NASA's plan to return to the moon is as fateful as the name Artemis.
Originally scheduled to launch in the first half of 2021, a year later, fuel leakage and emission pipeline failures are still difficult to solve.
Just last night, NASA was "pigeon" again. Nasa held a media briefing, and the management team said that because the liquid hydrogen leakage problem has not been resolved, the Artemis 1 lunar rocket will not be launched until it is fully prepared.
In Greek mythology, artemis, the god of the moon, was the sister of the sun god Apollo, and her love affair was blocked by Apollo, and eventually she could only look at her lover who became "Orion".
The "Artemis Project", which carries the "Orion" spacecraft and repeatedly "jumps the ticket", still lives in the shadow of the dazzling ring of the "Apollo Plan" half a century ago.
1
Artemis had a lot of fate
The Artemis Project got stuck in the first step of the progress bar. One drum blows, then declines, three exhausts. Artemis 1 has announced a delay in launch much more than three times.
In 2019, NASA officially announced the implementation of the "Artemis Program", which aims to send American astronauts to the moon by 2024 and establish a permanent base on the lunar surface by 2028, laying the foundation for landing on Mars and deep space exploration missions.
The Trump administration at the time was ambitious, making it clear that by 2024, a man and a woman would land on the moon, restoring the glory of space to the United States. This plan, which shocked the world, actually disrupted the right steps: first send probes, robots, and then send people to the moon. The White House forced NASA to adjust its priorities, causing planned difficult births.
On December 11, 2017 local time, US President Trump signed a space policy directive announcing that US astronauts will return to the moon and eventually go to Mars (Source: Oriental IC)
The Moon is "permanent" and does not "run away". Rushing to the moon will only increase complexity and cost, and the benefits will be pitiful. Even if the moon landing is successful, a man and a woman will certainly not be able to build shelters, maintain water sources, make oxygen and rocket fuel, and lay the lunar orbit like robots. They spent at least $30 billion back and forth, but they couldn't provide the infrastructure for the subsequent moon landings.
The White House's guarantee funding is $1.6 billion a year, which is only a "small head" of expenses. Industry insiders judge that once Trump fails to be re-elected president, the next administration will inevitably cancel this money-burning plan. However, in February 2021, the Biden administration decided to support NASA and carry out the Artemis Project to the end.
Similar to the Apollo program, if the Soviet Union had not launched the first artificial satellite and sent the first astronaut into space, the U.S. manned lunar landing program would not have been able to advance smoothly. Because the space race has a deep connotation, once the opponent has more advanced technology, then there must be a more superior faith.
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong left the first footprints of mankind on the lunar surface
China's lunar exploration project is divided into "exploration", "boarding" and "stationing", known as the "three steps". At the end of 2020, chang'e 5 successfully returned to earth after sampling the moon. By the 2030s, China will land astronauts on the moon. At the same time that the "Artemis Plan" once again announced the postponement of launch, the astronauts of the Shenzhou 14 crew on the Chinese space station opened the door of the Wentian Laboratory and completed all the scheduled tasks.
2030 "the limit is approaching", and the United States has to set the realization date of the "Artemis Plan" in 2028 or even 2024.
The government is in a hurry, and NASA is not very reliable. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that NASA and Boeing, the lead contractor for the Space Launch System (SLS), "underestimated the complexity of manufacturing and assembling core engine stages."
NASA's new Rocket Space Launch System (SLS), which will send astronauts to the moon during the Artemis mission (Source: NASA)
And outsourced private companies are in constant trouble. Originally, Blue Origin, Space X, Bigelow Aerospace, Virgin Galactic and other companies that entered space purely for commercial interests promoted the "new space" movement, giving a heavy blow to the "old space" cooperative relationship maintained by the government and military contractors that had monopolized for many years in a low-cost, efficient and economies of scale model.
The "PPP" model of public-private partnership has been hampered by successive legal proceedings. A lawsuit would take 7 months at random. NASA signed a $967 million contract with Blue Origin, Space X, and another company in 2020 to fund the development of project Artemis's lunar lander.
NASA's choice of Space X caused Blue Origin to be greatly dissatisfied, and while complaining, it publicly criticized Space X's next generation of "starships" as extremely complex and too risky. In recent years, Blue Origin founder Bezos and Space X founder Musk have continued to "face each other head-on": the wealth list competes for the first place, and the war of words escalates frequently. During the lawsuit, NASA suspended its cooperation with Space X.
The progress of Artemis 1 may come to a standstill at any time.
