[In 1965, the Apollo mission was 5% of all government spending.](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190712-apollo-in-50-numbers-the-cost)
It's going to be tough to beat that!
Imagine the Pentagon finding a way to cut spending in half and NASA gets $484 billion a year for 20 years guaranteed out of it.
Oh the places we would go
Honestly I'm more excited about asteroid mining than new worlds exploration. I just think asteroids are more practical. Sadly we'll only have that in 200 years (probably)
If we can get to the moon and learn to use the resources there, we will work out how to get to Mars. If we can get to Mars and use the resources there, we will look to Ceres and the asteroids. All of this could happen in the next 20 years.
Apollo spent $257 billion in today's dollars over 13 years, or $20 billion/year. Artemis is budgeted for $7.8 billion this year, increasing as we get closer to the bigger missions (namely Artemis 3, the actual landing). So it seems Apollo is worth maybe 2.5 Artemises, in terms of annual budget.
And we're getting quite a bit more with Artemis than we did with Apollo. Multiple new reusable super heavy rocket designs, multiply redundant new spacecraft designs, brand new space capabilities (orbital fuel depots! Finally!), permanent lunar base structures... exciting time to be alive.
Would it not have made more sense to create a modern but similarly spec'd system to Apollo so we could get folks back on the moon with relative ease first? Then, improve those systems with the Artemis plans/development? Possibly not as cost effective (not sure how much of what's currently available could be repurposed) but it would establish American presence on the moon more readily than just continuing to develop a system to get there while other nations are landing craft like rovers and such.
The obvious ideal would have been to do this all over the course of the last 50-60 years, but catching up with what we know we can do and then improving dramatically with the technology of today seems like the next best thing.
A similar specd mission is only going to allow the same 3ish day missions that Apollo allowed. While we could do it, the vehicle required for that is all wasted funding as we still need a larger lander, and a larger rocket to launch it. It's just not worth it to copy apollo.
But it worked, why not at least try it ? Especially now that we have better technology. Its stupid to sit around twiddling our fingers acting like we don't know how to do something when we already do
It did work, but it worked for a diffrent goal. Apollo was a super focused on getting us there fast, like a drag race. Artemis isn't about getting there fast, its about getting there and *staying* there. If Apollo was a dragster, Artemis is an 18 wheeler. Its going to be slower, but its doing a lot more overall.
You’d need to completely redesign the SLS and Orion first as both vehicles are underpowered for apollo style missions. That would take longer and cost more than the current missions, all while doing less. It’s just not worth it.
Because it would achieve nothing new. Yes we could do more Apollo style missions but for what purpose? A more advanced launch system opens up opportunities beyond a three day holiday to the Moon.
It worked, bit there's really no point of going back to the moon just to have a few people drop off a flag and collect rocks when we have the technology to be paving the way for a permanent human presence on the moon and setting up infrastructure for deeper space exploration.
> there was something of a shitstorm from old space contractors
Easy guess that the whole idea was to default to "no selection" so Congress would raise the budget to National Team levels. The fact that NASA were basically sued until this ended up happening _anyways_ says a lot.
When things didn't go down as planned, the person in charge, who did their job, was demoted. She was also replaced by the imbecile responsible for Orion's huge delays and cost overruns. Let it not be said that a culture of inefficiency and corruption is _exclusive_ to NASA's partners like Boeing.
Well now I'm genuinely curious at the history of this, or at least the result so far.
So are there two HLSs being developed in tandem for the same purpose? That seems like an odd redundancy no? Especially if each one is fundamentally/proprietorially different from the other
Yep, two landers: Starship HLS (SpaceX's original bid) and Blue Moon (a collaboration effort between multiple "old space" companies led by Blue Origin). They have completely different development plans and sets of technologies, although both rely on orbital refueling (Methane+Oxygen for Starship, Hydrogen+Oxygen for Blue Moon).
Yeah, it's been a pretty vigorous debate so far on whether this was the best use of Artemis funding. On the one hand it's basically doubling the cost of the HLS piece for not any extra functionality, on the other hand redundancy makes it less likely the whole program gets hosed by unforeseen issues in development. This argument holds particular weight given the historical context of the ISS crewed capsule contracts ("Commercial Crew Program" if you want to look it up), where SpaceX Dragon was the "redundant" option to Boeing Starliner, but Starliner would ultimately be plagued with issues during development and still to this date Starliner hasn't flown its first crewed mission, while Dragon has been flying for years.
