Is artemis a good thing, or is it a bad thing? Watch to learn the surprising answer. @Eager_Space on Twitter Triabolical_ on Reddit / eagernetwork / eager-space-1038430522...
I constantly listen to Scott Manley and Tim Dodd, and I honestly think you deserve to be up with them. You make great, in-depth, content. Keep up the superb work!
I actually prefer this to Everyday Astronaut, although Tim’s a perfectly cromulent dude. This just has more of a “Your favorite nerdy high school physics teacher” vibe to it. To each their own. Have you been through all the nuclear propulsion vids? My wife gets angry at me for rewatching them while I do housework.
@@junkdriver42 completely agree, the everyday astronaut is just too... entusiastic and not enough sarcastic for me :D this is much better.ALSO this has much better product placement
This exceeds the quality of the Everday Astronaught by leaps and bounds. The professionalism and intelligence behind the communication is why I love this channel.
Eric never fails to generate content which is relevant regardless of one’s familiarity with spaceflight, which is no small feat. My only frustration is that his content is so short in duration - I would gladly listen to him for an hour or more each week!
Hey, thanks. My earlier videos tended to be a bit longer - more like 30+ minutes - but that's a bit longer than optimal IMO, and the current ones end up as long as they end up.
The exploration upper stage with 4 RL-10 engines won't be ready until Artemis IV. The first few are using a modified Delta II/III cryogenic upper stage.
@@whingebot The limiting factor is Orion itself, not the ICPS. Artemis IV and beyond will still use the same profile, EUS just allows them to send additional payloads alongside Orion such as gateway components.
I talk about this in detail in my video on Orion, but the short story is that Orion came out of the constellation program, and in the constellation architectures Orion would be placed into low lunar orbit by either an earth departure stage or the lander. They therefore designed it to have the amount of delta-v required to get out of LLO and back to earth, plus some margin on top of that. When constellation got cancelled by the Obama administration, congress came back with the space act of 2010 which both told NASA to build SLS and to keep developing Orion. At that point, neither SLS nor Orion had an actual mission associated with them so there would have been any redesign possible.
@@EagerSpace Yeah I’ve seen it - excellent research on that, btw! That’s very interesting how the delta-v of the previous architecture is dictating the architecture of the current mission. It still “feels” upside-down, because I’m used to watching hardware iterations move a lot faster than this. I’m still of the opinion that it would’ve been less money to significantly modify Orion when the new mission architecture was designed (and thus lower the costs associated with the oversized craft). Or perhaps the blame simply lies with Constellation for oversizing their capsule. I remember the discussions immediately after the Constellation Program around “Capabilities-based development” as opposed to “mission-based development.” A common criticism of that rationale was that Orion was too big for the SLS, so there weren’t really any increased capabilities. To me, that represents a missed opportunity (immediately after Constellation) to redesign Orion/SLS to actually be a proper deep space “Capabilities” system (ie, shrink Orion to increase dv and decrease long-term costs). Of course, it was also a missed opportunity to do the Saturn-derived vehicles, so probably not possible given risk-intolerance of state officials.
@@JayVal90 There's an interesting question as to what level of design changes for Orion would have met the spirit of what Congress wanted when they said, "keep working on Orion". Though NASA has quite a lot of history of interpreting congressional requirements in the way that works best for them... A redesign was obviously possible, but probably would have slowed things down quite a bit. It would be especially challenging because the service module is based on Europe's ARV resupply vehicle, and it would need a significant change to get more delta-v.
I have been a bigger Gateway fan than many in my space circles are, and not just because of the geopolitics (or should I say "astropolitics"). Since Artemis is made to be a testbed for Mars, having a lander be separate from a station is common sense, and deep space rendezvous for a mothership and lander needs to be tested. Not to mention the destination aspect for deep space experimentation and cargo for the landers. Not sure how well economies of scale work in that aspect with Starship. A small rapidly-reusable lander could be more economical.
