The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.
I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
(It seems that Artemis cost is $92B, where as SpaceX's Starship costs are less than $10B so far, give or take. So it seems that SpaceX is a more efficient approach.)
This reminds me of my all-time-favourite HN comment[0] (and a life lesson too):
This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote:
"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
Given that SLS is the part of Artemis that has actually shown it works, and Starship is the part that is nowhere near schedule, and doesn't work, it's very funny to suggest that NASA should learn from SpaceX and not the other way around.
SpaceX hasn't even had the confidence to put Starship in LEO yet, and has not carried 1kg of real payload (and barely a few kg of test payloads) - while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.
It's not like SLS is on schedule either, and it is absurdly more expensive than Starship. It's very likely that Starship will eventually be operational with lower total costs by any accounting measure. (And I say this as a current NASA contractor and current anti-fan of Musk)
I agree that SLS is not an efficient project by any stretch of the imagination, and they have their own problems. I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it. In particular, their plan for how to achieve the Moon mission, requiring an unclear number of missions to fuel a single flight in orbit.
Orion is actually pointless, I don't understand why the mission goals are valuable. Partial success would be meaningless. Success is meaningless.
Starship in contrast has a variety of meaningful objectives. Even if Starship only achieves proving that cryogenic fuel transfer in LEO is possible that's a valuable mission goal in and of itself.
If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.
And do you think the this next launch will deploy actual satellites in orbit around the Moon? If not, I still don't see why you'd compare it to SLS's current success. Or do you think this will deploy 100 tons to orbit for less than $10/ton, or fly to Mars, since these are the stated goals for Starship?
Even if a Starship needs to be scrapped after landing, the Super Heavy booster works, returns nominally to the launch site, and can be reused. This alone should make the whole thing cheaper than SLS.
Only if the SuperHeavy booster can achieve the same performance as the SLS (payload to orbit), with similar levels of operational complexity.
The SLS has already proven it can fly to lunar orbit and back on one single launch. In contrast, even if everything goes according to plan, Starship requires at least a dozen re-fueling flights while it hangs in orbit around the Earth to be able to then fly to the Moon.
Will one Starship launch, when it eventually works, be cheaper than SLS? Very likely. Will 12+ Starship launches + the time in orbit be cheaper than a single SLS launch? Much, much less likely.
I don't think "no idea" is fair. We don't have exact numbers, but there are various statements out there that give clues. Even the highest estimates I can put together put Starship far cheaper than SLS.
You have to consider that Starship has not reached anywhere near the operational goals for Artemis, and there is no realistic time line for when it might. So we really do have no idea how much it might cost by the time it reaches the milestone SLS has already cleared (successful flight in lunar orbit, with a full payload that it successfully deploys).
To OP's point, Artemis has cost $92 billion over 14 years. This has produced exactly one launch.
It's hard to put an exact timeline on Starship since a lot of its development overlaps with Falcon 9 using the same components, but it's inarguable that it has cost one tenth Artemis so far.
I agree that Starship has been plagued by delays and the capabilities are so far mostly just talk. However, it has flown a number of times, and I would be willing to make a strong bet that it will orbit the moon with real payload long before it catches up to Artemis in budget.
Starship has not yet flown even a fraction of what SLS has, so I think the comparison is premature. If it takes another ten years to get to a point that it can successfully achieve its Artemis objectives, I doubt it will remain cheaper than SLS. And given that it has already been delayed way beyond the first estimates for when it might be ready (it was supposed to have flown to Mars with astronauts on board by 2022, I believe), I don't see why another 10 years is any worse an estimate than others.
lol what? They've caught and successfully reflown the super heavy booster, and they've mostly successfully done a soft landing of Starship in the sea. How is that remotely "just talk"?
This is why I do not believe in America setting up a permanent lunar base.
The Chinese are basically going to launch a few astronauts up there with a modern Saturn 5. But for them that would be a success because it is their first time.
You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.
> You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.
Depends on what happens once on the moon. If all you do is send 2 people at a time to collect rocks, then it does get boring to the general public. If each landing assembles the next section of a moon habitat, then I think the interest sticks around longer.
Congress is fickle enough without rockets blowing up, even if NASA explains up front that it's going to happen. There is much which is suboptimal about NASA, not just their attitude towards perfection, which is downstream of the political reality they have to deal with. For instance, a project that could be done in one year given adaquate funding will instead be spread out over ten years or more, to spread out the costs and keep NASA's monetary requirements as smooth and predictable as possible, for the sake of Congress.
2cents from a kid who grew up in a NASA family during the shuttle years -
As others have commented, NASA’s baseline objective is to not kill astronauts.
My understanding of their ethos growing up was that there was absolutely no excuse not to pursue excellence and prioritize safety when people’s lives were on the line.
One would have to think that goal is fundamentally incompatible with SpaceX’s way of doing things (see the many exploding rockets - who wants to get in that?).
And from what I’ve read and heard through the grapevine, working with SpaceX as a contractor on Artemis has certainly had pain points related to these mismatched priorities.
SpaceX has the most reliable orbital launch vehicle ever made. Falcon 9 block 5 has had 550 successful launches out of 551 attempts, giving it a 99.8% success rate. For comparison, Soyuz-2's success rate is 97%, Ariane 5 is 95.7%, and the Space Shuttle was 98.5%. All of these are worse than Falcon 9's block 5's landing success rate of 98.9% (552 out of 558 attempts[1]).
The current Starship launches are part of a development and testing program. They expect quite a few failures (though probably not as many as they've experienced). But since each Starship launch is only 1/25th the cost of an SLS launch, SpaceX can afford to blow up a lot of them. And they won't put people on them until they have a track record of safe operation. Falcon 9 didn't have crew on it until the 85th launch.
1. The number of landing attempts is higher than the number of launches because Falcon Heavy results in multiple landings per launch.
You risk it when there are no people on board to find the issues. Fix issues, rinse repeat.
NASA/Congress pushes the armchair quarterback approach. Analyze forever, fail because analysis isn't the same thing as real world experience, get stuck using 50 year old rocket technology. Each engine on SLS cost more than the entire Starship super heavy launch vehicle.
By weight the RS-25 engines cost about 70% of that of building their 7000lb mass dry mass out of gold. That's insane.
Testing wasn't really the issue with the loss of the two shuttles. In both cases, it was mostly a management issue. For Challenger NASA had seen o-ring erosion in earlier launches, and decided it was not a big risk to the crew. Then they launched Challenger against the recommendations of the engineers in charge of o-ring seals. For Columbia, they has seen foam strikes in earlier launches, but since they had not caused catastrophe in the past, they decided that foam strikes were acceptable. Even when it was clear that a large foam strike had occurred on the launch of Columbia, management wasn't concerned enough to try to get ground-based images of the shuttle to check for damage. Could Columbia's crew have been saved had they known the extent of the damage? No one can say of course, but not even trying to do everything possible was inexcusable.
I don't think so, because both losses were due to bad management decisions under irrational political pressure, not any lack of engineering knowledge that more unmanned testing could have provided.
Challenger was lost because NASA ignored a critical flight risk with the SRB joint O-rings. And by "ignored", I mean "documented that the risk existed, that it could result in loss of vehicle and loss of lives of the crew, and then waived the risk so the Shuttle could keep flying instead of being grounded until the issue was fixed". They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it. But that was politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.
Columbia was lost because NASA ignored the risks of tile damage due to their belief that it couldn't be fixed anyway once the Shuttle was in orbit. But that meant NASA also devoted no effort to eliminating the risk of tile damage by fixing the issue that caused it. Which again would have been politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.
> They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it.
Should such testing have been needed? No.
Was such testing needed, given NASA's political pressures and management? Maybe. Unmanned testing in similar conditions before putting humans on it might've resulted in a nice explosion without loss of life that would've been much harder to ignore than "the hypothesizing of those worrywart engineers," and might've provided the necessary ammunition to resist said political pressures.
> Unmanned testing in similar conditions before putting humans on it might've resulted in a nice explosion without loss of life that would've been much harder to ignore
The loss of the Challenger was the 25th manned orbital mission. So we can expect that it might have taken 25 unmanned missions to cause a similar loss of vehicle. But what would those 25 unmanned missions have been doing? There just wasn't 25 unmanned missions' worth of things to find out. That's also far more unmanned missions than were flown on any previous NASA space program before manned flights began.
Even leaving the above aside, if it would have been politically possible to even fly that many unmanned missions, it would have been politically possible to ground the Shuttle even after manned missions started based on the obvious signs of problems with the SRB joint O-rings. There were, IIRC, at least a dozen previous manned flights which showed issues. There were also good critiques of the design available at the time--which, in the kind of political environment you're imagining, would have been listened to. That design might not even have made it into the final Shuttle when it was flown.