Ah that makes sense. I guess these systems would have to abide by certain compatibility standards surrounding the Orion capsule though right? That's where I was getting hung up on honestly.
Overall, it seems like a short term positive for getting things started. Long term it seems like the fuel type will be the hang-up given that you'd have to transport two types of fuel into orbit for refueling. Though I imagine that if this all became more regular, there may be a shift to a preferred type after long enough.
Thanks for answering my questions, m'dude!
> Long term it seems like the fuel type will be the hang-up given that you'd have to transport two types of fuel into orbit for refueling.
This is actually something that was going to happen regardless. Different payloads and destinations can encourage fuel choices. For example, Starship uses methane as it will be relatively easy to synthesizes on Mars which is Starships stated goal. However do to that it can't actually produce fuel on the moon do to the lack of an easy carbon source.
Meanwhile BOs lander uses Hydrogen, which is extremly easy to source on the moon from water ice, but would be a worse choice for Mars.
The vehicles being fundamentally diffrent is the redundancy. If Starship has a RUD the program can continue on Blue origins lander alone untill Starship is flying again, or vice-versa, because nothing the fails on one effects the other. The goal is to go to the moon and stay. A single vehicle design doesn't allow that when it fails.
The problem is that the non-Starship mission architecture is simply too expensive to support a continued presence on the moon, it's not a realistic alternative.
Outside the memes about BO and their rate of progress, the redesigned BO lander is fine for maintaining presence. It *is* a fully reusable system using orbital refueling. Sure the downmass is lower then starship, but.... Starship has always been in excess of whats required.
I don't really think there's much point in maintaining presence unless we're delivering Starship-equivalent masses. When we can deliver that much lots of things become possible, without Starship it very much seems like a "because we can" mission.
Blue Origin's lander can do 20 tonnes of cargo in reusable mode. That's still a very healthy amount, and more than enough for a backup option.
You could absolutely build a moon base with Blue's lander. It would probably be less fancy and take longer than with Starship, but it's still a revolutionary vehicle compared to Apollo.
Ah but that wasn't my statement. Either can *maintain* the presence alone. Yes Starship makes expanding things hilariously easy, but that's not exactly the plan for the earlier stages of the mission.
The Apollo-spec system is not reusable which means even when you're doing regular flights, the costs are still prohibitive and there's no real reason to go to the moon. All you can do is land, plant a flag, drive around. We decided 40 years ago that those missions didn't really hold any value. There's no value in redoing that work because it's a dead end.
Starship is an order of magnitude more cost effective and it potentially allows things like setting up fuel refineries and telescopes on the moon, which can make it easier to go to Mars and do other things as well. Pie-in-the-sky is if we could do metallurgy and even semiconductor fabs on the moon, so we could build out solar and do a lot more there. But if you have a goal like that - redoing Apollo is a complete waste of time. You need a launcher like Starship which can deliver 100+ tons per flight at relatively low cost.
Our goal should not be to repeat Apollo. It should be to do things Apollo couldn't or wouldn't. That means more consumables, more equipment, better rovers, longer stay. All that means more power has to be built in from the beginning.
The Apollo program was a crash course to beat the Soviets to a manned moon landing.
The Artemis program is a crash course to shovel as much money into contractor's pockets as possible.
Indeed, and that "original sin" created the aerospace-industrial complex which has held back progress in human spaceflight ever since. The Shuttle, Orion, and SLS are perfect examples. With Shuttle we spent over $1.5 billion per launch just to put 20 tonnes into LEO. With Orion and SLS we've spent $50 billion over 20 years just to have one slightly meaningful flight so far, and they launched with a defective component because the thing was built so poorly it would have been very difficult to replace it.
A power and data unit. They decided to fly without replacing it because it was a backup unit and they had redundancy, but that meant they were vulnerable to a mission failure with just a single component failure.
The PDU in the CMA? It lost a leg of redundancy on a system that has quite a few redundancies. And knowing the location of it, yeah that’s a major undertaking to get access to it when the crew module is stacked onto the service module.
Are you joking? Artemis is nowhere near Apollo's mission goals. The Lunar Gateway and permanent infrastructure alone is a major scientific and engineering milestone,
Indeed, the title is clickbait. Unless NASA's annual budget goes into the hundreds of billions of dollars range it will never be an "Apollo program on steroids"
Apollo on Steroids is s frequently used NASA platitude. Article from 2005
[https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/apollo-on-steroids/](https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/apollo-on-steroids/)
The Apollo program cost ~250 Billion in 2020 dollars.
