NASA's Artemis Program Updates and Discussion Thread 5

[StraumliBlight]

Recommendation to prevent program delays from yesterday's NAC-HEO meeting.

[rsnellenberger]

Recommendation to prevent program delays from yesterday's NAC-HEO meeting.

More precisely, a recommendation to prevent uncomfortable early warning of program delays.

[dglow]

SLS is still a national disgrace (by Casey Handmer):
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a-national-disgrace/

https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1841558221573513579

Nice work, Casey, bringing my blood to a boil.

[deadman1204]

Brutal, well reasoned and true.

If I was king for a day I'd bring back Jim B and give him free-reign to overhaul both NASA and Artemis.

Unfortunately, nobody with a reasonable brain gets to be a king for a day.  I don't see this getting fixed anytime soon regardless of who is the next President.  There are so many things ruined by the rot of incompetence and politics.

My guess is that the heat shield issue on Orion not being fixable anytime soon and [[without billions of extra dollars and China making steady progress on their lunar ambitions is the most likely combination that could blow things up.  At that point maybe the President or Congress could push for proposals from industry on how they could handle crew and cargo to and from the Moon.   It would be a start.  Hopefully SpaceX and others have been working on concepts just in case.

Your correct that its not in presidential power to fix it. Obama tried to kill Ares - which was as bad or worse than SLS. Congress just made up SLS and gave the designs to NASA.

Nothing can change until the political issues are addressed.

[hplan]

Brutal, well reasoned and true.

If I was king for a day I'd bring back Jim B and give him free-reign to overhaul both NASA and Artemis.

Unfortunately, nobody with a reasonable brain gets to be a king for a day.  I don't see this getting fixed anytime soon regardless of who is the next President.  There are so many things ruined by the rot of incompetence and politics.

My guess is that the heat shield issue on Orion not being fixable anytime soon and [[without billions of extra dollars and China making steady progress on their lunar ambitions is the most likely combination that could blow things up.  At that point maybe the President or Congress could push for proposals from industry on how they could handle crew and cargo to and from the Moon.   It would be a start.  Hopefully SpaceX and others have been working on concepts just in case.

Its not in presidential power to fix it. Obama tried to kill Ares - which was as bad or worse than SLS. Congress just made up SLS and gave the designs to NASA.

But surely no congressional representatives can design rockets. Someone provided the SLS plans to congress. What i would like to hear more about is who designed SLS and lobbied for it in congress. Boeing? Some people at NASA?

[Athelstane]

Brutal, well reasoned and true.

If I was king for a day I'd bring back Jim B and give him free-reign to overhaul both NASA and Artemis.

Unfortunately, nobody with a reasonable brain gets to be a king for a day.  I don't see this getting fixed anytime soon regardless of who is the next President.  There are so many things ruined by the rot of incompetence and politics.

My guess is that the heat shield issue on Orion not being fixable anytime soon and [[without billions of extra dollars and China making steady progress on their lunar ambitions is the most likely combination that could blow things up.  At that point maybe the President or Congress could push for proposals from industry on how they could handle crew and cargo to and from the Moon.   It would be a start.  Hopefully SpaceX and others have been working on concepts just in case.

Its not in presidential power to fix it. Obama tried to kill Ares - which was as bad or worse than SLS. Congress just made up SLS and gave the designs to NASA.

But surely no congressional representatives can design rockets. Someone provided the SLS plans to congress. What i would like to hear more about is who designed SLS and lobbied for it in congress. Boeing? Some people at NASA?

That was definitely Lori Garver's sense, if you read her memoir.  Nelson and his colleagues clearly had someone in the agency funneling them information and study. Probably, several someones.

I do not think we can say any problem is *unfixable*; the question is how much political capital a president is willing to expend to fix it. Obama considerably underestimated the capital he needed to invest to really kill Constellation dead; and he was in the middle of a big fight to get Obamacare through the Hill, and that's where he thought he needed to spend his capital.

But yes, I think it's clear that the problems at NASA go much deeper than any firing any senior managers or terminating a particular vehicle can address. It's fundamental to the organization in more profound ways.

[dglow]

Brutal, well reasoned and true.

If I was king for a day I'd bring back Jim B and give him free-reign to overhaul both NASA and Artemis.