In short, I don't see your alternative scenario as plausible, because the very things that would have been required to make it possible would also have made it unnecessary.
They very nearly lost the first shuttle they launched. Jumping straight into manned testing was quite reckless, but politically necessary. If they had tested the shuttle without crew, that would have gotten people thinking that crews probably aren't necessary for a lot of shuttle missions, in particular launching satellites. It also would have prompted people to compare the cost of shuttle launches to other unmanned rocket launches, in particular for commercial satellite launches (which they were doing until the Challenger disaster.) These are comparisons that would have been very problematic for NASA as a political entity.
> They very nearly lost the first shuttle they launched.
Which mission are you referring to?
If it's STS-1, AFAIK there were no close call incidents during the actual flight, but the mission commander, John Young, did have to veto a suggestion to make that mission an RTLS abort instead of an actual orbital flight. Doing that would have been reckless, yes: Young's reason for not doing it was "Let's not practice Russian roulette."
The overpressure caused by the SRB ignitions exceeded predictions due to the geometry of the launch pad. This overpressure forced the orbiter's bodyflap away, beyond the design limits of the hydraulic system that controls it. John Young said that if he had known this, he would have ejected, which would have caused the loss of the shuttle.
Ah, I see. But in fact the body flap was not inoperative, and the Shuttle landed safely. So this looks to me like a case where Mission Control turned out to be justified in not telling the crew what had happened.
One thing I wonder about is whether it would have been possible to test the flap while in orbit, to see if the hydraulic lines were actually ruptured or not.
NASA is beholden to politicians and voters who get easily ruffled when politicians can point to explosions and say "those are you tax dollars." NASA needs to be perfect and impress people or they get their budget cut even further.
SpaceX's move-fast-and-break-things approach was lauded and NASA panned as being stuck in the past until <checks notes> the zeitgeist turned against Musk at which point the drones and tech blogs they read and write now view SpaceX as dangerous and wasteful at all costs. When a mere few years ago they couldn't shower them with enough praise.
I have no skin in this game other than to say the old school methods resulted in a janky ship that stranded two astronauts in space for months until they could catch a ride home on a SpaceX ship.
Starship is starting to be a very long and not so cheap project though that doesn't seem to be making significant iterative improvements - Rockets are still exploding regularly where you'd expect them to have moved beyond that phase.
Sorry, what? Starship 11 proceeded with a totally nominal ascent, orbit, descent, and powered landing that would end up with it standing on the ground, were it not deliberately landed into water.
What SLS currently has achieved had been achieved by Falcons and Dragons years ago, only way more cheaply and successfully.
No matter what we may think about Mr Musk, SLS is dead end.
NASA has been directed by Congress to use the remaining Space Shuttle RS25 engines on SLS. There aren't that many RS25's left, so Artemis requires that they make the most of each launch. Getting more RS25's produced is one of those "nobody's made them in a long time and it would be terribly expensive and time-consuming to do so" type of situations.
correction: there are 16 RS25's left, but production has begun on more for the Artemis V mission. However, production is slow so they can't just yeet SLS's into space and test rapidly.
I think we're all misunderstanding SpaceX. I think it's more of an engine factory disguised as a general space company that managed to borrow the dad's card.
The only thing SpaceX truly has an edge is its engines.
They have perfected the engine for a ship like a giant Mars class rockets. And that engine has been in full scale series production for years, while the actual Starship keeps blowing up. The reason they developed their hoverslam landing technology, also, was because they wanted their precious engines back.
It's as if they handed groups of gamers a credit card and they went onto plunder stocks of RTX cards from 20 miles around with some Roombas bought on reward points. It's just inches below the threshold for typical BS detector if it weren't specifically tuned for the relevant topics.
All makes sense if everything was an elaborate ploy to get someone to pay for specifically the engines.
Systemic inefficiencies aside. I wonder how much of that is a public funding feedback loop? The cost gets higher, because the standards, requirements, and processes are stricter, because there is the need to validate the use of public funds, exacerbated by being higher, increasing the standards/requirements etc etc... Especially in a political environment where there is no shortage of sniping funding for points.
Regardless, first thing it reminded me of was that interview quote about how if nasa had SpaceX track record they would have lost funding long ago. Is there a US political landscape, even back to 2008-2016, where that isn't the case?
I wonder how much is a cost-plus billing issue, too… and a contrast between primes with a single customer in mind and a commercial firm chasing a bigger pie than the immediate program at hand
It's everything. NASA doesn't have the money, brainpower, efficiency etc. to implement SpaceX development method. They can't fab it fast enough, nor can they iterate on the engineering fast enough, nor are they will to sustain the optics of a "government rocket blowing up" like Musk is. They don't have the caliber of engineering talent available or a workflow setup (high autonomy, long hours, better pay).
I think the public funding aspect complicates this, NASA is probably not in a position where it can blow up a bunch of rockets and still get funding for the next year.
Boris Chertok's memoir[0] on early Soviet space program is essential reading.
inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development, but they kept doing it. After that R-7 derivatives became the most reliable launch vehicle.
> inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development
I have not looked at the source (in Russian) for several years; now that I am curious I will check at home tonight. But as far as I remember "we are shooting towns into the sky" remark was not in reference to the R-7, but in reference to N1-L3, a hellishly expensive competitor to the Apollo manned Moon mission rocket. The meaning of the phrase was that each and every test should be taken extremely seriously as the cost of each flight is comparable to the cost of building a new city.
R-7 was developed much earlier when Korolev and his team at OKB-1 were iterating rapidly on much cheaper models that were primarily funded as rockets for strategic thermonuclear strike warheads. The civilian (Sputnik and later Gagarin) flights were an offshoot of that and were small enough that it happened as a side project. R-7 was a comparatively simple and cheap design, which may be why that family became a workhorse from the late 50s to carrying crews to the ISS. And the super expensive N1-L3 was a stillborn.
That's my recollection, need to recheck the sources.
I read it last some years ago too but I think it was in relation to many early moonshot failures - first half of Luna program and also early attempts at Mars and Venus.
Have to reread it too.
Still, while R-7 was initially funded as ballistic missile system, that was abandoned quite early, since it was very unwieldy, basically unusable.
Ballistic program in OKB-1 continued separately resulting in superchilled-LOX R-9.
N1 failure is attributed mostly to Korolev - Glushko rivalry that resulted in N1 lacking engines in time. It is widely belived that Kuznetsov bureau delivered just a bit too late - Korolev died, Moon race was lost and N1 project was literally buried.
EDIT: Mishin (OKB-1 head after Korolev) had no administrative push, and Glushko ended up heading it and building Energia-Buran. It's all a sad story of unchecked emotions leading to monumental waste.
> N1 failure is attributed mostly to Korolev - Glushko rivalry that resulted in N1 lacking engines in time.
That is a viable version. But I think this was one of the problems and there were plenty of others. While Chertok does point to the engines as a major problem, he also admits that the whole system became way too complex to succeed.
His description of electrical components (for which IIRC he was the chief engineer) and checkouts is telling. He also describes the feeling of "good envy" as the Russian engineers were listening in on comms between the Earth and the Apollo 13 during its mission. Which drove home the point of how much advantage US had, at least in electronic, and how powerful it was for its successful lunar program.
> It's all a sad story of unchecked emotions leading to monumental waste.
I have a softer view. Both Korolev and Glushko wanted their own leadership, which is normal. Korolev ran his shop in a dictatorial fashion, as that was the only way he could operate efficiently. Which is also fine and can produce spectacular results (and it did early on). But it comes with its own risks, including motivating strong leaders to branch out. I would not call it unchecked emotions that Glushko, after many years at OKB-1 went to run his own projects.
Living in a someone's shadow while under his dictatorial control is not for everyone. I can see the arguments for both sides. My 2c.
NASA did have SpaceX like approach. Much more aggressive as a matter of fact. They cooked the occupants of Apollo 1 and they sent another mission out broken so they had to fix it live in space.
The question is whether you have the appetite for killing three astronauts on a test run like the Apollo team did.
EDIT: Fine, I’ll clarify. By “SpaceX like approach” I mean iterative design. By “more aggressive” I mean risk tolerance much greater than SpaceX to the degree that they do things that SpaceX wouldn’t do.
This is ignoring the massive distinction between manned flight (where failure is not an option) and unmanned tests. NASA and SpaceX both know this well.
Calling it a "SpaceX like approach" and connecting to Apollo 1 is a neat trick, but SpaceX wouldn't (and doesn't) adopt that risky approach during manned flights.
