NASA's Artemis Program Updates and Discussion Thread 5

[OTV Booster]

Wow! VSECOTSPE and clongton, both of you, your passion is jaw dropping and your historical analysis is stunning. Thank you.


On the question of ditching SLS and Orion and backing another horse, l look at it from a slightly different angle. My opinion of SLS is pretty low. Orion too but not quite as low. Still, would flat shutting them down and going with one of the many alternatives be faster or less expensive? We are talking about Washington here. Yeah, yeah, we've got a new administration that's planning on new levels of efficiency but short of a good ol' sovietski style purge that won't happen overnight.


IIUC, the sunk cost fallacy is about staying with a program that is abysmally sub par. SLS and Orion cost waaay too much and they are not optimal for the missions expected of them. But the technical problems are not earth shattering. In my armchair opinion they can be made to work and are good enough to get through Artemus II, III and IV. It's hardware that has flown, however imperfectly vs hardware still fairly early in the agile development cycle, if even that far along.


While these three missions play out a new architecture would have time to come up to speed - hopefully as a commercial FFP program.


My fear is that killing the hardware will kill the program.

[TheRadicalModerate]

Flight Safety:  The projected LOC for Orion/SLS is worse than STS projected at closeout and in the same ballpark as STS flight history.  It’s way below the required LOC for commercial crew.

Do you have a source for this that's public?  I would've thought that one of the only good things about SLS and Orion was the existence of PRA models with failure trees that had been made bushy through painful experience, where you could just plug in the MTBF of the components and get a pretty good pLOC number.  I don't think it would hit 1:500 for either launch or EDL, but I'd kinda expect it to be in the range where the proper bureaucrats could sign off on a waiver without getting huge amounts of pushback.

[Eric Hedman]

When I look back at the last twenty years of NASA's development of Constellation and then SLS/Orion it is a wasted two decades.  Changing course has been almost impossible with the power specific members of Congress have had with members like Sen. Shelby.  The person I find most to blame is Mike Griffin for pushing down the path of Constellation creating the monstrosity in the first place that has been morphed into SLS instead of put out of our misery.  We would have been far better off if Sean O'Keefe had stayed on through Bush jr's second term.  By 2008 I was just dumbfounded at what a mess it was becoming.  The real kicker for me was when Griffin came to the 2008 EAA AirVenture and spoke.  I was able to ask him about the rather severe vibration problems in the solid boosters.  He said that if that was the worst problem they were going to face, development of Constellation was going to be a breeze (I think the video of him answering is still on Youtube).  My initial reaction was oh my God, how did this guy get to be NASA Administrator.  They were seriously considering putting a 10,000 pound shock absorbing system between the booster and the upper stage of the stick on a rocket that was already severely mass constrained.

My one hope for a real change of direction this time is that the new administration has embraced a take no prisoners attitude on everything they have done so far.  I'm hoping that extends to NASA where disruptive change is desperately needed.

[VSECOTSPE]

Still, would flat shutting them down and going with one of the many alternatives be faster or less expensive?

Faster doesn’t matter unless someone in the WH thinks it’s really important to beat China back to the lunar surface before 2030-ish.  I think that’s a fool’s argument.  Like I wrote upthread, the taikonauts will be on the surface for about eight hours and then won’t be back for years.  The world isn’t going to change because of that.

What will change the world is if China is sending several manned missions to the lunar surface per year starting in the mid-2030s or so.  Their launch fleet and infrastructure is on a ramp to support that.  Artemis on Orion/SLS is not.  If taikonauts are at the lunar south pole for months each year and we’re there for a couple weeks once every couple years, then they’ll get to make the rules, regardless of how many signatories we have on the Artemis Accords.

We are talking about Washington here. Yeah, yeah, we've got a new administration that's planning on new levels of efficiency but short of a good ol' sovietski style purge that won't happen overnight.

We have modern landers and a mini lunar station in the works.  What’s missing is a reliable, frequent, and affordable lunar crew transport capability.  Compete that using the commercial ISS cargo/crew model.  Shut down Orion/SLS, retain the key elements of that workforce, and apply the savings and workforce towards the laundry list of things that industry is not doing that we need for a real Moon-to-Mars program.