Unfortunately, nobody with a reasonable brain gets to be a king for a day.  I don't see this getting fixed anytime soon regardless of who is the next President.  There are so many things ruined by the rot of incompetence and politics.

My guess is that the heat shield issue on Orion not being fixable anytime soon and [[without billions of extra dollars and China making steady progress on their lunar ambitions is the most likely combination that could blow things up.  At that point maybe the President or Congress could push for proposals from industry on how they could handle crew and cargo to and from the Moon.   It would be a start.  Hopefully SpaceX and others have been working on concepts just in case.

Its not in presidential power to fix it. Obama tried to kill Ares - which was as bad or worse than SLS. Congress just made up SLS and gave the designs to NASA.

But surely no congressional representatives can design rockets. Someone provided the SLS plans to congress. What i would like to hear more about is who designed SLS and lobbied for it in congress. Boeing? Some people at NASA?

The prime movers:

Congress:  Alabama, Florida, Texas, Utah delegations
Industry:  Boeing, Lockheed, ATK
NASA:  Marshall first and foremost

[clongton]

Its not in presidential power to fix it. Obama tried to kill Ares - which was as bad or worse than SLS. Congress just made up SLS and gave the designs to NASA.

But surely no congressional representatives can design rockets. Someone provided the SLS plans to congress. What i would like to hear more about is who designed SLS and lobbied for it in congress. Boeing? Some people at NASA?

To answer your question:
With the signing of the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, the DIRECT team declared Mission Accomplished, because what the ACT mandated was exactly what the Jupiter HLV was designed to do, both as a SSTO and as a TSTO launch vehicle. NASA had received the entire set of specs for the vehicle and all its variants; ALL of which had been verified by the Aerospace Corp in Los Angles, as a totally and completely valid design that would fulfill all required objectives, and that obeyed the letter of the law; which was to reuse existing Shuttle hardware in the build. The Jupiter fulfilled every requirement to a tee. But NASA did not follow the law. Everything was turned over to Boeing, who promptly set about building a Jupiter look-alike but was in fact a completely redesigned vehicle. In every way except its appearance, it was the Ares-V that Boeing, Lockheed, ATK, Marshall and NASA had been working on under the Constellation program that President Obama tried to kill. It was a bait and switch. They simply recreated the Ares-V with enough changes to make it look like the Jupiter but was, in fact, a complete redesign of nearly every element of the LV. They reused nothing of the Shuttle technology and hardware. Everything except the RS-25 was brand new, and required that the entire Shuttle infrastructure be torn down, discarded, reconfigured and replaced. Even the reusable 4-segment SRBs were scrapped and replaced with a 5-segment, disposable, and MUCH HEAVIER booster. The new SRB was so much heavier that its lift capability was actually less than the lift capability of the 4-segment boosters used for the Space Shuttle and required a completely new chemical formulation for its propellant just to get back to, and then squeeze out a tiny little bit more lift capability than the reusable 4-segment boosters it replaced. The Shuttle ET, instead of being used as designed, became bigger, more complex and heavier, negating the small advantage of the new SRBs. The result is that the SLS is incapable of doing what DIRECT’s Jupiter LV could do right out of the gate. The previous Authorization Act that required that existing Shuttle hardware be used was never negated and therefore still a requirement. But that inconvenient part of the law was ignored. The newest version of the law directed that the core elements of SLS be operational not later than December 31, 2016. Yea, we all know how that turned out. Eight years later the look-alike fake HLV has flown only once, and it was plagued with anomalies. Even the Orion spacecraft almost didn’t make it back because of short-sighted design efforts on its heatshield. So yea, the answer to your question is “all of the above” that you mentioned. They all, in concert, screwed HSF, themselves, and All of us, by not following  the law. One very big takeaway from this misguided effort to build the biggest, badest rocket conceivable is that bigger is not always better. Real rocket design engineers designed the Jupiter HLV to take us to the moon and beyond. Bureaucrats and politicians designed the SLS to maximize profit margins and political power.

[VSECOTSPE]

But surely no congressional representatives can design rockets. Someone provided the SLS plans to congress.