It's all about "the right risk for the job." You can't be risky with human safety, but you also don't want to be overly timid and failure-averse during safely managed R&D tests, or your R&D grinds to a halt.
NASA and SpaceX are fundamentally incomparable, considering how these two organizations are established and the motivations that drive all the actors within. Sure, NASA could start to adopt certain approaches but I don't imagine it to work in a way anyone else would imagine it to.
They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit. Artemis I flew around the moon and came back already.
And don't compare costs because Starship does not and may never work so I dont care how much cheaper it is. If we are comparing fictional rockets I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.
> They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit.
They purposely were not trying for orbit from my understanding. The last one did orbit the earth at suborbital heights and release satellites. It did seem to do what they wanted it to do, it wasn't a failure.
Not only were they not trying to reach orbit, they are specifically trying to do risky things that they can learn from. It's not exactly destructive testing because they hope to succeed, but it's close.
Each Expendable Starship Super Heavy launched costs less than a single engine on the Artemis program.
Every time you see a Starship launch what you aren't seeing is manufacturing processes corrected, issues in launch protocols and field issues resolved. All the little things that build up to make your system reliable. Do you want the doctor who has done a hundred successful surgeries, or the one who has done one or two but spent a long time in school watching videos.
The big difference is in the end, Starship gets built faster, costs much less, and can do more. It's not even close.
You can't compare costs for a rocket that doesn't work yet. It's fictional. As I said in my post, if we are comparing fictional rockets then I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.
Of course you can. It wasn’t fictional when Superheavy flew back and was caught, was it? It costed real money, not fictional. What kind of mental gymnastics are you doing?
When SpaceX launches a rocket, they think it will work.
When NASA launches a rocket they know it will work.
The cost of going from "I think this will work" to "I know this will work" is really expensive. It might be cheaper/faster to fail a few times and fix those problems than it would be to verify everything up front.
> When SpaceX launches a rocket, they think it will work. When NASA launches a rocket they know it will work.
That is such an ignorant thing to say. You think Falcon 9 has had 500+ successful launches because they _think_ it will work?
The difference is that SpaceX is a private company that has the ability to iterate fast. NASA is a jobs program and Artemis/SLS a barrel of pork, simple as that.
So let's say you want to check something like a new fuel nozzle.
SpaceX might design and build the nozzle, then put it in the rocket and launch it. It might work how they intended, or it might not, but they'll find out immediately. They'll make changes, build a new nozzle, launch another rocket, and continue until it works like they want.
NASA will do a lot more testing, simulation, redesigning, etc. until they KNOW that the nozzle will perform perfectly on the first try.
On the surface, NASA's approach sounds cheaper because you aren't wasting rockets. In reality it looks like SpaceX's approach might be better.
You don't test the nozzle on _launch day_, what kind of ridiculous statement is that? You think the Air Force is paying SpaceX so they can test things the day it flies?
All components go through several test campaigns on the ground, while iterating on the design to address issues. These campaigns take months/years. That's why changes are stacked into "blocks", which are the equivalent of rocket versions. Each block must be certified by the Air Force and NASA to be deemed worthy of flying their payloads.
>> And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.
But everything that didn't blow up has been tested 11 times already. Things that did fail have had more than one design iteration tested. One approach has gains more real-world test experience.
NASA is constrained by the triple-whammy of taxpayer dollars, an administration that hates public science, and a market that rewards private enterprise more than them.
JPL would blow up a rocket every week, if the budget had room for it. Alas, we don't see that testing pace outside defense procurement.
I was referring to the quote “JPL would blow up a rocket every week, if the budget had room for it.” That makes it sound as if JPL can’t afford to follow the SpaceX strategy, hence my question.
I'm very, very concerned for the astronauts piloting this upcoming trans-lunar flight. Given that Boeing, well, does Boeing things, the current state of NASA in this political climate, and the fact that problems keep arising with this current stack, it makes me feel that there is a significant chance of issues mid-flight.
Godspeed to them, hopefully I'm being overly dour.
You summarized my concerns almost perfectly. My only addition is that you didn't stress enough how much this anti-science administration has destabilized NASA, both directly and indirectly. The institutional decision making has definitely been compromised.
Sadly, the worst thing I'm worried about is the current president pushing for a landing before he leaves office in order to have that feather in his cap. Isaacman seems competent and this article shows they are responding to the concerns of the plan and are "shortening the steps in the staircase" to a landing.
So far, Isaacman's competence has mostly consisted of (rightfully) throwing is predecessors under the bus. The real test will be if there are problems on his watch, but also it seems likely the result of having backbone will not be good for Isaacman and sycophants will end up running the agency again.
Wow, in the past no presidents pushed for NASA to launch under deadlines. Imagine telling them they need to get to the moon before the end of the decade. Unprecedented.
Good thing we have a large number of CRUD SaaS experts to tell us what's wrong with the space program
JFK set the goal 8 years out, not less than three to align with his presidential term to try to make himself look good. He also got a lot of feedback from NASA on the timelines of what was possible so the goal wasn't pulled out of thin air.
JFK set a goal that NASA managed to meet, but it is kind of difficult to see it as a hard deadline considering JFK was dead for years before any of the Apollo launches took place.
But even assuming we do view it as a deadline, the Apollo 1 losses are a pretty good argument that maybe we shouldn't repeat that.
Re: JFK and the 60s, I think the experts were in charge and had the final say on launch decisions with buy-in from all parties. Space exploration is certainly not risk-free.
Then you had Challenger, when experts were not listened to, and people died when they shouldn't have.
NASA got astronauts killed during Apollo, for some reason people forget about that or think it doesn't count because they weren't flying when it happened. After that they pumped the brakes and reevaluated their approaches, but the whole program remained extremely risky.
NASA was also far better funded back then and didn’t have to fight congresspeople and the aerospace giants lobbying them. Things move a lot more quickly when money isn’t a concern and you’re not having to scatter R&D and manufacturing across the four corners of the earth to get congress on board with you.
This is a good change. To summarize for those not following closely:
SLS, a rocket derived from Shuttle tech, takes astronauts on the Orion spacecraft to the vicinity of the moon. From there, a lander built by either SpaceX or Blue Origin will take the astronauts to the surface and then back to Orion. The astronauts will then return to Earth in Orion.
Artemis I flew a couple of years ago and took an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the moon and back to Earth.
Artemis II, which should hopefully fly in April, will take 4 astronauts around the moon--the first time humans have been that far in space in 50+ years.
Artemis III was going to be a crewed moon landing, planned around 2028, but between delays in the lander development and the complexity of this mission, no one expected it to happen on time.
The major change that NASA has announced is to launch SLS more often--ideally once every 10 months. There are two major advantages to this:
1. More frequent launches will improve reliability because the team/engineers will understand the system better. There will be more commonality between launches.
2. With more launches before the end of the decade deadline there are more opportunities for intermediate milestones. In particular, Artemis III will turn into an Earth-orbit mission in which Orion will dock with one or both of the landers. This will test out the system before heading to the moon. Moreover, NASA plans to have at least two lunar landing attempts in 2028, which means that even if the first attempt is scrubbed, they will still have a chance to land before the end of the decade.
to be fair they had way less requirements on making the CGI look good
back then TVs weren't that popular and those that had one were stuck with very low definition video, today our 2k and 4k screens would be able to spot their flaws easily
I think the main difference was political: for Apollo you had the most powerful nation in history throw their economic and political will into pushing a project forward.
NASA programs today are mainly about creating/maintaining jobs and keeping private industry contractors busy. They lost the political agency and freedom to move fast that they had in the 60s.
Well to be fair Nasa isn't nearly as good as it once was. The quality of engineer during the Apollo era was far better and more like what can be found at Spacex
More frequent launches with less ambitious progress per launch makes good sense,
and follows the old-school approach used through Apollo to mitigate risk.
Having a lunar lander test in earth orbit,
for example,
is roughly the same mission as Apollo 9, is a good call.
Validating everything works together has been a sort of sore spot for the Artemis program.
And even the Apollo 10 mission which went 99.99% of the way from the Earth to the moon, just 15km from the surface (but couldn't have landed on the moon- LM structure was too heavy) was incredibly important step. The sort of thing that people today would want to skip, it doesn't seem flashy or necessary. Why take all the risk of going into lunar orbit and separating the modules (requiring the very first rendezvous not in in Earth orbit) but not actually land on the Moon? It was about getting all of the ground crew proved and worked out, and proving that the rendezvous would work and they could get home, so that the actual landing mission could focus their efforts on just working out the last 15km, confident that all of the other problems were already dealt with. Trying to do all of that in one mission would have been a gigantic mess- A11 crew felt a lack of training time as it was.
Orion doesn't seem operationally or financially capable of launching more than once a year. It's not that they don't want to do test flights, it's that they can barely do anything.
