NASA starts bolting together Artemis III rocket for 2027 Moon shot NASA has begun assembling the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that will send humans on a lunar landing mission in 2027. The buildup has begun at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida with the shift of the SLS engine section and boat tail, which protects the engines during launch, from the Space Systems Processing Facility to …
Need to get into orbit first. A few years ago Gwynne Shotwell predicted that SpaceX would be landing on the Moon by ... 2022. So far, Starship is a giant boondoggle. There is no scientific reason for Artemis that is worth the expense and it should be cancelled entirely.
I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. SLS is the Congressional jobs program, not really a rocket. Starship actually has a useful goal, making a fully reusable heavy lift booster... like a Saturn V but not mostly thrown in the ocean.
So that is a hell of a difficult engineering challenge, much like landing a booster and reusing it, so they're going through development hell.
If that happens, and I'm optimistic, it'll enable a ton of things, much like the Falcon 9 has. Hell, just the re-entry protection tech will be worth its weight in gold.
"Starship actually has a useful goal, making a fully reusable heavy lift booster"
Your assignment is to submit a fully researched paper on how a "fully reusable" rocket is more viable than an expendable version. There is very little call for heavy lift vehicles. Even a sorta heavy lift vehicle such as the F9H isn't launched that often. Satellite busses have been getting smaller and lighter over time. Going to the moon would be a once or twice a year thing for the foreseeable future so anything designed for that would cost a load of money for recovery, refurbishment and storage until needed again if it isn't superseded by something more shiny.
Launching a space polluting mega-constellation is something that can justify a certain level of reusability, but not much else.
F9 hasn't enabled a whole lot. Outside of mega-constellations, there really isn't a massive increase in space launches. Launch costs have always been a small fraction of the mission price with the payload being the highest ticket item and that hasn't dropped in price that much. Ongoing operational costs, launch facility fees, etc are also going up which makes the launch an even small fraction. Electron is the least expensive provider if your payload fits within their capability. Another issue for SpaceX is they have been having to raise money for all of their projects rather than the F9 carrying those costs.
"Your assignment is to submit a fully researched paper on how a "fully reusable" rocket is more viable than an expendable version."
Falcon 9 launches are much less expensive. Period.
"There is very little call for heavy lift vehicles."
You might want to double check with the National Reconnaissance Office on that, most of their launches use heavy lift vehicles. There are also numerous scientific payloads that need large paylod capacity or high velocity launches.
"Satellite busses have been getting smaller and lighter over time."
Depends on the satellite's mission, this is a serious over generalization.
"Launching a space polluting mega-constellation is something that can justify a certain level of reusability, but not much else."
While I share your concern over the number of Starlink satellites being launched, about the only people this affects is is astronomers. Being one of my special interests this does cause me great concern especially now that some of the largest and most sophisticated Earth based telescopes are being brought on line or built. Also not enough attention has been paid to the RF pollution that will be a difficult problem for radio astronomy to solve. A large part of that concern is not only the number of Starlink satellites already put in orbit but also the final number of satellite they want to put in orbit. This is made worse by potential competitors also putting large numbers of satellites in orbit. That said these satellites provide a very useful and in many cases essential service to personal and commercial customers. How idea how to balance these competing interests will be a very hard problem to solve with astronomy probably coming out as the loser which to me is a great loss.
"F9 hasn't enabled a whole lot."
There have been 13 Falcon 9 rideshare missions with up to 143 experimental and commercial satellites launched on one rocket. The much lower cost of Falcon 9 launches spread over this many satellites is crucial in allowing access to low Earth orbit to small commercial players and educational institutions for a wide range of experimental applications that was not available before.
"Outside of mega-constellations, there really isn't a massive increase in space launches"
Citation needed.
"Launch costs have always been a small fraction of the mission price with the payload being the highest ticket item and that hasn't dropped in price that much."
See Falcon 9 rideshare above.
"Electron is the least expensive provider if your payload fits within their capability."
