NASA's Moon Landing Will Likely Be Delayed 'Several Years' Beyond 2024, Auditors Say (theverge.com) 94
"NASA is not properly estimating costs for the Artemis program and could spend $93 billion between fiscal years 2021 and 2025," writes Slashdot reader schwit1. "NASA recently extended its target date for sending astronauts back to the moon to 2025 at the earliest." But, according to a new report (PDF) from NASA's Office of the Inspector General, it could be several years after 2024. The Verge reports: The recent prediction comes from NASA's Office of the Inspector General, which does periodic audits of the space agency's various programs. In its latest report, the OIG took a comprehensive look at NASA's Artemis program, the agency's ambitious initiative to send people back to the Moon, as well as land the first woman and the first person of color on the lunar surface. [...] NASA's Artemis program relies on a suite of complicated vehicles all working together to get astronauts safely to the Moon, including a massive new rocket called the Space Launch System, or SLS, that will send people to deep space inside a new crew capsule called Orion. Meanwhile, SpaceX is developing its next-generation spacecraft, called Starship, to carry people to and from the lunar surface for NASA -- part of a $2.9 billion contract awarded to the company in April.
However, Starship is still in very early stages of development and has yet to launch to orbit. SLS and Orion also have not flown on their first flight together. The OIG report, released Monday, highlights these issues and reveals just how much work is left to be done on Artemis, making a 2024 landing date unrealistic. "Given the time needed to develop and fully test the HLS and new spacesuits, we project NASA will exceed its current timetable for landing humans on the Moon in late 2024 by several years," the report states. [...] Rival space company Blue Origin had also hoped to receive a contract from NASA to develop a lunar lander, but when the space agency gave the award to SpaceX, the company sued in federal court. The lawsuit prevented NASA and SpaceX from working together on the lander until the litigation was resolved.
The OIG report notes that the lawsuit did have an impact on the overall schedule, but the office also argues that the development schedule for SpaceX's Starship is overly optimistic. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk continues to make bold predictions for Starship's first major test launch, claiming multiple times it'd be ready to fly to orbit for the first time this year. However, the OIG report estimates the first orbital flight test of Starship will occur sometime in the second quarter of 2022. The document does argue that SpaceX may be able to shave off some time due to its speedy testing pace compared with earlier NASA spaceflight programs. But there is still quite a lot of work to be done after Starship's orbital flight test. [...] The OIG report predicts that the debut of NASA's SLS rocket and Orion combo will also be delayed.
However, Starship is still in very early stages of development and has yet to launch to orbit. SLS and Orion also have not flown on their first flight together. The OIG report, released Monday, highlights these issues and reveals just how much work is left to be done on Artemis, making a 2024 landing date unrealistic. "Given the time needed to develop and fully test the HLS and new spacesuits, we project NASA will exceed its current timetable for landing humans on the Moon in late 2024 by several years," the report states. [...] Rival space company Blue Origin had also hoped to receive a contract from NASA to develop a lunar lander, but when the space agency gave the award to SpaceX, the company sued in federal court. The lawsuit prevented NASA and SpaceX from working together on the lander until the litigation was resolved.
The OIG report notes that the lawsuit did have an impact on the overall schedule, but the office also argues that the development schedule for SpaceX's Starship is overly optimistic. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk continues to make bold predictions for Starship's first major test launch, claiming multiple times it'd be ready to fly to orbit for the first time this year. However, the OIG report estimates the first orbital flight test of Starship will occur sometime in the second quarter of 2022. The document does argue that SpaceX may be able to shave off some time due to its speedy testing pace compared with earlier NASA spaceflight programs. But there is still quite a lot of work to be done after Starship's orbital flight test. [...] The OIG report predicts that the debut of NASA's SLS rocket and Orion combo will also be delayed.
I would just be happy if.. (Score:2)
I would just be happy if we were able to land someone on the Moon before the last person who landed to the Moon dies. We are getting down to only a couple so NASA better hurry up.
