'We are not where we wanted to be': NASA's
$4.1b Artemis I could be delayed until
October; leaking shuttle was sent back
for assembly 20 TIMES before attempted launch
Daily Mail (UK),
by
Keith Griffith
Original Article
Posted By: Imright,
9/3/2022 10:51:57 PM
After yet another cancelled launch on Saturday, NASA's Artemis 1 rocket will not lift off during this launch period, which ends on Tuesday, likely pushing the date back to October.
Jim Free, associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said 'we will not be launching in this period,' as the agency is 'not where we wanted to be.'
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the shuttle was sent back to the Vehicle Assembly Building 20 times before the attempted launch.
'The cost of two scrubs is a lot less than a failure,' said Nelson.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
scottj 9/3/2022 11:05:49 PM (No. 1267783)
This just highlights the incompetence of the government. Turn it over to SpaceX. They will do it twice as fast and for half the price.
22 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
Catherine 9/3/2022 11:21:52 PM (No. 1267800)
I have no idea why NASA wants to go back to the moon. What's there that we need to spend so much money trying to get there?
12 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
HisHandmaiden 9/3/2022 11:50:05 PM (No. 1267821)
“Sent back 20 times,” how incompetent and embarrassing! What else is new?
Paging Elon, STAT.
TBIYTC
13 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
mc squared 9/4/2022 12:03:42 AM (No. 1267828)
You'd think that the heavy stuff was tested repeatedly before a high profile launch.
9 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
brownshoepogue 9/4/2022 12:24:06 AM (No. 1267843)
Old aviation saying...better to be on the ground wishing to be in the air, rather than in the air wishing you were on the ground.
They will work out the bugs and gremlins in due time.
5 people like this.
It is going to be tough to get human volunteers to go to the moon if they don't get that leak fixed.
Attention Elon Musk. Please report to NASA Control Room for major consultation on getting rid of NASA wokeness and
bringing NASA some modern technology on rocket launching.
13 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
DVC 9/4/2022 12:34:51 AM (No. 1267847)
Better to get it right than to rush.
And for those with selective memories, Musk crashed a dozen or more before the first one of his landed successfully. And he crashed about eight or nine Starships before that program had a successful launch. Musk just kept pushing on, eventually got it right.
All of this is damned difficult engineering and I'm betting that NASA will get it right. I've known an astronaut and a NASA program manager. Both high achievers, very skilled.
5 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
chance_232 9/4/2022 12:46:09 AM (No. 1267855)
23 billion over 11 years and this is what we get.
Space X spent 5-8 billion starting around 2016....or 6 years for those of you in Rio Linda. A third of the cost in half the time.
10 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
chumley 9/4/2022 1:14:16 AM (No. 1267866)
Musk would have been there and back twice by now, with a Vulcan shuttle in tow. Meanwhile NASA has meetings and works from home.
8 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
DVC 9/4/2022 2:28:00 AM (No. 1267881)
Yes, #8, and less than 9% of the lifting capacity in a Falcon 9 in "throwaway mode" for the Artemis.
And if you recover the booster for the Falcon 9, you have less than 6% of the lift capacity of the Artemis.
Said the other way, the first versions of Artemis SLS will lift 11.6 times a throwaway Falcon 9 and 17.4 times what a Falcon 9 does in booster recovery mode. Recovering the booster saves some of the booster fuel, and that fuel weight is then deducted from the available time-at-thrust because the burn must be shorter and the landing fuel weight is added to the dead weight of the booster stage.
Like a baby rocket to a real rocket. THIS is why making Artemis is difficult, because it is a hell of a big job to get to the moon and back. Saturn V was an absolutely huge and amazing achievement in the day, and even 50+ years later it is difficult to replicate that capability, even though in some areas our technology is fare more advanced.
Numbers.....First gen Artemis can lift 209,000 lbs to orbit and Falcon 9 can lift about 18,300 lbs to GTO if you throw away the booster. If you land the booster, the reserved landing fuel cuts lift performance, so you can lift only 12,100 lbs to GTO.
Later models of the Artemis will be lifting 290,000 lbs, so 16 times the lift capacity of a throw away Falcon 9, or 24 times the lifting capacity of the Falcon 9 when recovering the booster.
7 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
DVC 9/4/2022 2:35:19 AM (No. 1267889)
Re #8, " a third of the cost"....for 9% of the lift capacity. OOPS! Not so magical? Like his EVs.
NASA is a bargain, it looks like on a $ per lifted pound basis.
I LIKE Musk and wish him well, and think that the booster recovery is magnificent. But - the main reason it was never done in the past is that the cold engineering, when NOT making a profit from launches, because you are the government, means that you toss away the booster to get the 1/3 gain in performance that is seen between the throwaway mode and booster recovery mode of the Falcon 9.
Nobody in the past was willing to cut their rocket's lift performance to 2/3 of what it could be to save the booster. Some of this was "taxpayer funded", and some of it was "not enough computer power available in a small enough package to do the calculations to make the landing work".....in the old days.
If Musk was a REAL innovator he'd buy Paul Allen's huge Stratolaunch bird and use THAT as his 'reuseable first stage'. It's a shame that Mr. Allen died before completing this. He was a very cool guy, into a lot of VERY interesting historic and ground breaking things.
4 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
EJKrausJr 9/4/2022 4:21:02 AM (No. 1267936)
A new black hole was recently discovered by astronomers, located at Cocoa Beach Fl, at the Artemis Complex. It was called NASA 2022 by the astronomers. They said this black hole was able to consume Billions of Taxpayer $$$ without producing anything of value.
9 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
Strike3 9/4/2022 6:10:22 AM (No. 1267955)
NASA's progress with this rocket is about as successful as the rollout of electric vehicles, a complete failure with no promise of improvement. They are long past the need to lose their funding.
8 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
F15 Gork 9/4/2022 6:57:42 AM (No. 1267981)
I smell diversity not meritocracy.
13 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
Pearson365 9/4/2022 7:12:25 AM (No. 1267987)
Why is an 80 year old attorney and former Democrat Senator the head of NASA? From Wikipedia:
Clarence William Nelson II is an American politician and attorney serving as the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Nelson previously served as a United States Senator from Florida from 2001 to 2019. Wikipedia
Born: September 29, 1942 (age 79 years), Miami, FL
Space missions: STS-61-C
Office: NASA Administrator since 2021
Party: Democratic Party
Previous offices: Senator, FL (2001–2019), MORE
Nelson turns 80 just a month before Biden. And like Mean Joe, he is another federal double dipper below the managerial competence level. His fuel surely leaked a decade or so ago.
13 people like this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
snapper451 9/4/2022 7:25:41 AM (No. 1267992)
As a FL resident who voted against Senator Bill Nelson every time I had the chance, I was repulsed when Dementia Joe put him in charge of NASA. Nelson is among the stupidest people to ever serve in the Senate, let alone run NASA. He got be an astronaut because he was a politician, not on brains or merit. Remove this idiot before he kills someone!
11 people like this.
Reply 17 - Posted by:
Bur Oak 9/4/2022 7:40:54 AM (No. 1267999)
The Muslim outreach program has been quite successful. New rockets, not so much.
President Obama told NASA administrator Charles Bolden that his highest priority should be "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering."
8 people like this.
Reply 18 - Posted by:
SkeezerMcGee 9/4/2022 8:07:59 AM (No. 1268019)
Bill Nelon is a liberal Democrat but it probably Biden's best federal agency head. He was not a bad Senator from Florida. He's always been wealthy and did get into government to make money. I do not like his politics, but he has integrity and is not stupid.
This adulation of Elon Musk is amazing. He's a super conman. His greatest skill is getting governments to subsidize his businesses. His program to colonize Mars is the biggest con in decades. It's going to be a worthless disaster that eventually will be defunded by Congress when the DC politicians wise up after too many people die from its utter stupidity. As of now his Starship is an empty dustbin. His alleged schedule to fly to Mars is a total joke.
1 person likes this.
Reply 19 - Posted by:
navybrat 9/4/2022 8:25:50 AM (No. 1268034)
Bill Nelson served in the Florida house of representatives in the 1970's before he was a senator. He is another career politician.
6 people like this.
Reply 20 - Posted by:
Sully 9/4/2022 8:30:31 AM (No. 1268039)
Ooook. So the spaceship / she-shed needs to find a man w a plumbers wrench to fix a leaky pipe.
Ok but who's gonna parallel park that thing in the moon?
1 person likes this.
Reply 21 - Posted by:
NamVet70 9/4/2022 8:34:25 AM (No. 1268044)
It looks like today's NASA doesn't really have their focus on their mission if they can't repeat what their predecessors did a quarter of a century ago. Maybe their true focus is on woke causes.
6 people like this.
Reply 22 - Posted by:
udanja99 9/4/2022 8:39:05 AM (No. 1268048)
How’s that Muslim outreach thing working out for you, NASA?
7 people like this.
Reply 23 - Posted by:
Muguy 9/4/2022 8:43:20 AM (No. 1268053)
#2, to quote a companion story about the subject on the Breitbart site, the cost is required and justified because there is a priority to "put a woman and a person of color" ON THE MOON.
This rocket has been way behind schedule. It would have likely been shut down to spend the money elsewhere on welfare programs to buy votes, but it is fueled by identity politics.
4 people like this.
Reply 24 - Posted by:
red1066 9/4/2022 9:15:54 AM (No. 1268092)
Is there no pressure testing on the fuel tanks before assembly? Why are leaks found only on the launch pad? More proof government run anything isn't run very well.
3 people like this.
Reply 25 - Posted by:
Gordon Mills 9/4/2022 10:11:09 AM (No. 1268142)
#5, at what cost? And who will examine why the bugs and gremlins exist since they have had years and billions to design and test before launch. IMHO, we don't really need to send persons to the moon if there is no justifiable reason to do so. We've been there and done that, and then dropped the ball.
2 people like this.
Reply 26 - Posted by:
mc squared 9/4/2022 10:35:23 AM (No. 1268169)
#14 and others: our moon landing over 50 years ago wasn't socially equitable, so we're doing it again with 'New NASA' . Nothing wrong with that - it just isn't working.
3 people like this.
Reply 27 - Posted by:
MickTurn 9/4/2022 10:36:28 AM (No. 1268172)
Sounds like very sloppy workmanship...It's the SEALS you MORONS!
2 people like this.
Reply 28 - Posted by:
Heil Liberals 9/4/2022 10:42:26 AM (No. 1268174)
That sucking sound you hear is the military-industrial complex stealing more billions from us in the form of NASA criminal incompetence. All of the alphabet agencies need to be abolished and only those that meet constitutional muster allowed to be reformed with the smallest contingent of people needed to make them run.
4 people like this.
Reply 29 - Posted by:
hershey 9/4/2022 10:49:22 AM (No. 1268184)
Thats what you get for sourcing to the cheapest bidder...probably China...
2 people like this.
Reply 30 - Posted by:
Kate318 9/4/2022 11:24:21 AM (No. 1268222)
The crumbling of what was once the most powerful nation in the world is unbelievably painful to watch.
2 people like this.
Reply 31 - Posted by:
paral04 9/4/2022 11:34:43 AM (No. 1268234)
What would you expect under a Biden Administration? He probably wanted a diverse team of one-eyed, transgender, intellectually, challenged democrats.
2 people like this.
Reply 32 - Posted by:
DVC 9/4/2022 11:58:25 AM (No. 1268265)
I'm glad I never had a bunch like this working on a difficult engineering project with me.
2 people like this.
Reply 33 - Posted by:
Luandir 9/4/2022 2:30:00 PM (No. 1268403)
It's troubling that this is not exactly new technology. The hydrogen-fueled main engines are the same design as on the shuttle; in fact, some of the engines on this Artemis flew on shuttle missions. How newfangled can the fueling system be? Can Biden's NASA not follow the plans left by their predecessors?
1 person likes this.
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