NASA announces overhaul of Artemis program amid safety concerns, delays

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Every new story about Artemis gives me even more respect for the Apollo engineers.

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.

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

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 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?

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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=%...