General Discussion

Cross posted from Daily Kos: about the 'inspiration' of the moon program

Yes, that’s about my growing up time, but I even bought the dream, and became a full-fledged Rocket Scientist. Wrote the book even. Msg me for reading recommendations….

Artemis built a nice 4 person capsule that can withstand very high speed reentry. But there was no money left for a decent ‘service module’ in Apollo lingo. So the Europeans supplied the aft end of their space station logistics vehicle. The part with rocket engines and fuel and such, but not enough of either. The SLS launch rocket, assembled basically out of Shuttle parts (“Lego Rockets”, we call them.. ) was assembled by Boeing. It worked well, in spite of huge cost overruns and infinite delays. Yes, that’s the same Boeing that did the Starliner capsule, and the 737 Max.

Artemis II won’t get very close to the moon. In fact, it can’t. It takes fuel to get down close to the moon, and more still to get back out of the moon’s dinky ‘gravity well’ again. Artemis doesn’t have it.

Apollo was cut short at Apollo 18, when the American public, yea verily, even those with short attention spans, complained that their soap operas and sporting events were being interrupted by space news. But in a sense, it was stopped just in time. Sunspot maximum was approaching, and there wasn’t good radiation protection in the Apollo capsule nor on the lunar surface. Artemis doesn’t have good radiation protection once it leaves the safe bubble of the earth’s magnetic field, either. It will do so tonight, if everything continues to plan.

Of course, we are in the middle of sunspot maximum, so this is a real concern. Once on the lunar trajectory, there is no easy way to abort back to the safety of earth. Even Apollo 13 couldn’t do that.