I’d say we’ll look back in a few decades and recognise the Apollo programs as the peak of the USA. Those people did truly amazing things. I recommend “Space Rocket History” podcast if you like Apollo. It’s a wonderful and highly detailed podcast and covers the US and Soviet space race in great detail.
If you visit US, I really recommend a detour to the Kennedy Space Center if you can, there's a ton of interesting stuff especially about the Apollo program.
Especially if you can time your visit to Florida with a launch. Seeing the Shuttle launch in real life made me realize what a poor medium television is to actually show you reality.
(I don't know what the current policies are but you used to be able to apply in advance for VIP tickets, or buy them on the secondary market, which gives you much closer viewing of the launch)
They're getting slightly bullied into following their own rocket certification process. Wild they're going right to human flight without their three unmanned certification flights, etc. NASA themselves will not allow mission critical payloads on rockets that don't meet that process. But they're (trying) to skip it with Artemis.
I'm glad this is getting overhauled, the existing plan was a bit of a mess and NASA can't afford mistakes on a program of this scale. Hopefully we get safer and more effective result out of this.
I knew a lot of this, and had a good idea of how bad this whole thing was but... damn, how comprehensively horrible a parade of bad, multi-decade decisions this is turning out to be.
Why does it seem like we can’t do shit anymore? Was it always like this and there was no news coverage of all the failures? If not what is the main cause of failure right now? Is it onerous regulations and bureaucracy? Stressed work environments?
Artemis was never a "return to the moon" program. NASA had one of those; congress killed it and replaced it with a "keep shuttle jobs going" program. There has always been and will always be pork spending, but in this case keeping the gravy train going has been the primary if not sole driver, as opposed to programs like Apollo where it was a means to an end. People have known it was a problem from day one and probably most people thought it would get cancelled and replaced by something more sound long before this point.
The Apollo program budget was immensely large, and the objective was clear: put people on the moon before the Soviet Union.
Artemis objectives are less well defined, more ambitious and with way less money. The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor. The difference in importance between the two is the cause of all the failures.
And we can't forget the nationalism at the time. Everyone was rallied behind the program and wanting to beat the Soviet Union. I mean, sputnik scared the hell out of everyone.
I think that's probably important framing for how things were reported back then. But also, I'm wrong like 99.9999999% of the time. So!
I feel the same. The Golden Gate Bridge took 3 years to build, start to finish. It was the biggest suspension to have ever been built at the time. Compare that to any modern public works project of today. There are countless examples of how we used to be able to build things before 1970.
Per Wikipedia, the Golden Gate Bridge was proposed in 1917, approved by the state for design in 1923, funded in 1930, started construction in 1933, and completed in 1937.
The reason modern projects take so long is that so many of them are stuck in design or awaiting funding stage for what feels like interminable ages; once the construction phase starts, they tend to go fairly quickly. But if you look at projects 100 years ago, well, they also seem to have fairly lengthy pre-construction timelines. It's just that we conveniently forget about those when we look back on them nowadays.
11 people died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. We have onerous safety requirements and red tape which is why everything is so slow. Very few people die on construction sites now. Do we want 11 dead people or do we want things done extremely slow? I guess as a society we have answered that question.
We've probably answered wrongly. Even money aside, how many more people die in traffic accidents due to the extra miles driven because of delays in construction?
Some regs are worth it, certainly, but being overly cautious is in itself unsafe.
Sure and sometimes you just need to actually issue safety equipment and install a fall net.
The historical comparisons are complete BS: they wind up at "if we sacrifice enough people to the industrial god he will reward us" rather then discussing anything real.
I think the narrative is more difficult now, as is visibility of goals. “Land a man on the Moon and return him safely” is a clear objective, while “decarbonize the global economy” or “make AI safe and useful” are fuzzier, and don’t give you a single flag‑planting moment.
But there's no lack of huge achievements. The Mars rovers are amazing: super-sonic parachutes, retro rockets, deploying a little helicopter with no real-time control is huge. So is planting JWST at the L2 point and unfolding it a million miles from earth.
Also, the NASA budget in the 1960's was 10 times higher.
We're doing really complicated stuff. And think about it though, in the 60s/70s we had one organization - NASA. That was it. Today, we have RocketLab, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and NASA, plus Boeing I guess.
If you look at the unmanned side of NASA, that's going great. NASA can get amazing stuff done.
The manned side gets political attention, and the nature of current politics makes it a bad kind of attention. Results are essentially irrelevant. Jobs and cronyism are the point.
The overall design of the Space Launch System makes very little sense. We know all too well that solid rockets are a bad idea for crewed spaceflight. Hydrogen is a bad fuel for a first stage. It's horrendously wasteful to use expensive, complicated engines designed to be reused, and then throw them away on every launch. Early estimates were over $2 billion per launch, which in the current age is total clownshoes. The actual costs will be much higher still.
So why are they doing it? Because using all this old, rather inappropriate tech allows them to keep paying the contractors for it. If you gave NASA a pile of money and told them to build a moon program, they wouldn't build this. But it's not their choice.
Way more safety and rigid testing procedures and a better understanding - the Apollo program was all done by the seat of the pants engineering that somehow worked all based on the ideas of the team that built the German V2.
Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.
Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.
Essentially, neoliberalism. The goal of everyone on the project is now higher and higher profits. Delivering a working product doesnt necessarily mean best profits anymore. Spacex would rather drag the project along with ships that dont work than to just make something that works. The government has privatized so much of their workload into so few specialized companies that they really can't stop them from doing this.
On the surface, the changes appear logical.
The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.
I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
(It seems that Artemis cost is $92B, where as SpaceX's Starship costs are less than $10B so far, give or take. So it seems that SpaceX is a more efficient approach.)
This reminds me of my all-time-favourite HN comment[0] (and a life lesson too):
This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105478
This works if there's no cost of failure in the meantime.
If we're putting humans into rockets into space, I'd like to think we adopt a balanced approach.
Isn't this a non-sequitur though? Artemis presumably doesn't have to actually load up humans on the rockets to flight test them.
It works perfectly well when you’ve got deep pockets and unmanned test vehicles though.
Now tell the fake story about the moneys and the ladder too.
The actual real world result is the opposite. When you score on quantity you get James Patterson, not F Scott Fitzgerald.
Given that SLS is the part of Artemis that has actually shown it works, and Starship is the part that is nowhere near schedule, and doesn't work, it's very funny to suggest that NASA should learn from SpaceX and not the other way around.
SpaceX hasn't even had the confidence to put Starship in LEO yet, and has not carried 1kg of real payload (and barely a few kg of test payloads) - while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.
It's not like SLS is on schedule either, and it is absurdly more expensive than Starship. It's very likely that Starship will eventually be operational with lower total costs by any accounting measure. (And I say this as a current NASA contractor and current anti-fan of Musk)
I agree that SLS is not an efficient project by any stretch of the imagination, and they have their own problems. I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it. In particular, their plan for how to achieve the Moon mission, requiring an unclear number of missions to fuel a single flight in orbit.
Even if Starship completely fails, SLS is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. Terminating it is the only logical thing to do.
The whole moon thing is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. But if one wants to do it, one should choose between the working approaches.
Orion is actually pointless, I don't understand why the mission goals are valuable. Partial success would be meaningless. Success is meaningless.
Starship in contrast has a variety of meaningful objectives. Even if Starship only achieves proving that cryogenic fuel transfer in LEO is possible that's a valuable mission goal in and of itself.
If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.
Might as well get some ROI out of it though.
IMO the Blue Origin hate was overhyped. They're clearly the only ones who know what they're doing. NASA and SpaceX both are way in over their heads.
You don't have long to wait to see an obvious reason, the first v3 starship is in preflight testing right now.
And do you think the this next launch will deploy actual satellites in orbit around the Moon? If not, I still don't see why you'd compare it to SLS's current success. Or do you think this will deploy 100 tons to orbit for less than $10/ton, or fly to Mars, since these are the stated goals for Starship?
We have no idea what starship has cost. It's a private company.
Even if a Starship needs to be scrapped after landing, the Super Heavy booster works, returns nominally to the launch site, and can be reused. This alone should make the whole thing cheaper than SLS.
Only if the SuperHeavy booster can achieve the same performance as the SLS (payload to orbit), with similar levels of operational complexity.
The SLS has already proven it can fly to lunar orbit and back on one single launch. In contrast, even if everything goes according to plan, Starship requires at least a dozen re-fueling flights while it hangs in orbit around the Earth to be able to then fly to the Moon.
Will one Starship launch, when it eventually works, be cheaper than SLS? Very likely. Will 12+ Starship launches + the time in orbit be cheaper than a single SLS launch? Much, much less likely.
