[fastball]

My problem with his criticism (and to some extent echoed by Maciej in this article) is that the main takeaway seems to be "we did it once, we can do it again, let's revisit the past instead of re-inventing the wheel".

But I don't think anyone actively involved wants to revisit the past. Who wants to go back to the moon just because we can? Nobody. Assuming best intentions:

- People at NASA want to go to the moon to build a permanent base there. Maybe this is just to beat China, maybe it will actually be very useful to have a moon base. But that is the stated goal.

- People at SpaceX want to go to the moon as a way to fund Starship development, so that they can go to Mars.

- People at Lockheed Martin / Aerojet Rocketdyne / etc just want to get paid. I am going to ignore this cohort for the purposes of my argument.

These motivations are not served by doing what the Apollo missions did. Can you get to the moon and back on a Saturn V with a single rocket launch, making for a much simpler mission plan? Absolutely, we did it 6 times. Can you build a moon base using a series of Saturn V launches? Absolutely not. Would SpaceX (clearly the most competent launch provider available in 2024) get anything out of building a much smaller HLS / not using methalox / anything else that would be more practical if your only purpose was to go to the moon? Also no – SpaceX doesn't really care about the moon. So a mission profile that is actually optimized for the moon does little for them.

So while I think overall Artemis is a dumpster fire of spending, I don't think pointing at the Apollo missions is the gotcha that critics seem to think it is.

[bayindirh]

From my understanding, nobody is telling that "We should use Apollo as-is", but "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?".

Everything made/designed in Apollo are no short of marvels. Today we can do much better with lighter, smaller electronics, and should be able to do weight savings or at least cost savings where it matters.

Instead Artemis feels like "let's dig the parts pile and put what we have together, and invent the glue required for the missing parts", akin to today's Docker based development ecosystem.

Yes, the plan might be to carry much more equipment in fewer launches, but if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If this amount of people are saying that something is lost in spirit and some stuff is not done in an optimal way, I tend to believe them.

[imiric]

> From my understanding, nobody is telling that "We should use Apollo as-is", but "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?".

The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to move space exploration forward.

While arguably today there are comparable tensions, countries no longer have to prove anything to the world, and space exploration is mostly a scientific endeavour fueled by private companies that want to make a profit. There's less of an urgency to get to the moon, which can explain that difference in spirit that you mention.

FWIW I don't think that's a bad thing. Space exploration is the most difficult human endeavour, and taking the time to do it right seems like the optimal way to go. The fact world superpowers achieved what they did in a couple of decades of the last century, a mere 60 years after flying machines were invented, is nothing short of extraordinary. But it was a special time, and we shouldn't feel pressured to repeat it.

> Instead Artemis feels like "let's dig the parts pile and put what we have together, and invent the glue required for the missing parts", akin to today's Docker based development ecosystem.

That doesn't seem like a bad approach to me. There is a lot of value to be gained by gluing existing technology together, and if anything, Docker is proof of how wildly successful that can be. Most scientific breakthroughs are effectively a repurposing or combination of previous ideas, after all. I don't think this is a valid criticism of Docker, nor of this approach.

[gcanyon]

For anyone interested in this, Apple TV's "For All Mankind" is a wonderful exploration of what could have happened if the space race never ended. It's not a historical treatise or anything, but it's still a fascinating take and makes me hope we see real progress in the coming years.

[imiric]

Thank you. From a more historical perspective, I would also recommend the 2018 movie "First Man".

[coldtea]

>The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to move space exploration forward.

Well, money wise they now spend much more budget (inflation adjusted) it seems. Technology wise, one would expect they have more of it now, than back then. So, what, they lack some mystery motivation factor?

I'd say it's rather general modern bureucratic incompetence, overdesign, plus losing the people who knew how to build stuff and had actual Apollo-era experience, with a huge period in between without Moon missions that meant they couldn't pass anything directly to the current NASA generation (a 40 year old NASA engineer today would be negative years old back then), which obliterated all kinds of tacit knowledge.

It's like they had the people who designed UNIX back in the 70s, and a room full of JS framework programmers in 2024, plus all kinds of managers "experts" in Agile Development.

>FWIW I don't think that's a bad thing. Space exploration is the most difficult human endeavour, and taking the time to do it right seems like the optimal way to go.

