I thought by now they had ran into some galaxies without the effects ascribed to dark matter, which would be pretty solid evidence it must exist even if it’s not direct detection?
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At some point NASA is going have to face the reality that Artemis III will not happen as long as Elon is in charge of SpaceX. Starship is fundamentally ill-suited to be a lander (or for just about any other purpose). Better to figure it out sooner than later.
Whoever is responsible within the agency for yoking Artemis to Starship (haven’t looked at the org chart lately) has no business working in the space policy world. That writing was on the wall long before the decision was made, and there is no excuse.
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pretty sure that was her doing;
On May 15, 2023, a couple weeks after retiring from NASA, it was reported that Lueders would join SpaceX as a general manager working on the Starship program at Starbase. She reports directly to SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell.[7]
e/ ohyes, we already had her here… 
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Just don’t stare into the void all the time, you’ll be fine.
This theory does support Douglas Adams’ notion that Earth is situated in one of the less fashionable parts of spaaaaace, though.
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Just watched this video and am now feeling even more down on the whole architecture of the Artemis program than I was already. I didn’t realize that the reason that they opted for the really wacky-looking “Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit” rather than the much simpler Low Lunar Orbit of past missions is largely because the Orion spacecraft doesn’t have the delta-v capability to do what the old Apollo spacecraft did. The NHRO saves fuel and is more efficient, but imposes some serious issues in that, depending on the timing of the orbit, Astronauts who need to get off of the moon may need to wait up to about a week before everything lines up right, as opposed to a 2-hour orbit for the old Apollo service module.
He also touches on the issue of cryogenic refueling in orbit, which has never been tried so far and is a requirement of both the SpaceX and Blue Origin landers. The schedule of this program is bound to be delayed, probably by a LOT.
Note: the first 25 minutes or so are all introductory stuff that you can probably skip if you’re not too interested in the guy’s background.
Edit to add: here’s the latest report from the Government Accountability Office talking about “challenges” with the program.
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Yeah, Artemis has been ill-conceived from the very beginning, and it’s just gotten weirder and worse as time has gone on. “Boots on the Moon” made sense for the US in the 60’s - it makes zero sense now.
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Maybe something like this business could have worked a couple decades ago if they’d found a way to make the flights cheap and reliable enough. But considering that this is just a quick joyride, and there are competitors that offer “real” spaceflights, it’s hard to see how they could have enough customers paying enough per flight to ever make this profitable.
One of the original selling point for this design was supposed to be that it was inherently safer than a traditional rocket launch. But sadly 4 people have died so far during testing of this system (3 in an engine explosion in 2007 and one test pilot in 2014) that seems to be a technological dead end anyway.
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from the article;
Galactic has just completed its sixth commercial flight in six months, with tickets starting at $450,000 a seat on its rocket-powered Unity space plane.
one flight per month. and there seems to be demand from the (ultra)-rich.
besides blue origin?
But, like I said, they’re nowhere near profitable because the ticket doesn’t even come close to covering the launch costs and overhead. And yes, there’s enough demand at that price to fill four passenger seats a month, but if they succeed in dramatically increasing the cadence of launches and reduce the operational costs of flying the thing (a huge "if) then we’ll see if there’s still enough demand to keep them afloat. I wouldn’t bank on it.
None of us on this forum are big fans of Elon but the fact is that if you’re rich enough you can charter a real space flight on one of the SpaceX rockets. There have been two tourist flights so far. The rumor is that the first tourist flight was a bit shitty though…
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You know your place is overdue for a cleaning when people can see the dust from another galaxy.
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