Tom Cremins:

In 2010, as a fellow on the Senate commerce committee, he played an instrumental role in the development and passage of the 2010 NASA Authorization Act.

https://www.nasa.gov/people/nasa-associate-administrator-for-space-security-interests-thomas-e-cremins/

[deadman1204]

Aside from Cremins, there also has been zero mention of good ol senator shelby.
This idea that one person is to blame for sls is silly, it was all of boeing and congress together.

[woods170]

Brutal, well reasoned and true.

If I was king for a day I'd bring back Jim B and give him free-reign to overhaul both NASA and Artemis.

Unfortunately, nobody with a reasonable brain gets to be a king for a day.  I don't see this getting fixed anytime soon regardless of who is the next President.  There are so many things ruined by the rot of incompetence and politics.

My guess is that the heat shield issue on Orion not being fixable anytime soon and [[without billions of extra dollars and China making steady progress on their lunar ambitions is the most likely combination that could blow things up.  At that point maybe the President or Congress could push for proposals from industry on how they could handle crew and cargo to and from the Moon.   It would be a start.  Hopefully SpaceX and others have been working on concepts just in case.

Its not in presidential power to fix it. Obama tried to kill Ares - which was as bad or worse than SLS. Congress just made up SLS and gave the designs to NASA.

But surely no congressional representatives can design rockets. Someone provided the SLS plans to congress. What i would like to hear more about is who designed SLS and lobbied for it in congress. Boeing? Some people at NASA?

Lori Garver details this in her book "Escaping Gravity". It was a small group of people at NASA who came up with the numbers for a Shuttle-ET-scale version of Ares V and handed the specifics over to Congress folks like Nelson and Shelby. Lori even names a few of these people. It will take me too long to refind that particular chapter and paragraph, but it is in that book.
When Lori had "Escaping Gravity"published, she pulled no punches. She revealed, in rather good detail, how "players" like Nelson, Shelby and certain people at NASA, basically conspired to screw over the US taxpayers to keep Shuttle and Constellation contracts in place to satisfy the usual suspects like Boeing, ATK and LockMart. All in the name of "jobs" while it really was just a grift for established old-space companies.

Lori's book basically confirmed what a lot of people has suspected for a long time: SLS and Orion are not really "jobs programs", as everyone always seem to refer to them. In reality they are "keep the shareholders of old-space satisfied and the pockets of Congress members lined"-programs.

But I digress.

[woods170]

Brutal, well reasoned and true.

If I was king for a day I'd bring back Jim B and give him free-reign to overhaul both NASA and Artemis.

Unfortunately, nobody with a reasonable brain gets to be a king for a day.  I don't see this getting fixed anytime soon regardless of who is the next President.  There are so many things ruined by the rot of incompetence and politics.

My guess is that the heat shield issue on Orion not being fixable anytime soon and [[without billions of extra dollars and China making steady progress on their lunar ambitions is the most likely combination that could blow things up.  At that point maybe the President or Congress could push for proposals from industry on how they could handle crew and cargo to and from the Moon.   It would be a start.  Hopefully SpaceX and others have been working on concepts just in case.

Its not in presidential power to fix it. Obama tried to kill Ares - which was as bad or worse than SLS. Congress just made up SLS and gave the designs to NASA.

But surely no congressional representatives can design rockets. Someone provided the SLS plans to congress. What i would like to hear more about is who designed SLS and lobbied for it in congress. Boeing? Some people at NASA?

That was definitely Lori Garver's sense, if you read her memoir.  Nelson and his colleagues clearly had someone in the agency funneling them information and study. Probably, several someones.

I do not think we can say any problem is *unfixable*; the question is how much political capital a president is willing to expend to fix it. Obama considerably underestimated the capital he needed to invest to really kill Constellation dead; and he was in the middle of a big fight to get Obamacare through the Hill, and that's where he thought he needed to spend his capital.

But yes, I think it's clear that the problems at NASA go much deeper than any firing any senior managers or terminating a particular vehicle can address. It's fundamental to the organization in more profound ways.

Correct. I have a grand total of 12 sources all over NASA. Nine of them have, over the years, told me stuff that confirms my bolding above. The rot that is destroying NASA from the inside out, has penetrated all major aspects of NASA, from the highest management levels right down to the people doing the actual usefull work at the various NASA centers. For now it only concerns a minority of NASA employees. But if nothing is done to radically and permanently cut away the rot, it will eventually affect everyone working there. At that point NASA becomes a total loss. And that's happening faster than most people (including some NASA employees) can imagine.

