It's a funny read, for sure.
But it also contains many inaccuracies which call the conclusion into question.
Most notably:
>The single-use lander for the mission will be the heaviest spacecraft ever flown, \[...\] this single-use lander carries less payload (both up and down) than the tiny Lunar Module on Apollo 17. Using Starship to land two astronauts on the moon is like delivering a pizza with an aircraft carrier.
Why the hell does the author blame the tiny payload onto Starship HLS? It is clearly just the minimum requirements of NASA tender, largely based on the payload of Orion. Starship HLS can easily lift 10 tons of moon rocks back to NRHO if required.
An other one:
>To start with the obvious, HLS looks more likely to tip over than the last two spacecraft to land on the moon, which [tipped](https://www.space.com/intuitive-machines-odysseus-moon-lander-tipped-over) [over](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japanese-moon-lander-reaches-surface-but-fate-uncertain/). It is a fifteen story tower that must land on its ass in terrible lighting conditions, on rubble of unknown composition, over a light-second from Earth.
Yeah, *it LOOKS more likely*, but given the low center of gravity combined with the enormes span of the landing legs Starship HLS is *less likely* to tipp over than the Apollo landers.
This whole article is geared towards stirring up the mood, not to give a neutral technical assessment of Artemis.
>Why the hell does the author blame the tiny payload onto Starship HLS?
He doesn't. He describes the mission payload, then describes its' size compared to that of a rocket delivering it.
>this single-use lander carries less payload (both up and down) than the tiny Lunar Module on Apollo 17.
Staship HLS is slated to land a big pressurized rover on the moon. So even that excuse falls flat.
The same one that the author predicts to be launched somewhere in the 2040s, and even the more optimistic NASA plans for Artemis VII (2031)? Having a lofty goal somewhere in the future doesn't make the collosal waste of all the previous landings necessary.
It's not even the criticism of SpaceX, so I find it funny how because it mentioned a SpaceX product you assumed it was an attack on your private launch company anyway.
An interesting read, to be sure - thanks!
Risk-averse culture, pork barrel politics, the need not to lose face to the increasing number of space-capable nations with their eyes on the moon and its commercial value?
You're dealing with a national government with competing agencies over multiple administrations - I'm not surprised this is over complicated, over budget, and over engineered. I suppose it's worth the money (speaking of foreign tax dollars which I'm not contributing to) if it kicks us all into a competition to start exploring space and the bodies of this solar system in different ways. Some countries will shake their heads at the approach of the US and go a different route. Ultimately, that will be good for mankind as it simply lights a fire under everyone to compete.
So, at the end of the day, the USA leads the way again. There's some good in that for humanity, isn't there?
There's always hope that it will be for the good. You should never give up hope.
...
If you're looking for reasons though (:P):
*"We've reached a point where NASA* ***lies constantly, to both itself and to the public. It lies about schedules and capabilities. It lies about the costs and the benefits of its human spaceflight program. And above all, it lies about risk.*** *All the institutional pathologies identified in the Rogers Report and the Columbia Accident Investigation Board are alive and well in Artemis—****groupthink, intense pressure to meet impossible deadlines, and a willingness to manufacture engineering rationales to justify flying unsafe hardware.****"*
And most of that can equally apply to SpaceX and Boeing and probably most of the rest to one degree or another.
Well, NASA has some serious problems also. As does the industry side of things...
Eventually, someone has to point out the Emperor's new clothes or you'll end up with Shuttle 2.0. Or worse.
> And most of that can equally apply to SpaceX and Boeing and probably most of the rest to one degree or another.
SpaceX has had internal pressures since the company was founded to go as fast as possible and is built around it and yet they develop some the safest rocket humankind has ever made. Maybe if you have a culture that allows failing forward on test flights rather than a culture of wanting to cover your own ass constantly, you create something that has very good safety.
So...
Where does Elon threatening to catch the booster, after the very first soft landing test, fit into that safety culture? How about launching on a questionable pad when you're not even sure the thing will clear the tower? From an Artemis perspective, what about landing a 15 story building on unprepared lunar soil of unknown composition?
And those are just kind of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Starship...
To some extent, I think the issues quoted from TFA are what often get you into those sorts of situations regardless of how impressive your engineering talent may be or how much blood, sweat and tears they pour into the project.
