight. They'll need another vehicle to get home.
Yeah I get that the lunar lander is a different thing, but presumably you could pack a return module into the Starship payload as well? Or dock with a Dragon in LEO?
Artemis has been generally proceeding well, but I understand OPs attitude, considering that the progress before Artemis (i.e. pre-2017ish) was really faltering, the whole Constellation/SLS/Orion trifecta was largely a mess even if bits of them are now getting finally some use
There is no way they'll have a lander ready by then. They spent 10 years and $1B just to develop a suit before giving up. The lander RFP only went out in 2019. Their primary selection is a massive tower that's going to land on an uneven rocky surface and use the same engines to take off. There's way too much risk involved for them to ever meet that date. Apollo 12 landed on the edge of a crater with enough tilt that they were close to aborting the mission. If that happens with a starship they're all dead.
They really need to work on reducing the glare on the visor and illuminating the face in the dark. Otherwise we won't be able to see their emotions on camera as they're attacked by aliens.
Maybe just full MR and forget about the visor? That way we can see the aliens sneaking up on them as they blindly bumble around deceived by their advanced technology.
Yes, I'm joking. But really there are reasons to do MR/VR in space due to the huge dynamic range and availability of non-visible spectra. The huge clear face shield looks like a point of failure (as are joints etc). At the same time, I expect once there is MR for some cheesy horror movie to use it to arouse innate human fears of the unseen. One could always flip a covering visor up to see, if there were a failure... and once part of your space suit is failing, you've already got problems!
Did you miss that we've already been back to the moon with Artemis 1? The crewed mission is still Artemis 2 scheduled for 2024 now, only 3 years late (but that's 12 years of development, hardly problematic.)
Is there any specific reason why the suit is not white/reflective? It looks like that would be thermally not ideal, and a departure from all previous designs.
>Though this prototype uses a dark gray cover material, the final version will likely be all-white when worn by NASA astronauts on the Moon’s surface, to help keep the astronauts safe and cool while working in the harsh environment of space.
I love the idea of the Lunar Gateway space station's extreme orbit, which will allow astronauts to travel quickly between the station and the surface of the Moon with relatively low power consumption. "Attention all taking the 9:30 to Mare Serenitatis, please mind the gap between the platform and the capsule!"
It stands out to me that it is not white but black with red accents. A pure white suit would surely be more visible right I'm guessing. If an accident occurs and you are lying half in the regolith with the red accents as the only visual guide, i can't help but think a white suit would be better.
Maybe a white suit gets dirty easily from the regolith anyway so they went with dark to start with ?
> What's the point of returning? To prove we haven't regressed since the 60's?
Essentially the same point that we had in 60s, to be stepping stone for greater things.
Artemis is basically rebooting the manned space program, and that inevitably includes retracing some past steps to regain the position. Progress is not always a linear straightforward thing, occasionally there are setbacks and losses.
So the exitement for Artemis is not just for the mission itself, but more for it being a sign of manned space programs getting attention again, hopefully this time on a more sustainable basis than Apollo.
I have to agree, I was 11 years old when Apollo 11 landed, I thought that by now you could fly there in something like an airplane or that we would have been to Mars. It feels a bit disappointing for sure.
The gateway station will provide experience operating outside LEO. That's a valuable thing to pursue. Lunar operations give gateway something to do while advancing the tech stack.
> The main difference between the prototype shown today and what will be going to the moon is that the ones going to the moon will be white instead of dark. “That’s really for thermal reasons,” Mr. Ralston said.
So after the moon landings public interest started fading quickly for space programs. NASA didn't have enough funds to both continue Apollo programs and develop the Space Shuttle so they wound down Apollo early to best use the budget they had. When a large program like that ends production is shut down, people leave companies and the unique skill sets required to build those products disappears.
So yeah truly we just haven't had a compelling enough interest to devote the necessary funds to go back. Also the Moon doesn't offer super unique research opportunities.
Also there is some incredibly interesting reading on the Russian Moon program. Your belief that they didn't want to go says that largely the effort to cover up their failed moon program was mostly a success towards the average person. The Russian spent a ton of money on their N1 rocket which failed on launch 4 times and then was cancelled and they ordered everything be destroyed.
> It’s 55 years later, and Artemis 2 is just planned for next year to do a manned lunar orbit. And MAYBE a landing rig and walk for 2025. We’re using 2023 methods and engineering to develop suits that will work. We have vastly more computing and skills and materials. Our rockets are 50 years better.
I'll be the first to talk shit about the SLS, but we've spent about 1/5 as much money so far, inflation-adjusted, and public projects in general are way more expensive now. We're also way worse at building subway tunnels—slower and less efficient per dollar spent. Like, a lot worse. It's a pretty worrisome trend, but isn't confined to NASA.
[EDIT] My point is, our burn-rate in costs is far lower, and that money, even inflation-adjusted, doesn't go as far these days when we try to use it to build Real Things, so it's not that surprising it's taking longer, even with better tech. It also seems to have been mis-managed more than a little, to a degree that Apollo wasn't—but Apollo was far more high-profile, so was less likely to be allowed too much mis-management.