I don't think "no idea" is fair. We don't have exact numbers, but there are various statements out there that give clues. Even the highest estimates I can put together put Starship far cheaper than SLS.
You have to consider that Starship has not reached anywhere near the operational goals for Artemis, and there is no realistic time line for when it might. So we really do have no idea how much it might cost by the time it reaches the milestone SLS has already cleared (successful flight in lunar orbit, with a full payload that it successfully deploys).
I think it's actually a reasonable comparison.
To OP's point, Artemis has cost $92 billion over 14 years. This has produced exactly one launch.
It's hard to put an exact timeline on Starship since a lot of its development overlaps with Falcon 9 using the same components, but it's inarguable that it has cost one tenth Artemis so far.
I agree that Starship has been plagued by delays and the capabilities are so far mostly just talk. However, it has flown a number of times, and I would be willing to make a strong bet that it will orbit the moon with real payload long before it catches up to Artemis in budget.
Starship has not yet flown even a fraction of what SLS has, so I think the comparison is premature. If it takes another ten years to get to a point that it can successfully achieve its Artemis objectives, I doubt it will remain cheaper than SLS. And given that it has already been delayed way beyond the first estimates for when it might be ready (it was supposed to have flown to Mars with astronauts on board by 2022, I believe), I don't see why another 10 years is any worse an estimate than others.
SLS has flown once. What are you talking about?
> the capabilities are so far mostly just talk
lol what? They've caught and successfully reflown the super heavy booster, and they've mostly successfully done a soft landing of Starship in the sea. How is that remotely "just talk"?
Isn’t SLS still costing like $4 b’s per launch?
This is why I do not believe in America setting up a permanent lunar base.
The Chinese are basically going to launch a few astronauts up there with a modern Saturn 5. But for them that would be a success because it is their first time.
You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.
> You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.
Depends on what happens once on the moon. If all you do is send 2 people at a time to collect rocks, then it does get boring to the general public. If each landing assembles the next section of a moon habitat, then I think the interest sticks around longer.
> You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.
If America (or China) says the best spots on the moon belong to America (or China), suddenly it's Space Race 2.0 and everyone cares.
This is what will happen once any building actually starts happening.
Congress is fickle enough without rockets blowing up, even if NASA explains up front that it's going to happen. There is much which is suboptimal about NASA, not just their attitude towards perfection, which is downstream of the political reality they have to deal with. For instance, a project that could be done in one year given adaquate funding will instead be spread out over ten years or more, to spread out the costs and keep NASA's monetary requirements as smooth and predictable as possible, for the sake of Congress.
2cents from a kid who grew up in a NASA family during the shuttle years - As others have commented, NASA’s baseline objective is to not kill astronauts. My understanding of their ethos growing up was that there was absolutely no excuse not to pursue excellence and prioritize safety when people’s lives were on the line. One would have to think that goal is fundamentally incompatible with SpaceX’s way of doing things (see the many exploding rockets - who wants to get in that?). And from what I’ve read and heard through the grapevine, working with SpaceX as a contractor on Artemis has certainly had pain points related to these mismatched priorities.
SpaceX has the most reliable orbital launch vehicle ever made. Falcon 9 block 5 has had 550 successful launches out of 551 attempts, giving it a 99.8% success rate. For comparison, Soyuz-2's success rate is 97%, Ariane 5 is 95.7%, and the Space Shuttle was 98.5%. All of these are worse than Falcon 9's block 5's landing success rate of 98.9% (552 out of 558 attempts[1]).
The current Starship launches are part of a development and testing program. They expect quite a few failures (though probably not as many as they've experienced). But since each Starship launch is only 1/25th the cost of an SLS launch, SpaceX can afford to blow up a lot of them. And they won't put people on them until they have a track record of safe operation. Falcon 9 didn't have crew on it until the 85th launch.
1. The number of landing attempts is higher than the number of launches because Falcon Heavy results in multiple landings per launch.
You risk it when there are no people on board to find the issues. Fix issues, rinse repeat.
NASA/Congress pushes the armchair quarterback approach. Analyze forever, fail because analysis isn't the same thing as real world experience, get stuck using 50 year old rocket technology. Each engine on SLS cost more than the entire Starship super heavy launch vehicle.
By weight the RS-25 engines cost about 70% of that of building their 7000lb mass dry mass out of gold. That's insane.
The shuttle lost two crews. Maybe pushing its limits in unmanned testing would have prevented those incidents.
Testing wasn't really the issue with the loss of the two shuttles. In both cases, it was mostly a management issue. For Challenger NASA had seen o-ring erosion in earlier launches, and decided it was not a big risk to the crew. Then they launched Challenger against the recommendations of the engineers in charge of o-ring seals. For Columbia, they has seen foam strikes in earlier launches, but since they had not caused catastrophe in the past, they decided that foam strikes were acceptable. Even when it was clear that a large foam strike had occurred on the launch of Columbia, management wasn't concerned enough to try to get ground-based images of the shuttle to check for damage. Could Columbia's crew have been saved had they known the extent of the damage? No one can say of course, but not even trying to do everything possible was inexcusable.
I don't think so, because both losses were due to bad management decisions under irrational political pressure, not any lack of engineering knowledge that more unmanned testing could have provided.
Challenger was lost because NASA ignored a critical flight risk with the SRB joint O-rings. And by "ignored", I mean "documented that the risk existed, that it could result in loss of vehicle and loss of lives of the crew, and then waived the risk so the Shuttle could keep flying instead of being grounded until the issue was fixed". They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it. But that was politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.
Columbia was lost because NASA ignored the risks of tile damage due to their belief that it couldn't be fixed anyway once the Shuttle was in orbit. But that meant NASA also devoted no effort to eliminating the risk of tile damage by fixing the issue that caused it. Which again would have been politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.
> They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it.
Should such testing have been needed? No.
Was such testing needed, given NASA's political pressures and management? Maybe. Unmanned testing in similar conditions before putting humans on it might've resulted in a nice explosion without loss of life that would've been much harder to ignore than "the hypothesizing of those worrywart engineers," and might've provided the necessary ammunition to resist said political pressures.
> Unmanned testing in similar conditions before putting humans on it might've resulted in a nice explosion without loss of life that would've been much harder to ignore
The loss of the Challenger was the 25th manned orbital mission. So we can expect that it might have taken 25 unmanned missions to cause a similar loss of vehicle. But what would those 25 unmanned missions have been doing? There just wasn't 25 unmanned missions' worth of things to find out. That's also far more unmanned missions than were flown on any previous NASA space program before manned flights began.
Even leaving the above aside, if it would have been politically possible to even fly that many unmanned missions, it would have been politically possible to ground the Shuttle even after manned missions started based on the obvious signs of problems with the SRB joint O-rings. There were, IIRC, at least a dozen previous manned flights which showed issues. There were also good critiques of the design available at the time--which, in the kind of political environment you're imagining, would have been listened to. That design might not even have made it into the final Shuttle when it was flown.
In short, I don't see your alternative scenario as plausible, because the very things that would have been required to make it possible would also have made it unnecessary.
> So we can expect that it might have taken 25 unmanned missions to cause a similar loss of vehicle.
That doesn't follow. If those were unmanned test flights pushing the vehicle limits you can't just assume they would have gone as they actually did.
They very nearly lost the first shuttle they launched. Jumping straight into manned testing was quite reckless, but politically necessary. If they had tested the shuttle without crew, that would have gotten people thinking that crews probably aren't necessary for a lot of shuttle missions, in particular launching satellites. It also would have prompted people to compare the cost of shuttle launches to other unmanned rocket launches, in particular for commercial satellite launches (which they were doing until the Challenger disaster.) These are comparisons that would have been very problematic for NASA as a political entity.
> They very nearly lost the first shuttle they launched.
Which mission are you referring to?
If it's STS-1, AFAIK there were no close call incidents during the actual flight, but the mission commander, John Young, did have to veto a suggestion to make that mission an RTLS abort instead of an actual orbital flight. Doing that would have been reckless, yes: Young's reason for not doing it was "Let's not practice Russian roulette."
The overpressure caused by the SRB ignitions exceeded predictions due to the geometry of the launch pad. This overpressure forced the orbiter's bodyflap away, beyond the design limits of the hydraulic system that controls it. John Young said that if he had known this, he would have ejected, which would have caused the loss of the shuttle.
Ah, I see. But in fact the body flap was not inoperative, and the Shuttle landed safely. So this looks to me like a case where Mission Control turned out to be justified in not telling the crew what had happened.
One thing I wonder about is whether it would have been possible to test the flap while in orbit, to see if the hydraulic lines were actually ruptured or not.