Electron specializes in small payload launches to low Earth orbit. I think they are a great company and I am very happy with their success so far, but they serve a different market and lack the versatility of the Falcon 9. It will be interesting to see what happens if/when Electron can start reusing their boosters and lowering their costs to compete with the Falcon 9 rideshare program for some launches. I still believe that there will be some small projects that will require Falcon 9 rideshare to be viable.
"Another issue for SpaceX is they have been having to raise money for all of their projects rather than the F9 carrying those costs"
Last I heard this is the way a large number of corporations generate capital to expand operations, especially since the stock market has devolved into devising new ways to skim money off the top with much less (any?) of the investment going to where it was originally intended. Given the scope and cost of the Starship program it is hardly surprising that they need investors.
And of course the minot point that heavy lift or not, it is likely to be cheaper to fly a SS/SH than an F9 even.
That's the really crazy part of reuse, not the heavy lift capacity.
Of course the heavy lift does enable a whole pile of other missions,...
"And of course the minot point that heavy lift or not, it is likely to be cheaper to fly a SS/SH than an F9 even."
The deception comes from numbers being stated in cost/kg. Starship might beat F9 using that metric if the entire capability is used. There are fixed costs to any launch and fuel is one of the smallest line items so not filling tanks full for a less than max payload doesn't save loads of money.
Rideshares have been a way for rockets to use some of their excess capacity if they can find enough small customers that aren't that fussed about the specific orbit the rocket will be launched towards. The impetus for the launch is the prime customer. Without that key payload, the rest of the launch would make no sense.That's another reason booking a rideshare to save money can mean delays and cancellations.
Not having any element of the craft thrown in the sea is a massive saving - the additional propellant used for recovery is, as you say, a minor line item.
F9 costs are quoted as 60-90 million per launch (that's not F9H, just F9) with internal costs estimated to be 15-30 million.
SS is targeting costs an order of magnitude smaller than that, so even if they miss that target by quite some margin, it is still likely to be flat out cheaper. The *only* cost is the fuel, time share of the launch infrastructure, and some inspection costs on the vehicles post flight (and those will come down over time as they get more and more data).
Of course that assumes that they achieve the reusability that they want to, but I'm not betting against that yet.
The last fully expendable estimate I saw was more like 100 million, and they've already demonstrated that SH recovery is achievable, so we can probably halve that for a reasonable guess at "F9 mode" operations (and they're pretty good at that mode right now).
" the additional propellant used for recovery is, as you say, a minor line item."
An odd thing is SpaceX leave the grid fins deployed on the ascent which are big, heavy and draggy things that would not be needed at all if there were no recovery. The engines have to be built more robustly to be reused a bunch of times which add mass. The flight trajectory has to be planned so the booster can have a chance of being recovered. Etc, ad nauseum. The cost of fuel is not an issue, but its mass and all of the rest of the needful items to make a return possible add up. A rule of thumb is you need 45% of the total capability of the booster to be able to get it back. Returning to base may be more than that over a semi-parabolic flight that lands on a barge down range depending on how costly the cross-range travel is. Getting to orbit is a scalar, not vector problem. A rocket goes mostly up to get out of atmosphere to minimize drag, but really needs to hit a minimum speed to achieve orbit. If the 1st stage/booster can give more of a push, the further stages don't have as big of an acceleration job which makes them lighter, which make them easier to accelerate.
The calculations they made are that the folding mechanism for those fins cost more performance* than the drag on ascent... but you already knew that.
The "build the first stage at twice the cost, but be able to fly it dozens of times" option is a pretty easy tradeoff to make.
And yes - of course it costs performance to flip and return, but when that's already part of the booster design, it's not actually a problem. You're still only talking about fuel which, as we've both said, is a minor line item. Anything you can reuse doesn't need to be paid for on every flight, those things get amortised over many flights - and even with a(n optimistic) target cost of 250k the engines on SH alone are 8.25 million... which already dwarfs the approximately 1 million fuel cost for a SS stack - you really do want to recover that 8.25 million, especially if the cost is as low as 500k in fuel!
* Or at least little enough that the complexity wasn't worth adding.
Gary, you make absolute statements about how SpaceX is so much better, but provide no backing material and then ask ME to submit citations.