There were plenty of ways to ask “why haven’t we been back in 50 years” without dragging in conspiracies, or even “how do I refute the conspiracy theories” without saying “this one has a ton of logical sense backing it up”.
It didn’t sound like a good faith question, and it’s an extraordinarily tired argument, so you got downvoted.
1) It was principally a national pride competition between the US and USSR so when the US succeeded there wasn't much of a reason to go there. We gathered loads of rocks for all the science we could want to do for a long time (they're still cracking open fresh samples to this day).
2) There's not that much economically or scientifically on the moon to really investigate that needs people there we can get new data pretty simply through orbiters or rovers
3) NASA's budget is much smaller portion of the overall budget and it's no longer singularly dedicated to the Moon
4) Longer term stays are much more intensive on resources than the short sprint to the Moon and back done by Apollo. The main goal of the moon now is to use it as a stepping stone to test for a Mars mission.
Now we're going back with a plan. Not just to win the space race, but to start laying the foundation for a permanent moon base that we can use as a way point for going to Mars.
The financial woes of the 70's combined with the substantial cost overruns of the Shuttle Craft killed Congress' appetite for further investment. Modern technology has substantially lowered the costs so we've revived the idea.
We did it last time in a lot less time taking far more risks. I think the majority is the lack of political or economic incentives, but there is something to the idea that our current culture is much more risk averse, and probably less good at "just make it work" projects than it used to be.
I think the riskiness is definitely another part of it, though if the will to do it were there I think we could still accept it now. We're definitely moving slowly in part because there's just not a huge reason to go beyond exploration.
We went the first time because politics at the time allowed it to have massive, massive funding. We're finally at a point where we can go without massive, massive political backing. I think it's as simple as that. I'm pretty sure NASA has always wanted to go back.
> We’re using 2023 methods and engineering to develop suits that will work. We have vastly more computing and skills and materials. Our rockets are 50 years better.
We're also using 2023 safety standards, budgets, and political will. It's not an engineering problem.
You have the why right there. The first time it was to show up the Soviets, but it was monstruously expensive and they couldn't compete, so there was no reason to keep doing it. And now it's less expensive and the Chinese are stronger and so on.
https://xkcd.com/1074/ provides a surprisingly robust explanation for how we know we actually went to the moon:
> If NASA were willing to fake great accomplishments, they'd have a second one by now.
More prosaically, the main reason that we went to the Moon in the first place was that it was a superpower dick-length contest, although the space technology also has sufficient other uses in things like intercontinental ballistic missiles and other military technology. Once someone landed on the moon, the contest was over, and the evaluation of the scientific or economic benefits of manned missions to the moon took over and... there isn't really that many, so interest in it waned very quickly, and resources were allocated to other (frankly, more useful) missions instead.
Interest has spiked again because it's essentially a new dick-length contest. Several powers that weren't superpowers 50 years ago are interested in doing it, in part, to prove their mettle as modern superpowers, and the US is interested in doing it again (in part) to one-up the wanna-be superpowers.
For the US in particular, manned spaceflight programs have had a fair amount of listlessness since the cancellation of Apollo. There's a tension between people who want to focus on LEO, those who want to move to the next great accomplishment (landing on Mars, which is probably somewhat beyond current capabilities, though how far beyond is debatable), and those who would rather have more robotic space exploration endeavors. And pretty much every administration comes in, declares a new vision for human spaceflight that scrubs the previous administration's proposals, and things move on because you can't get anywhere in 8 years.
Why did we pretend to go back in Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16, 17. Why did we pretend to have a near catastrophic loss of Apollo 13. As far as conspiracy theories go, it sure is another one.
Not only that but the moon missions happened during the height of the Cold War. The Soviets were watching very closely and would have loved to have shown the world the US faked the moon landings.
I don’t think those points make comparable reason for the question asked.
Landers and rovers to mars make sense to most people. Not having to deal with life support and being very familiar with the mechanics of cars and robots and drones helps.
I think the crux to me is that we did a thing six times, and then stopped for 50 years, no one else even tried, and only now after tech has drastically improved are we doing it again.
I think the better argument is that while some things are easier, some are harder than say Mars. Between the solar day and temp extremes.
We went collect moon rocks several times. We put a flag there, we put reflectors up there. The moon itself is rather boring.
Saying your question is "good faith" doesn't necessarily make it so. Same with implying you have a "steelman" argument. It's not. It's an idle thought.
The only reason to go back at this point is to conduct certain types of research. The moon doesn't have the same protections as Earth with regards to radiation. You can't just chuck some people and some plants on the surface and call it a day.
But it would be a good place to see what could withstand the radiation. Ways to mitigate that radiation. Ways to field test certain extraterrestrial bases with the least amount of risk possible. I mean, it's still 240k miles away, so if something goes really wrong, you're likely dead. But it's not like you're halfway to Mars and you realize you forgot to bring water.
Here's the official NASA channel video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5KnOtI4fS3U
Also NYTimes and CBS News articles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/science/nasa-moon-suit-as...
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/nasa-axiom-space-spacesuit-...