The lesson is that people can be irrational even it the logic is sound.
NASA is beholden to politicians and voters who get easily ruffled when politicians can point to explosions and say "those are you tax dollars." NASA needs to be perfect and impress people or they get their budget cut even further.
SpaceX's move-fast-and-break-things approach was lauded and NASA panned as being stuck in the past until <checks notes> the zeitgeist turned against Musk at which point the drones and tech blogs they read and write now view SpaceX as dangerous and wasteful at all costs. When a mere few years ago they couldn't shower them with enough praise.
I have no skin in this game other than to say the old school methods resulted in a janky ship that stranded two astronauts in space for months until they could catch a ride home on a SpaceX ship.
Starship is starting to be a very long and not so cheap project though that doesn't seem to be making significant iterative improvements - Rockets are still exploding regularly where you'd expect them to have moved beyond that phase.
Sorry, what? Starship 11 proceeded with a totally nominal ascent, orbit, descent, and powered landing that would end up with it standing on the ground, were it not deliberately landed into water.
What SLS currently has achieved had been achieved by Falcons and Dragons years ago, only way more cheaply and successfully.
No matter what we may think about Mr Musk, SLS is dead end.
NASA should not do what businesses do, because by definition their job is to do what businesses cannot or will not do.
They should not adopt spacex practices, they should adopt spacex lift vehicles (once proven).
NASA has been directed by Congress to use the remaining Space Shuttle RS25 engines on SLS. There aren't that many RS25's left, so Artemis requires that they make the most of each launch. Getting more RS25's produced is one of those "nobody's made them in a long time and it would be terribly expensive and time-consuming to do so" type of situations.
correction: there are 16 RS25's left, but production has begun on more for the Artemis V mission. However, production is slow so they can't just yeet SLS's into space and test rapidly.
Neither craft have achieved their missions so it's a bit early to make that call.
Well the SLS has already sent a capsule around the Moon. And it has kept a lot of people employed. That's pretty much what it was intended to do.
Only the latter achievement was a real intention. The former is just the malarkey useful to sell it
Also interesting to hear what the NASA people assigned to work with SpaceX say:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E&t=1440s
> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
that would be such a culture change you'd have to disband NASA and start it over.
Yeah there is no way they do that with THREE LOCVs in their history. The fire, Challenger, and Columbia.
It's a risk-averse culture for a reason.
I think we're all misunderstanding SpaceX. I think it's more of an engine factory disguised as a general space company that managed to borrow the dad's card.
The only thing SpaceX truly has an edge is its engines.
They have perfected the engine for a ship like a giant Mars class rockets. And that engine has been in full scale series production for years, while the actual Starship keeps blowing up. The reason they developed their hoverslam landing technology, also, was because they wanted their precious engines back.
It's as if they handed groups of gamers a credit card and they went onto plunder stocks of RTX cards from 20 miles around with some Roombas bought on reward points. It's just inches below the threshold for typical BS detector if it weren't specifically tuned for the relevant topics.
All makes sense if everything was an elaborate ploy to get someone to pay for specifically the engines.
Systemic inefficiencies aside. I wonder how much of that is a public funding feedback loop? The cost gets higher, because the standards, requirements, and processes are stricter, because there is the need to validate the use of public funds, exacerbated by being higher, increasing the standards/requirements etc etc... Especially in a political environment where there is no shortage of sniping funding for points.
Regardless, first thing it reminded me of was that interview quote about how if nasa had SpaceX track record they would have lost funding long ago. Is there a US political landscape, even back to 2008-2016, where that isn't the case?
I wonder how much is a cost-plus billing issue, too… and a contrast between primes with a single customer in mind and a commercial firm chasing a bigger pie than the immediate program at hand
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4498/1
If I were to bet, even with no information. I would wager that the private company is more capital efficient than the government ran one
Maybe go read the report on Starliner before making that call? Boeing is a private company too and no one is this deferential about it.
My suspicion is ULA can’t manufacture SLS quickly enough, at high enough quality, to meet multiple, gradual tests.
It's everything. NASA doesn't have the money, brainpower, efficiency etc. to implement SpaceX development method. They can't fab it fast enough, nor can they iterate on the engineering fast enough, nor are they will to sustain the optics of a "government rocket blowing up" like Musk is. They don't have the caliber of engineering talent available or a workflow setup (high autonomy, long hours, better pay).
SpaceX doesn't have investors itching to take AWAY money from their programs. they are obligated to be perfect on the first run. Public vs. private.
If NASA switches to the Space X approach of just blowing up its rockets it would soon need to change its name to "Need Another Seven Astronauts".
I think the public funding aspect complicates this, NASA is probably not in a position where it can blow up a bunch of rockets and still get funding for the next year.
They used to depend on the Army to blow up the rockets for them.
The Artemis mission is manned. I assume the Starships are unmanned.
The risk profile is very different.
Boris Chertok's memoir[0] on early Soviet space program is essential reading.
inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development, but they kept doing it. After that R-7 derivatives became the most reliable launch vehicle.
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...
> inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development
I have not looked at the source (in Russian) for several years; now that I am curious I will check at home tonight. But as far as I remember "we are shooting towns into the sky" remark was not in reference to the R-7, but in reference to N1-L3, a hellishly expensive competitor to the Apollo manned Moon mission rocket. The meaning of the phrase was that each and every test should be taken extremely seriously as the cost of each flight is comparable to the cost of building a new city.
R-7 was developed much earlier when Korolev and his team at OKB-1 were iterating rapidly on much cheaper models that were primarily funded as rockets for strategic thermonuclear strike warheads. The civilian (Sputnik and later Gagarin) flights were an offshoot of that and were small enough that it happened as a side project. R-7 was a comparatively simple and cheap design, which may be why that family became a workhorse from the late 50s to carrying crews to the ISS. And the super expensive N1-L3 was a stillborn.
That's my recollection, need to recheck the sources.
"For all Mankind" is a great alternate history show that imagines the N1 succeeding.
I read it last some years ago too but I think it was in relation to many early moonshot failures - first half of Luna program and also early attempts at Mars and Venus.
Have to reread it too.
Still, while R-7 was initially funded as ballistic missile system, that was abandoned quite early, since it was very unwieldy, basically unusable.
Ballistic program in OKB-1 continued separately resulting in superchilled-LOX R-9.
N1 failure is attributed mostly to Korolev - Glushko rivalry that resulted in N1 lacking engines in time. It is widely belived that Kuznetsov bureau delivered just a bit too late - Korolev died, Moon race was lost and N1 project was literally buried.
EDIT: Mishin (OKB-1 head after Korolev) had no administrative push, and Glushko ended up heading it and building Energia-Buran. It's all a sad story of unchecked emotions leading to monumental waste.
> N1 failure is attributed mostly to Korolev - Glushko rivalry that resulted in N1 lacking engines in time.
That is a viable version. But I think this was one of the problems and there were plenty of others. While Chertok does point to the engines as a major problem, he also admits that the whole system became way too complex to succeed.
His description of electrical components (for which IIRC he was the chief engineer) and checkouts is telling. He also describes the feeling of "good envy" as the Russian engineers were listening in on comms between the Earth and the Apollo 13 during its mission. Which drove home the point of how much advantage US had, at least in electronic, and how powerful it was for its successful lunar program.
> It's all a sad story of unchecked emotions leading to monumental waste.
I have a softer view. Both Korolev and Glushko wanted their own leadership, which is normal. Korolev ran his shop in a dictatorial fashion, as that was the only way he could operate efficiently. Which is also fine and can produce spectacular results (and it did early on). But it comes with its own risks, including motivating strong leaders to branch out. I would not call it unchecked emotions that Glushko, after many years at OKB-1 went to run his own projects.
Living in a someone's shadow while under his dictatorial control is not for everyone. I can see the arguments for both sides. My 2c.
NASA did have SpaceX like approach. Much more aggressive as a matter of fact. They cooked the occupants of Apollo 1 and they sent another mission out broken so they had to fix it live in space.
The question is whether you have the appetite for killing three astronauts on a test run like the Apollo team did.
EDIT: Fine, I’ll clarify. By “SpaceX like approach” I mean iterative design. By “more aggressive” I mean risk tolerance much greater than SpaceX to the degree that they do things that SpaceX wouldn’t do.
This is ignoring the massive distinction between manned flight (where failure is not an option) and unmanned tests. NASA and SpaceX both know this well.
Calling it a "SpaceX like approach" and connecting to Apollo 1 is a neat trick, but SpaceX wouldn't (and doesn't) adopt that risky approach during manned flights.
It's all about "the right risk for the job." You can't be risky with human safety, but you also don't want to be overly timid and failure-averse during safely managed R&D tests, or your R&D grinds to a halt.
