NASA Ducks The Lunar Landing Date Question – Again.
Someone just asked the "when will you land people on the Moon?" question. NASA guy: "I do not want to give a date right now". How helpful.
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) March 14, 2022
Someone just asked the "when will you land people on the Moon?" question. NASA guy: "I do not want to give a date right now". How helpful.
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) March 14, 2022
At IEEE conference 2025 for crew starship and 2024 for uncrewed demo flight.
those dates sounds almost achievable …
And another thing…
what clown decided to add that ANNOYING music ? ? track over the EVA briefing animation?! GD ?
Maybe ask if we put a man on the moon why can’t we put a woman or a man on the moon?
The question is out of NASAs hands. The only possible/probable Moon lander at this point is Star Ship, waiting to be tested in south Texas. If it is successful I would expect a Moon landing within 2 years, maybe less. So maybe 2024. Maybe longer. Maybe theyll also use an Orion/SLS, but maybe not. Its hard to see where it would be needed.
I can see an uncrewed Starship landing on the Moon maybe as early as 2024. I think crewed landing would be maybe another two years after that. Starship hasn’t even flown to space yet, much less reached orbit, much less flown to the Moon. I have confidence it will do all of those things, but it’s nearly impossible to predict the timeline for crewed landing on the Moon until they start reaching some of these initial milestones. If these milestones are hit quickly like so many people seem to expect, then sure the earlier dates are possible.
As for the need for Orion, I think we will never see crews launch from Earth on Starship for any NASA mission. If we thought the requirements NASA was putting onto propulsive landing for Dragon were onerous, the requirements for a crewed vehicle with no launch escape capability would likely far exceed that. I expect crews will launch on Orion and meet up with Starship as planned, or the less likely possibility that they will cancel SLS and use Dragon to carry crew to Starship. And return to Earth will be by whatever capsule is used. That’s my prediction.
Some reasonable conjectures. I am not sure why a backup landing capability like large parachutes, perhaps combined with a linear charge that separates the crew compartment from the booster/tankage, would not be possible. While you’d like to save and reuse the vehicles, one thing we’ve seen is that once the fuel is gone the remainder is pretty light and probably a parachute could come in as a possible back up. Besides, if Musk starts taking dozens or a hundred passengers, it will look funny if NASA must rely on a smaller capsule.
NASA didn’t place any harsh or onerous requirements on propulsive landing of a Dragon capsule. They just said it would have to be tested (reasonable) and that SpaceX couldn’t test it on cargo Dragon landings (which would risk the payload being returned from ISS, and therefore also reasonable.) Given the choice, SpaceX decided that flying dedicated tests at their own expense simply wasn’t worthwhile.
I’m not sure how tests of propulsive landing would have been much different than the drop tests that they had to do for the parachutes. In fact the SuperDracos would have fired at a much lower altitude than the altitude that the parachutes open.
Testing with Cargo Dragon would have required adding SuperDracos to the Cargo Dragon design, which that version doesn’t otherwise doesn’t have. Certainly feasible, but it would have only provided two or three tests per year in addition to helicopter drop tests. Considering that they wound up doing about 25 drop tests for the parachutes, not being allowed to do tests with Cargo Dragon probably wouldn’t have made that much difference in testing costs.
Musk stated that the reason they decided against propulsive landing is because “it would have taken a tremendous amount of effort to qualify that for safety, particularly for crew transport”. That sounds to me like there was a lot more in the requirement than was required to certify parachute landing.
I think we should just send the boots instead of the crew.
Sorry, all:
KILL SLS. Now.