IIUC, the sunk cost fallacy is about staying with a program that is abysmally sub par.

Sunk-cost fallacy refers to a common weakness in human reasoning that what you’ve spent to date on X should matter to future decisions about funding X.  That’s totally wrong.  The only thing that matters is choosing the best option going forward, which may have nothing to do with how funding was allocated in the past. 

For example, let’s say I’m halfway through the development of a new launch vehicle using chemical rockets.  It promises to drop launch costs by a quarter and I’ve spent a half-billion on it with another half-billion to go.  Right at that moment, aliens visit Earth and share their anti-gravity technology.  It only costs a quarter-billion dollars to develop an anti-gravity launch vehicle, which will drop launch costs by three-quarters.

People who succumb to sunk-cost fallacy keep working on the chemical rocket because that’s what they’ve sunk their money into to date.  They erroneously think that’s the better choice because it will somehow make their prior investments pay off.  But they couldn’t be more wrong.  The anti-gravity launch vehicle costs less to finish development and will be three times more cost-effective.  It doesn’t matter that a half-billion has been sunk into the chemical rocket.  The anti-gravity technology has changed the game, and the only thing that matters is making the best investment going forward.

But the technical problems are not earth shattering.

If we kill astronauts on Orion/SLS, it will be shattering.  Orion/SLS carry at least a 1-in-75 chance of crew loss each time they send a crew to lunar orbit and back.  That’s worse than Shuttle’s projected chance of crew loss of 1-in-90 when that program was being flown out.  It’s in the ballpark of the 1-in-67 chance of crew loss that Shuttle demonstrated over its lifetime.  And it’s probably substantially worse than these figures given how a year or two between launches negatively impacts workforce skills retention and given the multiple build violations on EUS.

Spaceflight inherently involves risk.  But there are smart risks we have to take and dumb risks we shouldn’t.  Orion/SLS is the latter.

My fear is that killing the hardware will kill the program.

Defenders of the status quo trot out this argument.  It doesn’t hold water.  No President or congressman wants to be responsible for shutting down US human space exploration.  We’ve terminated programs and “wasted” their hardware before — Apollo, Shuttle, Constellation, etc. — and the federal budget still funded human space flight at NASA to the tune of many billions of dollars.

[VSECOTSPE]

Do you have a source for this that's public? 

2014 NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel report, p. 13:

The Panel was less pleased that these thresholds were not significantly safer than the actual historical performance of the Space Shuttle. It was the ASAP’s hope that the inherently safer architecture of the SLS and Orion as compared to the Space Shuttle, including full abort capability, separation of energetics from the crew module, and parachute reentry instead of aerodynamic, would greatly improve inherent safety. The chosen LOC probability thresholds appear in the following table:

Flight Stage             Maximum Probability of Loss of Crew
Ascent                     1 in 300
Cislunar Mission      1 in 150
Entry                        1 in 300
Total Mission            1 in 75

In comparison, the mature Space Shuttle system’s PRA was 1 in 90 at the end of the program for a different, but not totally dissimilar, LEO mission. It is important to note that the actual performance of the Space Shuttle over 135 flights was 1 in 67, which reflects the higher actual risk early in the program due to the unknown failure modes and design weaknesses (as noted in the previous section).

Here’s the direct link to the 2014 PDF:

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2014-asap-annual-report.pdf?emrc=679dca092ec55

Other ASAP annual reports linked here:

https://www.nasa.gov/history/asap-historical-reports/#2000to2023

[meekGee]

To be fair, Obama wanted to kill Ares V as well, and the moon was "been there done that" and let's move on.

That plan ran into the "Obama is killing HSF" buzzsaw, Ares V and the moon survived, and the rest is history.

All true.  Recounting this 20-year tragic history in a post forces some details to be summarized or left out.

I think the next level of detail on the Obama Administration is that they did initially fight the good fight on terminating Orion/SLS and deserve credit for that (along with commercial crew).  But like the Bush II Administration before and Trump I after, the Obama Administration also quickly surrendered control of civil human space exploration to Congress and NASA leadership captive to those congressional interests.  Unfortunately, the topic has not been enough of a national priority to sustain interest from any recent White House over multiple years (Bush II) or to warrant even a small expenditure of political capital in the face of congressional resistance to change (Obama and Trump I).