Insane that this is getting downvoted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system
NASA and SpaceX are fundamentally incomparable, considering how these two organizations are established and the motivations that drive all the actors within. Sure, NASA could start to adopt certain approaches but I don't imagine it to work in a way anyone else would imagine it to.
They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit. Artemis I flew around the moon and came back already.
And don't compare costs because Starship does not and may never work so I dont care how much cheaper it is. If we are comparing fictional rockets I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.
> They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit.
They purposely were not trying for orbit from my understanding. The last one did orbit the earth at suborbital heights and release satellites. It did seem to do what they wanted it to do, it wasn't a failure.
Not only were they not trying to reach orbit, they are specifically trying to do risky things that they can learn from. It's not exactly destructive testing because they hope to succeed, but it's close.
That just seems like a huge waste of money
Each Expendable Starship Super Heavy launched costs less than a single engine on the Artemis program.
Every time you see a Starship launch what you aren't seeing is manufacturing processes corrected, issues in launch protocols and field issues resolved. All the little things that build up to make your system reliable. Do you want the doctor who has done a hundred successful surgeries, or the one who has done one or two but spent a long time in school watching videos.
The big difference is in the end, Starship gets built faster, costs much less, and can do more. It's not even close.
You can't compare costs for a rocket that doesn't work yet. It's fictional. As I said in my post, if we are comparing fictional rockets then I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.
Of course you can. It wasn’t fictional when Superheavy flew back and was caught, was it? It costed real money, not fictional. What kind of mental gymnastics are you doing?
Until it actually works every dollar is waste.
It wouldn't if you were scheduled to fly on it.
Elon Musk's net worth now (sadly) near a trillion dollars... :/
Easy not to fail when you are purposefully not trying to succeed
I doubt they set out to launch eleven times without reaching orbit.
They very explicitly were not setting out for orbit for most of them.
Yes, but if you asked someone at SpaceX before flight 1 where they would be by flight 11, I doubt they would have been happy about the reality.
And?
Not a single one of them had reaching stable orbit in the flight plan.
This is why NASA can never adopt the SpaceX philosophy. People don't understand the concept of test fight.
> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
This seems so ridiculous in the abstract. Like, what is that exactly supposed to entail in the context of launching rockets?
When SpaceX launches a rocket, they think it will work. When NASA launches a rocket they know it will work.
The cost of going from "I think this will work" to "I know this will work" is really expensive. It might be cheaper/faster to fail a few times and fix those problems than it would be to verify everything up front.
> When SpaceX launches a rocket, they think it will work. When NASA launches a rocket they know it will work.
That is such an ignorant thing to say. You think Falcon 9 has had 500+ successful launches because they _think_ it will work?
The difference is that SpaceX is a private company that has the ability to iterate fast. NASA is a jobs program and Artemis/SLS a barrel of pork, simple as that.
Again, that is put so vaguely as to be actionably useless.
So let's say you want to check something like a new fuel nozzle.
SpaceX might design and build the nozzle, then put it in the rocket and launch it. It might work how they intended, or it might not, but they'll find out immediately. They'll make changes, build a new nozzle, launch another rocket, and continue until it works like they want.
NASA will do a lot more testing, simulation, redesigning, etc. until they KNOW that the nozzle will perform perfectly on the first try.
On the surface, NASA's approach sounds cheaper because you aren't wasting rockets. In reality it looks like SpaceX's approach might be better.
You don't test the nozzle on _launch day_, what kind of ridiculous statement is that? You think the Air Force is paying SpaceX so they can test things the day it flies?
All components go through several test campaigns on the ground, while iterating on the design to address issues. These campaigns take months/years. That's why changes are stacked into "blocks", which are the equivalent of rocket versions. Each block must be certified by the Air Force and NASA to be deemed worthy of flying their payloads.
SpaceX is willing to blow up a rocket, even if it exploding is fully planned and expected. That's it, really not hard to comprehend.
Columbia. Challenger.
The real question is which is more likely to avoid catastrophic failures in practice.
And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.
>> And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.
But everything that didn't blow up has been tested 11 times already. Things that did fail have had more than one design iteration tested. One approach has gains more real-world test experience.
NASA is constrained by the triple-whammy of taxpayer dollars, an administration that hates public science, and a market that rewards private enterprise more than them.
JPL would blow up a rocket every week, if the budget had room for it. Alas, we don't see that testing pace outside defense procurement.
So is Artemis cheaper than Starship then?
Are you familiar with the definition of the word "constrained"?
I was referring to the quote “JPL would blow up a rocket every week, if the budget had room for it.” That makes it sound as if JPL can’t afford to follow the SpaceX strategy, hence my question.
I'm very, very concerned for the astronauts piloting this upcoming trans-lunar flight. Given that Boeing, well, does Boeing things, the current state of NASA in this political climate, and the fact that problems keep arising with this current stack, it makes me feel that there is a significant chance of issues mid-flight.
Godspeed to them, hopefully I'm being overly dour.
Sadly, I feel the same way. Here's a great video of Starliner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L96asfTvJ_A
You summarized my concerns almost perfectly. My only addition is that you didn't stress enough how much this anti-science administration has destabilized NASA, both directly and indirectly. The institutional decision making has definitely been compromised.
Artemis II is a disaster in progress.
Sadly, the worst thing I'm worried about is the current president pushing for a landing before he leaves office in order to have that feather in his cap. Isaacman seems competent and this article shows they are responding to the concerns of the plan and are "shortening the steps in the staircase" to a landing.
So far, Isaacman's competence has mostly consisted of (rightfully) throwing is predecessors under the bus. The real test will be if there are problems on his watch, but also it seems likely the result of having backbone will not be good for Isaacman and sycophants will end up running the agency again.
Wow, in the past no presidents pushed for NASA to launch under deadlines. Imagine telling them they need to get to the moon before the end of the decade. Unprecedented.
Good thing we have a large number of CRUD SaaS experts to tell us what's wrong with the space program
JFK set the goal 8 years out, not less than three to align with his presidential term to try to make himself look good. He also got a lot of feedback from NASA on the timelines of what was possible so the goal wasn't pulled out of thin air.
As someone who worked on Orion I find this comment section hilarious.
How so? Hearing from someone who has worked in this environment would be enlightening.
We're just going off what we read in the news. I'm sure that informed commentary from someone with first-hand knowledge would be interesting.
Challenger was pretty directly caused by the Reagan admin pressuring NASA to launch it too, so yes?
Politicians have pressured NASA for launches previously and it has killed astronauts.
JFK set a goal that NASA managed to meet, but it is kind of difficult to see it as a hard deadline considering JFK was dead for years before any of the Apollo launches took place.
But even assuming we do view it as a deadline, the Apollo 1 losses are a pretty good argument that maybe we shouldn't repeat that.
Re: JFK and the 60s, I think the experts were in charge and had the final say on launch decisions with buy-in from all parties. Space exploration is certainly not risk-free.
Then you had Challenger, when experts were not listened to, and people died when they shouldn't have.
I don't understand the hostility.
NASA got astronauts killed during Apollo, for some reason people forget about that or think it doesn't count because they weren't flying when it happened. After that they pumped the brakes and reevaluated their approaches, but the whole program remained extremely risky.
NASA was also far better funded back then and didn’t have to fight congresspeople and the aerospace giants lobbying them. Things move a lot more quickly when money isn’t a concern and you’re not having to scatter R&D and manufacturing across the four corners of the earth to get congress on board with you.
This is a good change. To summarize for those not following closely:
SLS, a rocket derived from Shuttle tech, takes astronauts on the Orion spacecraft to the vicinity of the moon. From there, a lander built by either SpaceX or Blue Origin will take the astronauts to the surface and then back to Orion. The astronauts will then return to Earth in Orion.
Artemis I flew a couple of years ago and took an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the moon and back to Earth.
Artemis II, which should hopefully fly in April, will take 4 astronauts around the moon--the first time humans have been that far in space in 50+ years.
Artemis III was going to be a crewed moon landing, planned around 2028, but between delays in the lander development and the complexity of this mission, no one expected it to happen on time.
The major change that NASA has announced is to launch SLS more often--ideally once every 10 months. There are two major advantages to this:
1. More frequent launches will improve reliability because the team/engineers will understand the system better. There will be more commonality between launches.
2. With more launches before the end of the decade deadline there are more opportunities for intermediate milestones. In particular, Artemis III will turn into an Earth-orbit mission in which Orion will dock with one or both of the landers. This will test out the system before heading to the moon. Moreover, NASA plans to have at least two lunar landing attempts in 2028, which means that even if the first attempt is scrubbed, they will still have a chance to land before the end of the decade.