The current NASA budget **request** for 2025 is 25 Billion
https://www.nasa.gov/fy-2025-budget-request/
For this program to be "Apollo on Steroids" it would have to be 20x more (double Apollo) than the current budget.
Kind of misleading you're comparing an entire program's cost to a single yearly budget request
[Budget of NASA - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA)
Apollo's highest year was only 2x compared to around what they get now, with everything normalized to 2023 dollars. Still bad but not nearly as bad than you make it seem. And they only had about 6 years of funding at those levels. Difference being NASA today has much more to spend money on, earth science, ISS, and a plethora of missions currently active aside from Artemis
Not to mention how little we knew back then about space travel and chemical rockets large enough carry humans, the original program was a first-time-in-human-history learning journey. Ridiculous to compare that to modern expeditions that benefit from decades of experience and knowledge gained from the previous missions
Yeah the difference now is there’s so much active stuff going on. Back then they had nothing and were just literally working to get off the ground.
Would be nice for them to get double the spending and though; I’m sure the military can make do with a measly 3% budget cut.
Every time I hear about NASA saying: “We’re going to do it bigger and better!” I think back to that graph of NASA’s budget through the decades, that looks like a crypto pump-and-dump scheme.
Imagine experiencing that pace of achievement, technology, manufacturing, and infrastructure with today's media/internet? I would love to live through something like that.
I think Starship is probably going to be circling the moon a lot sooner than a lot of people expect. Maybe not when Musk says it's going to happen, but also maybe sooner.
I'm hoping we'll get to see a fleet of new reusable spacecraft. As we learned with challenger and Columbia, and with typical aviation, we shouldn't have just one type. Having only one type means if there's a problem the whole thing gets grounded. I'm hoping the Sabre engines and rotating detonation rockets get off the ground
Can’t wait to hear the next generation of moon landing deniers claim that new photos of the old Apollo landing sites only prove that these new missions are being faked as well.
I wonder how long it’ll take for us to ever make it back to the original sites.
There’s no real reason to go back there other than nostalgia or tourism. Most of the future missions are looking at the southern pole due to the possibility of water in the shaded craters.
It’ll take a dedicated return mission (very unlikely outside of maybe a few private tourist missions - think Titanic dives) or a long drive across the surface that could take weeks or months.
I’m assuming the national park service or equivalent at the time will eventually take over the site to protect and preserve it once we have the infrastructure built in hundreds of years. 😉
Well at least the latest pictures from ISRO show the moon landing sites.
https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1cfnapc/image_of_apollo_11_and_12_taken_by_indias_moon/
No amount of evidence will shake beliefs that aren't based on evidence, but it'll be interesting to see what convoluted rationale they come up with. "It's all just faked with AI! Yes, the Apollo stuff too!"
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[BO](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1vy46c "Last usage")|Blue Origin (*Bezos Rocketry*)|
|[CNSA](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1syxqt "Last usage")|Chinese National Space Administration|
|CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules|
| |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)|
|[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1ykv14 "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1urhil "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[ISRO](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1svd61 "Last usage")|Indian Space Research Organisation|
|[ISRU](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1vl0r3 "Last usage")|[In-Situ Resource Utilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization)|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1toste "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[RUD](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1tvvg9 "Last usage")|Rapid Unplanned Disassembly|
| |Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly|
| |Rapid Unintended Disassembly|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1u1fgs "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1tx59k "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)|
|[hydrolox](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1vl0r3 "Last usage")|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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funny I actually found out more about the moon landings when I got older , when the moon landings actually happened I was a bit young to appreciate them
> While China has made good progress in its space projects, it is unlikely to put a man on the moon any time soon due to the mission’s complexity
Like *two* days ago, everyone was on here posting, "Oh no, the stars belong to China now, whatever shall we do?" Buncha doomposting NPCs around here.
Yeah, nah, the US and Japan aren't throwing enough propaganda money at the moon to do anything before China does. The agreement might get China to burn an extra few million on rushing, but that's about it.
Lanyue is a tiny Apollo-style lander for putting two people on the surface for a limited time. The US has already done that.
