NASA called a press conference today to announce that the next two Artemis missions have been pushed out in time. Are the dates as far out as watchers have been suggesting?
NASA announced today (Dec. 5) that it's delaying the planned launch of Artemis 2, a flight that will send four people around the moon and back, from September 2025 to April 2026. And Artemis 3, a crewed moon landing that had been targeted for late 2026, is now scheduled for mid-2027. The extra time is needed primarily to finish prepping the Orion capsule for its first-ever crewed flights, according to NASA officials.
This seems to be the resolution of details mentioned at the end of October, nearly six weeks ago, which said:
NASA says they have found the root cause of the Orion heat shield issues. But they're not telling us what it was. Maybe by the end of the year.
And those details were discussed.
Everything appeared to go well on Artemis 1. However, postflight analyses revealed that Orion's heat shield wore away more unevenly during its reentry to Earth's atmosphere than engineers had predicted. Temperatures inside Orion remained near room temperature, meaning that astronauts would have remained safe, had any been aboard. But engineers needed to figure out what happened — and they've now come to some conclusions, NASA officials announced in today's press conference.
The uneven ablation was a consequence of Orion's "skip" reentry trajectory, in which the capsule bounced off the atmosphere and then came back in again multiple times. This strategy is required to dissipate the tremendous energy associated with high-speed returns from the moon, NASA officials said, but it had an unexpected downside on Artemis 1.
"While the capsule was dipping in and out of the atmosphere as part of that planned skip entry, heat accumulated inside the heat shield outer layer, leading to gases forming and becoming trapped inside the heat shield," NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said today. "This caused internal pressure to build up and led to cracking and uneven shedding of that outer layer."
The solution suggested is what has been talked about since the start of studying the heat shield issues: they will change the trajectory during re-entry away from skipping up and down to a path with a lower, more constant temperature, to keep the pockets of heated gasses from forming and being trapped inside the heat shield.
As for how far out it has been pushed, back in November of '22, I noted that
I've seen a prediction by
a guy who has been scary accurate
in his predictions saying that Artemis 3 won't launch until '27 instead of
'25. Eric Berger at Ars Technica has better sources than I do and says, a more
realistic date "for Artemis 3 is probably 2028-ish." Today's announced
date was “mid-2027” which is roughly mid-way between the just-dropped “late
2026” and Berger's “2028-ish.”
After NASA’s Orion spacecraft was recovered at the conclusion of the Artemis 1 test flight and transported to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, its heat shield was removed from the crew module inside the Operations and Checkout (O & C) Building and rotated for inspection. (Image credit: NASA)
It's worth remembering that we're in a relatively low key "space race" to land
on the moon. For us it's to land on the moon again; for China it's to land for
the first time.
The newly revised Artemis 3 timeline still keeps the United States ahead of China, which has said it plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2030. Both nations are targeting the lunar south pole, which is thought to be rich in water ice, a crucial resource for a settlement or research outpost.
Nelson has said repeatedly that the U.S. needs to establish its lunar toehold first, so China cannot establish norms and practices on the moon — which could include barring other nations from certain areas. And the NASA chief said today that he thinks the U.S. is in good shape to be the lunar leader.
A major hold up for Artemis 3 is that the Human Landing System (HLS) has to
be ready to fly by then. SpaceX has not progressed as far as they should have,
and while it's hard to not talk about the FAA delays the big picture is simply
that the HLS is a long way from ready. There are reports spreading that SpaceX
is trying for 25 Starship launches next year - one every other week. There are
many steps that must be proven out for Artemis 3 and refueling in space so that
the HLS can get to the moon is a very big one.
Ridiculous........The program should be canceled.
ReplyDeleteDOGE may finally allow us to cancel the SLS.
DeleteIf Starship gets fully operational and can take SLS's place, anything they've built might be useful for something or other. The overpriced monster that is SLS only has one redeeming feature: there's hardly one piece of new technology on it, so it should be easier to get refined than something as radical as Starship. Not that we've ever seen anything about SLS happen rapidly or on budget.
Oh Please, Oh Please!
DeleteWhen I first heard of what the Launch Tower/Gantry was going to cost, I very nearly burst a blood vessel. 2 BILLION?? Good Lord, how many other rockets, probes, and other micellaney could we spend just on that amount of money alone?? And that's just for the FIRST one, there's one more to go!!
The taxpayers are getting raped, is what. We should be mining asteroids by now!
The one I simply can't let go of is the first stage engines. So far, only actual, used, ABF (Already Been Flown), Space Shuttle Main Engines, and to make just the four that go in the SLS main booster, it's practically $600 million. Not the whole booster, just the four SSMEs. A single launch is going to be north of $4 billion.
DeleteYou can go buy four Blue Origin BE-4s for $80 m and if the Raptor 3 makes it's goals, all four will cost $4 million or less. Both have the same thrust as the SSMEs. Except you can't just put those engines on the SLS because they're hydrogen/oxygen engines and both BE-4s and Raptor 3s are methalox.
Now throw in what they've wasted on SLS because the contractors seem to have forgotten how to work with LH2.
Find it astounding how impracticable and a waste of funds that whole scheme is. Crazy. what are these characters thinking, at the first struck me as showboating instead of getting down to business. It is most likely from everything to date, to turn out SpaceX handles the whole human landing on the moon. And after all, though a lunar landing is quite different than one on Mars, they got to be considering how lunar experience will enhance their methods of landing safely. Got to start someplace and the moon is a lot closer too.
ReplyDeleteThat rocket exemplifies everything that is out of common sense practical control within a beurocracy that could do splendidly stepping aside, providing it's full support for commercially feasible human space activity in the private sector. It seems they do so with the research satellite aspect, how many spectacular achievements in that sector, totally top shelf. But they go numb with internal human space flight. Its like they have forgotten almost deliberately just about everything learned from Apollo to Mercury. institutional brain fart? Or deliberate erasure of that mountain of knowledge and experience? Nothing makes sense to me what they be doing, particularly the amount of money they have blown, bewilderment ensues thinking about it.
ReplyDelete