[deadman1204]

Brutal, well reasoned and true.

If I was king for a day I'd bring back Jim B and give him free-reign to overhaul both NASA and Artemis.

Unfortunately, nobody with a reasonable brain gets to be a king for a day.  I don't see this getting fixed anytime soon regardless of who is the next President.  There are so many things ruined by the rot of incompetence and politics.

My guess is that the heat shield issue on Orion not being fixable anytime soon and [[without billions of extra dollars and China making steady progress on their lunar ambitions is the most likely combination that could blow things up.  At that point maybe the President or Congress could push for proposals from industry on how they could handle crew and cargo to and from the Moon.   It would be a start.  Hopefully SpaceX and others have been working on concepts just in case.

Its not in presidential power to fix it. Obama tried to kill Ares - which was as bad or worse than SLS. Congress just made up SLS and gave the designs to NASA.

But surely no congressional representatives can design rockets. Someone provided the SLS plans to congress. What i would like to hear more about is who designed SLS and lobbied for it in congress. Boeing? Some people at NASA?

That was definitely Lori Garver's sense, if you read her memoir.  Nelson and his colleagues clearly had someone in the agency funneling them information and study. Probably, several someones.

I do not think we can say any problem is *unfixable*; the question is how much political capital a president is willing to expend to fix it. Obama considerably underestimated the capital he needed to invest to really kill Constellation dead; and he was in the middle of a big fight to get Obamacare through the Hill, and that's where he thought he needed to spend his capital.

But yes, I think it's clear that the problems at NASA go much deeper than any firing any senior managers or terminating a particular vehicle can address. It's fundamental to the organization in more profound ways.

Correct. I have a grand total of 12 sources all over NASA. Nine of them have, over the years, told me stuff that confirms my bolding above. The rot that is destroying NASA from the inside out, has penetrated all major aspects of NASA, from the highest management levels right down to the people doing the actual usefull work at the various NASA centers. For now it only concerns a minority of NASA employees. But if nothing is done to radically and permanently cut away the rot, it will eventually affect everyone working there. At that point NASA becomes a total loss. And that's happening faster than most people (including some NASA employees) can imagine.

This feels rather revisionist. Congress instructed nasa to build sls, and instructs nasa how to handle the contracts. If nasa actually fines boeing for doing a bad job, what do you think congress would do? NASA is the fall guy here. If they actually managed sls/orion well, boeing/lockheed would get screwed and congress would just fire everyone until the contractors started earning infinite money again.
NASA is doing a crap job at managing the contracts because thats what congress wants. Congress wants lots of money to the contractors. The contracts are obviously milking the contracts, stretching them out, slow walking them, ect. If NASA starts fining them for doing a bad job, the contractors go to congress, and congress asks nasa if they still want to have a job.

[clongton]

Lori Garver details this in her book "Escaping Gravity". It was a small group of people at NASA who came up with the numbers for a Shuttle-ET-scale version of Ares V and handed the specifics over to Congress folks like Nelson and Shelby. Lori even names a few of these people.

I've read her book and I think I remember the piece you are referring to. It turned my stomach. I have it on my Kindle. I'll see if I can locate it.

[deltaV]

The rot that is destroying NASA from the inside out, has penetrated all major aspects of NASA, from the highest management levels right down to the people doing the actual usefull work at the various NASA centers.

ISTM that the human spaceflight portion of NASA is much, much worse than the uncrewed science part. For example the JPL-led MSR was probably ~2x more expensive than it could be whereas SLS is ~50x more expensive than it could be. And science missions always have a reasonable goal, unlike Gateway. So implying NASA is uniformly bad isn't accurate.

[Robotbeat]

I'd say MSR is probably more like 4 times as much as it should be.

JWST was estimated to be about $500m originally (about $1B in today's money). It ended up being $10 billion.

So I'm not sure I agree about uncrewed generally being better. MSR and JWST both seem to be breaking that trend. JWST in particular, as it became "too big to fail" and got Congressional support similar to SLS/Orion/etc.