3
The most powerful rocket is ready to go
The "new space race" of the 21st century, the "Artemis Project", which is dragged by several parties, seems to be difficult to surpass the sharp edge of the "Apollo Program". From 1968 to 1972, the United States completed 9 manned lunar missions, 6 successful landings, and a total of 12 astronauts landed on the moon.
In the 1970s, the United States was supposed to expand the results of a manned lunar landing and continue to explore Mars or the vast expanse of the universe. However, such statements are more like the wishes of space enthusiasts. For U.S. presidents in the 1970s and 1980s, priorities were primarily the Vietnam War, the oil crisis, and not spending taxpayers' precious money.
In space, the problem of physics is equal to the problem of economics. Standing on the launch pad waiting to take off, 90% of the mass is fuel, 8% of the mass is a metal shell, and the things sent into space — people and cargo — account for only 2% of the total mass.
That is to say, the mechanism of manned spaceflight is to tie people to several disposable fireworks tubes carrying thousands of tons of fuel and a very small amount of goods. 50 years ago, the cost per kilogram of goods was more than $10,000.
So, after the last manned landing on the moon in December 1972, for half a century, astronauts could only be seen raising ants and turning their heads a few kilometers above the earth. The exploration of space in the 21st century surprised the people of the 20th century, after all, the mainstream idea of the 70s was that the asteroid mining in the 90s and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn were explored in 2000.
On February 7, 1984, American astronaut Bruce McCandless walked without ropes in space
It's not exactly a matter of money. Since 2003, the United States has spent more than $4.79 trillion in Iraq, Afghanistan and other related wars. Rough estimates equate to the cost of at least 40 large-scale Mars missions, enough to establish permanent settlements on Mars.
America today needs the Artemis Project to be "great again."
The "Artemis Project" was designed entirely around "manned". The Orion spacecraft consists of three parts. One is the crew compartment, which can accommodate 4 astronauts to work and live; The second is the service cabin, which contains the life support system of the crew, the engine and the fuel reserve; The third is to launch the mid-mounted system, and in the event of any accident, the system can pull the crew compartment to a safe place.
In order to complete the manned and heavy payload mission, NASA built the SLS, named "the world's most powerful rocket", which in many ways surpassed the legend of the "Apollo" era - Saturn V. It consists of a cargo hold, an Exploration Upper Level (EUS), a core stage, and two additional solid rocket boosters. The SLS weighs 2721 tons, of which 2358 tons are fuel. The four RS-25D engines are currently the world's largest stage-burning liquid hydrogen-oxygen engines, with a maximum thrust of 39.1MN (megantons) at takeoff, which is 15% higher than the Saturn V's 34.5MN.
The Space Launch System rocket thrusters are installed and awaiting liftoff at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida (Source: NASA)
It is reported that the journey of Artemis 1 is 2.09 million kilometers long and lasts 42 days. "Orion" weighs 54.4 kilograms and contains three mannequins of simulated astronauts, Snoopy dolls and other items.
With Orion into lunar orbit, there are 10 CubeSatellites. Last July, CubeStar was already deployed on rockets. The launch was delayed by a year and there are currently 5 recharged. These CubeSats carry different scientific research missions, studying different fields such as microorganisms, water, hydrogen content, solar particle infrared, etc. The cost of cube stars is low, the level of redundancy is also poor, the failure rate is relatively high, and it is expected that several cannot complete the task.
3
Space Shuttle makeover, lunar commercialization?
A more important reason for America's return to the moon is that trial and error are costly and almost "wasted" more than three decades of time.
With the retirement of the last three space shuttles in 2011, the United States even lost the ability to send humans into space — at one point paying Russia $80 million to send an astronaut to the space station.
The Space Shuttle program, created in the early 1970s, plans to make cheap low-orbit vehicles that can be transported every two weeks.
NASA astronaut Eugene Cernan was the lunar module pilot for the main crew of Apollo 10 at a press conference at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston (now NASA's Johnson Space Center) on April 26, 1969 .00
Everyone complained that rockets were too expensive, and they didn't realize that rockets were actually missiles that sent cargo into space.
NASA was founded on the basis of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency, which hired captured German missile expert von Braun, later chief designer of the Saturn V launch vehicle.
In the 1960s, NASA was the sixth corner of the Pentagon. When the Pentagon launches missiles, it never considers cost issues such as recycling.
However, the popularity of television has made the "luxury" of the rocket clear at a glance, after all, it is not a missile fired at the enemy camp, and it is burned out.