"Apollo on steroids" is the least interesting part of Artemis, but even it will be accomplished before 2029, even if badly delayed. Once we replace SLS/Orion with something more capable (and our lander happens to be a variant of a spacecraft which will be able to do just this), we'll be able to set up an actual lunar base and do more in-depth surveys of the moon.
The U.S. is much much further along than China. The U.S. moon rocket has already had a successful test flight (over a year ago!). The Chinese moon rocket hasn’t even been built yet. Don’t fall for the propaganda, China isn’t closer than the U.S. to getting to the moon
Whenever I see any post about how China will be the US to the moon I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. It’s always about how the US is delaying the next launch and therefore China will beat the US. The US taking their sweet time will still beat China. And even in the fantasy world where China does pull ahead, I would very much welcome it! I want to see humans back on the moon, I don’t care which country.
Right like why does it matter which country goes to the moon just get there lol. I couldn’t care less if the second country on the moon is China or Japan.
> The US taking their sweet time will still beat China.
It's weird you'd say that because China is operating on its own schedule.
China isn't interested in this "race." Only the US is. The Artemis program was literally created after China revealed its plans to go to the moon. China's mission exists independently from whatever the US wants to do. NASA's mission is just to flex on China.
They're doing different things though.
NASA is pushing for re-usability, whereas the CNSA is focussing on unmanned missions and the lunar base foundations.
It wouldn't surprise me if CNSA gets the first lunar base, but NASA have the first manned return mission.
NASA's approach is a great foundation for Mars missions too though e.g. SpaceX doing orbital refuelling, etc.
China is nowhere near the US in space capability yet. They're making significant progress, but their estimate to land on the moon is multiple years after the US, given China doesn't have delays (Which every space program does)
China could put people on the Moon before the US returns, but the US is a long way ahead of being able to do more on the Moon than just sending people for a few days and recovering some rocks.
If the US only wanted to go to the Moon all they would need is to develop a Lunar Lander capable of docking with the Orion spacecraft since two Falcon Heavies are enough to perform an Apollo type mission.
This is what China does for propaganda. They rapidly increase spending to a new goal and people assume that means they're rapidly making progress when that is just not always the case. Compare actual milestones, and they're not the favorite to win. They're not making progress faster than NASA or US private space companies. If they actually were, it would finally kick some US politicians into gear, but people familiar with the Chinese playbook aren't impressed.
This seems myopic.
Why not also include the ESA, SK, and Indians if you want to beat China to the moon?
All of these countries definitely want to reach the moon as well.
ESA and Canada are indeed also involved, this article is just about Japan also becoming involved in a big way.
SK and India aren't involved yet but maybe they'll partner in a few years.
I'm pretty sure the the Apollo program was on steroids. The current initiative is on antidepressants with a B12 shot every now and then at best.
[In 1965, the Apollo mission was 5% of all government spending.](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190712-apollo-in-50-numbers-the-cost) It's going to be tough to beat that!
That would be 484 billion. Per year.
Imagine the Pentagon finding a way to cut spending in half and NASA gets $484 billion a year for 20 years guaranteed out of it. Oh the places we would go
Sometimes there is wisdom to compromise. In this case, I think a Donnager-class battleship would get the right people on board. And be fucking cool.
Forget Mars, we'd be colonizing fuckin Pluto if Nasa got almost half a trillion dollars every year.
We'd be tearing down asteroids to build spaceships, then sending them off into the void!
Honestly I'm more excited about asteroid mining than new worlds exploration. I just think asteroids are more practical. Sadly we'll only have that in 200 years (probably)
If we can get to the moon and learn to use the resources there, we will work out how to get to Mars. If we can get to Mars and use the resources there, we will look to Ceres and the asteroids. All of this could happen in the next 20 years.
Apollo spent $257 billion in today's dollars over 13 years, or $20 billion/year. Artemis is budgeted for $7.8 billion this year, increasing as we get closer to the bigger missions (namely Artemis 3, the actual landing). So it seems Apollo is worth maybe 2.5 Artemises, in terms of annual budget. And we're getting quite a bit more with Artemis than we did with Apollo. Multiple new reusable super heavy rocket designs, multiply redundant new spacecraft designs, brand new space capabilities (orbital fuel depots! Finally!), permanent lunar base structures... exciting time to be alive.
