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Artemis

"What is Artemis?"

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
May 9, 2022


Keith’s update: Someone saw this tweet.
No One on Jeopardy! Knew About NASA’s New Moon Missions, Gizmodo
“I grew up in the 1960s during the Apollo era… but, given the constant reminders I got in school and in the news about going to the Moon, I knew exactly what the brother of Artemis was up to,” Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and editor of the site NASA Watch, told me in an email. “So did everyone else.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

31 responses to “"What is Artemis?"”

  1. Johnhouboltsmyspiritanimal says:
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    how do you sell Artemis in the age of tik tok and influencers? does PAO know how to really engage the public anymore with all the new media channels/outlets? if 60 minutes is your grandparents program sadly I am not sure PAO has modernized to stay up with the times.

    • ed2291 says:
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      I agree! In addition Artemis (and SLS) have a deep reputation for corruption and/or incompetence. A correct “What is Space X?” might have worked better.

      • Richard Brezinski says:
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        I’m not sure about corruption and incompetence, but they certainly have a reputation for non-performance.

  2. Brian_M2525 says:
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    What is Artemis? I guess it starts with an unmanned test of the SLS. Maybe it will happen this year but just as likely next. That will be an unmanned flight; it won’t be exciting since it is unmanned and besides it does not even accomplish anything any of the Apollo manned missions accomplished. Maybe in a few years there will be another Artemis flight with people?

    The flight that might cause a brief excitement would be a Moon landing with the first woman and person of color. That is completely dependent on the Space X Starship. We are all hoping for the best but so farits never flown.

    What is the goal of Artemis? Another brief Apollo flags and footprints? A Moonbase? I’ve never seen an explanation.

    So what is Artemis? Its somebody’s dream. Maybe Space X can make it a reality?

    • james w barnard says:
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      Right now Artemis is a large launch vehicle and (currently) unmanned spacecraft that has show the capability of traveling through the space between the launch pad and the VAB at the speed of 2 mph, twice, and will be at least one more time from VAB to the pad.
      Question: Why is the FAA delaying approval of the Environmental Impact statement for SpaceX at Boca Chica, month by month? Could it be they are waiting for Artemis I to actually launch? Just saying…

      • fcrary says:
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        The FAA has to get about half a dozen other state and federal agencies to sign off on that environmental assessment. And they got far more comments from the public than they expected (all of which have to be responded to.) Add other projects they have to work on and understaffing, and the delays aren’t too surprising. In any case, SpaceX isn’t currently ready for an orbital flight out of Boca Chica. They’re probably still a month or so away from that.

  3. James in Southern Illinois says:
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    Artemis is a money sucking black hole.

  4. Richard Brezinski says:
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    Lets not forget that Orion (the only piece of Artemis that will have flown this year, perhaps?) we were told would be flying by the time Shuttle ended in 2010 or 2011. Its now more than a decade later. They got all of the money they wanted and should have needed. There is no new technology and little high technology. ESA built the service module which should have been a huge cost and time savings to NASA and Lockmart, since the SMs are just repurposed ATVs. Now more than a decade later and yet it still has not flown.

    • robert_law says:
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      Thats what happens when you have a president trying to destroy the space program , trying to delay the heavy lift Rocket five years and cancel Orion and a congress and Senet that would not fund commercial space properly NO surprise that commercial crew was years late and SLS has not flown yet .

      • Richard Brezinski says:
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        Congress ensured that both Orion and SLS were kept well funded despite Obama’s efforts to redirect to an asteroid. Both of them got $40 billion for a solution that was ‘safe, simple and soon’ (according to the NASA ‘leadership’.

        Commercial cargo and crew had their challenges but for some reason inexperienced upstart Space X has been flying now for two years and that experienced spacecraft builder, Boeing, is still trying for a successful first flight,

      • tutiger87 says:
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        Obama wanted to destroy the space program. Source? From what I remember, he did what was recommended by the ASAP because of Constellation’s failures.

  5. Bob Mahoney says:
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    The real revelation embedded in this lack of a correct response/question is that no one knew the sister of Apollo. This indicates that folks aren’t learning much beyond the cardboard cutout landscape served up today as substantive educational subject matter, i.e., much more of what to think and little to none of how to think.

    • mitest1234 says:
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      That would make sense if the contestants were high school or college kids, but given they are adults “the cutout landscape served up today” is really “the cutout landscape served up yesterday.”

  6. richard_schumacher says:
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    Artemis is an eternal thought in the mind of Senator Shelby.

  7. Nick K says:
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    Artemis is representative of the new NASA.

    Artemis is not the NASA of our fathers, the Shuttle NASA, in which NASA had given up exploration, research and development in favor of operating a national ‘spaceline’. It never really happened but it was good for the operators for a short time.