I was in the business for a bunch of years as an engineer and still know people working for just about all of the major players. You don't have to take my word as gospel, but I can spot some indications that you are getting your information from media rather than industry. Elon is well known for hyperbole, exaggerations and lack of scientific/engineering knowledge. He's not even a very good public speaker, but people seem to take his lack of presentation skills as a genius nerd that doesn't get out much when his main talent would be applied as patent medicine salesman in years past.
Companies do raise money to develop new products, but not the extent that SpaceX does. Their flagship product, Starlink, made them $20mn over the last two years. $6/subscriber/year is woefully inadequate to balance the ongoing investment much less leave billions in the bank for Starship development. If Starship development starts going the way Elon has been promising, they are still years and billions of dollars away from a useful spacecraft that can dispense Starlink satellites and maybe land on the moon to fulfill even the truncated requirements of their NASA contract. There's no near term hope of sending anything to Mars with Starship especially since there's a negative ROI. The surface of Mars could be covered in large diamonds and pre-cast Platinum bars and it could still be a bust. That's fine for nationally backed science missions, but not for a "for-profit" private company.
In the early days I was as supportive of SpaceX's dreams as many others were. Over time, so much absurdity crept in that I had to take a close look and it wasn't good. Where I worked building rockets, we ran numbers and looked at existing technology and couldn't square Elon's comments with reality. It wasn't just our group but it was the same with our counterparts at other similar companies that we'd hoist a few with at trade meetings. As we had to mind out tongues about the sorts of things we were working on for our own employers, topics were often other companies, NASA and pie-in-the-sky missions were we could talk freely.
"$6/subscriber/year"
Where does that number come from, it certainly doesn't match any income figure I'm aware of?
Starlink is, apparently, currently profitable - I don't know whether that's counting launch costs with any profit margin for the parent company though.
"That's fine for nationally backed science missions, but not for a "for-profit" private company."
Sort of depends on the company, and whether they see a long term profit... plenty of companies invest in pure research with the hope of finding something truly profitable. SpaceX is reportedly 42% owned by the crazy man, and if he is willing to pour money into that particular research wing then it will end up being funded.
SS/SH do have the capacity to seriously change the way we access space, but whether that's a good thing or not is a different question.
"$6/subscriber/year"
Where does that number come from, it certainly doesn't match any income figure I'm aware of?"
If a leaked document about profits is correct, yes, there is a small profit. There's no indication if it's inclusive of all costs or treats launches as if the cost Starlink the going retail price. Take that profit number, the number of subscribers and the years 2023 and 2024 and do a little arithmetic. Maybe 2025 numbers look better. It's hard to say since SpaceX is private and they don't even break out details for most of their investors.
Common Sense Skeptic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7z_uzuoiLs
They do a good job identifying their sources and I've backed checked many of them so I could read a whole article they had quoted a part of so I'm confident in their reporting. They also apply arithmetic to Elon's wild statements to show how he doesn't just exaggerate or even grossly exaggerate, but goes off into giga-exaggeration. The Elon presentation that is the basis of the above link was done in front of a gaggle of SpaceX employees and you can tell from the silence that they knew lots of what he said could fertilize some really big fields.
So it's an annual profit number, not a revenue number, that makes more sense, though it's somewhat meaningless in the void of information associated. Profits are frequently shunted around to avoid paying taxes, and I don't think for a moment that Elon would miss any chance to move profits into companies which can write them off or move them to lower tax jurisdictions.
There can be no doubt that Elon has a tendency to shall we say "avoid understatement".
"... the stock market has devolved into devising new ways to skim money off the top ..."
AFAICT the main reason for the existence of stock markets has *always* been to skim money off the top.
I was party to a Public Offering in the 1980s. Even back then, after watching the goings-on for a few months it seemed to me that the object of the exercise was nothing to do with expanding my business. Apart from the fact that it got lumbered with unbelievable bills from Big Name Accountants and for people staying at The Connaught and The Ritz doing "due diligence", the business was entirely incidental to the real purpose of the exercise which was to bilk the punters on the Denver exchange. The sales projections were pure fiction; to meet them would have required me to buy more of some of the major components in my products than the global supply chain at that time was capable of providing. It left a very nasty taste which still lingers.