I’d also critique the Obama Administration for proposing a five-year HLV engine technology plan when industry already had a couple/several HLVs and engines in the works (although other elements of their exploration technology plan like cryo prop mgmt were much needed).  They should have just procured HLV rides.  And I’d critique them for not having any plan for the Constellation workforce beyond a bumper sticker, which of course was going attract negative congressional attention.

But the main problem with all these recent White Houses is that they lose interest after a year or so and don’t see this as an issue worth fighting appropriators over.  If they want a useful civil human space program, like Kennedy and Johnson did, then they have to regularly revisit the program and make sure it’s on track at the agency and in congress like Kennedy and Johnson did.  When they don’t, they cede control of what should be a national program to local, parochial interests.  And we’ve seen what a North Alabama Space Agency civil human space exploration program can achieve for two decades now,

Maybe having an Isaacman instead of a Nelson or Bolden in the Administrator’s suite will change the dynamic, but I’m not sanguine given Bridenstine’s inability to effect even minimal change on Orion/SLS in the absence of Trump I support.  Shelby is thankfully gone now, but it’s still not clear that a billionaire with no DC experience will be any more savvy with appropriators unless the Trump II White House lends a lot of support.

And maybe Musk’s relationship with Trump will mean that support is forthcoming in ways it was not under Trump I and prior White Houses.  But I’m also not sanguine on that given the history of big ego clashes between former Presidents and their ultra-wealthy allies and given the amateurish budget chaos on display last week.

We’ll see...

Is Lori Garver to blame for that? From what I recall the idea of an Asteroid missions comes from the Augustine committee's flexible path option

Human NEO mission studies go back farther than Augustine II.  Augustine II mentioned them as one destination in a multi-route Flexible Path option, which also included destinations like lunar orbit, Lagrange Point observatories, Mars orbit, and Phobos/Deimos.  (Venus swingby/orbit might have been in there, too.) Flexible Path did not equal NEOs.  NEOs were just one sub-option under Flexible Path, which itself was just one overarching option among three, the other two being Moon First and Mars First.

While it was great that Augustine II pointed out these other, Flexible Path destinations, there was no strong recommended pathway or destination or architecture coming out of that committee (like most committees).  The strongest points they made were that Constellation was unaffordable without an annual budget increase of several billion dollars and that an architecture could be built out of 40t launches to LEO, which would have been a reasonable evolution of the EELV families.  But even those semi-recommendations were mostly lost in the details of the rest of the report.

At the end of the day, the Obama Administration had to make sense of this committee output and develop a program.  To her credit, Garver stepped in and tried to force some of that decision making when other leadership, like the perennially wish-washy Bolden, did not.  But coming from a political background, she didn’t understand the difference between high-level mission studies and the real, detailed homework that’s needed to understand whether a novel mission is worthy of funding, nevertheless White House imprimatur.  I know guys at Langley who review unmanned planetary mission proposals for the Discovery Program who would have told Garver in a weekend that humans to NEOs or something like ARRM are on the ragged edge of executability, at best.  She needed some red team or other internal rapid technical sanity test before going all in on a NEO mission.  Instead, that harsh critique came publicly from the small bodies segment of the planetary science community, and the effort never really recovered after that.  And of course, the experts were right.  Even after five or six years of work, a clear target for ARRM was never identified.

FWIW...

Something had to break in order for things to change.

[leovinus]

Do you have a source for this that's public? 

2014 NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel report, p. 13:

The Panel was less pleased that these thresholds were not significantly safer than the actual historical performance of the Space Shuttle. It was the ASAP’s hope that the inherently safer architecture of the SLS and Orion as compared to the Space Shuttle, including full abort capability, separation of energetics from the crew module, and parachute reentry instead of aerodynamic, would greatly improve inherent safety. The chosen LOC probability thresholds appear in the following table:

Flight Stage             Maximum Probability of Loss of Crew
Ascent                     1 in 300
Cislunar Mission      1 in 150
Entry                        1 in 300
Total Mission            1 in 75

In comparison, the mature Space Shuttle system’s PRA was 1 in 90 at the end of the program for a different, but not totally dissimilar, LEO mission. It is important to note that the actual performance of the Space Shuttle over 135 flights was 1 in 67, which reflects the higher actual risk early in the program due to the unknown failure modes and design weaknesses (as noted in the previous section).