Every new story about Artemis gives me even more respect for the Apollo engineers.
You meant cinematographers, right?
to be fair they had way less requirements on making the CGI look good
back then TVs weren't that popular and those that had one were stuck with very low definition video, today our 2k and 4k screens would be able to spot their flaws easily
I think the main difference was political: for Apollo you had the most powerful nation in history throw their economic and political will into pushing a project forward.
NASA programs today are mainly about creating/maintaining jobs and keeping private industry contractors busy. They lost the political agency and freedom to move fast that they had in the 60s.
Well to be fair Nasa isn't nearly as good as it once was. The quality of engineer during the Apollo era was far better and more like what can be found at Spacex
More frequent launches with less ambitious progress per launch makes good sense, and follows the old-school approach used through Apollo to mitigate risk. Having a lunar lander test in earth orbit, for example, is roughly the same mission as Apollo 9, is a good call. Validating everything works together has been a sort of sore spot for the Artemis program.
And even the Apollo 10 mission which went 99.99% of the way from the Earth to the moon, just 15km from the surface (but couldn't have landed on the moon- LM structure was too heavy) was incredibly important step. The sort of thing that people today would want to skip, it doesn't seem flashy or necessary. Why take all the risk of going into lunar orbit and separating the modules (requiring the very first rendezvous not in in Earth orbit) but not actually land on the Moon? It was about getting all of the ground crew proved and worked out, and proving that the rendezvous would work and they could get home, so that the actual landing mission could focus their efforts on just working out the last 15km, confident that all of the other problems were already dealt with. Trying to do all of that in one mission would have been a gigantic mess- A11 crew felt a lack of training time as it was.
Orion doesn't seem operationally or financially capable of launching more than once a year. It's not that they don't want to do test flights, it's that they can barely do anything.
Which goes back to the Pork-on-a-stick requirement that everything be about keeping the workers still employed.
I’d say we’ll look back in a few decades and recognise the Apollo programs as the peak of the USA. Those people did truly amazing things. I recommend “Space Rocket History” podcast if you like Apollo. It’s a wonderful and highly detailed podcast and covers the US and Soviet space race in great detail.
A couple of new posts by Nasa Administrator Isaacman:
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.
If you visit US, I really recommend a detour to the Kennedy Space Center if you can, there's a ton of interesting stuff especially about the Apollo program.
Especially if you can time your visit to Florida with a launch. Seeing the Shuttle launch in real life made me realize what a poor medium television is to actually show you reality.
(I don't know what the current policies are but you used to be able to apply in advance for VIP tickets, or buy them on the secondary market, which gives you much closer viewing of the launch)
Yes! I just got to go there earlier this month for the first time. They even have the lectern from the Kennedy speech (and the speech itself)!
Went to Florida some years ago when my kids were all teens and pre-teens. Did Disney World, Universal Studios, Sea World, the works.
We unanimously agreed KSC was by far the best of all. If you only do one thing in Florida, that would be it.
Been once as a kid and once as an adult. Wonderful place. The rocket garden is wonderful.
Make sure you look at ALL the stuff in the rocket garden and make sure you take the bus to the Apollo center and make sure you do them in that order.
If you've never seen a gator then looking in the ditches by the road during the bus tour is a good bed.
They're getting slightly bullied into following their own rocket certification process. Wild they're going right to human flight without their three unmanned certification flights, etc. NASA themselves will not allow mission critical payloads on rockets that don't meet that process. But they're (trying) to skip it with Artemis.
I'm glad this is getting overhauled, the existing plan was a bit of a mess and NASA can't afford mistakes on a program of this scale. Hopefully we get safer and more effective result out of this.
Relevant: https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
I knew a lot of this, and had a good idea of how bad this whole thing was but... damn, how comprehensively horrible a parade of bad, multi-decade decisions this is turning out to be.
I made sure to watch the first SLS launch in person as I'm not confident they will be able to launch again.
Same contractors (Beoing) who built Starliner...
Explaining Why NASA's Starliner Report Is So Bad > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L96asfTvJ_A
Why does it seem like we can’t do shit anymore? Was it always like this and there was no news coverage of all the failures? If not what is the main cause of failure right now? Is it onerous regulations and bureaucracy? Stressed work environments?
Artemis was never a "return to the moon" program. NASA had one of those; congress killed it and replaced it with a "keep shuttle jobs going" program. There has always been and will always be pork spending, but in this case keeping the gravy train going has been the primary if not sole driver, as opposed to programs like Apollo where it was a means to an end. People have known it was a problem from day one and probably most people thought it would get cancelled and replaced by something more sound long before this point.
The Apollo program budget was immensely large, and the objective was clear: put people on the moon before the Soviet Union.
Artemis objectives are less well defined, more ambitious and with way less money. The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor. The difference in importance between the two is the cause of all the failures.
And we can't forget the nationalism at the time. Everyone was rallied behind the program and wanting to beat the Soviet Union. I mean, sputnik scared the hell out of everyone.
I think that's probably important framing for how things were reported back then. But also, I'm wrong like 99.9999999% of the time. So!
I feel the same. The Golden Gate Bridge took 3 years to build, start to finish. It was the biggest suspension to have ever been built at the time. Compare that to any modern public works project of today. There are countless examples of how we used to be able to build things before 1970.
Per Wikipedia, the Golden Gate Bridge was proposed in 1917, approved by the state for design in 1923, funded in 1930, started construction in 1933, and completed in 1937.
The reason modern projects take so long is that so many of them are stuck in design or awaiting funding stage for what feels like interminable ages; once the construction phase starts, they tend to go fairly quickly. But if you look at projects 100 years ago, well, they also seem to have fairly lengthy pre-construction timelines. It's just that we conveniently forget about those when we look back on them nowadays.
11 people died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. We have onerous safety requirements and red tape which is why everything is so slow. Very few people die on construction sites now. Do we want 11 dead people or do we want things done extremely slow? I guess as a society we have answered that question.
We've probably answered wrongly. Even money aside, how many more people die in traffic accidents due to the extra miles driven because of delays in construction?
Some regs are worth it, certainly, but being overly cautious is in itself unsafe.
Sure and sometimes you just need to actually issue safety equipment and install a fall net.
The historical comparisons are complete BS: they wind up at "if we sacrifice enough people to the industrial god he will reward us" rather then discussing anything real.
I think the narrative is more difficult now, as is visibility of goals. “Land a man on the Moon and return him safely” is a clear objective, while “decarbonize the global economy” or “make AI safe and useful” are fuzzier, and don’t give you a single flag‑planting moment.
But there's no lack of huge achievements. The Mars rovers are amazing: super-sonic parachutes, retro rockets, deploying a little helicopter with no real-time control is huge. So is planting JWST at the L2 point and unfolding it a million miles from earth.
Also, the NASA budget in the 1960's was 10 times higher.
it's because we "destroyed the technology" :^)
We're doing really complicated stuff. And think about it though, in the 60s/70s we had one organization - NASA. That was it. Today, we have RocketLab, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and NASA, plus Boeing I guess.
Basically because we don't feel like it.
If you look at the unmanned side of NASA, that's going great. NASA can get amazing stuff done.
The manned side gets political attention, and the nature of current politics makes it a bad kind of attention. Results are essentially irrelevant. Jobs and cronyism are the point.
The overall design of the Space Launch System makes very little sense. We know all too well that solid rockets are a bad idea for crewed spaceflight. Hydrogen is a bad fuel for a first stage. It's horrendously wasteful to use expensive, complicated engines designed to be reused, and then throw them away on every launch. Early estimates were over $2 billion per launch, which in the current age is total clownshoes. The actual costs will be much higher still.
So why are they doing it? Because using all this old, rather inappropriate tech allows them to keep paying the contractors for it. If you gave NASA a pile of money and told them to build a moon program, they wouldn't build this. But it's not their choice.
Way more safety and rigid testing procedures and a better understanding - the Apollo program was all done by the seat of the pants engineering that somehow worked all based on the ideas of the team that built the German V2.
Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.
Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.
That doesn't imply that it was faster though. It just implies they didn't have the technology to simulate it, nor CNC machining to do it another way.
I mean does it sound like that was faster then what we can do today?
Essentially, neoliberalism. The goal of everyone on the project is now higher and higher profits. Delivering a working product doesnt necessarily mean best profits anymore. Spacex would rather drag the project along with ships that dont work than to just make something that works. The government has privatized so much of their workload into so few specialized companies that they really can't stop them from doing this.
Did we ever get clarification as to how the Dragon 8 crew member got hurt and why SpaceX got warned? https://www.popsci.com/science/nasa-spacex-safety/#:~:text=%...