As far as the mission being delayed, I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
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Buzz Aldrin's blood is mostly alcohol so he's already well preserved into the next 50 years at least
SpaceX (Score:5, Informative)
NASA knows how to get to the Moon. Give the contract to SpaceX. It is Congress that insists that money be given to Bezos because of campaign contributions from Amazon and Bezos himself. The relevant facts, not mentioned in the article, are that SpaceX is flying regular crewed flights to the ISS and even higher, is delivering cargo to the ISS, is launching orbital payloads for the military and private companies including to geosynchronous orbit with the most powerful rocket currently in existence, the Falcon Heavy. And SpaceX is making rapid progress on Starship which could do the entire Moon landing mission without SLS/ Orion if the politicians would get out of the way.
Meanwhile, Bezos has never put anything into orbit. He is running single engine pop-up flights for tourists. Even though Blue Origin got much more development money than SpaceX for the HLS lander, what they delivered to NASA was a fake prototype consisting of an inflated balloon instead of an actual crew cabin. Bezos is a con man who willl never get to the Moon no matter how much money you give him.
Personally, I would skip the Moon and go directly to Mars but if the Moon is what you want, then cancel SLS/ Orion and fund the Starship for the entire mission. Whether you like Musk or not (and he is a bit irritating at times) he is the DaVinci of our age and he is personally dedicated to colonizing Mars, no matter what the politicians want.
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SpaceX is flying regular crewed flights to the ISS and even higher
It's easy to forget just how much higher the moon is compared to the ISS.
There's a graphic on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] that shows the radius of the earth (blue ball), the ISS orbit (purple circle), and how far out the moon is.
Saying that you can reach the purple line doesn't really mean much in terms of reaching the moon. It's literally 0.1% of the way there. (About 400km to the ISS, vs. 400,000km to the moon, give or take.)
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Saying that you can reach the purple line doesn't really mean much in terms of reaching the moon. It's literally 0.1% of the way there. (About 400km to the ISS, vs. 400,000km to the moon, give or take.)
Distance from orbit to the moon is much more trivial compared to the effort required of getting a spacecraft in orbit.
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Height isn't relevant, only how much energy it takes to get there. There's a famous saying that once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere. It only takes around 35% more energy to get to the moon than it takes to get to low earth orbit.
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His battles with depression and alcoholism [biography.com] are well known.
Aldrin is 91, Frank Borman still holds the title as oldest living astronaut at 93.
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No kidding. We're a year and one month away from it being a full half century since the last person left the moon. At this point, there's basically no chance of getting there before then. In 2025, if any of the astronauts who walked on the moon are even still living, the youngest of them will be 90.
Elon (Score:3)
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Well you need to assume that there is going to be enough people who will want the Rear Wheel Drive model. Most people who have per-ordered one had opted for the duel or try-motor all wheel drive models.
Tesla originally expected the cheaper 1 motor truck would be more popular, but that wasn't the case. So it may be 2025 or 2026 for the 39,900 Cybertruck.
The Duel Motor and Tri Motor are expected at the end of 2022, with 2023 having a large ramp. This is assuming by then they will have the Chip Supply, 4860
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I doubt they will hit the $39,900 target. They missed it for the Model 3. Yeah yeah you could technically phone up and order it, but all you got was a more expensive car with some things disabled in software. They couldn't get the build cost down enough so just shoved that out and discouraged anyone from buying it for a few months, then discontinued it.
Musk's timeframe predictions are always hopelessly optimistic too. Full Self Driving was due back in 2017 and is still years away. Robotaxi was supposed laun
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"Musk's timeframe predictions are always hopelessly optimistic too. "
Fortunately, the targets he actually hits are very valuable too. While not $40k, the Model 3 is still a worthy purchase at $50k. And, while the Tesla Roadster might have been a semi-failure (in number of units and price per unit), you have to wait months and months for a new Tesla.
Also, Elon Musk has launched 1,740 satellites for the Starlink network, which compares quite favourably to other communication networks: under 100 for Iridium, 3
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Full Self Driving was due back in 2017 and is still years away.
That is because he insists doing it himself. Basically every German car company has self driving cars since a decade, same for Toyota.