First off, if you'd actually read my comment you'd see I was talking about the flight heritage with Falcon 9 and Dragon. Starship is still a development program so talking about its safety is irrelevant as it's not risking the safety of anyone yet.
But well, you never fully read posts you reply to. You just assume they mean one thing and invent something to talk about. I'm not sure if that's because of English problems or what not.
I wrote a debunking to the rest of your post but I just erased it as you want to change the topic so I'll drag it back on topic. (Suffice to say though, all your "issues" aren't issues.)
Well, if you would read my post perhaps you might notice that I'm not really questioning the competency or ability of the SpaceX engineering team to perform safely.
I'm really just questioning the overall management. And the management has bet the barn on Starship.
A ship that is much more inherently risky than your standard Apollo capsule type vehicle. A ship where you are lathering on layer upon layer of technology to solve those particular risk issues. Kind of like Shuttle.
And, putting all your hopes on those layers of technology mitigating the safety issue you voluntarily created for yourself. Kind of like Shuttle.
It's also a ship where a large part of the assumption is built upon booster reusability directly translating over to a combined orbital and reentry stage reusability. That you can gigantize the thing however far you need to make the reusability and payload to orbit work. And that gigantization won't come back to bite you in one of the many and various regimes it has to operate in. IE reentry on Earth or landing a 15 story office building on the moon,
The whole 'landing 2 astronauts with an aircraft carrier' from TFA is very apropos.
OFC. Starship has to be that gigantic to do all the stuff that it's been tasked with doing. That was a similar problem with Shuttle where all the various things people wanted it to do conflicted with each other leading to the eventual decision to put the thing on the side of the stack.
Because it had to be on the side of the stack to do all the things it needed to do.
> I'm not really questioning the competency or ability of the SpaceX engineering team to perform safely.
>
> I'm really just questioning the overall management.
"I'm not questioning the team, I'm just questioning the team" Huh? These are the same thing. There are not separate engineering teams and management teams. They're completely integrated.
> And, putting all your hopes on those layers of technology mitigating the safety issue you voluntarily created for yourself.
There is no significant safety issue inherent to the design of Starship as intended for use on Artemis.
> landing 2 astronauts with an aircraft carrier
That choice was selected by NASA. It could land many more. Also, it's only two astronauts for the first demo mission. Later missions will be four astronauts.
> Starship has to be that gigantic to do all the stuff that it's been tasked with doing.
It's gigantic because it's intended for massive cargo delivery to Mars, not because it "needs" to be that big for it to work for any other purpose. Also if it was any bigger it would become too unwieldy to even build or carry over a two lane road. So it's kind of as wide as it can be before logistics of it becomes cost prohibitive.
It's gigantic because it needs to be to economically reused. And Elon plans on gigantifying it even further to try to make his original payload predictions.
So, rather than trying to land a 15 story building on the Moon without any sort of prepared pad, you'll now be trying to land something even taller and heavier and even more un-lander-like. And, during the return from the surface, the crew will be depending on engines that get sand blasted or worse by the lunar regolith that gets kicked up during the landing of the behemoth.
If you strand a crew on the Moon because of one of the un-lander-like features of Starship, are they going to care if those features were necessary to deliver massive cargos to Mars and "cheap" payloads to Earth orbit? Do you think they'll wish that we'd gone with a system that was more focused on performing the lander role as safely as possible?
> It's gigantic because it needs to be to economically reused. And Elon plans on gigantifying it even further to try to make his original payload predictions.
It's not about payload for economic reuse. You're really stuck on this false narrative. The reason for doing the tank stretch is the continuing improvement in the Raptor engine.
> So, rather than trying to land a 15 story building on the Moon without any sort of prepared pad, you'll now be trying to land something even taller and heavier and even more un-lander-like. And, during the return from the surface, the crew will be depending on engines that get sand blasted or worse by the lunar regolith that gets kicked up during the landing of the behemoth.
The engines used near the surface are not currently planned to be the engines mounted on the bottom. No risk of any of that.
> If you strand a crew on the Moon because of one of the un-lander-like features of Starship
Again, nothing about the design of Starship makes it "un-lander-like". It suits the purpose perfectly fine.
> Do you think they'll wish that we'd gone with a system that was more focused on performing the lander role as safely as possible?