Here’s the direct link to the 2014 PDF:

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2014-asap-annual-report.pdf?emrc=679dca092ec55

Other ASAP annual reports linked here:

https://www.nasa.gov/history/asap-historical-reports/#2000to2023

And previously discussed in SLS General Discussion Thread 7.

[VSECOTSPE]

The person I find most to blame is Mike Griffin for pushing down the path of Constellation creating the monstrosity in the first place that has been morphed into SLS instead of put out of our misery.  We would have been far better off if Sean O'Keefe had stayed on through Bush jr's second term.

I agree.  O’Keefe had a direct line to VP Cheney and Appropriations Chair Stevens (because he had worked for both).  He was politically insulated enough that he could stiff-arm the Shuttle (sorry, need to stop here for a second and just say that I have to use stupid words to get my point across. I know that means I must have a weak argument, but that's why I use bad words). and make decisions based on technical, budget, schedule, and programmatic considerations, not workforce and political considerations.  (O’Keefe wasn’t really making these calls, rather he was protecting those did, like ESMD AA Steidle.)

Griffin lacked O’Keefe’s political independence.  I think to get confirmed as Administrator, Griffin had to more or less promise Senate appropriators that he would preserve the Shuttle workforce and institution.  He had recently volunteered on a Planetary Society (of all things) mini study that had resurfaced the single-SRB launcher concept.  So he hired an ex-astronaut at ATK (Horowitz, who was also associated with the concept) to make sure all the sole-source justifications happened and boom, Ares I is born and the rest is history,  Griffin got a nice no-show emeritus professor job in Huntsville followed by a CEO position in one of the local technical firms after leaving NASA.  One or both of those might have been part of the deal Griffin struck with appropriators behind closed doors.

I don’t think we’d have a thriving Antarctic base at the lunar South Pole or be on our way to Mars if O’Keefe had hung in longer.  Steidle’s EELV-based exploration architecture had limits, and he was reluctant to push on things that were later covered in the Artemis Accords.   (I know because I pressed him on them.)  But I think NASA would have put boots on the lunar surface, addressed a couple research priorities, and been in a much better position to transition to a Starship/New Glenn world.  And that world still would have happened, maybe even sooner, because COTS had been formulated and was ready to roll under O’Keefe/Steidle, not Griffin/Horowitz.  (I know because I was the program exec.)

They were seriously considering putting a 10,000 pound shock absorbing system between the booster and the upper stage of the stick on a rocket that was already severely mass constrained.

This is what happens when you rely on former astronauts like Horowitz or other mission operators with little/no experience in designing, developing, and building things.  They’re two totally different skill sets.

Even Griffin, despite all his degrees, largely lacked development experience.  His one development experience was chief engineer for the modification of an upper stage for an SDIO proof-of-concept.

Steidle, by comparison, ran JSF/F-35 before coming to NASA.  Folks have complaints about F-35, but there’s no doubt that Steidle’s range and depth of experience in getting hardware to flight far outclassed Griffin and Horowitz put together.  Isaacman is going to need someone(s) like that.

My one hope for a real change of direction this time is that the new administration has embraced a take no prisoners attitude on everything they have done so far.  I'm hoping that extends to NASA where disruptive change is desperately needed.

It will be interesting to see if Isaacman can act independently of old Shuttle politics like O’Keefe did.  AFAIK, he lacks the DC connections to do so.  So it will be up to Musk and/or the Trump WH to protect him.  But after the first couple weeks of Trump II, it’s not clear to me that they have the focus, planning, or knowledge to do so.  Disruption and taking no prisoners is one thing.  Effecting actual change is another.

Again, we’ll see....