[Robotbeat]

https://flic.kr/p/2qknSEa

https://flic.kr/p/2qkkzkq

NASA Johnson
Gateway Stands Tall for Stress Test
 
jsc2024e055348 (July 9, 2024) -- Gateway’s Habitation and Logistics Outpost stands vertically inside a Thales Alenia Space facility in Turin, Italy, after completing static load testing. With this phase of stress testing complete, the module is one step closer to final outfitting ahead of launch to lunar orbit.
 
508 Description: Gateway’s Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) is seen standing vertically inside a Thales Alenia Space facility in Turin, Italy. The cylindrical metallic module is surrounded by a red steel frame. Thales Alenia Space is the subcontractor for Northrop Grumman, NASA's commercial partner developing HALO.

That looks extremely unfinished for something that's supposed to be launching relatively soon attached to something else.

[Robotbeat]

Graphics posted by NASA Johnson

Those actually look really cool. I'm skeptical really of the need for Gateway, but... It's kind of exciting to see all the deep space hardware planned... and actually being fabricated now.

[catdlr]

Phillip Sloss Weekly Atrimus Report:

Mobile Launcher for Artemis II back in the VAB, but SLS stacking schedule still up in the air

Oct 6, 2024
NASA Exploration Ground Systems work crews rolled Mobile Launcher-1 from Launch Pad 39B back into the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center on October 3rd and 4th, but we're still no closer after the milestone to knowing when Artemis II stacking will start.

This video begins with coverage of the details of the rollback of the Mobile Launcher and a recap of the upgrades and repairs completed since the Artemis I launch two years ago.  Before the ML entered the building, the SLS Core Stage was temporarily lifted out of its transportation carriers to get weight and balance measurements, and NASA provided some footage of that.

There's more Starship schedule drama between SpaceX and the FAA to recap, now that maritime and flight restriction notices for mid-October are trickling out.  SpaceX is itching for the next flight test, but the FAA is still sticking with its late November forecast for a new launch license...at least for now.

While we wait for an Orion heatshield decision, there's plenty of time for another quick look at the cloudy big picture for Artemis II and III.

Imagery is courtesy of NASA, except where noted.

00:00 Intro
00:49 Mobile Launcher-1 is back in the VAB for Artemis II stacking
09:51 "Weight and cg" measurements of the Artemis II SLS Core Stage in the VAB
10:58 A quick look at the Artemis II big picture after the ML rollback
12:09 Starship IFT-5 schedule drama
14:03 Other news and notes
16:32 A similar quick look at the Artemis III big picture
18:00 Thanks for watching!

[Eric Hedman]

After seeing all the latest updates/non-updates from NASA and comments here, the near future of Artemis right now really depends on the heat shield decision.  Nothing else matters at the moment nearly as much.

We saw NASA playing it very safe by not returning the two astronauts to Earth on Starliner.  In a way, that puts them in a box.  How do they prove a redesigned heat shield is safe without another uncrewed test flight?  They don't.  They can't say an analysis proves it, because why didn't their analysis prove the current shield design wouldn't have chunks popping out?

I think NASA knows the heat shield needs a redesign and just don't know how to tell Congress what that means.  They also may not know yet what that means.  They probably don't know what they have to change the design to which means they don't know how long it will take.  If they want to follow the safety standard precedence they set with Starliner, they need to turn Artemis II into an uncrewed test flight.  Anything else will smell of a cost over crew safety decision.

I don't think NASA wants to make this decision right now.  I think they want to delay it as long as possible while other parts of Artemis get further along looking like better progress is happening.  I hope I am wrong, but I don't see them announcing any decision on the heat shield until after the election and probably no earlier than the very end of this year.

If Artemis II becomes an uncrewed testflight and hopefully successful, then I would expect all the other planned missions to be pushed back a flight.  Artemis III becomes the Apollo 8 analog.  Artemis IV becomes the first to land a crew, etc.  It would give schedule room for all the other components that are facing a challenging schedule to complete.

I don't think SLS/Orion gets canceled unless the heat shield fails on  the next test flight.  What I think will eventually kill off SLS/Orion is when a crewed Starship on a test flight goes out to the Moon and back and lands successfully on Earth for the fraction of the cost of an SLS/Orion flight.  Until then money flows fast enough to keep the program going.  And even then, it will be a slow phase out at best.