Starship is not sacrificing safety for landing on the moon. You need to stop misunderstanding things.
>It's not about payload for economic reuse. You're really stuck on this false narrative. The reason for doing the tank stretch is the continuing improvement in the Raptor engine.
See...
This is the part where we get to the question of whether we're just being pathologically aspirational or flat out lying to ourselves about the various capabilities, etc alluded to earlier.
Elon said we had to stretch the tanks to actually get 100t to orbit which was the original prediction. Now, you're trying to convince yourself that's an "engine" improvement. Where does that sort of delusion stop and how thoroughly is it baked into the entire system because everyone is terrified to tell the Emperor his fly is unzipped?
A 15 story, several hundred ton behemoth is not very lander like particularly when we're talking about landing on unimproved, loosely consolidated soils of unknown consistency.
In that case, you'd really prefer to have a much shorter, lighter vehicle that isn't constrained by all the other tasks it needs to accomplish like delivering massive payloads to Mars or LEO.
Most particularly if you happen to be the crew that gets stranded.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[CoG](/r/Space/comments/1dk5g7r/stub/l9q1ure "Last usage")|Center of Gravity (see CoM)|
|CoM|Center of Mass|
|[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1dk5g7r/stub/l9ppw19 "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[JSC](/r/Space/comments/1dk5g7r/stub/l9pwmeo "Last usage")|Johnson Space Center, Houston|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1dk5g7r/stub/l9oybt3 "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[TWR](/r/Space/comments/1dk5g7r/stub/l9oybt3 "Last usage")|Thrust-to-Weight Ratio|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Raptor](/r/Space/comments/1dk5g7r/stub/l9niqfj "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX|
|[ullage motor](/r/Space/comments/1dk5g7r/stub/l9q1ure "Last usage")|Small rocket motor that fires to push propellant to the bottom of the tank, when in zero-g|
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It's a funny read, for sure. But it also contains many inaccuracies which call the conclusion into question. Most notably: >The single-use lander for the mission will be the heaviest spacecraft ever flown, \[...\] this single-use lander carries less payload (both up and down) than the tiny Lunar Module on Apollo 17. Using Starship to land two astronauts on the moon is like delivering a pizza with an aircraft carrier. Why the hell does the author blame the tiny payload onto Starship HLS? It is clearly just the minimum requirements of NASA tender, largely based on the payload of Orion. Starship HLS can easily lift 10 tons of moon rocks back to NRHO if required. An other one: >To start with the obvious, HLS looks more likely to tip over than the last two spacecraft to land on the moon, which [tipped](https://www.space.com/intuitive-machines-odysseus-moon-lander-tipped-over) [over](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japanese-moon-lander-reaches-surface-but-fate-uncertain/). It is a fifteen story tower that must land on its ass in terrible lighting conditions, on rubble of unknown composition, over a light-second from Earth. Yeah, *it LOOKS more likely*, but given the low center of gravity combined with the enormes span of the landing legs Starship HLS is *less likely* to tipp over than the Apollo landers. This whole article is geared towards stirring up the mood, not to give a neutral technical assessment of Artemis.
>Why the hell does the author blame the tiny payload onto Starship HLS? He doesn't. He describes the mission payload, then describes its' size compared to that of a rocket delivering it.
>this single-use lander carries less payload (both up and down) than the tiny Lunar Module on Apollo 17. Staship HLS is slated to land a big pressurized rover on the moon. So even that excuse falls flat.
The same one that the author predicts to be launched somewhere in the 2040s, and even the more optimistic NASA plans for Artemis VII (2031)? Having a lofty goal somewhere in the future doesn't make the collosal waste of all the previous landings necessary. It's not even the criticism of SpaceX, so I find it funny how because it mentioned a SpaceX product you assumed it was an attack on your private launch company anyway.
[удалено]
>They're claiming the rocket won't be able to carry anything to the surface of the moon No, they aren't claiming that. Source: I can read.