My main concern is how much the Artemis program can actually grow while keeping SLS and Orion, but Congress isn't in a rush to cancel, replace, or even supplement SLS. I just see Artemis struggling to really get beyond annual/biannual visits to a permanently inhabited moonbase without private industry investment carrying them forward. It's the same with "moon to Mars". The realistic trajectory for Artemis to be a training run for a crewed Mars visit is to basically count on SpaceX to do most of the heavy lifting for them. I guess we'll see if private industry does kick in to power things further in the next decade or two.
@@EagerSpace That to me is what's going to get SLS cancelled: NASA's ambitions outgrowing it. Especially if Crewed Starship is flying and someone else is getting capsules to Gateway (Starliner? BO?), then I could see SLS's early retirement being used to pay for a permanently crewed moonbase and a crewed mission to Mars. That's the lesson from shuttle: NASA has to settle on a vision the current vehicle doesn't work for.
@James Winters Starliner isn't made for deep space, so why would it be going to the Gateway? As someone who works with SLS and the Artemis program I find it very unlikely SLS will be receiving an early retirement.
@@ChannleDDD I just think that Artemis runs a real risk of getting stuck at twice yearly(at best) visits to the moon for the next few decades, just like NASA was stuck in LEO with the shuttle. And no, I don't think a single SLS launch per Mars window is going to enable a crewed mission to Mars. The question is what's more important to NASA and Congress: keeping SLS going, or expanding Artemis to actually achieve more than just 4 people visiting the moon once or twice a year.
Congress doesn't care whether NASA has a purpose-driven plan or a vendor-driven plan. They only care that money gets spent in particular districts. So to get a good program you need to design a purpose driven program that spends money in a way congress would approve. Then you need to manage the contractors harshly - instead of giving Boeing bonuses for being late and over budget, you should give them no more money and official frank evaluation of their performance in the media. If NASA can do that, it can have a much better space program than it had since 1972. I think space fans should criticize NASA for failing to do that, and not just start with giving up and then reach the conclusion that the current program is not too bad because it could have been worse.
In my opinion, if there had been a cheaper, more capable alternative each time NASA experienced a fatality, the incumbent launch vehicle would have been mothballed. The NASA contractors have been very canny by ensuring they are a monopoly. Those days are over.
NASA and congress have done their best to keep astronauts off of commercial options. They changed the rules on crew vehicles early in constellation so that none could launch on Delta IV or Atlas V, and they slowed down commercial crew as much as possible in the same timeframe. SLS got built mostly because of the desire to keep shuttle programs going; it didn't have an assigned mission for a number of years.
A Strangelove indeed, to love SLS or even Orion. :D Enough repetition has brought me over to liking Gateway a lot because of the broad international participation. Deeper and deeper involvement by many will be necessary to make a real Moonbase with a fair degree of self-sustainment. I do love Artemis. Absolutely love that the HLS is a Starship. Can sorta try to like SLS but it's so flawed in concept and execution that it's hard. Absolutely deplore the cost. I understand the funding politics behind SLS, I know how the sausage is made. But the abuse of the cost-plus system by Boeing & Lockheed is an abomination. NASA's failures in stemming this are a disappointment. But yes, I do love Artemis.
I can appreciate how the Artemis program is increasing sustainability of global efforts into space flight, and more importantly bank rolling actually effective space flight systems in Starship. However I still dislike the pathological obsession with shoving the Lunar Tollway into every future mission architecture including NASA mars missions which have no need and are actively hindered by requirements to do as such. It would be far more purposeful if they would focus on pushing international efforts towards an actual moon base rather than dithering around in deep space first. Nevertheless I suppose we got to take what we can get, and it’ll be a nice interlude to watch while Starship is scaling exponentially and other Newspace companies get themselves really going
My original gateway video had a section showing why stopping by gateway on the way to Mars is a stupid idea; the only way it maybe makes sense is if you have rocket fuel coming from the Mars surface. I might finish that off and release it separately.
