It also means not paying credit card fees, not having to chase down bounced checks, etc. Cash means the money is there, which has value.
4,138 karma · joined March 8, 2011
While I'd suspect the design is still in flux, the current design is for a 120kw satellite with 110 square meters of radiators. Scaling to hundreds of gigawatts is intended to be by repeatedly launching smaller designs.
The DPS-1 burn which restored the free return trajectory was done using the Apollo guidance computer.
The PC+2 burn which sped up the return from earth was done using the Apollo guidance computer.
The MCC-5 mid-course correction burn was done by hand.
The MCC-7 mid-course correction burn was done by hand, but used the Apollo guidance computer to integrate the accelerometer to let everyone know when the burn was done.
(All the burns on Apollo 8 were computer controlled. I'd assume Gemini 7 and 12 were hand flown, though I don't know for sure.)
Adding to it - Apollo 13 was a mission where 3 men should have died, but somehow didn't. If it had happened while the LM was on the moon, you would have had the CSM lose power, and then two men on the moon would have had no way to return home.
(And for the shuttle design mission - my understanding is it was likely the ability to do a HEXAGON-style film return mission in a single orbit, before the Soviets knew what was happeneing.)
New NASA administrator Isaacman has redone the Artemis program. The changes were announced at the Ignition event a few weeks ago:
https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/
If you read one thing, read the sides on building the moon base:
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2-building-t...
The goals it to fly often - adding a SLS launch to 2027 and a second launch to 2028. This drops the cost-per-launch, which is mostly fixed. It redoes SLS to make it less expensive and more capable. It moves the lunar space station down to the surface of the moon.
And it's budgeted at $10B/3 years, which fits into NASA's budget.
Isaacman took the Artemis program and fixed it. The reckoning came, and it's looking good.
The commander just named a feature on the moon for his late wife.
The new NASA administrator, Isaacman, seems to have done a very good job of convincing the various Senators to, if not get rid of the pork, allow him to allocate it in a way that benefits the lunar program.
The result was the Ignition event, which looks like it's planning to send up 17 small and 4 crew-capable landers by 2028, along with a fleet of orbital assets.
You can find out more https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/ , especially the "Building the Moon Base" section. The cost is $10B spread out over 3 years.
Most of the other big news events are ones where people get severely hurt, and political ones where one partly loses.
With this, we can look up at the moon, and say "Humanity did that."
Artemis II is not safe, at least by the standards we apply to things. It's the third flight of a capsule, on the second flight of the rocket, and the first flight of things like the life support system.
At the end of the day, one of the reasons astronauts are respected is they understand those risks, and go into space anyway. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize risks - but at some point the risk becomes acceptable, and the cost of reducing it too great.
To paraphrase a quote from Star Trek - risk is their business.
Launch cadence across NASA programs:
https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2027456699175497741
An infographic showing the new architectures:
https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2027456713507356713
It's interesting how Artemis III (the new one) will try to prove out both HLS landers in one LEO mission.
For what it's worth, this project plans to use Tesla AI5/AI6 hardware for the first launches.
(I kept a copy of original wordle, and it seems to have 2,315 words that are possible answers.)