[eric z]

 I kind of knew I would get clobbered by bringing up the asteroid-thing, but thanks to all for a great, informative trip down memory lane. I really appreciate it! Sometimes it is good to refresh the memory!

[clongton]

As to the question beating the Chinese to the moon - who cares? They are going to get there once, stay a few hours, come home and not go back again for years. Let them. Between that 1st landing and the 2nd, several years later, they are developing (as we speak) a human translunar transportation system that is fully reusable and capable of nearly airline-type turn-around times to cleanup, replenish, fuel up, and do it again and again and again. When they go back the 2nd time it will be with THAT infrastructure. THAT!!! is what should scare you, not some schoolboy king of the hill fist fight to see who stands up 1st. To put it politely, that's just plain stupid. We need to stop spending - right now - any further funding on the SLS/Orion/Gateway PoR and go all in on SpaceX and Blue Origin to create that system and make it operational before the Chinese 2nd landing. If we don't do that, the Chinese will soon be sending crews to the moon at least once a month for 6 month tours of rotational duty. There will be Chinese bases all over the lunar south pole and Chinese scientific, and possibly military, installations as well. The Chinese don't care how many nations have signed on to the Artemis Accords. They want the moon. The fact of the matter is that they will control at least the south polar region of the moon. And we will not be welcome.

So the question becomes:
1. Stick with SLS/Orion/Gateway and **MAYBE** beat the Chinese to the moon for their 1st landing, which I personally doubt, or;
2. Let them go there unimpeded for their 1st landing, and utterly dump the boondoggle SLS/Orion/Gateway fools errand approach and give SpaceX and Blue Origin the green light to focus on a highly sustainable, human translunar transportation system and bring it to operational status - sooner rather than later. THAT is what we should be doing, and SLS/Orion/Gateway is a millstone around our necks that is guaranteed to cede control of the moon to a nation that is hostile to Western civilization and our way of life.

That's the choice. There is no middle ground. But here's the problem. I have major doubts that the new administration, for all its bluster, has the balls to do it. They are focused on other things. NASA can't do it on its own. They are subservient to Congress, which doesn't give a rat's ass until it's already too late. It's going to take someone with the vision, the balls and the money to do it themself, to tell Congress, the military industrial complex and all the teat sucking government contractors to go play in their sandbox while the adults do the work. Anybody come to mind?

We'll see. YMMV

[DanClemmensen]

As to the question beating the Chinese to the moon - who cares? They are going to get there once, stay a few hours, come home and not go back again for years. Let them. Between that 1st landing and the 2nd, several years later, they are developing (as we speak) a human translunar transportation system that is fully reusable and capable of nearly airline-type turn-around times to cleanup, replenish, fuel up, and do it again and again and again. When they go back the 2nd time it will be with THAT infrastructure. THAT!!! is what should scare you, not some schoolboy king of the hill fist fight to see who stands up 1st. To put it politely, that's just plain stupid. We need to stop spending - right now - any further funding on the SLS/Orion/Gateway PoR and go all in on SpaceX and Blue Origin to create that system and make it operational before the Chinese 2nd landing. If we don't do that, the Chinese will soon be sending crews to the moon at least once a month for 6 month tours of rotational duty. There will be Chinese bases all over the lunar south pole and Chinese scientific, and possibly military, installations as well. The Chinese don't care how many nations have signed on to the Artemis Accords. They want the moon. The fact of the matter is that they will control at least the south polar region of the moon. And we will not be welcome.

So the question becomes:
1. Stick with SLS/Orion/Gateway and **MAYBE** beat the Chinese to the moon for their 1st landing, which I personally doubt, or;
2. Let them go there unimpeded for their 1st landing, and utterly dump the boondoggle SLS/Orion/Gateway fools errand approach and give SpaceX and Blue Origin the green light to focus on a highly sustainable, human translunar transportation system and bring it to operational status - sooner rather than later. THAT is what we should be doing, and SLS/Orion/Gateway is a millstone around our necks that is guaranteed to cede control of the moon to a nation that is hostile to Western civilization and our way of life.