I disagree about Shuttle cancellation. It was a direct consequence of Columbia, despite the time lag. Bush's Vision for Space Exploration/Constellation was put forth as a "what next?" replacement *because* they had decided to end the Shuttle program, not the other way around. It's true that the Shuttle flew a whole bunch of missions after Columbia, but Bush made it explicitly clear that, going forward, Shuttle missions would be used exclusively to finish construction of the ISS, and then be retired, with all other (non-ISS) missions being canceled (only one exception was made, due to huge public pressure: the final Hubble servicing mission). The reason they risked flying Shuttle for another 7 years was not because they were complacent but because they had no choice - they had massive commitments to international partners. NASA could kill Shuttle after ISS completion, but they could not kill ISS itself. This is the same argument as Artemis' unkillability: international partner commitments.
I can understand saying: the better thing to do is to make the best of it since it's already on track and making big changes in the middle of an already running program is just not NASA's and Congress' style. But saying anyone should love it..? Ultimately comparisons will tell how to qualify it. How will China's program do? Will SpaceX end up doing everything themselves through the Polaris program, or will Elon go crazy? It's all very uncertain tbh.
"Love" is perhaps strong - it was required to get the exact wording I wanted. But if you think Starship is the way to go, how can you not be excited about a program that is going to send $4 billion to SpaceX to build starship?
@@EagerSpace it definitely is exciting. Ultimately NASA is basically doing the best they can given the circumstances. The lunar Starship selection was done almost in a surreptitious way. It's all in the best tradition of mining water out of rocks.
It's not inconceivable that Polaris 4 will be landing six people on the Moon at the same time Artemis 4 is landing two. A month or two ago Eric Berger laid out the crazy long gap between Arty 3 and 4 so there's plenty of time. If Polaris 3 can fly by 2025 then Dear Moon could do its loop around the Moon at the same time as Arty 3 in 2026. Although Elon and SpaceX have too good a relationship with NASA to show them up with an actually simultaneous mission it could happen in the same year. Of course I'm crossing my fingers that the TPS problem can be mastered.
This is logical. However, I don’t have to like it. It’s a huge waste, with very little actual utility Eventually, there will be some kind of accident near or on the moon and the gateway based architecture will make it impossible to return to earth quickly. Bad choices for bad reasons
Hi Eric, I'm not sure if that's your field, but with the recent "death" of InSight, could you explain why is NASA/JPL not implementing any cleaning devices? I read that you can do it with a mechanism called electrodynamic shield and such thing was researched and tested a long time ago but nobody has put it to use yet. About the video, for me the only advantage of Artemis is that it exists and brings people back to the Moon. The rest, when you compare it Apollo, is disappointing. You have extremely low launch launch cadence. We already know that SLS will launch at best, once per years till 2040, meanwhile Saturn V managed to launch four times in twelve months since Apollo 8 launch. It will over a decade to achieve what Apollo did in just a few years. And the worst is that NASA is doing nothing to overcome that issue. They are not looking for any alternative to SLS/Orion which is the bottleneck of this program.
I am with you on with the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft but strongly disagree with you on the Lunar Gateway. Does the Lunar Gateway provide a destination for astronauts? Yes it does but is it really necessary? Artemis III is going to land astronauts on the Moon without the Lunar Gateway where the Orion spacecraft and Lunar Starship will rendezvous in a NRLO and Starship will then transport astronauts to the surface. Instead of Gateway, we could easily build a Lunar Surface Station which would be essential in learning to live on the surface of the Moon. This would be essential in doing long term research on the Lunar Surface and learning how to one day to survive on other worlds. Any trip to Mars is going involve astronauts staying on the Martian surface for over a year so it is critical we learn how to survive on the Lunar Surface. A Lunar Surface Station also provides avenues for collaborating with international partners and commercial partners since other space agencies like ESA, JAXA, CSA, and private space companies would be eager to provide modules and landing services to the Moon. The Lunar Gateway in my opinion is a useless and uneccesary project.