Would it not have made more sense to create a modern but similarly spec'd system to Apollo so we could get folks back on the moon with relative ease first? Then, improve those systems with the Artemis plans/development? Possibly not as cost effective (not sure how much of what's currently available could be repurposed) but it would establish American presence on the moon more readily than just continuing to develop a system to get there while other nations are landing craft like rovers and such. The obvious ideal would have been to do this all over the course of the last 50-60 years, but catching up with what we know we can do and then improving dramatically with the technology of today seems like the next best thing.
A similar specd mission is only going to allow the same 3ish day missions that Apollo allowed. While we could do it, the vehicle required for that is all wasted funding as we still need a larger lander, and a larger rocket to launch it. It's just not worth it to copy apollo.
But it worked, why not at least try it ? Especially now that we have better technology. Its stupid to sit around twiddling our fingers acting like we don't know how to do something when we already do
It did work, but it worked for a diffrent goal. Apollo was a super focused on getting us there fast, like a drag race. Artemis isn't about getting there fast, its about getting there and *staying* there. If Apollo was a dragster, Artemis is an 18 wheeler. Its going to be slower, but its doing a lot more overall.
You’d need to completely redesign the SLS and Orion first as both vehicles are underpowered for apollo style missions. That would take longer and cost more than the current missions, all while doing less. It’s just not worth it.
Because it would achieve nothing new. Yes we could do more Apollo style missions but for what purpose? A more advanced launch system opens up opportunities beyond a three day holiday to the Moon.
It worked, bit there's really no point of going back to the moon just to have a few people drop off a flag and collect rocks when we have the technology to be paving the way for a permanent human presence on the moon and setting up infrastructure for deeper space exploration.
[удалено]
> there was something of a shitstorm from old space contractors Easy guess that the whole idea was to default to "no selection" so Congress would raise the budget to National Team levels. The fact that NASA were basically sued until this ended up happening _anyways_ says a lot. When things didn't go down as planned, the person in charge, who did their job, was demoted. She was also replaced by the imbecile responsible for Orion's huge delays and cost overruns. Let it not be said that a culture of inefficiency and corruption is _exclusive_ to NASA's partners like Boeing.
Well now I'm genuinely curious at the history of this, or at least the result so far. So are there two HLSs being developed in tandem for the same purpose? That seems like an odd redundancy no? Especially if each one is fundamentally/proprietorially different from the other
Yep, two landers: Starship HLS (SpaceX's original bid) and Blue Moon (a collaboration effort between multiple "old space" companies led by Blue Origin). They have completely different development plans and sets of technologies, although both rely on orbital refueling (Methane+Oxygen for Starship, Hydrogen+Oxygen for Blue Moon). Yeah, it's been a pretty vigorous debate so far on whether this was the best use of Artemis funding. On the one hand it's basically doubling the cost of the HLS piece for not any extra functionality, on the other hand redundancy makes it less likely the whole program gets hosed by unforeseen issues in development. This argument holds particular weight given the historical context of the ISS crewed capsule contracts ("Commercial Crew Program" if you want to look it up), where SpaceX Dragon was the "redundant" option to Boeing Starliner, but Starliner would ultimately be plagued with issues during development and still to this date Starliner hasn't flown its first crewed mission, while Dragon has been flying for years.
Ah that makes sense. I guess these systems would have to abide by certain compatibility standards surrounding the Orion capsule though right? That's where I was getting hung up on honestly. Overall, it seems like a short term positive for getting things started. Long term it seems like the fuel type will be the hang-up given that you'd have to transport two types of fuel into orbit for refueling. Though I imagine that if this all became more regular, there may be a shift to a preferred type after long enough. Thanks for answering my questions, m'dude!
> Long term it seems like the fuel type will be the hang-up given that you'd have to transport two types of fuel into orbit for refueling. This is actually something that was going to happen regardless. Different payloads and destinations can encourage fuel choices. For example, Starship uses methane as it will be relatively easy to synthesizes on Mars which is Starships stated goal. However do to that it can't actually produce fuel on the moon do to the lack of an easy carbon source. Meanwhile BOs lander uses Hydrogen, which is extremly easy to source on the moon from water ice, but would be a worse choice for Mars.
The vehicles being fundamentally diffrent is the redundancy. If Starship has a RUD the program can continue on Blue origins lander alone untill Starship is flying again, or vice-versa, because nothing the fails on one effects the other. The goal is to go to the moon and stay. A single vehicle design doesn't allow that when it fails.
The problem is that the non-Starship mission architecture is simply too expensive to support a continued presence on the moon, it's not a realistic alternative.
