NASA’s Orion spacecraft reaches the moon, flying 81 miles above the surface

Automation is their friend. Just "hot pink" those wires and batch the process =P

That's not true. Everyone knows that Coppola forced them to shoot on-site.

If the fundamental delay to NASA releasing images is leak of proprietary data, that is a pretty good argument against the continued existence of NASA as a public agency.

>ITAR is the main limiting factor to releasing images/videos at this point.

Pictures of the moon fall under ITAR?

heck I have a vacuum chamber on my desk at home, though not one as good as the NASA ones

Here is the entire Orion spacecraft being put in one NASA's vacuum chambers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G99L5RRjEKA

My GoPro won't work if it's too cold (lithium battery).

They're using GoPro 4's, which is somewhat interesting, as the 11 just came out. So, old tech (8 years old or so) that's been heavily modified to work in space. I'm reminded some janky PowerPC powers the FORTRAN code that runs the Hubble.

It is romantic to think that the Earthrise photo was taken with a Hasselblad medium format camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kovAmQ0jz4

To add to that - vacuum can also mess up sealed components that were manufactured at 1ATM. This is mostly a problem with electrolytic batteries and capacitors which puff up when the atmospheric pressure is removed. For batteries mitigations include manufacturing at low pressures or constraining the expansion mechanically.

They were both basically still within Earth’s biosphere when it comes to camera destroying ionization.

The Van Alan Belts are the first problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt and from there it gets pretty bad on out.

Space is hard, in the learning-loop sense. 99.999% of all in-space experience has taken place less than 5000km from Earth.

They've been working on SLS/Orion for much longer than 10 years. They're just we tad bit behind schedule

I'm pretty sure they've been working on this, hence hardware locked, for 10 or more years.

Not saying I agree with the choice as I'd prefer better quality images, but I understand their reasoning (if it really is as I said)

Weird interpretations from these results to say the least. “Space Dominance” is nowhere mentioned except in the headline, yet the headline claims that’s what people want (!)

Seeing the results though I see that human space exploration is in the lower tier, just like my previous post was suggesting. More people would rather prioritize normal robotic missions as it seems. More people seem to put some importance to Conducting research to understand space then don’t. This is reverse (i.e. more people don’t think it important to) Research space travels health effect.

The high profile cases of recent human space travel is the Blue Horizon which generated a ton of buzz, mostly from people complaining (justly) about how out of touch these people are. I think the sentiment of human space travel extends from there. People cringe from seeing Jeff Bezos spill his champagne after landing and then if they hear about some people going to the ISS they ask: “whats the point?” I think this is a just question and a logical extensions.

Now for the excitement around SpaceX. There was also a ton of buzz around Perseverance. And think people were also quite excited—though not as much—about the Parker solar probe. For future missions I think more people are excited about getting back mars samples from Percy the rover, and about a hypothetical mission to use gravitational lensing from the Sun to photograph surfaces of exo-planets. The hype around Starship seems to me to be inflated by marketing, when talking to space nerds around me there isn’t really that much excitement about what we can achieve with a SpaceX Starship that we can’t with a regular old robotic state funded mission.

Search for Jeff Bezos space flight, look at news discussions and social media posts, and you will find more haters.

Would it? I don't personally know anyone who has an 8k display, and I don't know that many people who knew about the SLS launch attempt last week until after it happened

You're describing marketing, and marketing of an idea is important - I agree.

However, you also need to have a population that cares about science, engineering, exploration, etc. I don't believe what gets people into engineering and science is because of how engineering and science are marketed. It certainly doesn't harm anything by marketing it, my opinion is that it is a small component of the overall picture.

For a little more context, there were Apollo flights planned out to 20, Nixon cut those. The Apollo Applications Program aimed at building a lunar base and observatories up through '76 but the Johnson administration declined to fund it partially to fund of Great Society programs but also partially because no one could adequately explain what a lunar base would be worth. We did get Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz project, so it's not like project ground entirely down to a halt but what we did eventually get was a far cry from the heady dreams of the mid-60s, that's for sure. And, as cool a vehicle as the Shuttle was the STS did not at all deliver on its promises, further sapping resources.

Why haven't we gone back to the moon? Funding dried up real quick once it was clear the Space Race could be won with the existing amount of money spent, new projects had to answer "why" in a concrete way to compete for limited resources and it was not at all clear what we'd go to the moon for compared to, say, building the ISS.

Space theorists in the 30s - 50s assumed that you would have to build up on-orbit Earth infrastructure before the moon could be sustainably reached, meaning you could go back whenever just because. That is, you need stable communication, transit hubs, refueling, space-based construction went the thinking. Both the US and the Soviets took big, expensive shortcuts in the Space Race but I find it hard to believe that the original analysis -- space is only as reachable as its infrastructure allows -- hasn't been showed true in the last 50 years.

And there’s not much there aside from rocks

And incredibly far, much further than I used to think - you can fit all planets in the solar system in the average distance between the earth and the moon!

https://www.universetoday.com/115672/you-could-fit-all-the-p...

Critical in which way in your opinion?

> it is projected to overtake practically every single other industry including electronics at some point in the future.

projected by who and how many % of his guesses turned out to be right ?

But it has nothing to do with manned spaceflight. U.S. is beyond doubt the space power #1 today, and it has nothing to do with manned flights.

Honestly, I think it's just silly that we are still trying to make these things on the ground.