The Space Shuttle project began with an eye toward recovering rocket boosters: fished out of the sea, refurbished and reused. It sounds very frugal, but the reality is that the booster is badly damaged and refurbished much more expensive than building a new one.
NASA recovers the ships that launched the boosters from the ATLANTIs and returns to port
Scientist and science fiction writer David Brin's novel Tank Farm Dynamo may have suggested that if the shuttle's main fuel tank is left in orbit, collected and welded in space, the United States could have a low-cost circular facility in low-Earth orbit that generates artificial gravity and can accommodate more than 1,000 people.
One of the meanings behind the story is that NASA's money-saving skills are not at all right.
The "cost reduction and efficiency increase" under the slogan of recycling strictly limits the creativity of engineers. For reuse, the cost per launch increased by about $500 million. In order to divide the political fat, Congress has distributed contracts for various components of the space shuttle to its own constituencies, covering the east, west, south, and north of the United States, resulting in unnecessary and expensive logistics costs.
Finally, the cost of each launch of the space shuttle program is about $1.5 billion, which is enough to complete six rocket manned launches per year. The project was so puzzling that it frightened the Soviets of the time. Even NASA itself now admits that the shuttle program was a mistake.
The moon shines on a space launch system rocket on the launch pad (Source: NASA)
Since the space shuttle is NASA's main launch vehicle, a large number of follow-up projects have been affected. Satellites of specific size and mass, designed according to the space shuttle cargo compartment specifications, can only be postponed or cancelled. The overrun of the space shuttle squeezed the research and development funds of the more superior launch vehicle technology, which in turn formed a vicious circle, resulting in the increasing cost of NASA flying into space.
In addition, the head of government changes every four or eight years, and NASA must adjust its pace to accommodate the different blueprints of each administration. Anyway, since the 1970s, flying to Mars has always been the tone of "20 years apart, we'll meet". The current Biden administration is also portrayed in this way.
The space shuttles are not like the Star Wars Millennium Falcon, which takes off on the ground and enters space in an instant, they are gliders that need to be sent into space with rockets. Today, the "space plane" is favored by the public, which can enter low-Earth orbit directly from the ground.
The Millennium Falcon from the movie Star Wars
The first aircraft to approach outer space on a large "on its own" was the U.S. Air Force's X-15 supersonic rocket-powered aircraft, which entered service in the 1960s. The X-15 first fell from the B-52 to an altitude of 13.7 kilometers, then rose to more than 50 miles, and the pilot was qualified as an astronaut.
The success of the X-15 inspired the concept of consumption in spaceplanes in the 21st century. In 2004, Spaceship 1 was the first private spacecraft to reach space, leaping over the Carmen Line, a space boundary at an altitude of 100 kilometers. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have both developed similar projects that allow several passengers to enjoy the curves of the Earth's edge against a backdrop of 100,000 meters of pitch-black space in a microgravity environment for a few minutes, a commercial race in low-Earth orbit.
Europe also has a forward-looking, underfunded spaceplane program, the Skylon, a single-stage orbiting spacecraft conceived by the British Reaction Engines Ltd. and developed since the 1980s. The aircraft uses a hybrid scramjet engine called SABRE, also known as a synthetic aspirated rocket engine.
It works by pumping oxygen from the atmosphere as an oxidant until the speed reaches Mach 5, and then switching to stored hydrogen, oxygen rocket fuel for faster speed and higher thrust. Because of the lack of money, so far it has only been possible to conduct concept tests.
"Sky Tower" C1 configuration
All feats require great effort, and great efforts require great funding. Good profits are both an end and a result. The same is true for lunar exploration.
No one has the moon. According to the Outer Space Treaty (formally known as the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies), the Moon does not belong to anyone.
Just like the development of Antarctica, as the cost of landing on the moon becomes cheaper, the moon will set up a scientific laboratory. When resources on the moon prove profitable and all agreements are at risk of lapses, nations and major corporations will compete for the best "turf" and defend themselves against the Outer Space Treaty before an international tribunal. When trillions of dollars in profits can be realized, the moon will eventually be "commercialized" for large-scale development.
That's how history on Earth is.
Source: South Wind Window
Author: Cao Zaiji
EDIT: Shallow
[Disclaimer: This number is an official public welfare account for the decision-making of governments at all levels, enterprises and institutions, and this article is reproduced for the purpose of transmitting more information. If there is a source labeling error or suspected infringement of your legitimate rights and interests, please contact us. We will correct and delete it in a timely manner, thank you. 】