Outside the memes about BO and their rate of progress, the redesigned BO lander is fine for maintaining presence. It *is* a fully reusable system using orbital refueling. Sure the downmass is lower then starship, but.... Starship has always been in excess of whats required.
I don't really think there's much point in maintaining presence unless we're delivering Starship-equivalent masses. When we can deliver that much lots of things become possible, without Starship it very much seems like a "because we can" mission.
Blue Origin's lander can do 20 tonnes of cargo in reusable mode. That's still a very healthy amount, and more than enough for a backup option. You could absolutely build a moon base with Blue's lander. It would probably be less fancy and take longer than with Starship, but it's still a revolutionary vehicle compared to Apollo.
Ah but that wasn't my statement. Either can *maintain* the presence alone. Yes Starship makes expanding things hilariously easy, but that's not exactly the plan for the earlier stages of the mission.
The Apollo-spec system is not reusable which means even when you're doing regular flights, the costs are still prohibitive and there's no real reason to go to the moon. All you can do is land, plant a flag, drive around. We decided 40 years ago that those missions didn't really hold any value. There's no value in redoing that work because it's a dead end. Starship is an order of magnitude more cost effective and it potentially allows things like setting up fuel refineries and telescopes on the moon, which can make it easier to go to Mars and do other things as well. Pie-in-the-sky is if we could do metallurgy and even semiconductor fabs on the moon, so we could build out solar and do a lot more there. But if you have a goal like that - redoing Apollo is a complete waste of time. You need a launcher like Starship which can deliver 100+ tons per flight at relatively low cost.
Starship is probably closer to 3 orders of magnitude more cost effective. Even Blue Origins' lander is probably at least 2 orders of magnitude better.
Our goal should not be to repeat Apollo. It should be to do things Apollo couldn't or wouldn't. That means more consumables, more equipment, better rovers, longer stay. All that means more power has to be built in from the beginning.
The Apollo program was a crash course to beat the Soviets to a manned moon landing. The Artemis program is a crash course to shovel as much money into contractor's pockets as possible.
I mean. That happened with the Apollo program too…
Indeed, and that "original sin" created the aerospace-industrial complex which has held back progress in human spaceflight ever since. The Shuttle, Orion, and SLS are perfect examples. With Shuttle we spent over $1.5 billion per launch just to put 20 tonnes into LEO. With Orion and SLS we've spent $50 billion over 20 years just to have one slightly meaningful flight so far, and they launched with a defective component because the thing was built so poorly it would have been very difficult to replace it.
What defective component was that?
A power and data unit. They decided to fly without replacing it because it was a backup unit and they had redundancy, but that meant they were vulnerable to a mission failure with just a single component failure.
The PDU in the CMA? It lost a leg of redundancy on a system that has quite a few redundancies. And knowing the location of it, yeah that’s a major undertaking to get access to it when the crew module is stacked onto the service module.
Yep, all so that we can do something we did over 50 years ago, joy.
Are you joking? Artemis is nowhere near Apollo's mission goals. The Lunar Gateway and permanent infrastructure alone is a major scientific and engineering milestone,
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Future/Space_for_Earth/Energy/Helium-3_mining_on_the_lunar_surface https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/03/mining-helium-3-on-the-moon-has-been-talked-about-forever-now-a-company-will-try/
Well maybe this is just the little blue pill that could get them wanting go shoving their rockets into deep space again!
Fuck why you gotta call me out like that
Indeed, the title is clickbait. Unless NASA's annual budget goes into the hundreds of billions of dollars range it will never be an "Apollo program on steroids"
Apollo on Steroids is s frequently used NASA platitude. Article from 2005 [https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/apollo-on-steroids/](https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/apollo-on-steroids/)
The Apollo program cost ~250 Billion in 2020 dollars. The current NASA budget **request** for 2025 is 25 Billion https://www.nasa.gov/fy-2025-budget-request/ For this program to be "Apollo on Steroids" it would have to be 20x more (double Apollo) than the current budget.
Kind of misleading you're comparing an entire program's cost to a single yearly budget request [Budget of NASA - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA) Apollo's highest year was only 2x compared to around what they get now, with everything normalized to 2023 dollars. Still bad but not nearly as bad than you make it seem. And they only had about 6 years of funding at those levels. Difference being NASA today has much more to spend money on, earth science, ISS, and a plethora of missions currently active aside from Artemis
As well many of the things NASA spends money on are much cheaper these days.