Isn't the whole point that they're not "taking time to do it right", but waste enormous amounts of money and time while doing it massively wrong?

[p_l]

Apollo program got to the point that NASA budget was >4% of total federal budget.

And Apollo program itself was, IIRC, over half of it.

Never since NASA had such funding and political will to just let them try to get a stated goal. History of projects since Apollo is full of every attempt at making things simpler and more reusable either getting canceled, blown with congressional requirements for pork-barrel (SLS), damaged by needing to beg for money from organizations with different goals (Shuttle is a great example), smothered by budget cuts resulting in reuse plans getting canceled skyrocketing per-mission cost (Shuttle, Cassini), and that with NASA being effectively prevented from doing iterative approach and ending having to gold-plate everything to reduce risks on the often "once in a lifetime" launch.

[Symmetry]

It's important to remember that Apollo was one of Kennedy's signature political projects at the time he was assassinated, which was an important factor in its political viability.

[p_l]

It had considerable impact on why it had so much leeway compared to pretty much any later work by NASA.

When Apollo ended, "space race" ended for USA and it decided to stop on laurels.

[coldtea]

>Apollo program got to the point that NASA budget was >4% of total federal budget

Given the figures in TFA, that points to a much smaller federal budget and much smaller government expenditures in general, than to less absolute (inflation adjusted) money for this over Apollo.

[xvilka]

>It's like they had the people who designed UNIX back in the 70s, and a room full of JS framework programmers in 2024, plus all kinds of managers "experts" in Agile Development.

Does it mean Artemis is the Electron of space missions?

[Zigurd]

There is a space race now, between the US and China. It is tempered by China being only a non-NATO regional security threat, especially in the form of forcibly uniting Taiwan with the PRC. The modern space race is one branch of a many-faceted technological rivalry. So it doesn't have to make business sense or scientific sense in any strict way. But it also can't consume a large fraction of the GDP, or blow up a crew if that can be avoided.

[dash2]

>The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to move space exploration forward.

I'd say the climate is as tense today, and it is getting tenser. NATO is now talking about putting "trainers" into Ukraine, and US-made weaponry is being used to kill Vatniks; China is using water cannon on Philippine ships in the South China Sea; Iran is shooting missiles at Israel and the Houthis are trying to knock international shipping out of the Gulf of Aden.

It's just that the US looks a lot weaker and less competent today. (But perhaps that is hindsight? In the 60s people were still worried that the USSR would overtake the West economically.)

[imiric]

> I'd say the climate is as tense today, and it is getting tenser.

I think that all the examples you mentioned pale in comparison to the terror of global annihilation from nuclear weapons, a couple of decades after the bloodiest war in human history, during the peak of the Cold War. Conflicts exist today as well, and there is an increasing risk of a global conflict, but there is no urgency of beating an adversary ideologically because you can't fight them militarily. There was a nationwide competitive spirit back then that just doesn't exist today, which caused nations to accomplish things that seem impossible in hindsight.

> It's just that the US looks a lot weaker and less competent today.

I wouldn't say the US as a whole, since as a country it's still a leader in science and technology, and it has sufficient financial resources to invest in this project, if it wanted to. I think it boils down to the lack of urgency and political/public support, and perhaps managerial and competency problems at NASA itself.

> (But perhaps that is hindsight? In the 60s people were still worried that the USSR would overtake the West economically.)

By some measures, China has overtaken the US economically, and they have a space program with a focus on the moon, yet both sides are sloppy in their own ways. I think we'll get there eventually, but it will take more attempts, time and resources than we planned for. And, to be fair, it took 11 missions for Apollo to land on the moon, 10 Gemini missions before it, and many failures along the way. But if you take a look at the rate of progress, and time between missions, it's clear that getting to the moon was US' primary objective in the '60s, which is far from what it is today.

[rockemsockem]

I certainly agree with the lack of political support, but the American public never supported Apollo. There was a brief moment, right when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, when just over 50% of Americans thought Apollo was a good idea. The rest of the time it was a majority opinion that it wasn't worth it.