He simply could buy the technology instead of reinventing the wheel.
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Self driving cars is not likely to happen ever.
They will definitely not happen in the next 20-30 years.
...but "ever" is a very long time. Could we see self-driving cars by 2075? I would think so.
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Re: Elon (Score:2)
Yes, when the math is balance sheets and annual budgets.
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Although, to be fare, the Cybertruck is do damn ugly they may need to sell it at a loss to move any units. They'll just make it up on volume
Government space travel is done (Score:2)
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And they only have to maim a few people while peeing in bottles to get there.
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NASA is sourcing the technology with SpaceX (Owned by Musk), Blue Origin (Owned by Bezos) is having a fit that they didn't get the contract.
If you want it done faster for less. Then we just don't need to care about the safety of the men and woman who will be on these ships. Build a ship, dump people on it, if it doesn't make it, collect the data and try again, we can probably give it a try every 90 days. After 5 or 6 tries we will probably get it right, and the crew will come back with a victory, under bud
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That's the stupidest thing I've heard in a while. "Move fast a break things" may work in silicon valley wh
Re: Government space travel is done (Score:3)
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They cost billions because it's a hard problem. Harder than the "fly above the 80-km some see as the edge of space", or "launch a rocket above the 100km line everyone considers the edge of space".
Much higher even than the problem of "accelerate something to 9 km/s to put it in orbit".
Also, you want the failures to happen relatively close by so that you can actually record and transmit what's happening before things blow up - which doesn't take more than a few seconds in case of rocketry experiments.
The cost
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No dumbass, they cost billions because PHYSICS. Safety systems are a minimal cost compared to the propulsion system. The moon is very far away and we live at the bottom of a gravity well. Low earth orbit (where the international space station is and SpaceX rockets can currently reach) is 408 km from the earth's surface. The moon is nearly 1000 times farther away than that (384000 km). Apollo is the fastest thing humans have every flown in and it took over 3 days to get to the moon. Wasting all that fue
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We as a species are rather risk adverse group of folks.
Do you pick an Employee who has a 4.0 GPA at a top school, or someone with a 3.0 GPA at a mid level school?
Well the guy with the 4.0 GPA seems like the safest choice, has a track record in success...
However the guy with the 3.0 GPA may be the better choice, he had suffered failures, and mistakes, and had learned from them, and has coping strategies to deal with problems and mistakes.
In industry the Academic star is often considered less desirable, in co
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How many unmanned rockets did NASA launch and never use again, because they wanted to play it safe. How many were destroyed and needed to be rebuilt?
A lot of them. Designing a rocket is hard, building it rather easy in comparison.
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Jeff "barely into orbit" Bezos? The guy losing staff to *cough* SpaceX? The guy who owns Blue Origin who's being blamed for delaying ULA? [businessinsider.com]
I mean come on, he still hasn't delivered drone delivery yet! [time.com]
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When did Bezos get into orbit? Did he buy a SpaceX flight?
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Why do people really think theres a competition between SpaceX and Blue Origin?
Where did this come from? Why does Blue Origin have to judge its own "success" on the basis of out doing SpaceX? Is that an American thing or something? Your accomplishments aren't worth anything unless you are beating someone else? You have to be "winning" all the time?
SpaceX is doing what SpaceX do on SpaceX's timescale.
Blue Origin is doing what Blue Origin do on their own timescale. They don't need to be competing with Sp
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Where did this come from? Why does Blue Origin have to judge its own "success" on the basis of out doing SpaceX?
Could be because they are both businesses in the same field. Both want to sell the ability to put cargo and people into orbit. So far only one of them has done either and it wasn't Blue Origin. So by the metric of actually having the desired business up and functioning SpaceX is a success and Blue Origin is a failure.
Now SpaceX is branching out into sending up 1000s of their own satellites to sell broadband internet access to the world and building and launching their own satellites. More than 1700 in o
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One way
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If for less you mean no taxpayer money being given to them, that they have to fund everything out of their own pocket, then yes, that would be for less.
Shut it down, now (Score:2)
The NASA moon mission is to get money for NASA and its contractors and then demand more when they delay.
