The last time NASA flew a new design of spacecraft was 1981, and that lack of experience in the current generation of managers (whose careers were shaped by the orbiting bureaucratic Habitrail of ISS) is really showing in the Artemis missions.
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The plan as I best I can understand it right now is to fly people around the moon (Apollo 8 reenactment), then put a space station up sort of nearish the moon, and then make all later astronauts change planes there to use the space dildo to land on the lunar surface.
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What NASA learned from the Shuttle and ISS is that all plans for human spaceflight have to be bureaucratically armored against Congressional defunding, caps on capital expenditure, and flaky international partners, which is why you get these preposterous mission configurations.
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This is part of my argument that you really don't want us to go to Mars, even though you think you do. Everyone dreams of an Apollo scale effort with modern tech, but what we'd get is the ISS with three rockets strapped onto it and a single landing before never returning again.
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The NASA I dream of fires the entire human spaceflight division and launches two New Horizons probes a month to the weirdest parts of the solar system, in perpetuity. Let China and Russia figure out how to keep abrasive moon dust from blocking the space toilet.
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I'm not against human exploration in principle, but let's get the tooling in place to do it right. Work on a next-generation concept like a space elevator or the scary nuclear bomb powered rocket that can put a small town into orbit. Let's arrive on Mars in comfort and style.
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Facts about a Mars mission I think don't get enough attention: 1) It would take years, for orbital reasons 2) It requires several foundational breakthroughs, all of them in boring life support areas rather than anything fun. 3) First mission would be a flyby It really is ISS+
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The culprit in all of this is the Moon. It's just close enough that it got everyone worked up about landing on things. On better designed planets you maybe put a few colleagues into orbit and then get busy researching UFO engines or robot probes, without the expensive dead end.
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Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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It would appear they think it's still remarkably hard to make a rocket stand for its relaunch back home when all you have to work with is sharp-as-fuck dust and the couple meatbags you brought from Earth
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People really don't know how sharp that dust is
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