[PaulHoule]

This Feb 1968 poll

https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31107646/questio...

asked of 58% of people who favored cuts in domestic spending, found 5% of people wanted cuts to "Space technology, Moon Shots, Scientific Research" (compared to 20% in welfare)

However, this one

https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31107534/questio...

says 54% of people think the space program is "not worth it" in July 1967 and similar questions around that time get similar results. In April 1970 (after the 1969 success) Harris asks the question

https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31107574/questio...

and gets 64% "not worth it".

[imiric]

You're probably right. I wasn't alive nor in the US during that period, so can only infer from what I've seen and read, but I would wager that even the staunchest opponents of the US space program back then couldn't have helped but feel pride of what their country accomplished in such a short time.

And even if the majority opposed it, I still think that overall the amount of supporters then would've been greater than the amount of people who support it today. We're living in a time of ignorance and public disinterest in science that Carl Sagan predicted in the '90s[1], which didn't exist in the '60s. That spirit of optimism was partly what enabled such grand scientific projects, and I think most Americans were deeply moved by the words of JFK in that historic 1962 speech[2].

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/632474-i-have-a-foreboding-...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZyRbnpGyzQ

[anarticle]

Only difference is when the container is OOMKilled people die!

[stetrain]

During the Apollo era NASA was receiving nearly 5% of the federal budget.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/09/NA...

Apollo was a development and technical marvel. I don't think I would necessarily consider it done in an "optimal way" except for optimizing for time at great expense.

Artemis certainly isn't fiscally optimal either, mostly driven by a bunch of stipulations in their budget placed there by senators from states where all of these Shuttle-derived parts are built.

[rdtsc]

> "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?".

What if we don't have the same spirit any longer? Nobody is going to acknowledge that publicly at NASA but they are acknowledging it by their actions. What if people who had "spirit" went to make youtube videos, work for Musk, Wall Street or Google? It takes some time to gauge the stickiness and depth of bureaucratic muck, but after a few years people can see it, and move on to other things. Guess who's left? Those who don't have much spirit left.

[mlindner]

> "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?".

Isn't that just personal opinion? If anything, the current era of spaceflight has finally restored the Apollo ethos that had been dead for decades. So the answer to your question is "we're already doing it". Lots of people seem to be going nuts and saying "but not like that!" as they seem to have some alternative weird vision for what Apollo was. My dad grew up watching Apollo launches, he even got to work on the Apollo-Soyuz mission in a small part. He's one of the people more hyped for SpaceX's mission/goal and Starship than anyone I know.

[golol]

Because the spirit of Apollo - unsustainable one off dlag planting missions - lead to human spaceflight stagnating for the subsequent half century.

[rockemsockem]

Nixon cancelling Apollo early is what led to stagnation.

[thombat]

NASA had only contracted for 15 Saturn V stacks, and in 1968 declined to start the second production run. Nixon only assumed office in 1969, at which point the only question was how many of the remaining ten stacks would fly as part of Apollo. Under Nixon the final three Apollo lunar missions were cancelled, with one of those Saturn V stacks being used for Skylab instead. But even if all three had flown to the moon stagnation was inevitable as NASA's focus had already been directed to the shuttle.

[rockemsockem]

I wasn't aware of those extra details! Very interesting.

[kragen]

the people who did it once are almost all dead

people in the age range 20–70 in 01970 would be in the age range 74–124 today. different people, who identify with those people, in several different countries, would like to do what those people did. it behooves them to study what those people did and how they did it, not because they can't do anything better, but because it's easy to do worse, and both of these criticisms make a good case that artemis is doing much worse. the ussr at the same time did so much worse that they never landed humans on the moon at all. similarly with contemporary france, the uk, the prc, etc.

you cannot get to the moon and back on a saturn v because there aren't any saturn v rockets in operable condition, and there never will be again. it belongs to history now, like children's chemistry sets that could make rocket fuel, being able to order rocket fuel ingredients without getting a visit from a police agency, drugs being legal by default instead of illegal, new classes of antibiotics being brought to market, and being able to go out in public without your movements being permanently archived for spy agencies to data-mine later on

artemis is on track to follow in the footsteps not of apollo but of the soviet n1/l3 program, which was canceled after losing the race decisively to apollo. it's chang'e that's following in the footsteps of apollo. we'll see if spacex can change that, but i'm not that optimistic

[Aloha]

You raise the point, that particularly when it comes to manufacturing, living knowledge is paramount -

Could we have restarted Saturn V production in 1975? yes, at some vast cost to remake tooling.