How bad does it have to get before the President and Congress say 'enough'!.
Re: Who cares? (Score:2)
Better plan: send all the late-model Nazis and economize by not spending on fuel for the return trip.
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Right on. Earth is no place for intolerance and the Woke Nazi hoards.
We can also starve them of oxygen for their whining, both on the trip and down here, too.
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Billions? For what?
With a lunar base, we can harvest water to refuel a rocket destined for Mars with return fuel. However, we also need to modernize various space technologies which will be used to colonize Mars and beyond. The faster we develop these technologies, the sooner we can avoid the human race getting wiped out by a big space rock that coincidentally meandered to our planet.
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I suggest that a substantial amount of time - a hundred years or so - should be spend on progress that would as a side benefit produce cheaper and safer space travel.
Feel free to run for office with that slogan, all while ignoring the bloated military budget.
Logistics (Score:3, Funny)
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try Uranus
Privatize the Moon Landing by Offering a Reward (Score:2)
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A reward is how the British parliament solved the longitude problem.
Actually not really. They guy who invented/designed the accurate clocks did never get his reward from the Parliament. He had to petition the King to get his reward - who agreed to pay it.
The problem was kind of solved with relatively accurate sand clocks/glasses. So the Admiralty and Parliament did not want to pay up.
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Yes it motivated him.
But the problem became smaller and smaller during development of better sand clocks.
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Congress should ask NASA how much it will cost to get to the moon by some deadline, and offer that as a reward to whatever private organization lands a man on the moon by that deadline. Cut NASA's funding by that amount. A reward is how the British parliament solved the longitude problem.
First, NASA doesn't know. They solicited bids to find out, and got three different answers which varied by a factor of three. Second, Bezos has made it abundantly clear that he's not going to spend a dime of his own money on anything but lawyers to build a Lunar Human Landing System, so who would contend for this prize? SpaceX is going to Mars and officially has no inherent interest in the Moon. The usual suspects notoriously never spend any of their own money. If they can't bill it all to the governme
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A reward is how the British parliament solved the longitude problem.
You should read up on History before trying to make statements like that with a straight face.
John Harrison [wikipedia.org]
While "technically" the reward did work and a solution was found Parliament screwed over the guy who actually did it because they expected some aristocrat with connections to win.
But why (Score:1)
I believe that this nation... (Score:2)
...should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.
We chose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
There. Can we finally get it done now? 2030 too soon?
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Not so simple. If you don't have the Soviets breathing down your neck, that is. Under such conditions it becomes pretty simple, pretty fast.
All major players have displayed ICBM-capability by now. And they did it neither because it's easy, nor because it's hard, but because they had to. Nobody will go to the moon nowadays, unless there is money to be made.
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I think China will do it whether or not the path to profitability is clear.
Re: I believe that this nation... (Score:2)
We already been there and done that. The glory days of the race to the moon are over, and right now we have some real problems in USA, Earth that need to be fixed. Getting back to the moon is a frivolous expense.
Re: I believe that this nation... (Score:2)
I don't really strongly disagree.
But given that we did it once, repeated successfully many times, now have better technology, vastly cheaper computing power, improved materials science, experienced and efficient space contractors (not Bezos), WTF is going on?
Why are we flopping around like space virgins?
We should've been done years and billions ago.
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Why are we flopping around like space virgins?
Because there's almost nothing to be gained for such a high cost. We have robots on mars and Elon is dead set on a mars colony. Be happy about that. It's progress.
Smart! (Score:2)
I'm so glad the rocket engineers in Congress mandated we re-use 1970's era space shuttle technology to save money.
Otherwise this could turn into a runaway boondoggle that we just kept dumping money into with no tangible result.
manual
Well, duh. (Score:3)
Anybody paying attention and still thinking they were going to hit that target date is deluded beyond belief. There was, at one time, the teeny-tiniest chance that SpaceX would have been capable of it, but regulation and lawsuits are gonna hold them back for a while even if they overcame their engineering and technical challenges.
I wonder how much money got wasted on "auditing" something that was so obvious.