"AFAICT the main reason for the existence of stock markets has *always* been to skim money off the top."
It's a way to flog off ownership of a company to the uninformed masses to let the initial investors get their money back out while at the same time still having stock or some control just in case it turns out well. The non-conspiracy reason is for companies to raise a lot more money by selling shares to expand the company fast enough to get solidified in the marketplace before somebody else comes along that has the money to capitalize on their idea in a bigger way. Doing all of the things that are required to sell shares on the public market means investors don't have to be qualified before they can invest as they are in many cases with private firms. That opens up a much larger pool of investors.
The whole dot-com era was companies that never made a dime incubating some product/service until there was enough excitement and selling it to some big company at a phat profit or taking it public before the wheels fell off. Load and loads of hot potatoes.
Artemis II is basically a repeat of Apollo 8.
And like the Starship lander, the Apollo LM was running WAY behind. It didn't even make it onto the rocket for Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 was too heavy to land and had other unfinished bits.
The Apollo 11 LM was the result of a SWIP (super weight improvement program) that lightened it enough that it could land AND take off again, something Neil & Buzz no doubt appreciated.
So it's not like NASA doesn't have form here.
“Artemis II is basically a repeat of Apollo 8.“
In many ways it’s less ambitious that Apollo 8, it will be following a free-return trajectory, that sends it towards the moon, loops around and then returns straight to Earth. Unlike Apollo, which used the SM engine to slow it enough to be captured into lunar orbit, of which it did ten (IIRC), before firing the engine again to accelerate it out of orbit and send it back to Earth.
The LM was first tested by the Apollo 9 less than three months later. And that was the last piece to test. As I asked before, how much Space X has still to test? Starship didn't even enter in orbit, didn't leave the orbit, have to show its refuelling capability, and the lunar module tested. I'm not saying it will never happen - my question is - how much is still to test, and how long will it take?
Orbit is just the first in a long line of requirements that need testing from the never before achieved storing fuel in orbit without losing most of it to boil off and refueling to the simple - returning in one piece rather than thousands. Most of this year's Starship test goals have been put back to 2026 because it keeps blowing up due to structural and design failures.
Not to mention that what they have been testing is only a scale model. In three launches time they will start using the Block 3 variant which is larger but which needed the results of all of this year's failed flights to complete its design. So expect that to throw up a whole new set of problems.
Getting Starship working by 2027, let alone a human rated lunar lander version, seems ambitious at best.
"how much is still to test, and how long will it take?"
It's still all there to get sorted. The have been putting flame to touch paper, but the first part is still well short of complete. If there has been work on other hardware, it's been well hidden and left undisclosed.
If Test #10 does tick all the boxes on the flight card, it's not scheduled to be caught on the chopsticks (that could change) so there would be that to do on the next flight. Orbit would be another milestone. De-orbit from orbital velocity without melting and suitable for reuse would have to be shown. An orbit and catch back at the launch tower will need a ton of political wrangling so they'd be allowed to overfly Mexico on their decent. Mexico is already unhappy about all of the debris washing ashore so there may be some push back. If the US allows Starship activities at Cape Canaveral, a recovery there would entail a decent over most of the contiguous country land mass. I expect that before that happens there will be a requirement to do a simulated safe landing at sea under close supervision.
"It occurred to me that a landing-from-orbit could be done at Vandenberg, because the approach is over water."
Possibly, but SpaceX isn't building any infrastructure there for that sort of activity. They are building a whole load of stuff at Cape Canaveral.
If they built a tower at Vandenberg, the rocket would have to be disassembled there or shipped through the Panama Canal to be returned to Boca Chica or the Cape. To do even that, they'd need some way to get the rocket to a port to be loaded on a ship. It's 9m in diameter so that wouldn't be too much fun and I don't see any sort of port/pier at VSFB.
" I expect that before that happens there will be a requirement to do a simulated safe landing at sea under close supervision."
They have already done a couple of those (though deeper supervision will likely be required)
The option of vandenburg isn't great, because how the hell do you get the SS back to somewhere useful if you're always landing it on the east coast.