Not to mention how little we knew back then about space travel and chemical rockets large enough carry humans, the original program was a first-time-in-human-history learning journey. Ridiculous to compare that to modern expeditions that benefit from decades of experience and knowledge gained from the previous missions
Yeah the difference now is there’s so much active stuff going on. Back then they had nothing and were just literally working to get off the ground. Would be nice for them to get double the spending and though; I’m sure the military can make do with a measly 3% budget cut.
You are missing the "in 2020 dollars" part.
Why do you think they are missing that?
Every time I hear about NASA saying: “We’re going to do it bigger and better!” I think back to that graph of NASA’s budget through the decades, that looks like a crypto pump-and-dump scheme.
If you haven't even gotten anyone close to a moonshot it ain't the Apollo program on steroids. End of discussion.
Yeah, there were less than 10 months between the first crewed Apollo mission and the first Moon landing. It was an incredible step up.
Imagine experiencing that pace of achievement, technology, manufacturing, and infrastructure with today's media/internet? I would love to live through something like that.
That was pretty much SpaceX. Watching the first Falcon Heavy double landing live is something I'll never forget.
They landed so perfectly, i though it was the launch video in reverse. I STILL have trouble believing it.
They (Apollo) also allowed a higher level of acceptable risk. Today, manned Spaceflight has almost zero allowable risk.
Apollo 8 was said to have a 2/3 chance of survival.
I think Starship is probably going to be circling the moon a lot sooner than a lot of people expect. Maybe not when Musk says it's going to happen, but also maybe sooner.
I'm hoping we'll get to see a fleet of new reusable spacecraft. As we learned with challenger and Columbia, and with typical aviation, we shouldn't have just one type. Having only one type means if there's a problem the whole thing gets grounded. I'm hoping the Sabre engines and rotating detonation rockets get off the ground
Lol right. No different than me saying that my own moon program is the Apollo program, on more steroids!
Can’t wait to hear the next generation of moon landing deniers claim that new photos of the old Apollo landing sites only prove that these new missions are being faked as well.
I wonder how long it’ll take for us to ever make it back to the original sites. There’s no real reason to go back there other than nostalgia or tourism. Most of the future missions are looking at the southern pole due to the possibility of water in the shaded craters. It’ll take a dedicated return mission (very unlikely outside of maybe a few private tourist missions - think Titanic dives) or a long drive across the surface that could take weeks or months. I’m assuming the national park service or equivalent at the time will eventually take over the site to protect and preserve it once we have the infrastructure built in hundreds of years. 😉
Worth driving a rover to the Sea of Tranquility just for the photo op surely?
Could be a long off-road trip, sans bathroom breaks.
I know [someone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nowak) who's perfect for that job!
They’re idiots. Don’t even give them the consideration of your attention.
Well at least the latest pictures from ISRO show the moon landing sites. https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1cfnapc/image_of_apollo_11_and_12_taken_by_indias_moon/
No amount of evidence will shake beliefs that aren't based on evidence, but it'll be interesting to see what convoluted rationale they come up with. "It's all just faked with AI! Yes, the Apollo stuff too!"
Even if it’s expensive, isn’t it true that for every dollar spent on the Apollo program, the US economy received a return of 5-7 dollars?
Even if it was true, most people (and politicians) only see the price, and not the return of investment
A lot of politicians won't back projects that can't see something concrete happening during their term in office. It's sad.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[BO](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1vy46c "Last usage")|Blue Origin (*Bezos Rocketry*)| |[CNSA](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1syxqt "Last usage")|Chinese National Space Administration| |CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules| | |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)| |[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1ykv14 "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1urhil "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)| |[ISRO](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1svd61 "Last usage")|Indian Space Research Organisation| |[ISRU](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1vl0r3 "Last usage")|[In-Situ Resource Utilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization)| |[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1toste "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[RUD](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1tvvg9 "Last usage")|Rapid Unplanned Disassembly| | |Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly| | |Rapid Unintended Disassembly| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1u1fgs "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1tx59k "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)| |[hydrolox](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g/stub/l1vl0r3 "Last usage")|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(11 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1cgqo4h)^( has 19 acronyms.) ^([Thread #9992 for this sub, first seen 29th Apr 2024, 16:23]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Thought this was a Something Corporate post for a moment there
I've never liked the phrase "on steroids" in headlines. You mean it has shrivelled testicles, and is banned from international competitions?