That's the choice. There is no middle ground. But here's the problem. I have major doubts that the new administration, for all its bluster, has the balls to do it. They are focused on other things. NASA can't do it on its own. They are subservient to Congress, which doesn't give a rat's ass until it's already too late. It's going to take someone with the vision, the balls and the money to do it themself, to tell Congress, the military industrial complex and all the teat sucking government contractors to go play in their sandbox while the adults do the work. Anybody come to mind?

We'll see. YMMV

I disagree. There is a third choice, which is a short-term architecture with small crew that easily grows to the long-term sustainable architecture.
Cancel SLS/Orion/Gateway now. Use Crew Dragon to get crew to LEO. Use Starship (Depot/Tanker/HLS) to move crew from LEO to some cislunar rendezvous and back. Use another Starship (Depot/Tanker/HLS) to go from cislunar to lunar surface and back. This is more capable than Artemis III and can be done in the Artemis III timeframe, but as you say it's not a long-term architecture because it's constrained by the 4-person crew of Dragon.  However, it converts to a long-term solution when crewed EDL Starship (plus Depot/tanker) can take crew to cislunar rendezvous.

IMO this is actually faster than the current PoR, because it eliminates SLS/Orion while adding no new designs. It's better than skipping the short-term architecture because it has an achievable shirt-term mission. That is still directly on the path to the long-term solution.

[pochimax]

IMO this is actually faster than the current PoR, because it eliminates SLS/Orion while adding no new designs.

You keep repeating this over and over again, when the reality is that ALL of those components of your architecture are new developments.

[DanClemmensen]

IMO this is actually faster than the current PoR, because it eliminates SLS/Orion while adding no new designs.

You keep repeating this over and over again, when the reality is that ALL of those components of your architecture are new developments.

My favored architecture does not belong to me: I'm not that smart. What I said was "adding new designs". They are not added. Tanker/Depot/HLS are all new developments. However, they are already needed to implement the existing Artemis III PoR, and these developments are already underway. If any of them slip, then Artemis III will slip whether or not SLS or Orion Slips. Thus. With the existing PoR, We are exposed to all these slips and we are also exposed to SLS and Orion slips.

In clongton's model as I understood it, he is proposing that we start with a clean slate and design and implement the best architecture. My problem is that if the architecture needs any system that is not already in development, then we will not see a landing in the next ten years.

[clongton]

In clongton's model as I understood it, he is proposing that we start with a clean slate and design and implement the best architecture. My problem is that if the architecture needs any system that is not already in development, then we will not see a landing in the next ten years.

That is *not* correct.
No - clean - slate.
No - New - Starts! Go with what we have!
DUMP SLS/Orion/Gateway!
We already have Starship and the HLS under development. A depot to service the HLS is underway. Green light full speed ahead with those elements, with the understanding that the current designs are just a starting place and will drastically and rapidly improve as the system matures. Use Falcon-9/Dragon to bring crew into LEO to meet the HLS until Starship is crew certified. Then use Starship to do  that job. Incorporate Blue Origin into the human translunar transportation system as it comes on line. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos need to talk and create a merged plan that combines the strengths of both companies.

[DanClemmensen]

In clongton's model as I understood it, he is proposing that we start with a clean slate and design and implement the best architecture. My problem is that if the architecture needs any system that is not already in development, then we will not see a landing in the next ten years.

That is *not* correct.
No - clean - slate.
No - New - Starts! Go with what we have!
DUMP SLS/Orion/Gateway!
We already have Starship and the HLS under development. A depot to service the HLS is underway. Green light full speed ahead with those elements, with the understanding that the current designs are just a starting place and will drastically and rapidly improve as the system matures. Use Falcon-9/Dragon to bring crew into LEO to meet the HLS until Starship is crew certified. Then use Starship to do  that job. Incorporate Blue Origin into the human translunar transportation system as it comes on line. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos need to talk and create a merged plan that combines the strengths of both companies.

So we are actually in complete agreement.