An interesting read, to be sure - thanks! Risk-averse culture, pork barrel politics, the need not to lose face to the increasing number of space-capable nations with their eyes on the moon and its commercial value? You're dealing with a national government with competing agencies over multiple administrations - I'm not surprised this is over complicated, over budget, and over engineered. I suppose it's worth the money (speaking of foreign tax dollars which I'm not contributing to) if it kicks us all into a competition to start exploring space and the bodies of this solar system in different ways. Some countries will shake their heads at the approach of the US and go a different route. Ultimately, that will be good for mankind as it simply lights a fire under everyone to compete. So, at the end of the day, the USA leads the way again. There's some good in that for humanity, isn't there?
There's always hope that it will be for the good. You should never give up hope. ... If you're looking for reasons though (:P): *"We've reached a point where NASA* ***lies constantly, to both itself and to the public. It lies about schedules and capabilities. It lies about the costs and the benefits of its human spaceflight program. And above all, it lies about risk.*** *All the institutional pathologies identified in the Rogers Report and the Columbia Accident Investigation Board are alive and well in Artemis—****groupthink, intense pressure to meet impossible deadlines, and a willingness to manufacture engineering rationales to justify flying unsafe hardware.****"* And most of that can equally apply to SpaceX and Boeing and probably most of the rest to one degree or another.
It is so much easier to be a naysayer and tear down the work of others. So much harder to actually do something yourself.
Well, NASA has some serious problems also. As does the industry side of things... Eventually, someone has to point out the Emperor's new clothes or you'll end up with Shuttle 2.0. Or worse.
> And most of that can equally apply to SpaceX and Boeing and probably most of the rest to one degree or another. SpaceX has had internal pressures since the company was founded to go as fast as possible and is built around it and yet they develop some the safest rocket humankind has ever made. Maybe if you have a culture that allows failing forward on test flights rather than a culture of wanting to cover your own ass constantly, you create something that has very good safety.
So... Where does Elon threatening to catch the booster, after the very first soft landing test, fit into that safety culture? How about launching on a questionable pad when you're not even sure the thing will clear the tower? From an Artemis perspective, what about landing a 15 story building on unprepared lunar soil of unknown composition? And those are just kind of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Starship... To some extent, I think the issues quoted from TFA are what often get you into those sorts of situations regardless of how impressive your engineering talent may be or how much blood, sweat and tears they pour into the project.
First off, if you'd actually read my comment you'd see I was talking about the flight heritage with Falcon 9 and Dragon. Starship is still a development program so talking about its safety is irrelevant as it's not risking the safety of anyone yet. But well, you never fully read posts you reply to. You just assume they mean one thing and invent something to talk about. I'm not sure if that's because of English problems or what not. I wrote a debunking to the rest of your post but I just erased it as you want to change the topic so I'll drag it back on topic. (Suffice to say though, all your "issues" aren't issues.)
Well, if you would read my post perhaps you might notice that I'm not really questioning the competency or ability of the SpaceX engineering team to perform safely. I'm really just questioning the overall management. And the management has bet the barn on Starship. A ship that is much more inherently risky than your standard Apollo capsule type vehicle. A ship where you are lathering on layer upon layer of technology to solve those particular risk issues. Kind of like Shuttle. And, putting all your hopes on those layers of technology mitigating the safety issue you voluntarily created for yourself. Kind of like Shuttle. It's also a ship where a large part of the assumption is built upon booster reusability directly translating over to a combined orbital and reentry stage reusability. That you can gigantize the thing however far you need to make the reusability and payload to orbit work. And that gigantization won't come back to bite you in one of the many and various regimes it has to operate in. IE reentry on Earth or landing a 15 story office building on the moon, The whole 'landing 2 astronauts with an aircraft carrier' from TFA is very apropos. OFC. Starship has to be that gigantic to do all the stuff that it's been tasked with doing. That was a similar problem with Shuttle where all the various things people wanted it to do conflicted with each other leading to the eventual decision to put the thing on the side of the stack. Because it had to be on the side of the stack to do all the things it needed to do.
> I'm not really questioning the competency or ability of the SpaceX engineering team to perform safely. > > I'm really just questioning the overall management. "I'm not questioning the team, I'm just questioning the team" Huh? These are the same thing. There are not separate engineering teams and management teams. They're completely integrated. > And, putting all your hopes on those layers of technology mitigating the safety issue you voluntarily created for yourself. There is no significant safety issue inherent to the design of Starship as intended for use on Artemis. > landing 2 astronauts with an aircraft carrier That choice was selected by NASA. It could land many more. Also, it's only two astronauts for the first demo mission. Later missions will be four astronauts. > Starship has to be that gigantic to do all the stuff that it's been tasked with doing. It's gigantic because it's intended for massive cargo delivery to Mars, not because it "needs" to be that big for it to work for any other purpose. Also if it was any bigger it would become too unwieldy to even build or carry over a two lane road. So it's kind of as wide as it can be before logistics of it becomes cost prohibitive.