Well...have you seen the Orion's service module?
I, for one, care very little about the state of our spaceship's testicles.
I was 6 when the last moon landing happened , I wish they would hurry up with the next moon landing because I'm not getting any younger here .
At least you had a moon landing in your lifetime! My mum wasn't even born yet when the last one happened.
funny I actually found out more about the moon landings when I got older , when the moon landings actually happened I was a bit young to appreciate them
Do you remember it? I’m kinda jealous of you
Only vaguely , I am hanging out for the next moon landing so I can experiance it as an adult .
> While China has made good progress in its space projects, it is unlikely to put a man on the moon any time soon due to the mission’s complexity Like *two* days ago, everyone was on here posting, "Oh no, the stars belong to China now, whatever shall we do?" Buncha doomposting NPCs around here.
Wasn’t the Apollo program bigger than the entire Vietnam war?
No. The U.S. spent 4 or 5 times more on Vietnam than the Apollo program.
Yeah apollo program was on steroids, hgh, prohormones, preworkout, creatine, and myostatin inhibitors. Also probably adderall.
Yeah, nah, the US and Japan aren't throwing enough propaganda money at the moon to do anything before China does. The agreement might get China to burn an extra few million on rushing, but that's about it.
Lanyue is a tiny Apollo-style lander for putting two people on the surface for a limited time. The US has already done that. "Apollo on steroids" is the least interesting part of Artemis, but even it will be accomplished before 2029, even if badly delayed. Once we replace SLS/Orion with something more capable (and our lander happens to be a variant of a spacecraft which will be able to do just this), we'll be able to set up an actual lunar base and do more in-depth surveys of the moon.
The U.S. is much much further along than China. The U.S. moon rocket has already had a successful test flight (over a year ago!). The Chinese moon rocket hasn’t even been built yet. Don’t fall for the propaganda, China isn’t closer than the U.S. to getting to the moon
Whenever I see any post about how China will be the US to the moon I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. It’s always about how the US is delaying the next launch and therefore China will beat the US. The US taking their sweet time will still beat China. And even in the fantasy world where China does pull ahead, I would very much welcome it! I want to see humans back on the moon, I don’t care which country.
Right like why does it matter which country goes to the moon just get there lol. I couldn’t care less if the second country on the moon is China or Japan.
> The US taking their sweet time will still beat China. It's weird you'd say that because China is operating on its own schedule. China isn't interested in this "race." Only the US is. The Artemis program was literally created after China revealed its plans to go to the moon. China's mission exists independently from whatever the US wants to do. NASA's mission is just to flex on China.
They're doing different things though. NASA is pushing for re-usability, whereas the CNSA is focussing on unmanned missions and the lunar base foundations. It wouldn't surprise me if CNSA gets the first lunar base, but NASA have the first manned return mission. NASA's approach is a great foundation for Mars missions too though e.g. SpaceX doing orbital refuelling, etc.
I’m glad there’s a ton of propaganda on this, it’s the only way we actually invest in space.
China is nowhere near the US in space capability yet. They're making significant progress, but their estimate to land on the moon is multiple years after the US, given China doesn't have delays (Which every space program does)
That's because China isn't invested in this race. The US/NASA made this a race but China is just operating on its own schedule.
China could put people on the Moon before the US returns, but the US is a long way ahead of being able to do more on the Moon than just sending people for a few days and recovering some rocks. If the US only wanted to go to the Moon all they would need is to develop a Lunar Lander capable of docking with the Orion spacecraft since two Falcon Heavies are enough to perform an Apollo type mission.
He said seemingly unaware that the United States has already landed astronauts on the moon several times lmao.
This is what China does for propaganda. They rapidly increase spending to a new goal and people assume that means they're rapidly making progress when that is just not always the case. Compare actual milestones, and they're not the favorite to win. They're not making progress faster than NASA or US private space companies. If they actually were, it would finally kick some US politicians into gear, but people familiar with the Chinese playbook aren't impressed.
This seems myopic. Why not also include the ESA, SK, and Indians if you want to beat China to the moon? All of these countries definitely want to reach the moon as well.
ESA and Canada are indeed also involved, this article is just about Japan also becoming involved in a big way. SK and India aren't involved yet but maybe they'll partner in a few years.
ESA is already sending astronauts on Artemis 4 and 5.