What about 1985? oof, that's a little harder, how many of the people alive know how to make a Rocketdyne F-1, but probably still doable, at some yet greater cost.

What about 1995? maybe still possible - lots of the base industries we relied on to make it have ceased to exist, and the production knowledge for base components have changed so much that you're almost gonna start over. Some knowledge on how to build it is still alive, it's only 30 years later.

What about 2005? almost impossible, you'd have to recreate whole kinds of technologies from scratch - the tech trees have evolved so much, almost all of the first hand knowledge is dead, or very near to dead. It'd probably be easier to start over, with a clean sheet.

This is why the US Army still buys some number of tanks every year - so the production line stays open and we dont lose the knowledge. We're running into issues restarting some missile production (which is being used in Ukraine because of similar issues).

I do think in the end Artemis will likely be a success, but at a vast cost - but dont forget how expensive Apollo was. It too was vastly expensive.

[K0balt]

This is probably the most relevant take. “Going to the moon” is primarily a PR facade on “testing and development of technologies required to expand human space presence and begin the process of colonization of the moon and eventually mars”

“Going to the moon” appeals to the Everyman ego.

As for the obscene fraud/waste by the encumbent defense contractors, that is something we need to deal with. If we don’t make them compete dollar for dollar with spacex we will never see them evolve back into functioning organizations that will deliver real value to US strategic dominance. Having them as fat, lumbering slop-hogs hobbles the strategic and economic progress of the US MIC.

[WorldMaker]

> - People at NASA want to go to the moon to build a permanent base there. Maybe this is just to beat China, maybe it will actually be very useful to have a moon base. But that is the stated goal.

> - People at SpaceX want to go to the moon as a way to fund Starship development, so that they can go to Mars.

These seem to be inter-related, too. NASA seems to want Artemis to be a stepping stone to Mars as well (whether or not they are competing or cooperating with SpaceX to get there). Some of the arguments for Gateway in NRHO and/or even a possible permanent base on the Moon from NASA seem to indicate that some of the engineers believe NRHO is a great "launch pad" to Mars.

Some at NASA also clearly don't believe SLS as it exists is capable of getting to Mars and are pushing SpaceX and Blue Origin in the HLS stages of Artemis seemingly to try to get competition going today for whatever rockets can actually make it to Mars. SpaceX's HLS plans being based on Mars plans looks like a feature more than bug, if Mars may be a shared end goal anyway. (Blue Origin also presumably is equally Mars-focused like SpaceX.)

[nordsieck]

> My problem with his criticism (and to some extent echoed by Maciej in this article) is that the main takeaway seems to be "we did it once, we can do it again, let's revisit the past instead of re-inventing the wheel".

> But I don't think anyone actively involved wants to revisit the past.

I think that's fair... but then we should make systems that are at least as good as the ones from the past.

And SLS, even in the fully upgraded "Block 2" state is not as good a rocket as the Saturn V. One of the core problems is: we can't build Saturn V. It's Greek fire - we've lost the ability. There are schematics and plans, but apparently there was enough custom work and deviations by the actual welders and machinists that the plans are ... insufficiently specified.

And needless to say, those same workers are either dead or have forgotten the necessary details.

[pixodaros]

That is not the problem. Its that a technology designed in the 1960s for a 1960s workforce and tool base can't be made in the USA today, for the same reason that you can't produce cost-effective Browning HPs in Belgium today https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...

[lijok]

"Let's revisit the past instead of re-inventing the wheel" challenge was posed to the project management, not engineering.

[lupusreal]

Frankly I do think the whole point from the government's perspective is to beat China back to the Moon. And "Apollo style" short moon visit should be enough to give America a propaganda victory. SpaceX like Lockheed just wants to get paid (albeit so they can put that money into R&D instead of their shareholders.) The rank and file at NASA probably have some romantic notions of a Moon base but there are always a few dreamers to get disappointed by reality (Congress pulling funding once the propaganda victory is secured.)

[Dalewyn]

>SpaceX doesn't really care about the moon.

SpaceX is a business, SpaceX doesn't care about the Moon because there are no customers interested in going to the Moon.

