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Artemis

Artemis Day At Michoud: Missed Opportunities To Engage

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 9, 2019
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NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

15 responses to “Artemis Day At Michoud: Missed Opportunities To Engage”

  1. Homer Hickam says:
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    And once more Jim trots out the line that we’re going to the moon so we can go to Mars. This is not only inaccurate, it’s confusing. If we don’t make it back to the moon, this time to stay, it will be because of this silly and ridiculous insistence that the moon is only valuable because it will teach us to go to Mars. NASA has real work to do on the moon and that is to establish an anchor there and provide support for commercial and scientific entities to explore and utilize its resources so as to provide value back to the American people and the world and thus establish a true spacefaring civilization. Mars can wait, not that it’s that attractive, anyway, but somehow NASA HQ just can’t get that Percival Lowellian fantasy out of their collective heads.

    • Richard Malcolm says:
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      Well said. It is as if the premise that Mars on present evidence is more interesting as a scentific and colonization objective than the Moon (which, I think, most of us would agree is true on some level) is driving an unexamined premise that the Moon must not be interesting. As if 14 brief surface EVA’s spread out over 14 days at six Nearside equatorial landing sites five decades ago using five decade old technology (impressive as it was) somehow exhausts what could be learned and exploited on an alien planetary body with a surface area nearly the size of Asia. Perhaps it is, as you say, Martian romanticism hard at work.

      It’s a shame, too, because it is obvious that NASA has a lot more stakeholder partners willing and *able* to participate in lunar exploration and development than it does Mars.

      • Matthew Black says:
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        Yes. The Moon makes technical, logistical and (sort of, almost) fiscal sense. The money and technology for crewed Mars missions just isn’t there yet. Let Elon and his team spend his coin and technical efforts to pioneer Mars. There will be plenty of opportunities to participate and join in later if he succeeds.

    • Matthew Black says:
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      Brilliant, Mr Hickham. The nail has met the head of the hammer – and it is well met…

  2. Jeff2Space says:
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    I’m not surprised. I don’t work for NASA, but I do work for a large company. The one time I asked a question at a meeting like this, during the Q&A part of the meeting, the manager running the meeting got visibly ticked off and answered in such a way as to deny the premise of the question (even though the facts supported the underlying premise). That was the last question during the session (others were obviously afraid to ask another question). And it was the last question I ever asked of this manager.

    In my opinion, the manager in question didn’t want to acknowledge that a problem existed, even though the evidence in the years to follow showed that the problem I asked about not only existed, but continued to get worse. Oh well.

    • Blaise A. Darveaux says:
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      It is said that a large company is like a tree full of monkeys. The ones at the top look down and see only smiling faces. The ones on the bottom look up and see nothing but a bunch of butt holes.

      To take the analogy to the company meeting, the ones on the bottom are scared to open their mouths because of falling feces from above and getting knocked out of the tree.

      • kcowing says:
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        somewhat crude – but rather accurate 😉

      • mfwright says:
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        >the ones on the bottom are scared to open their mouths

        I see it as those on the bottom don’t have access to program information or knowledge of nuances at the higher levels so many of their questions are out of context. So you can easily sound like an idiot or a troublemaker.

      • fcrary says:
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        Ok. I’ll make my probably pointless sales pitch for anarchism. It isn’t about opposing rules or laws, and it isn’t about something like a Mad Max movie (gangs are, actually, quite hierarchical.) The word literally means “against kings.” My personal spin on it is that you need very short org charts. If the org chart is more than four rows tall, from the big boss all the way down to the janitor, the people at the top are not in touch with or understand the problems of the people at the bottom. And that’s very bad in many ways. And, yes, I know that implies small institutions and that makes large, coordinated efforts difficult. But every idea about social and political organizations has problem and drawbacks.

  3. disqus_dNxe4962pL says:
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    I’m surprised no one asked him the REAL launch date of EM, er, sorry, ARTEMIS-1 is. Although I guess I’m not surprised: they probably wouldn’t have a job an hour later. I’m working this program w/MAF, and i can tell you it’s NOT going to be the published 10/20 date. BOM24..r u kidding me!

    • Zed_WEASEL says:
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      Quite sure the folks from Hawthorne will be happy to name their first huge shiny manned vehicle landing on the Moon around 2024 as the “Artemis-1” with NASA astronauts aboard for some monetary consideration.

      There will be other paying customers waiting in line for the opportunity to land on Mars if NASA passes up on the ride.

      /S

  4. ExNASA says:
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    As you can see by the quality of the questions at Lovarro’s onboarding, the anonymity of questions is a much more transparent way as people upvoted the most common questions, and they were hard ones. I think that was a “well done”. Not sure their answers were entirely accurate, but taking tough questions is admirable, especially since there are a lot of tough questions these days. This approach generally doesn’t create good questions, not surprising.

    • fcrary says:
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      Unfortunately, anonymous questions can also be catastrophically mismanaged. I know of one institution (one of whose senior managers reads NASA Watch), which has an annual, all-hands meeting where (among other things) the managers answer questions from the staff and faculty. But supposedly to protect privacy and not to discourage questions from someone who’s shy, the questions are submitted in writing about half an hour in advance. Then the managers get to select, paraphrase and potentially censor the questions, and give their answer to the version of the question they feel like answering. That turns the whole thing into a farce. Why bother? Or, more to the point, what does that say about employees who fall for that sort of thing? Do you really want them working in jobs which require intelligence and good judgement?

      • ExNASA says:
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        I was just stating that an earlier post, NASA did it the right way and did not pick and choose. They got some tough questions and they did attempt to answer them. We may not like some of their answers. No problem with people taking issue with that. Running NASA is a real crucible.

  5. rb1957 says:
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    from my experience the only thing worse than having “all hands” meetings is not having them. No one can ask a really tough question and expect a proper considered response. It’s nice to get enthusiastic about a new program but we need to see the earnest support for it … show us the schedule, show us the money. And show us you are prepared to spend $X billions every year for an awful long time before maybe, just maybe, someday it’ll become self-supporting ? This needs to be way more multi-national (which costs more money and time) and sometime (soon?) we’ll need to work out the legal framework of using the resources on the moon.