The reentry failures we've seen so far have been mostly attitude control, which has generally been obvious before the decision to target reentry. I haven't done the maths to work out where the bits would fall (relative to the target landing site) if there was a failure at the reentry interface; lower atmospheric failures are likely to be sufficiently close to the catch tower that it doesn't matter.
"" I expect that before that happens there will be a requirement to do a simulated safe landing at sea under close supervision."
They have already done a couple of those (though deeper supervision will likely be required)"
Not in a reusable condition. They've all been on fire and that's without going that extra velocity needed to be in orbit. That they've hit their target splash down point is down to physics (ballistics) much more than their tech. For a decent from orbit, they'll need working engines and guidance control. They've scrubbed nearly all of the engine relight attempts for one reason or another. They've had numerous issues that have put a spin on the craft and two Starships that have given the Caribbean a big light show. The ocean has covered up most of those sins, but raining debris across a swath of land is problematic.
So your complaint is that they haven't finished testing before they do their testing...
They've demonstrated accurate landings after reentry, which includes significant aerodynamic control throughout the reentry as well as controlled relight, flip, and "landing" burn.
Whilst the flaps have been in poor shape (some in *very* poor shape) they've still had the authority to control the vehicle all the way to "landing". There have been other deliberately weak points on the thermal protection, and we haven't seen any serious failures from those - but the hinges were always going to be a challenge to construct.
I look forward to seeing the significantly sleeker looking v3 flaps go through reentry, and see what we learn (or rather what SpaceX have learned, and what they still need to learn).
You don't need to be immediately reusable to do a landing... just need the pins to be intact.
NASA is usually pretty thorough, if they think the Spacex thing can be made to do the job, I can’t really fault them. They put Ingenuity space helicopter on Mars, plenty of people thought it was impractical or improbable, and it worked!
As for “what is the point,” they haven’t come up with a reasonable justification at all. Just some hand-waving, “opportunity to conduct research” of unknown type or value. It’s like the time they ran out of ideas to be in space so they asked Elementary schools to think of something worthwhile to do in space, and nobody remembers what the kids came up with.
"They put Ingenuity space helicopter on Mars, plenty of people thought it was impractical or improbable, and it worked!"
Plenty of people don't count. NASA had a strong calculated belief that Ingenuity would fly on Mars. It flew in a simulated Mars atmosphere on Earth. Science, ruining Common Sense for ages.
The rocket assisted skycrane landing of the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers was also an amazing feat of engineering. As well as all of the Mars rovers, the mini-helicopter Ingenuity, and of course both of the Voyager space crafts vastly exceeding their expected lifetimes. It is a travesty that many future NASA missions are in great peril due to the anti-science idiocy of the current administration and republican congress. Sorry, but there is just no way that can be ignored.
"It is a travesty that many future NASA missions are in great peril due to the anti-science idiocy of the current administration and republican congress."
The politicians still haven't figured out how to turn investment in science into votes. That's a blind spot common to both sides of the aisle. This is even when those those investments have turned into long term advantages and profits.
"NASA is usually pretty thorough, if they think the Spacex thing can be made to do the job, I can’t really fault them. "
SpaceX was awarded the contract under suspicious circumstances by a NASA interim director who subsequently left NASA and took a senior job at SpaceX working on the Starship program. Common Sense Skeptic did a video (or series) on that and how the facts didn't point at SpaceX being the best candidate. It may have been that all three proposals fell short so maybe there should have been no award and all the parties sent back to try again with better direction.
"If it does I think we should all worry for the safety of the astronauts, as keeping schedule is likely to be the result of management/political interference overruling engineers. Which always goes well."
With the US leading the world in astronaut deaths by a wide margin, I don't this can be overstated. After the last shuttle disaster one would hope that NASA had learned that lesson but as you alluded to they are not always the final arbitrator.
The original timeline for the current attempt at landing men on the Moon never had a chance of being achieved. So far extensions of that timeline since then have not been any better.
