Artemis 1/SLS launch...

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luke strawwalker
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#1 Artemis 1/SLS launch...

Post by luke strawwalker »

Welp us working stiffs had to go to bed, but I did watch the live stream on YT this morning of the SLS launch in the wee hours of the morning...

SLS lifted off from Kennedy Space Center overnight and successfully achieved orbit after and 8 minute 3 second burn of the core stage, which was jettisoned along with the boosters to crash back into the ocean in a million pieces. Orion with its European service module, and the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, entered orbit and performed a short burn of the ICPS a half orbit later to raise the perigee, then performed TLI about an hour and 50 minutes after liftoff. After an 18 minute TLI burn, Orion was set on course for the Moon; the ICPS separated and will follow behind the Orion which performed a short separation burn. ICPS will deploy four cubesats destined for the lunar vicinity before performing a "disposal burn" which will cause it to loop around the Moon and be tossed into a heliocentric disposal orbit. Orion will arrive at the Moon in a couple days and, due to its limited propellant and thus propulsion capability, enter a weird looping extended highly elliptical orbit around the Moon, with a planned perilune of about 80 miles and an apolune of about 75,000 miles IIRC, which should take it further from the Earth than any man-rated spacecraft has ever been (though unmanned of course). The mission plan then calls for it to do a Trans-Earth Injection burn to return from the Moon and reenter and land off the Baja California coast IIRC a few days later, if all works well.

SO NASA's $4.1 billion dollar per launch shuttle-derived totally disposable mega-rocket finally lifts off. Middle of the night and couldn't see a d@mn thing other than a few seconds of pad camera footage, and a heck of a fire trail behind it, and SRB sep and plenty of sparkles of spent propellant slag from the spent boosters behind the core stage engine glare... that was about it. With it's 8 minute 3 second burn to orbit, dividing the $4.1 billion dollar (declared, God only KNOWS how much it ACTUALLY cost LOL:) price tag, that works out to $8,488,612.84 PER SECOND of flight time... all to get an Orion into orbit with an ICPS, barely capable of staggering through TLI and then incapable of even getting into a proper low lunar orbit once it gets in the vicinity of the Moon. One h3ll of an expensive fireworks show/stunt IMHO. Orion doesn't even have a lunar lander; NASA has let a contract to SpaceX for a "lunar starship" to act as a lunar lander for future crews... Needless to say, this is predicated ENTIRELY on there BEING a successful, operational Starship capable of launching a "lunar starship" and it being successfully modified to the "lunar starship" spec to enable it to land and take off from the Moon... AND if that actually works as planned, WTF do we need a $4.1 billion dollar per launch totally expendable dinosaur firecracker for?? We could just fly the whole d@mn mission on Starship for a TINY FRACTION of the cost... SO NASA has spent the past 12 years and untold billions developing this monstrosity for basically no purpose... AND if Starship DOESN'T work, or takes a lot longer to work the kinks out of it (as it seems it has been lately), then SLS/Orion exists to no purpose ANYWAY, because Orion in some pathetic highly elliptical lunar orbit by itself is WORTHLESS... Oh, I suppose they COULD go on and fund either a competitor commercial lunar lander (but IF SpaceX were to fail to deliver on lunar starship, I don't see Congress ever agreeing to fund ANOTHER commercial competitor with no guarantee of success), OR NASA could get approval to build their own lunar lander-- which will take most of a decade at least and BILLIONS more in development, and require a SECOND $4.1 billion dollar SLS launch to put in space or send to the Moon... so EVERY lunar mission would require $8.2 billion dollars FOR THE ROCKET LAUNCHES ALONE, excluding ANY and ALL other mission costs, like for Orion and any habs or landers...