    Artemis is not the NASA of our grandfathers, the Apollo NASA. Apollo’s NASA represented exploration and all that was new. It was exciting but only for a short time.

    I think Artemis represents current dreams of what we once thought the future might hold, but since no one, and especially not NASA, ever stopped to figure out that future purpose, it represents a total lack of any progress or rationale. Artemis represents lack of direction and lack of vision.

    After 18 years of thrashing about and wildly wasting people-an entire generation- and other resources, now we have no idea what NASA or Artemis is or where they are going.

    Why would anyone think the public would have a better idea?

    • tutiger87 says:
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      “NASA is not the NASA of our grandfathers”

      That’s true. Your grandfather used a freaking slide rule.

      • Nick K says:
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        You’re right, and yet they accomplished a lot on a tight schedule. Now we have much better technology and yet we accomplish nothing.

        • tutiger87 says:
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          They accomplished a lot on a tight schedule with almost 4% of the Federal budget. Last I looked it was .48% presently. So you’re comparing apples to oranges.

          You cant compare Artemis to Apollo. Unified national will. Now, the average person is more concerned with Kim Kardshian.

          And let’s not talk about how, as a nation, we’ve become risk-averse. Back in the 60s they took all kinds of risks. Try that nowadays and you’ll be testifying in front of Congress. Elon and others can blow stuff up and answer to no one.

          • fcrary says:
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            The federal budget in 1967 was $157 billion. Last year, it was $6.9 trillion. Even accounting for inflation, that’s a factor of 5.1 growth. So NASA’s current budget is, in current year dollars, about 60% of its peak in 1967. And, except for a few weeks around things like the Apollo 11 landing, public opinion about the Apollo program was far from unified. It actually wasn’t a widely popular project.

          • Nick K says:
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            Most people were against the Apollo Moon landing program from the early 60s right thru 1972. For about 2-3 months in 1969, about 50% of the people were equally balanced about whether Apollo was good or not.

  8. Ben Russell-Gough says:
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    Artemis is a postulate – the designation of a hypothetical moon landing program that is currently buried in hardware issues and red tape.

    • fcrary says:
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      That would be like saying, in February, 1967, that the Apollo program was just a hypothetical postulate. Artemis is a real program. It’s schedule is hypothetical, but the program is not. Otherwise, if it’s canceled, you’d have to say it was never real and just something NASA was considering.

      • Brian_M2525 says:
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        Was Constellation ever real? Were the Obama Asteroid Rendezvous missions ever real? A ot of people worked on them. A lot of money was spent. A huge effort was wasted. But were they ever real?

      • Nick K says:
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        Fact is most of Artemis (SLS and Orion amd Gateway)) could be shut down and Artemis might remain and be successful if Space X and Starship are successful. And Space X and Starship have to be successful or Artemis fails in any case.

  9. tutiger87 says:
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    Hell, the last guy in the White House was telling people that NASA was closed before he got in office.

    I’ve railed on PAO enough over the years.

    • robert_law says:
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      It Basically was the whole return to the moon program shut down and the US totally dependent on Russia to get into space and commercial crew years behind schedule .

      • tutiger87 says:
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        No it wasn’t. NASA sent probes all over the solar system, launch scientific spacecraft in Earth orbit, and maintained a manned platform. NASA was not closed.

        • Bob Mahoney says:
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          Yet the president’s inaccurate claim was not far off from a general perception across a large swath of the broader public regardless of political leanings.

          This speaks to NASA PAO’s continuing and pervasive inadequacies in public engagement on top of the years-long meandering programmatic silliness that was ARM.

    • Nick K says:
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      Lets remember Obama shut down the return to the Moon. Work continued on Orion, which we were told would be ready for flight in a couple years. Obama sent NASA in circles looking for asteroids. Four 8 years NASA human space flight did not know where to go. Between that lack of direction, shut down of Shuttle, and Orions impending launch repeatedly delayed, much of the world, incliding Presodent Trump, thought NASA had shut down.

  10. Nick K says:
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    Probably some good lessons for NASAs marketing division. They seem to put a lot of effort into news notification media, like Twitter. It has its place if you are making breaking news frequently. When was the last time NASA broke the news cycle? The Webb launch? or maybe the Perseverance landing? How often do these happen? Once a year?

    Last week “Crew 3” landed. I never even found a reference to the landing for 2 days. Crew 3 of what? ISS has been up so long theyve had
    70 crews. I dont even know where those guys went.

    If I want to go to a NASA source to find out what Artemis is, where would I go? Is there a website? Is it organized in any fashion so I could tell what its about?