NASA’s New Journey To Nowhere
Keith’s note: this editorial by Mike Bloomberg “NASA’s $100 Billion Moon Mission Is Going Nowhere“ certainly does not mince words. “A celestial irony is that none of this is necessary. A reusable SpaceX Starship will very likely be able to carry cargo and robots directly to the moon – no SLS, Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2 required – at a small fraction of the cost. Its successful landing of the Starship booster was a breakthrough that demonstrated how far beyond NASA it is moving.Meanwhile, NASA is canceling or postponing promising scientific programs – including the Veritas mission to Venus; the Viper lunar rover; and the NEO Surveyor telescope, intended to scan the solar system for hazardous asteroids – as Artemis consumes ever more of its budget. Taxpayers and Congress should be asking: What on Earth are we doing? And the next president should be held accountable for answers.”
4 responses to “NASA’s New Journey To Nowhere”
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I frequently disagree with Michael Bloomberg on certain things, but not on this one. The sls/gateway/orion cabal in Congress have some space exploration in the US a disservice. Starship is just the first of several vehicles who could put those concepts to shame. It’s time to move on.
I suspect NASA is trying to hang onto a manned spaceflight organization that is doing something, anything. Reality is it is now bypassed. No meaningful functions. No meaningful products. NASA’s manned spaceflight just wastes money. The designers of Orion screwed up; its heat shield is a danger and requires a.significant redesign. ISS development ended 30 years ago. The last several modules were hired out to the Europeans. Shuttle development ended almost 50 years ago. Despite needing serious rework NASA instead just hung on to the flawed design. They did not have the wherewithal to do more. NASA requires a serious reboot.
“The designers of Orion screwed up; its heat shield is a danger and requires a.significant redesign.”
That is still TBD from NASA’s invetsigation.
So far the consensus is that they will likey fly Artemis 2 with the existing heat shield on a different trajectory.
For future missions they might make some changes to the design, but I wouldn’t expect anything drastic.
Overall it still worked very well, just not how models predicted before flight.
Keith posting anti-human spaceflight takes with the header image being an empty launch pad is not that surprising.
Have to keep acting like Artemis 1 never happened and that this is still a paper rocket I guess.
The op-ed from Mike Bloomberg is filled with lies and twisted truths about these programs, so his opinions are pretty much worthless.