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You are right that any belief of the target date was delusion beyond belief - any no, there was never even the teeny-tiniest chance of anyone being capable. But it has nothing at all to do with "regulation" or "lawsuits"
It is because an actual engineering program to go to the Moon in 2024 never existed, and one to go to the Moon at all still does not exist. An actual program requires real plans developed by real engineering teams, and the funding to carry them out. Seriously. Money to start this program was
No shit (Score:2)
3 years to go and they haven't cut metal on test articles yet.
In 1966 they were already launching training missions into LEO with prototype vehicles.
You can't app your way out of a physics problem.
Politics (Score:2)
Elon through his lack of diplomacy on Twitter has pissed off enough politicians that the FAA environmental review will not pass and they are not letting him launch his orbital test flights. Now it is looking like they will not approve test flights for at least a year possibly more.
We are not in a hurry this time. (Score:2)
The reason why we got a man on the moon so fast the first time around was because we wanted to beat "those commies" in the space race to the moon, and to avoid further embarassment after the Soviet Union put Sputnik into Earth's orbit.
Scince we already accomplished the world's first manned moon landing, there is no reason to hurry up and get there.
That is NOT what it is saying. (Score:3)
Specifically, it does not address the fact that SpaceX will almost certainly have humans on the moon in 2023/24 timeframe.
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Specifically, it does not address the fact that SpaceX will almost certainly have humans on the moon in 2023/24 timeframe.
They will not. The dearMoon project is for a flyby, not a landing. They will be taking a long elliptical orbit that will take them out farther from the Earth than any humans before them and consequently they will not be landing. The orbital profile doesn't allow it. Not to mention the landing system won't exist yet, leastwise not in crew-rated condition, even if SpaceX pulls off a minor schedule miracle during HLS development.
Now it's true that there is no industry-wide formal standard for crew-rating a
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DearMoon and landing on the moon are 2 very different projects.
Gee, it's almost like my post was an exhaustive explanation of that.
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It was a little bit rambling to be fair. Maybe this is a lesson in being concise.
I started off being concise, writing just the first paragraph, but this is Slashdot. We are allowed to use more than 280 characters. So I discussed some of the additional ramifications.
Windbourne said SpaceX will have humans on the Moon by 2023. I said they won't, and then went on to explain there's more than one reason why, not just the most obvious reason of dearMoon being the earliest Lunar-related SpaceX project and it has a mission profile that doesn't include a landing. Man-rating to NASA standard
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I gave up reading it. It was ALL OVER THE PLACE.
But DearMoon, Artemis and SpaceX's primary missions are all different and have nothing to do with each other.
As such, there was no reason for you to post a paragraph, let alone a book.
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But DearMoon, Artemis and SpaceX's primary missions are all different and have nothing to do with each other.
As such, there was no reason for you to post a paragraph, let alone a book.
They very much have a great many things to do with each other. SpaceX is not a large company. They're not Lockheed, with whole divisions in different states and the ability to pursue 30 independent projects without so much as a paperclip of overlap among them.
SpaceX has somewhat less than 10,000 employees and the only semi-independent parts now are Starlink satellite design and manufacture and Falcon/Falcon Heavy/Cargo Dragon/Crew Dragon operations. Everything else they do is bound up in Starship, from d
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SX has the same ppl that designed and built F9/FH in a few years working on Starship and have many lessons learned. The last thing they want to do be is another Boeing, L-Mart, Ball, etc. Those companies are ran by MBAs and are worthless because they are busy chasing government funding.
SX does it right in that they are doing their own thing and NASA, DoD, various Intel gro
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Jeff Bozo (Score:2)
Pork Barrel 2: Electric Bugaloo (Score:2)
Sound Stage Prep? (Score:2)
I’m pretty sure they can prep a sound stage for the next moon landing sooner than that.
China (Score:2)
In the 1960's there was a rivalry between the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. Now there is one between China and the U.S.A. The Chinese are advancing fast. I don't think a U.S. administration will accept a symbolic victory by the Chinese in the coming years.
I called it. (Score:1)
This makes me (Score:1)