SO enjoy the fireworks show... hopefully we'll get some h3llacious HD footage from the cams on Artemis 1, because God knows we've paid enough for them LOL:)

The 5+ hour NASA stream was full of self-serving chest thumping and associated politically correct pablum, so I forwarded through most of it. All glitzy and shiny graphics, but pathetically dumbed down for the dumbed down masses LOL:) The launch wasn't much to see, honestly, as nothing was frigging visible but the fire trail, and it was essentially a king-size bottle rocket-- SpaceX liquid propulsion launches are MUCH more interesting to watch at night, honestly. SO lets hope they do better with the Artemis cameras... there's a YT stream going now I paused to come here to comment...

Sure gotta wonder what these people are thinking now, how they come up with this stuff and justify it... as Spock would say, "Highly Illogical!"

Later! OL J R :)
My MUNIFICENCE is BOUNDLESS, Mr. Bond...
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luke strawwalker
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#2 Re: Artemis 1/SLS launch...

Post by luke strawwalker »

AND the stupidity continues... been reading some articles over the past few weeks, from the stumbling process of getting a functional operational commercial lunar lander, aka lunar starship, when the orbital starship isn't even working yet and the FAA and EPA seem determined to make sure its delayed as much as possible (probably because the feds want to punish Elon Musk for pulling free Starlink service from the Ukraine war... they don't want to cripple his Falcon 9 launch capability which they heavily rely on, but Starship isn't in the 'critical path' for national security launches, so they can twist the knife on him on that one without causing them any blowback, which is typical gubmint modus operandi...) Read an article that "limited numbers of shuttle boosters and engines limit number of Artemis launches and schedule" and "SLS too expensive for prolonged Artemis program"... both of which are like DDDDUUUUHHHHHHHH!!!! because everybody even paying the slightest attention to this debacle has been saying that basically since the d@mn thing was approved to begin with, or shortly thereafter... SLS relies upon the most expensive REUSABLE bits of the shuttle system, used in EXPENDABLE mode, so used once and tossed into the ocean to sink to the bottom in very small pieces... RS-25 has been "redesigned" to make it "cheaper" to produce expendable versions of it, but it's still a ridiculously expensive engine by virtue of it's very design-- staged high pressure combustion cycle designs are ALWAYS going to be much more costly than a similar gas-generator cycle engine, which is a more suitable design for a throwaway engine. Furthermore, SLS can only fly so long as the remaining sets of shuttle booster segments holds out, and since it's disposing of them into the ocean to sink after each flight, and using 10 segments per flight instead of 8, they're not going to last for very long, even with SLS's anemic flight rate. Of course ATK will get billions more to develop a disposable ASRB using spiral-filament wound casings... OF course ATK was already paid to do this once already-- the ASRB's designed for the polar military shuttle launches which were planned to launch out of Vandenberg AFB in California from SLC-6, which never actually occurred. The additional power requirements for launching a shuttle into polar orbit instead of an eastward near-equatorial orbit, required advanced SRB's, and since NASA did not want to maintain two sets of ships to recover SRB's, and since they needed to be lighter and carry more propellant to give the extra power, the ASRB's for use on Vandenberg launches were designed to be disposable boosters, crashing into the ocean and sinking after each flight. Of course no shuttle actually ever launched from Vandenberg, the next flight after the ill-fated Challenger mission 51-L which of course blew up in late January of 1986, was SUPPOSED to be the inaugural flight of military shuttle missions launching into polar orbits out of Vandenberg. In the post-Challenger dust-up and reassessment of the shuttle program, all the polar launches out of Vandenberg using shuttle were canceled, so the ASRB was never actually flown, though it was tested and ready to go (a spent test firing casing is on display at the Stennis Space Center north of New Orleans where the liquid engine test stands are and liquid engines and stages are tested... (interestingly enough, solids were never tested at Stennis, they're test fired at the ATK facilities in Utah). Gone were the military polar shuttle launches, gone was the need for SLC-6 and it's questionable suitability for shuttle launches (some said the acoustics were SO bad that it would inflict fatal damage to the orbiter at liftoff). Also gone was the "Shuttle Centaur" high-power liquid-hydrogen/liquid oxygen fueled booster stage designed to be carried and launched from the shuttle payload bay... a cryogenic stage which had to be fueled inside the shuttle payload bay, and which was too heavy to land with fuelly fueled in case of a shuttle abort, so modifications had to be made to the orbiters to allow for a propellant dump system to get rid of the weight of the propellant in the Centaur after the abort started, but before the shuttle was on final approach for landing, by dumping it overboard through ducts to the end of of each wing... Having a liquid hydrogen fueled stage inside an enclosed payload bay inside the orbiter itself a matter of a few yards behind the astronaut's backs during the countdown and launch was always going to be extremely risky due to the natur of hydrogen propellant, being SO cold it forms liquid air which is explosive and flammable itself, and the risk of leaks because hydrogen is SO leak-prone due to the small molecule size of diatomic hydrogen...

