I agree 100% on your choice of Nova episodes. I don't know much about the rest of your audience, but I would probably, for real, be ROTFL, if you did an episode on how woke NOVA has become.
Orion’s lunar flyby came off beautifully, in large part, I guess, because Musk and Bezos had nothing to do with it. As for an actual lunar landing, this suggests a real mess in the offing.
The lunar lander is the most technically ambitious part of Artemis. Where SLS, Orion, and Gateway are mostly a compilation of NASA's greatest hits, the lander requires breakthrough technologies with the potential to revolutionize space travel.
Of course, you can’t just call it a lander. In Artemis speak, this spacecraft is the Human Landing System, or HLS. NASA has delegated its design to two private companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX. SpaceX is responsible for landing astronauts on Artemis 3 and 4, while Blue Origin is on the hook for Artemis 5 (notionally scheduled for 2030). After that, the agency will take competitive bids for subsequent missions.
The SpaceX HLS design is based on their experimental Starship spacecraft, an enormous rocket that takes off on and lands on its tail, like 1950’s sci-fi. There is a strong “emperor’s new clothes” vibe to this design. On the one hand, it is the brainchild of brilliant SpaceX engineers and passed NASA technical review. On the other hand, the lander seems to go out of its way to create problems for itself to solve with technology.
To start with the obvious, HLS looks more likely to tip over than the last two spacecraft to land on the moon, which https://www.space.com/intuitive-machines-odysseus-moon-lander-tipped-overhttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/japanese-moon-lander-reaches-surface-but-fate-uncertain/. It is a fifteen story tower that must land on its ass in terrible lighting conditions, on rubble of unknown composition, over a light-second from Earth. The crew are left suspended so high above the surface that they need a folding space elevator (not the cool kind) to get down. And yet in the end this single-use lander carries less payload (both up and down) than the tiny Lunar Module on Apollo 17. Using Starship to land two astronauts on the moon is like delivering a pizza with an aircraft carrier.
Amusingly, the sheer size of the SpaceX design leaves it with little room for cargo. The spacecraft arrives on the Moon laden with something like 200 tons of cryogenic propellant,and like a fat man leaving an armchair, it needs every drop of that energy to get its bulk back off the surface. Nor does it help matters that all this cryogenic propellant has to cook for a week in direct sunlight.
Other, less daring lander designs reduce their appetite for propellant by using a detachable landing stage. This arrangement also shields the ascent rocket from hypervelocity debris that gets kicked up during landing. But HLS is a one-piece rocket; the same engines that get sandblasted on their way down to the moon must relight without fail a week later.
Given this fact, it’s remarkable that NASA’s contract with SpaceX doesn’t require them to demonstrate a lunar takeoff. All SpaceX has to do to satisfy NASA requirements is land an HLS prototype on the Moon. Questions about ascent can then presumably wait until the actual mission, when we all find out together with the crew whether HLS can take off again
I'm curious how long your "pun never intended" stance survives your ongoing dadhood.
I agree 100% on your choice of Nova episodes. I don't know much about the rest of your audience, but I would probably, for real, be ROTFL, if you did an episode on how woke NOVA has become.
Recommended - the Mr. Show "Blowing up the Moon" sketch.
"And we're going during a full moon, so we get the whole thing."
I suspect Violet Gibson was driven mad by Mussolini's quivering jowls.
Orion’s lunar flyby came off beautifully, in large part, I guess, because Musk and Bezos had nothing to do with it. As for an actual lunar landing, this suggests a real mess in the offing.
https://idlewords.com/2024/05/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm#lander
The lunar lander is the most technically ambitious part of Artemis. Where SLS, Orion, and Gateway are mostly a compilation of NASA's greatest hits, the lander requires breakthrough technologies with the potential to revolutionize space travel.
Of course, you can’t just call it a lander. In Artemis speak, this spacecraft is the Human Landing System, or HLS. NASA has delegated its design to two private companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX. SpaceX is responsible for landing astronauts on Artemis 3 and 4, while Blue Origin is on the hook for Artemis 5 (notionally scheduled for 2030). After that, the agency will take competitive bids for subsequent missions.
The SpaceX HLS design is based on their experimental Starship spacecraft, an enormous rocket that takes off on and lands on its tail, like 1950’s sci-fi. There is a strong “emperor’s new clothes” vibe to this design. On the one hand, it is the brainchild of brilliant SpaceX engineers and passed NASA technical review. On the other hand, the lander seems to go out of its way to create problems for itself to solve with technology.
To start with the obvious, HLS looks more likely to tip over than the last two spacecraft to land on the moon, which https://www.space.com/intuitive-machines-odysseus-moon-lander-tipped-overhttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/japanese-moon-lander-reaches-surface-but-fate-uncertain/. It is a fifteen story tower that must land on its ass in terrible lighting conditions, on rubble of unknown composition, over a light-second from Earth. The crew are left suspended so high above the surface that they need a folding space elevator (not the cool kind) to get down. And yet in the end this single-use lander carries less payload (both up and down) than the tiny Lunar Module on Apollo 17. Using Starship to land two astronauts on the moon is like delivering a pizza with an aircraft carrier.
Amusingly, the sheer size of the SpaceX design leaves it with little room for cargo. The spacecraft arrives on the Moon laden with something like 200 tons of cryogenic propellant,and like a fat man leaving an armchair, it needs every drop of that energy to get its bulk back off the surface. Nor does it help matters that all this cryogenic propellant has to cook for a week in direct sunlight.
Other, less daring lander designs reduce their appetite for propellant by using a detachable landing stage. This arrangement also shields the ascent rocket from hypervelocity debris that gets kicked up during landing. But HLS is a one-piece rocket; the same engines that get sandblasted on their way down to the moon must relight without fail a week later.
Given this fact, it’s remarkable that NASA’s contract with SpaceX doesn’t require them to demonstrate a lunar takeoff. All SpaceX has to do to satisfy NASA requirements is land an HLS prototype on the Moon. Questions about ascent can then presumably wait until the actual mission, when we all find out together with the crew whether HLS can take off again
Always ready for a Johnny Unitas shout out!