It's not that I'm a fan of gateway, I just understand why NASA is doing it and if you are going to build SLS block 1b you can use it to build gateway. A lunar surface station is much much harder to do than gateway; there is currently no solution to get big cargo to the moon and then if you have a surface station you need an infrastructure to keep it supplied. NASA spends about $2 billion a year getting cargo and crew to ISS, and you now need to do that to the lunar surface. Maybe starship and/or Blue moon works out, but I don't think NASA understands how much a lunar base would cost. And yes, the Artemis partners would much prefer to send their people to the moon.
@@EagerSpace With the SpaceX Super Heavy, the upcoming New Glenn, we should be able to launch modules for a surface station. This was the plan with the Constellation Program to have a Cargo Variant of the Altair Lunar Lander which would then take modules to the Lunar Surface and make way for a Lunar Surface Station. SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon both have cargo variants planned that could be used to bring surface modules to the Lunar Surface much like was the plan with Altair. Although the details are still unclear, Roscosmos and the China National Space Administration have both decided their priority is an International Lunar Research Station on the Lunar Surface. They are bypassing building an orbital space station altogether. Now would a Lunar Surface Station be more expensive and more difficult to operate in the long run, yes absolutely but I feel we should be willing to take the next step forward. Lunar dust is certainly going to be a problem with a lunar base but that is a challenge we should be willing to take. Gateway will also cost billions of dollars to operate, perform EVAs and send supplies much like the ISS as you mentioned. But I feel the investment is far better worth focusing on the Lunar Surface even if it costs more. George H.W Bush's space exploration initiative, the Constellation Program and the current Russia/China plan for a International Lunar Research Station all did not call for a orbital lunar space station so I feel the Artemis Program can bypass Gateway altogether too.
@@novachromatic The plan for Artemis Base Camp is to have a Surface Habitat along with the Lunar Terrain Vehicle and Lunar Pressurized Vehicle however, only the Lunar Terrain Vehicle is an official NASA project. No funding bill has included any mention of any Surface Habitat of any kind nor has NASA issued any requests for a Surface Habitat. NASA should cancel the Lunar Gateway and immediately issue calls for a Surface Habitat which our international partners I am sure would love to help build as well.
Crew dragon doesn't have the life support endurance to do the lunar mission, and it's not clear that it could be modified to do that. And it's not like the HLS lander is ready to go yet either.
Well, the crew dragon is for falcon 9, starship is going to take many years for it to be reliable, but I'm concerned of how many re-fuels starship would take to leave earths orbit
I'm sorry but I'm still not convinced. I don't like the mentality that "they are here to stay", they are still a drain of resources that could be better spent on something like more telescopes and probes. I can accept Gateway for political reasons, even if I'd prefer those resources to go to a ground Lunar station instead.
>they are still a drain of resources that could be better spent on How are you defining "could be spent"? Is there a world where that alternative might be true?
@@EagerSpace I won't pretend I know exactly how the budget politics work, but I'd prefer those billion to go for probes and telescopes (I already mentioned this) than to more flag and footprint missions that won't accomplish anything new.
@@EagerSpace And my point is that we should not stop complaining even if it won't happen. I'll will watch when Artemis lands astronauts on the Moon and I'll cheer for them, but I will still be unsatisfied by the program.
@@canaldohectoryes, i mean there are private space players here in india who are actually wanting to bring a renaissance in how deep space missions should be done as well as to show the irony & hypocrisy of how Nasa does it and creating an illusion of international collaboration first with ISS & now Gateway(which is absolutely stupid btw) And some of these private players ik personally(some engineers) are not too happy on India signing Artemis Accords too & its been long enough Nasa wants to maintain a monolpoly by trying to create international relations with ISS & now Gateway & to sort of cripple aspiring private players with CLPS by setting up constraints or inventing black zones(remembers Delta IV & Atlas V). They're just waiting for private launchers to debut here in India to piggyback their missions to Moon and so.