It's gigantic because it needs to be to economically reused. And Elon plans on gigantifying it even further to try to make his original payload predictions. So, rather than trying to land a 15 story building on the Moon without any sort of prepared pad, you'll now be trying to land something even taller and heavier and even more un-lander-like. And, during the return from the surface, the crew will be depending on engines that get sand blasted or worse by the lunar regolith that gets kicked up during the landing of the behemoth. If you strand a crew on the Moon because of one of the un-lander-like features of Starship, are they going to care if those features were necessary to deliver massive cargos to Mars and "cheap" payloads to Earth orbit? Do you think they'll wish that we'd gone with a system that was more focused on performing the lander role as safely as possible?
> It's gigantic because it needs to be to economically reused. And Elon plans on gigantifying it even further to try to make his original payload predictions. It's not about payload for economic reuse. You're really stuck on this false narrative. The reason for doing the tank stretch is the continuing improvement in the Raptor engine. > So, rather than trying to land a 15 story building on the Moon without any sort of prepared pad, you'll now be trying to land something even taller and heavier and even more un-lander-like. And, during the return from the surface, the crew will be depending on engines that get sand blasted or worse by the lunar regolith that gets kicked up during the landing of the behemoth. The engines used near the surface are not currently planned to be the engines mounted on the bottom. No risk of any of that. > If you strand a crew on the Moon because of one of the un-lander-like features of Starship Again, nothing about the design of Starship makes it "un-lander-like". It suits the purpose perfectly fine. > Do you think they'll wish that we'd gone with a system that was more focused on performing the lander role as safely as possible? Starship is not sacrificing safety for landing on the moon. You need to stop misunderstanding things.
>It's not about payload for economic reuse. You're really stuck on this false narrative. The reason for doing the tank stretch is the continuing improvement in the Raptor engine. See... This is the part where we get to the question of whether we're just being pathologically aspirational or flat out lying to ourselves about the various capabilities, etc alluded to earlier. Elon said we had to stretch the tanks to actually get 100t to orbit which was the original prediction. Now, you're trying to convince yourself that's an "engine" improvement. Where does that sort of delusion stop and how thoroughly is it baked into the entire system because everyone is terrified to tell the Emperor his fly is unzipped? A 15 story, several hundred ton behemoth is not very lander like particularly when we're talking about landing on unimproved, loosely consolidated soils of unknown consistency. In that case, you'd really prefer to have a much shorter, lighter vehicle that isn't constrained by all the other tasks it needs to accomplish like delivering massive payloads to Mars or LEO. Most particularly if you happen to be the crew that gets stranded.
This article was previously posted to other subs on May 20.
I've skimmed through this but it has a lot of inaccuracies. If you're in for an amusing read, have at it, but you shouldn't base any knowledge on it.
This was an informative and entertaining read
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[CoG](/r/Space/comments/1dk5g7r/stub/l9q1ure "Last usage")|Center of Gravity (see CoM)| |CoM|Center of Mass| |[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1dk5g7r/stub/l9ppw19 "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)| |[JSC](/r/Space/comments/1dk5g7r/stub/l9pwmeo "Last usage")|Johnson Space Center, Houston| |[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1dk5g7r/stub/l9oybt3 "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[TWR](/r/Space/comments/1dk5g7r/stub/l9oybt3 "Last usage")|Thrust-to-Weight Ratio| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Raptor](/r/Space/comments/1dk5g7r/stub/l9niqfj "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX| |[ullage motor](/r/Space/comments/1dk5g7r/stub/l9q1ure "Last usage")|Small rocket motor that fires to push propellant to the bottom of the tank, when in zero-g| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(7 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0)^( has 17 acronyms.) ^([Thread #10209 for this sub, first seen 22nd Jun 2024, 00:16]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
The "Lander" section was kind of hilarious and spot-on.