> When your rocket engine is constructed by the the best TIG welders you can find carefully fitting Inconel parts together... it feels a waste to see that work crash and burn

Note that the rocket engines used by SLS (RS-25, and to a lesser extent the solid rocket boosters) were explicitly designed for reuse, as part of the Space Shuttle program; all the way back in the 1970s.

The four RS-25 engines that Artemis 1 dumped in the ocean had previously flown on Space Shuttles. IIRC they first flew in 1999 (although Shuttles only used 3 engines).

> If your booster is as disposable as a paper cup, with new ones flying off the assembly line faster than you could hope to rework anything, perhaps either the materials or the fuel are wasted but not so much work is wasted.

Also note that the marginal cost of an SLS launch is 4.5 billion dollars. That doesn't include all the one-off costs, like R&D; certification; restarting production lines; etc. Famously, it cost over a billion dollars to restart the RS-25 production line (so they can replace those engines being dumped in the ocean); despite claiming that the use of existing tech would save money!

In fact, refurbishing & upgrading those existing Shuttle engines cost more than producing brand-new RS-25s. Again, it was claimed that reusing the existing Shuttle engines would save money...

Despite the cost of these assembly lines, SLS rockets aren't "flying off" them. The (few) scheduled Artemis launches are separated by years.

SLS has just put a capsule into orbit around the moon, however, while Starship has yet to embark on its first orbit of the Earth, with no date in sight. Additionally, pinning the entirety of the American space program on a single private company seems like a recipe for disaster.

SLS created a mission context in which Starship could become economically viable much sooner than it would have on its own.

It doesn't necessarily work like that. SLS is expensive in part because it scatters jobs around to various important Senators and Representatives' districts. It's in part a jobs program.

> How so?

The profit motive is a powerful and universal incentive.

People are careless when spending Other Peoples' Money.

NASA is not designed to do it cheaper. It is designed to reduce political risk so that programs like CCP can continue to be funded by tax dollars.

Look at where the major NASA centers are compared to politically important states. That reduces political risk but also increases inefficiency.

SpaceX and NASA have different, but symbiotic, goals.

NASA is optimizing for different capabilities than SpaceX. With SpaceX's Starship every launch will require them leaving fuel for landing. Every gram of fuel you don't burn is less velocity you impart on your vehicle.

To get to the Moon a Starship will require two launches. A manned vehicle and a fuel tanker. They have to dock in Earth orbit, refuel, then the manned vehicle transfers to a Lunar injection orbit. It's very likely a Starship will need a tanker waiting on the Moon to refuel a lander for the return trip and landing back on Earth.

Starship hasn't even flown let alone demonstrated in-orbit refueling. SpaceX hasn't even demonstrated that in the small scale with Dragon capsules. It's a hard problem with a lot of unknowns.

SLS can launch the manned element directly into a Lunar injection orbit. It doesn't require any refueling to get anywhere. It also doesn't need a fuel tank at the destination to allow a lander to return home.

In order to do that the launch stages don't save any fuel for landing. It's "more expensive" to use expendable stages but all of their energy is used for their payload and none is saved for landing (and landing safety margin). Overall SLS is mass optimized rather than cost optimized.

The NASA way involves a lot fewer moving parts and <unproven technology goes here>.

Reuse isnt always cheaper. If you arent flying a bunch of missions, it can actually be more expensive.

SLS could absolutely be cheaper, but reuse isnt really part of that equation.

> How so? Surely if NASA can do something cheaper it should have more money to do other things or find it easier to get money for more things?

This touches on an important question in economics. When you take your 101 class, if you pay attention, you will see that there is no role for competition at all. The whole economy could be a single firm, and all the prices and quantities would be the same, because the firm drives down economic profit to zero on the marginal good as a result of maximizing their producer surplus all by itself. This comes from optimization of convex functions - with appropriate convexity assumptions, any economic profit is money left on the table for the firm because it would just produce more and sell more units up until the last unit sold would earn zero profits.

What this means is that there is usually not a difference between a planned economy managed by a social planner and a free market economy (there are some differences with more exotic models, but this isn't important here). That is the observation you are using.

This led economists to investigate what the difference would be, and one group focused on non-convexities, a small group jumped into the rabbit hole of disequilibrium economics, while another group -- the Austrians -- insisted it was lack of price information that thwarted the social planner. If everything was auctioned off and every task given a budget with a maximization goal, we would discover prices but administrative processes would not discover prices.

But what I believe is that many organizations are just bad actors -- they leave money on the table, both in the free market and in an administrative setting. What you need is competition to drive out bad actors. People do not act in their self-interest nearly as much as models predict -- they have to basically be forced into it with competition.

The first inkling I had of this was landlords in San Francisco letting their properties rot via water damage because they couldn't be bothered to fix the windows. Why would they commit economic sabotage? Because they could afford to lose the money and still make enough to meet their needs. And for others, it was just that they were bad at their job, but rising property prices/rents meant they would not be driven out of business. This is why monopolies suck so much -- there is no mechanism to get rid of those who are bad at their job, even the job of profit maximization. So rather than viewing an organization as maximizing efficiency, maybe view it as "minimizing effort subject to avoiding bankruptcy".

Once you adopt that view, you get different answers to questions such as why NASA isn't as efficient as possible (and neither is SpaceX). You are only as efficient as your competitors/shareholders force you to be.