A most excellent video. However I'm afraid I don't agree on the longevity of SLS/Orion in the Artemis program. It'll make Artemis 3 & 4 and maybe 5 but beyond that it will be replaced by Starship. Everthing you say about political support for SLS because of it's multiple sites in multiple states is true. But there is a limit to everything. When the CBS Evening News and MSNBC and the NY Times and Times of London are covering Arty 3 and the general public gets a look at tiny Orion next to the SpaceX ship they will be shocked and ask questions. This is the kind of thing that reporters do a series on. To the public at large the difference between $4 billion per trip vs half a billion per trip is too simple to miss. If the spotlight is big and bright even Congresscritters can't be too brazen. Starship HLS depends on SLS/Orion succeeding - at least for the first couple of missions. After that the cost advantage of a LEO-to-LEO Starship* to take their place will become too great to ignore. SLS/Orion & politics will have done their job and gotten the Artemis program on its way to the Moon. *The physics of this needs to be worked on. Would you know of anyone qualified to do this?😉😁
I doubt that "NASA is wasting money on SLS" is going to become one of the top 5 issues for the general public, and if it doesn't do that, there's not much political pressure to change. WRT LEO to LEO, I'm thinking about it but there are a bunch of scenarios there.
@@EagerSpace A bunch to be sure. But 2 or 3 will suffice. The simple low payload LEO to LEO with propulsive deceleration is the one that's most often brought up, by a wide margin. If you can give a firm answer to that one it will be a gift to the spaceflight fan world. The alternative of a Dragon-lite for crew reentry would be a bonus.
I'm not gonna sugarcoat this one; I think this is the worst video you've ever made. I also think that's a real shame since your opinions are usually more thought out than this.
@@EagerSpace For starters, you use the fact that SLS and Orion are here to stay as a reason to dislike them less. This is logically fallacious. Once you accept that their existence actively damages the interests of people like me and (hopefully) you, its longevity is only reason to dislike it MORE. But here's the rub. We got lucky that SpaceX are developing Starship for ideological reasons, but outside of that, robust HSF capability is usually only developed when NASA either signals that it'll be in the market soon, or outright starts procurement (even if this will change in the future, as I hope it will, this process will still be a source for at least SOME of the HSF capability, so the point remains). So long as SLS and Orion exist, and the longer they are signaled to last, they more heavily signal that NASA is NOT in the market for new HSF capability, thus dissuading anyone from attempting to invest in that capability. To prove this point, just look at the one Constellation element that the good guys actually SUCCEEDED in canceling. Because Altair no longer exists, NASA is forced to signal that it is in the market for a Lunar lander. We now have THREE independent privately developed (and each much more capable and much cheaper than Altair) Lunar landers that are fairly likely to all be built. When the first private Astronaut lands on the Moon, or when Axiom or whomever announces the first private Moon base, remember that this is happening when it is because we cancelled Altair. The exact same thing happened with Shuttle and commercial crew. Because NASA was "in the market" and no longer relied a single expensive vehicle designed by committee, we got 3 vehicles to replace it, all 3 of which will soon be flown, one of which is already flying humans. We're lucky to have Starship. It's the wildcard that breaks the mold when it comes to HSF procurement. But Starship doesn't have to be playing alone. If SLS and Orion never existed, we would have had 3 independent and privately owned, and cheaper and more capable, architectures to send humans to Lunar orbit to match with our 3 landers. Every year that SLS and Orion remain is one more year before NASA money starts going towards Lunar commercial crew.
@@danmosenzon1477 I don't disagree with your argument. But SLS and Orion are here, they work, NASA intends them to be a long-term platform and congress is very likely to keep funding them to do that. At this point I've done enough talking about the downsides of the big orange rocket and what could have been done instead, and I'd rather look forward to see what is likely to come from using it. The thing that is going to start lunar commercial crew is the limitations of SLS and Orion. Assuming HSL starship works, it's very likely that starship becomes the logistics option for gateway - that's probably why there no dragon XL resupply contract out there - and at that point, carrying people is the logical next step.