DS999,
There have been plenty of rumours, but I think there were enough people in the Soviet space program that if any deaths in space had been covered up, it would have come out by now. There was also a brief window when much of the Soviet archives were opened up to scrutiny - before Putin had them closed again.
Of course picking astronaut deaths as a metric was clearly selected to make NASA look bad. Given that nobody else has put more than 3 people into space in one craft - and NASA have had 2 accidents on fully-manned Shuttles. There have also been 2 Soyuz that have failed in flight (one parachute failure and one decompression).
I hadn't realised, until I looked it up, that one pilot was killed flying the X-15. Plus there's the Virgin SpaceShipTwo and Apollo 1 pad fire and an awful lot of training accidents and air crashes - particularly of astronauts and cosmonauts flying in fighters and jet trainers to get around.
The biggest fatalities have been launch explosions and fires. That's where Russia and China have "excelled". Nedelin killed over 100 and there was another explosion while fuelling in Plesetsk in 1980 that killed 48. The Chinese Communist Party covered up the death toll from the Intelsat launch in 96 that ended up crashing into a nearby town because range safety didn't destroy it when it went horizontally after take-off. So we've got an official death toll of 6, and estimates of 100 ish.
Another new one I learnt today was Brazil in 2003 - 21 killed in a rocket explosion during launch prep.
"The USSR likely covered up some stuff we never heard about."
It's impolitic for NASA to point those out, but there are plenty of tallies of known Soviet launches where it's pretty well known they were manned, had issues and no more was ever said about them officially.
The low number of deaths for something so dangerous is what's impressive. Many more people have died working on crab fishing boats over the same time period.
"Though probably not in terms of a percentage of participants."
Yep.
At the same time, accidents that didn't lead to death on a fishing boat would be fatal in space. I'm sure there could be a whole page of qualifications to compare the two. I'm just sayin' that given how just about any spacecraft accident can wind up killing a whole crew, we've done pretty well.
Faking the SLS launch and pocketing the money would be on brand for the current administration
then you would have the democrats as the conspiracy theorists claiming the whole thing was fake and MAGA all insisting that it went to the moon.
Overall: safer, cheaper, lower environmental impact, equally scientifically valuable and a lot more amusing
Not only is Starship nowhere near ready, none of the supporting tech that SpaceX needs to come up with has been shown nor tested. They need to perfect cryogenic propellant transfer before they can get anything to the moon which means they'll also need to launch over a dozen Starships fast enough to have one going to the moon. They aren't even into testing of the v3 iteration of the craft which is supposed to be the release candidate and not just a test platform.
The Americans have already been to the moon already with Apollo, so they've already beaten China. However, I do agree that China will probably land people on the Moon before SLS/Artemis does.
Although SLS and Orion have flown, which does put them ahead of the Chinese launcher and spacecraft (both of which are still in the testing phase), neither of the lander designs from SpaceX or Blue Origin have progressed past the 'pretty render' stage, whereas China has actual hardware which they are testing already.
China are further along with their Moon mission, and they have simpler goals (for now), China's lander is single use (like the Apollo LM), whereas Artemis is requiring fully re-usable landers.
Artemis is mired in delays, and is mostly used as a political football. Even if it was given priority, money, and clear goals, it's very unlikely that it could manage a moon landing before China does.
"The Americans have already been to the moon already with Apollo, so they've already beaten China. However, I do agree that China will probably land people on the Moon before SLS/Artemis does."
China's published plans are more than Flags and Footprints. They may do that for the first couple of manned landings just to test things, but there's also been talk of military (perhaps just mad rumors) and science bases. The impressive thing is they have a plan and have been executing on it for year now. Anything the US does happens in fits and starts due to politics and funding that appears and disappears with changes in the makeup of Congress.
Blue Origin has submitted a full size mock up of their lander for workups and consultations. BO and NASA are optimizing the placement of equipment and controls. It's a tried and successful method of development. The Apollo astronauts were doing a lot of that so the layout and placement of controls made the most sense to them rather than to somebody that had never been a test pilot. To my knowledge, the only thing SpaceX has delivered is a full size model of their cable crane to get astronauts up and down the side of the rocket.
