It’s less likely to happen if the candidate SA endorsed wins.
Depends on how BO does.
SpaceX will have to play a bit role for obvious reasons.
Yeah, I don’t trust the editors at SA. They picked a good mouthpiece for their (hidden) agenda (see below).
Once ISS is de-orbited, if nothing substantial changes at NASA it will be their last human endeavor in Space. SLS will collapse from its own budgetary avarice and waste long before it puts anyone on the Moon.
The question remains if NASA is willing to step aside or is perfectly willing to take down NewSpace with it.
Looking forward to those intersectional NASA (and SA) studies on why human psychopathology creates a need for Space travel when there is so much more important stuff to do on Earth.
When the government experts tell you it is so, who are you to question? Are you actually willing to hand over Science to greedy capitalists?
Yeah, I don’t trust the editors at SA. They picked a good mouthpiece for their (hidden) agenda (see below).
I noticed at the bottom a story about the Arctic Seed Vault which was merely about the installation being flooded one time (it’s in tundra) and the entrance modified. They spun it into a story about the futility of planning for adaptation to a future with climate change in it.
Well, I certainly wouldn’t trust this author (or their editor) to plan anything.
Naomi Orestes? tl;dr
Wow are those people (the editors foremost) stupid – and they call themselves “scientific”.
I stopped caring what Scientific American wrote in the 80s. Have they gotten better since?
I was able to find the full article on X by Googling the article’s title.
Overall it is a good article with good recommendation. My only two small nits with it is that a specific alternative isn’t laid out probably because the author doesn’t know the technical details.
We can do an end-to-end Artemis program without SLS, Orion, or Gateway using only SpaceX technology by Launching HLS to LEO and refueling there like normal but then also safely launching crew on Dragon to LEO and then having them dock with HLS and transfer before TLI.
The second point is that there needs to be an answer to the issue of launching humans. Starship won’t have a LAS which, understandably IMO, could make decision-makers nervous. One could reach statistical safety after enough Starlink launches in Starship. But that will take quite a while and so should we let go of the one “bird in the hand” before Starship shows sufficient flight safety. Rather, the easy alternative would be to launch crew not on Starship but on F9-Dragon. Yet this article didn’t mention that solution nor do hardly any other anti-SLS advocates. I don’t think that we can blame the decision-makers in DC for holding onto the current program of record as they haven’t been presented an equivalent alternative.
P.S. An Orbiter simulation would be useful for illustrating this alternate architecture.
“there needs to be an answer to the issue of launching humans”
You’re assuming SA wants humans in space. They’re most likely in the camp of “no science value of sending humans to moon/mars” and while they’re likely to use the “important stuff to do on Earth” excuse they’re meaning “bigger colliders & bigger cameras to take better pics of the eagle nebula” rather than fixing poverty/famine/disease.
Practice with depot in LEO, but put depot in lunar orbit, and that gives you a lunar program.
It’s less likely to happen if the candidate SA endorsed wins.
Depends on how BO does.
SpaceX will have to play a bit role for obvious reasons.
Yeah, I don’t trust the editors at SA. They picked a good mouthpiece for their (hidden) agenda (see below).
Once ISS is de-orbited, if nothing substantial changes at NASA it will be their last human endeavor in Space. SLS will collapse from its own budgetary avarice and waste long before it puts anyone on the Moon.
The question remains if NASA is willing to step aside or is perfectly willing to take down NewSpace with it.
Looking forward to those intersectional NASA (and SA) studies on why human psychopathology creates a need for Space travel when there is so much more important stuff to do on Earth.
When the government experts tell you it is so, who are you to question? Are you actually willing to hand over Science to greedy capitalists?
Yeah, I don’t trust the editors at SA. They picked a good mouthpiece for their (hidden) agenda (see below).
I noticed at the bottom a story about the Arctic Seed Vault which was merely about the installation being flooded one time (it’s in tundra) and the entrance modified. They spun it into a story about the futility of planning for adaptation to a future with climate change in it.
Well, I certainly wouldn’t trust this author (or their editor) to plan anything.
Naomi Orestes? tl;dr
Wow are those people (the editors foremost) stupid – and they call themselves “scientific”.
I stopped caring what Scientific American wrote in the 80s. Have they gotten better since?
I was able to find the full article on X by Googling the article’s title.
Overall it is a good article with good recommendation. My only two small nits with it is that a specific alternative isn’t laid out probably because the author doesn’t know the technical details.
We can do an end-to-end Artemis program without SLS, Orion, or Gateway using only SpaceX technology by Launching HLS to LEO and refueling there like normal but then also safely launching crew on Dragon to LEO and then having them dock with HLS and transfer before TLI.
The second point is that there needs to be an answer to the issue of launching humans. Starship won’t have a LAS which, understandably IMO, could make decision-makers nervous. One could reach statistical safety after enough Starlink launches in Starship. But that will take quite a while and so should we let go of the one “bird in the hand” before Starship shows sufficient flight safety. Rather, the easy alternative would be to launch crew not on Starship but on F9-Dragon. Yet this article didn’t mention that solution nor do hardly any other anti-SLS advocates. I don’t think that we can blame the decision-makers in DC for holding onto the current program of record as they haven’t been presented an equivalent alternative.
P.S. An Orbiter simulation would be useful for illustrating this alternate architecture.
“there needs to be an answer to the issue of launching humans”
You’re assuming SA wants humans in space. They’re most likely in the camp of “no science value of sending humans to moon/mars” and while they’re likely to use the “important stuff to do on Earth” excuse they’re meaning “bigger colliders & bigger cameras to take better pics of the eagle nebula” rather than fixing poverty/famine/disease.
Practice with depot in LEO, but put depot in lunar orbit, and that gives you a lunar program.