Stalin
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2008
- Messages
- 4,418
This sideshow is only going ahead to beat the Chinese..
It goes without saying that the useless frump administration, relentlessly starving science in general and nasa in particular
will use this mission as a feel-good exercise and exult in any success...
"..In lieu of a lunar landing, which the Orion spacecraft cannot carry out, the crew has begun a variety of tests of the entire SLS. The errors so far encountered include a brief communications dropout approximately 51 minutes into the flight, a fault light on the toilet system (subsequently resolved in coordination with mission control), a closed crossover valve on the spacecraft’s water tanks, and a single latching current limiter failure similar to those observed repeatedly during the uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022. None of these anomalies prevented the mission from proceeding.
,,,
Moreover, the enormous $93 billion price tag is primarily designed to feed into the corporate sector. Boeing and Lockheed Martin have each received approximately $15 billion, Northrop Grumman received roughly $6 billion, and the remainder went to a network of contractors operating on cost-plus contracts that reward schedule slippage and cost overruns.
Each SLS launch costs approximately $4 billion. Only two rockets have been built, with a third in production, and the entire system will almost certainly be discarded in favor of commercially produced launch vehicles, most likely Elon Musk’s Starship, which is still prone to exploding during or even before launch.
And there is nothing technically groundbreaking about the Space Launch System. It is a smaller Saturn V with solid rocket boosters attached and RS-25 engines salvaged from decommissioned space shuttles. The Orion capsule is a scaled-up Apollo Command Module. The entire mission architecture, including a free-return lunar trajectory to be followed by future crewed landings using a separate lander, directly replicates Apollo. The 14 years required to develop this system is almost twice the time elapsed between Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight in 1961 and the first Moon landing in 1969, when all of the underlying technology had to be invented from scratch. This reflects the bureaucratic and profit-driven character of the program, not the demands of genuine scientific exploration.
A further concern is the unresolved heat shield problem carried over from Artemis I. During that mission, portions of the Orion heat shield’s char layer broke away in fragments rather than ablating as designed. NASA’s own 2024 Inspector General report acknowledged this finding and noted the agency’s stated commitment to understanding the root cause. What the agency chose to do instead of fixing the underlying problem before flying a crew was to alter the reentry trajectory, a change that, according to publicly available analysis, actually subjects the heat shield to higher total stress over a shorter duration. Four people’s lives depend on how well that heat shield performs.
comrade stalin
moscow
It goes without saying that the useless frump administration, relentlessly starving science in general and nasa in particular
will use this mission as a feel-good exercise and exult in any success...
"..In lieu of a lunar landing, which the Orion spacecraft cannot carry out, the crew has begun a variety of tests of the entire SLS. The errors so far encountered include a brief communications dropout approximately 51 minutes into the flight, a fault light on the toilet system (subsequently resolved in coordination with mission control), a closed crossover valve on the spacecraft’s water tanks, and a single latching current limiter failure similar to those observed repeatedly during the uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022. None of these anomalies prevented the mission from proceeding.
,,,
Moreover, the enormous $93 billion price tag is primarily designed to feed into the corporate sector. Boeing and Lockheed Martin have each received approximately $15 billion, Northrop Grumman received roughly $6 billion, and the remainder went to a network of contractors operating on cost-plus contracts that reward schedule slippage and cost overruns.
Each SLS launch costs approximately $4 billion. Only two rockets have been built, with a third in production, and the entire system will almost certainly be discarded in favor of commercially produced launch vehicles, most likely Elon Musk’s Starship, which is still prone to exploding during or even before launch.
And there is nothing technically groundbreaking about the Space Launch System. It is a smaller Saturn V with solid rocket boosters attached and RS-25 engines salvaged from decommissioned space shuttles. The Orion capsule is a scaled-up Apollo Command Module. The entire mission architecture, including a free-return lunar trajectory to be followed by future crewed landings using a separate lander, directly replicates Apollo. The 14 years required to develop this system is almost twice the time elapsed between Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight in 1961 and the first Moon landing in 1969, when all of the underlying technology had to be invented from scratch. This reflects the bureaucratic and profit-driven character of the program, not the demands of genuine scientific exploration.
A further concern is the unresolved heat shield problem carried over from Artemis I. During that mission, portions of the Orion heat shield’s char layer broke away in fragments rather than ablating as designed. NASA’s own 2024 Inspector General report acknowledged this finding and noted the agency’s stated commitment to understanding the root cause. What the agency chose to do instead of fixing the underlying problem before flying a crew was to alter the reentry trajectory, a change that, according to publicly available analysis, actually subjects the heat shield to higher total stress over a shorter duration. Four people’s lives depend on how well that heat shield performs.
NASA’s Artemis II launches crew to the Moon for first time in 54 years
The mission, despite the scientific and engineering achievements, is driven primarily by geopolitical conflict with China.
www.wsws.org
comrade stalin
moscow
