NASA auditor's reality check says '2026 at the earliest' for Artemis Moon landing NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has administered a kicking to the US space agency over its handling of the Artemis project, making grim reading for anyone hopeful of even a 2025 crewed lunar landing. While the 2024 landing deadline imposed by the Trump administration is now history, even 2025 is looking shaky as the …
Oh well, we missed the deadline. Let's quit and just throw all this space stuff into the sea.
At least we can focus more on killing each other. I know! Let's build a giant metal cylinder that we can throw at the enemy!
All quite likely possibilities aside, I'm all for continuing to build things for as long as it takes to get it right.
Also, it'd be hilarious if NASA asked the military for a loan around congress... We suddenly have the money to land on the moon next week! Naahhh, never mind where the money came from, anybody going to the moon, pack your bags!
Given the Artemis programme I believe includes an unmanned landing as one of its tests that’s pretty much a given. Apart from from crew launch’ easily handled by a dragon; a starship with a refuel support can more or less handle the entire show.
SLS is at this stage just a way to print money and potentially win votes. I’m not so sure it’s that valuable to a Democrat administration given the states involved.
This kind of 'please the chain of command' scheduling never works -- you set a date, make flowery speeches about it (or issue glowing press releases, same difference) but the actual legwork of doing the development is.....where?
Let's assume that Artemis is an airliner for the sake of argument. If we task Boeing or similar to develop this plane then would we expect it to be ready in 'a couple of years'? Maybe, if its a lash up of existing parts. But if its a completely new system then its going to take a bit longer -- new fuselage, engines, avionics and so on. (i'm guessing that wings are an optional extra for a Moon lander.) The process requires an ongoing commitment, a series of steps, a lot of testing and one or two (spectacular) failures. This is what happened with the Apollo program and is what SpaceX has been doing. I figure that if we asked SpaceX to go to the Moon they'd probably be able to achieve it by the end of the decade (but being a company that seems to know which way up I'd expect any request to be met with the question "Why?" -- why send people when machines do the job a whole lot better?). The rest is just smoke.
Seems to me we should establish a reason to go to the moon first. The moon is mineral rich but knowing what and where is not well known. A programme of strategic robotic sample return missions would seem to make more sense while at the same time the human presence is perfected. We don't need people to being rocks back, but we may well need people to manage a industrial mining operation.
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