Sorry, I misinterpreted your concept to mean a "clean slate" focus on the long term, with no consideration of an early landing. What you actually said is not that, but this:

2. Let them [the Chinese]  go there unimpeded for their 1st landing, and utterly dump the boondoggle SLS/Orion/Gateway fools errand approach and give SpaceX and Blue Origin the green light to focus on a highly sustainable, human translunar transportation system and bring it to operational status - sooner rather than later. THAT is what we should be doing, and SLS/Orion/Gateway is a millstone around our necks that is guaranteed to cede control of the moon to a nation that is hostile to Western civilization and our way of life.

[catdlr]

Phillip Sloss Report

NASA updates Artemis II status, Gateway and Starship plans, and Boeing updates SLS stage builds - Feb 2, 2025

Feb 2, 2025
NASA and its Artemis contractors provided a little more color about the Artemis II schedule this past week, which helped contextualize the ongoing SLS solid rocket booster stacking in the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center.  Imagery was provided by NASA public affairs of the seventh of the ten segments being lifted into place on the Mobile Launcher in the last week of January, and now we're hearing that Orion may be ready for launch processing in April.

I review the latest solid rocket motor segment to be stacked and the schedule hints in this video, along with updates I got from Boeing about upcoming milestones for the SLS stages they are building for Artemis III and IV.  There were also few other Artemis news items from the same trade show panels where the Artemis II news came from, a rare Dragon XL note and a couple of details about the Starship HLS uncrewed lunar ascent demonstration.

And on top of that NASA and ISS took a turn in the political news cycle this week, which wasn't directly connected to Artemis...but we're wondering how much longer it will be before the circus comes for Artemis.

Imagery is courtesy of NASA, except where noted.

News articles cited:
https://spacenews.com/trump-tells-musk-to-bring-back-stranded-iss-astronauts-spacex-already-planned-to-return/


00:00 Intro
00:59 Artemis II stacking update and schedule hints
06:20 SLS Stages production updates from Boeing
15:15 Other news and notes
16:16 Dragon XL and Starship lunar ascent demo notes
18:02 Belated notice that RS-25 restart completed design certification
18:52 Thanks for watching!

[pochimax]

No - New - Starts! Go with what we have!

Yes!!!

This is SLS/Orion.

No new Starts for what already exists. 

[clongton]

No - New - Starts! Go with what we have!

Yes!!!
This is SLS/Orion.
No new Starts for what already exists. 

SLS/Orion is garbage. It already stinks to high heaven. Throw it out as fast as you can.

[TheRadicalModerate]

No - New - Starts! Go with what we have!

Yes!!!
This is SLS/Orion.
No new Starts for what already exists. 

SLS/Orion is garbage. It already stinks to high heaven. Throw it out as fast as you can.

Let's be as precise as possible.  Instead of "no new starts", the more pedantic version is, "Don't do anything that might create a longer critical path than already exists."  Right now, three things are jockeying for the dubious distinction of owning the critical path:

1) The SLS/Orion for Artemis III.
2) Starship HLS (aka LSS).
3) The xEVA suits.

Team Kill SLS/Orion Now is asserting that it can be replaced with a combination of two LSSes, one staged from LEO, with one (or possibly two) F9/D2s to bring the crew to and from LEO.  That requires the following new work:

a) LSS needs an active/passive docking ring.  This may be the plan already, but you can't dock a ferry LSS to the HLS LSS without active/passive.

b) D2 may need some additional consumables, depending on what happens if it waits, standalone, in LEO for the crew to return on the ferry LSS.

c) There's a whole bunch of mission planning to do:  Detailed orbit computations, especially propulsive insertion back into LEO.  Thermal management.  LSS fueling schedules.  LSS loiter analysis in NRHO, both for the ferry and the HLS.  All the usual lighting conditions management.  And, most of all, a huge amount of contingency planning, which is completely different from Orion's contingency planning.

If the trigger is pulled sometime in the next 6 months, none of these should be anywhere close to creating a new critical path.  But if the Team SLS/Orion can get everybody to drag their feet for long enough, then one of these items will become the critical path.  So it's pretty obvious what their strategy will be.

[Hadley Delta]

As to the question beating the Chinese to the moon - who cares? They are going to get there once, stay a few hours, come home and not go back again for years.

I'm not so sure of that. The Chinese have been very methodical and very persistent. They have announced plans for the moon that could well come to fruition before NASA gets its house in order.