Anyway, SLS/Artemis is turning out pretty much as anticipated-- a big expensive bridge to nowhere... Artemis 2 is of course in preparation, another "stunt" mission to loop around the Moon in that ridiculous 75,000 mile high apolune 24-ish hour lunar "orbit" (since the thing doesn't have the propulsive power to drop into a proper Low Lunar Orbit as Apollo did, but instead flies this bizarre Zond-like looping flight around the Moon, with *just* enough braking to barely fall into this looping 75,000 mile high orbit around the Moon, which is barely inside a "free return trajectory" which would return to Earth. This allows them to break out of lunar orbit with very little delta-V (propulsion capability) to get back to Earth, since the Orion service module does not have enough propellant/propulsion capability to actually brake into a low lunar orbit (LLO) from the Trans-Lunar Insertion trajectory, and doesn't have enough propellant/propulsion to boost back out of LLO into a Trans-Earth Injection (TEI) maneuver... This loping limping highly elliptical lunar orbit is all that Orion is capable of. The only difference between this mission and the last stunt with SLS/Orion, Artemis 1, is that this time there's a crew along for a joyride... course they're NO closer to the lunar surface than they were before, particularly without a LUNAR LANDER... and who knows when that will be ready, since it's left to the commercial providers to produce and test, and rely on technology that hasn't been proven itself yet (starship, necessary predecessor to lunar starship).

Also read that Boeing's Starliner is now well over a BILLION BUCKS in the red... they were already over $800 million in hock because of delays and problems, but now with the latest failed test flight (partially successful is by definition a failure) now they've racked up another $220+ million in expenses. I seriously wonder if this thing will EVER fly a manned mission before it's finally cancelled... it's ridiculously expensive for what it does anyway, SpaceX has already been contracted to deliver more commercial crew flights to make up for Starliner delays/cancellations, and although Starliner has the 'unique capability' to reboost ISS due to its propulsion design (using a traditional service module rather than having the engines on the front along with many of the maneuvering thrusters in the capsule like Crew Dragon, so they're all brought back and REUSABLE unlike the Starliner which uses a more traditional disposable service module type setup, and which throws the entire propulsion system of the Starliner away after each flight, save for a few minor thrusters for steering through reentry... Of course for the billions spent on Starliner, they could easily contract SpaceX to design and build and test a reboost module or kit to fit in the Dragon's trunk to allow it to reboost the station... Starliner is an albatross that simply isn't needed anymore realistically. Heck at the rate they're going, Dreamchaser mini-shuttle will be ready for flight to ISS before Starliner, and they didn't even get a CCDev contract from the gubmint... the money was shipped to Boeing since as a classic traditional NASA space contractor they were a "sure thing" where Sierra Nevada, as a new-space development company, was not considered "reliable" (nor was SpaceX but they couldn't give ALL the contracts to "traditional contractors" without showing their clear prejudice against the new space development companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada... so SpaceX got a contract for CCDev, and Boeing got the other one, leaving Sierra Nevada out in the cold. Dreamchaser is also capable of reboosting the ISS as-is... NASA *SHOULD* cut their losses with Boeing Starliner and cut a new contract with Sierra Nevada for them to finish Dreamchaser and get it up and running to ISS instead, honestly.

Later! OL J R :)
My MUNIFICENCE is BOUNDLESS, Mr. Bond...
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