If market forces shift and companies start wanting to go to the Moon, you bet SpaceX will care about the Moon because there's money to be made.

[fastball]

SpaceX is a business controlled by a single man that is really interested in making humanity multi-planetary by building a self-sustaining base on Mars.

[pfdietz]

It will stop focusing on Mars after Elon dies. This may take a while, admittedly.

[fastball]

Maybe. As part of the control he currently has, I think we can safely assume he has been filling the company with employees who are also very jazzed about going to Mars / making humans multi-planetary. So it really depends on where the power lies when Musk dies.

[skissane]

> SpaceX is a business, SpaceX doesn't care about the Moon because there are no customers interested in going to the Moon.

SpaceX claims to care a lot about going to Mars, but Mars has even less potential customers than the Moon has

[rockemsockem]

SpaceX doesn't make sense as a business without actually truly thinking space exploration is something worth doing.

Rocket companies are bad ways to maximize profits.

[Dalewyn]

SpaceX is a space exploitation business, Starlink being the foremost example but also commercial and governmental launches of Falcon 9 and eventually Starship. Even going to Mars is ultimately a mission of exploitation, not exploration.

Space exploration is the duty of governmental space agencies such as NASA, who (assuming sufficient budgeting) can all literally afford to run red ink for entire projects and not have to give a damn.

[rockemsockem]

Starlink was basically created to get SpaceX's launch cadence up. Which it absolutely succeeded at. SpaceX exists to cause space exploration/colonization/all-activities to occur, specifically going to Mars, but also more generally. Which again, it has absolutely succeeded at.

NASA and other space agencies are indeed picking the missions, but SpaceX has been a huge enabler here.

[fastball]

I think space expansion business might be more appropriate verbiage.

"Exploitation" has connotations of man-vs-man colonialism, which I don't think apply in the case of outer space.

[Dalewyn]

I feel exploitation is apt:

* Whoever gets to Mars (and the Moon for that matter) first in a permanent fashion gets to write all the rules. Full stop. It's also why the US really does not want China achieving a Moon presence first.

* Starlink is competing (and winning) against all the incumbent ISPs for being pieces of shit one way or another, especially incumbent satellite ISPs like Hughesnet who are their immediate competitors.

It's all man vs. man colonialism in the end.

Besides, "to exploit" something means to make productive use of something: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/exploit

[zajio1am]

'Exploration' / 'exploitation' are established terms for this kind of trade-off, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration-exploitation_dilem...

[Zigurd]

SpaceX makes sense as a business in the way a mega-yacht makes sense as a ship. The valuation was set by a vanity investment by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. 2.7 million subscribers can't keep 4500 satellites in orbit and replaced every 5 years. It is a prestige investment.

[bryanlarsen]

SpaceX is cash flow positive despite spending multiple billions each year on Starship and Starlink. The only way this is possible is if Starlink is profitable, and significantly so.

[fastball]

If you assume a very conservative $100/m subscription for every Starlink customer, they're making $3.6B a year already and it seems like they can do a lot more capacity.

Edit: just googled and they're predicting $6.6B in revenue for 2024.

[coldtea]

>My problem with his criticism (and to some extent echoed by Maciej in this article) is that the main takeaway seems to be "we did it once, we can do it again, let's revisit the past instead of re-inventing the wheel".

The problem is that this re-invention creates a square wheel made of marshmallow (with the road-trustiness one would imagine from the above design and materials), that costs 10x what a rubber wheel does.

[GuB-42]

The problem is that Artemis is in many ways inferior to Apollo. It is less safe, more expensive (which is to say something!), less capable,... If the goal is to build a moon base, it should be able to do what Apollo did with ample margins, but from the look of it, it doesn't appear like there is much margin. It is complexity for complexity sake, it doesn't translate into more payload, more scientific potential, or lower costs.

The only breakthroughs with Artemis is the part with Starship, the refueling in space part could change the deal for future mission, for the Moon, Mars, or elsewhere. And finding an excuse to write a blank cheque to SpaceX is, I think, not too bad an idea despite all the Elon Musk bullshit. SpaceX actually launches rockets, they are even pretty good at it, a rare thing. But do we really need all that baggage with SLS, Orion, and convoluted orbits? Just have SpaceX send a Starship to the moon (which is one of the last points in the article).