The Lunacy of Artemis
A nice long post summing up why the American space program has gone off the rails, and has not yet delivered a program tens of billions over budget and decades late. A rocket that relies on Space Shuttle parts that were designed in the 1970s, paired with a huge lunar lander based on tech that is still being invented. And a landing scheduled in two years that everyone knows will schedule slip by years, again.
Oh, and Gateway, fucking Gateway — did you even know that they're making a lunar orbital space station? And that the reason for this is that astronauts need a place to hang out because SLS isn't powerful enough to park the oversize Orion into low lunar orbit, so they need a place to wait until they can get back to their command module, perhaps for days, until the orbit lines up? NASA is spending all of its time on Gateway since all of the other portions have been jobbed out to other companies. Amazing.
A nice long post summing up why the American space program has gone off the rails, and has not yet delivered a program tens of billions over budget and decades late. A rocket that relies on Space Shuttle parts that were designed in the 1970s, paired with a huge lunar lander based on tech that is still being invented. And a landing scheduled in two years that everyone knows will schedule slip by years, again.
Oh, and Gateway, fucking Gateway — did you even know that they're making a lunar orbital space station? And that the reason for this is that astronauts need a place to hang out because SLS isn't powerful enough to park the oversize Orion into low lunar orbit, so they need a place to wait until they can get back to their command module, perhaps for days, until the orbit lines up? NASA is spending all of its time on Gateway since all of the other portions have been jobbed out to other companies. Amazing.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto