Artemis 2

billvon said:
The two things that need to balance are effort and will. The more effort required, the more will you need.

Right now it's a 10-15 year project, with the missions spread out over the next 10 years after that. But in 20 years it will be easier; SpaceX boosters will be more advanced/reliable. In 30 years we may have VASIMR, advanced ion or NERVA engines which will make the trip much easier. In 40 years we may have a cycler for Lunar personnel transfer.

And in 50 years we may even have a mass driver on the Moon or a Skyhook on Earth. Then it's almost trivial.

At some point it becomes an 8 year project, then a 4 year project. That's within one administration. And the will becomes much easier to sustain.

So it will happen at some point.
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I see a manned mission to Mars as a united effort, as the ISS was. More so.
All we need to do first is overcome our own follies here on Earth, and enter a period of relative peace and empathy. If, IF, that could happen, we as a united species, could start making real efforts in botting the first boots on Mars.
 
I like this, Collins was the most isolated person in human history (mentioned in another thread)
in 1969. He was glad to get a little peace from mission control.

"In 1969, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history taking the first steps on the lunar surface, Collins was alone in the command module, orbiting the Moon.

As his craft passed behind the far side, contact with the pair on the lunar surface, as well as with mission control, vanished for 48 minutes.

He described the experience in his 1974 memoir Carrying the Fire, saying he felt "truly alone" and "isolated from any known life", but that he did not feel fear or loneliness.

In later interviews, he described the peace and tranquillity brought by the radio silence, saying it offered a break from the constant requests from mission control."
 
Pinball1970 said:
I like this, Collins was the most isolated person in human history (mentioned in another thread)
in 1969. He was glad to get a little peace from mission control.

"In 1969, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history taking the first steps on the lunar surface, Collins was alone in the command module, orbiting the Moon.

As his craft passed behind the far side, contact with the pair on the lunar surface, as well as with mission control, vanished for 48 minutes.

He described the experience in his 1974 memoir Carrying the Fire, saying he felt "truly alone" and "isolated from any known life", but that he did not feel fear or loneliness.

In later interviews, he described the peace and tranquillity brought by the radio silence, saying it offered a break from the constant requests from mission control."
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Is this a case of..."Houston, we have a problem"
Nearly two months earlier than Collins you have John Young: My Bold below.
As an astronaut, John Young (1930-2018) was one of a kind. He was the first person to fly in space six times (twice each on Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle missions), the first person to circle the Moon alone, the first Space Shuttle mission commander, and the first to command another Space Shuttle mission. He served as an astronaut longer than anyone to date: 42 years (1962-2004)…..

…...While his two crew mates descended within ten miles of the surface in the lunar module, Young became the first person in solo flight around the Moon.
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National Air and Space museum, Smithsonian.
 
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Ken Fabian said:
Sigh. This is far more unlike than like anything historical. The riches not being the ones being aimed for are the historical example supposedly to spur us to greater effort (pull, pull harder in those boats towing the becalmed ships through the Doldrums), but riches were there waiting for any conquistador in the face of a susceptible native populace to extract in those times.
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Agreed. But given that North America was an accidental discovery, not the intent - there is arguably value in exploration for the sake of exploration.

I agree with you that there's not much for us on the Moon from a commercial perspective, with the exception of Helium-3 - and we can't really use that anyway until we have aneutronic fusion.

The biggest commercial opportunities in space are:

-Solar power satellites/AI centers
-Metals harvesting from asteroids (like Psyche)
-Waste disposal (requires a much cheaper/more efficient launcher first)

None of those require a human presence.
 
The NASA footage is live and they have travelled further from Earth than the Apollo missions. They will be on the far side of the Moon soon.
 
billvon said:
there is arguably value in exploration for the sake of exploration.
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Which is better done with astronomy and crewless missions. Not by picking out what attracts the eyes of a geologist astronaut but by looking at every rock, even the boring ones. With spectrometers that work at a distance such as Perseverance carries. Probes have gone all the way to Pluto and beyond already. But without the low cost transport there is no reasonable expectation of finding yet unknown exploitable opportunities.

And I would not start with Psyche for mining - Bennu or similar, has lots more sunshine, less distance/delta-v and lots of carbonaceous materials for making in situ rocket fuels, which I think will be needed more than anything else for commercial asteroid mining to work. Even the moons of Mars may be better than anything in the Asteroid belt, having similar delta v as going to Earth's moon.

Outside the 'commercial' sphere meteor defense is more broadly supported than any other NASA objective and presents plenty of ongoing R&D challenges and includes opportunity for international cooperation. Should the US ever turn again to international cooperation as strategy.
 
Ken Fabian said:
Which is better done with astronomy and crewless missions. Not by picking out what attracts the eyes of a geologist astronaut but by looking at every rock, even the boring ones. With spectrometers that work at a distance such as Perseverance carries. Probes have gone all the way to Pluto and beyond already. But without the low cost transport there is no reasonable expectation of finding yet unknown exploitable opportunities.

And I would not start with Psyche for mining - Bennu or similar, has lots more sunshine, less distance/delta-v and lots of carbonaceous materials for making in situ rocket fuels, which I think will be needed more than anything else for commercial asteroid mining to work. Even the moons of Mars may be better than anything in the Asteroid belt, having similar delta v as going to Earth's moon.

Outside the 'commercial' sphere meteor defense is more broadly supported than any other NASA objective and presents plenty of ongoing R&D challenges and includes opportunity for international cooperation. Should the US ever turn again to international cooperation as strategy.
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Yes I must say I have always been sceptical about the commercial value of mining other bodies, due to the huge change of momentum required. I suspect the arguments for doing it are largely spurious, invented to get political support for the space programme from politicians who understand $$$ but don't understand orbital mechanics. And I agree it seems that one can do the science exploration without incurring the enormous cost of sending live human beings.

I think one haas to conclude that manned missions are largely a technical tour de force, done for their own sake.

But a lot more worthy of humanity than gold statues of Orangemandias. :biggrin:
 
exchemist said:
Does the engine have to fire 3 times, once to set them on their way, once to slow down enough to be captured by the moon and a third time to escape the moon and return to Earth? I seem to remember this was one of the points causing anxiety in the Apollo missions.
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No. They are on a return pass. Once they are go for TLI (trans lunar injection) they coast the whole way around the Moon and return. They are never captured by the Moon and they do not need a burn.

This was a deliberate failsafe in the case of Apollo. If anything happened during the outward leg, the trajectory would automatically being them back to Earth.

But note, by the way, that this is standard orbital mechanics anyway, A satellite cannot be captured by a body in a 2-body system. If any body falls from outside the system into the system, it will have enough energy to leave the system. In other words, no single body can capture another body. It requires the interference of a third body to set up a capture (or some other confounding factor, such as an artificial burn or atmospheric friction).

All those captured planets and captured moons in our solar system were due to the interplay of - not one but two - other solar system bodies.
 
DaveC426913 said:
No. They are on a return pass. Once they are go for TLI (trans lunar injection) they coast the whole way around the Moon and return. They are never captured by the Moon and they do not need a burn.

This was a deliberate failsafe in the case of Apollo. If anything happened during the outward leg, the trajectory would automatically being them back to Earth.

But note, by the way, that this is standard orbital mechanics anyway, A satellite cannot be captured by a body in a 2-body system. If any body falls from outside the system into the system, it will have enough energy to leave the system. In other words, no single body can capture another body. It requires the interference of a third body to set up a capture (or some other confounding factor, such as an artificial burn or atmospheric friction).

All those captured planets and captured moons in our solar system were due to the interplay of - not one but two - other solar system bodies.
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Excellent point. But presumably that would mean they would be on a hyperbolic orbit w.r.t. the moon, were it not for the Earth’s gravity on top.
 
exchemist said:
Excellent point. But presumably that would mean they would be on a hyperbolic orbit w.r.t. the moon, were it not for the Earth’s gravity on top.
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Just a point of note: there is no such thing as a "hyperbolic orbit". Either it is in orbit (goes around the body, whether circular or eliptical) or it is on a hyperbolic trajectory (never being captured). There is the edge case where one body could theoretically do a parabolic trajectory around another, but on the whole all unpowered flybys (i.e. not orbiting) are on hyperbolic trajectories w.r.t. the object they're flying past. In this case with perturbations due to the earth. But it's standard to simply refer to the craft's trajectory even with these perturbations as a "hyperbolic flyby of the moon".
 
Pinball1970 said:
And all Newton pretty much yes?
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Pretty much. They start adding general relativity into the mix in the really high precision models, 'cos even though the relativistic effects are very small for earth-moon missions, they're not zero, and over time you could be noticeably inaccurate. But for the vast bulk, yeah, it will be Newton.
 
Sarkus said:
Just a point of note: there is no such thing as a "hyperbolic orbit". Either it is in orbit (goes around the body, whether circular or eliptical) or it is on a hyperbolic trajectory (never being captured). There is the edge case where one body could theoretically do a parabolic trajectory around another, but on the whole all unpowered flybys (i.e. not orbiting) are on hyperbolic trajectories w.r.t. the object they're flying past. In this case with perturbations due to the earth. But it's standard to simply refer to the craft's trajectory even with these perturbations as a "hyperbolic flyby of the moon".
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OK yes trajectory is the correct term.
 
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