Moon Myth: Artemis

We're going to the moon! Did you know about Artemis program? NASA plans to land the "first woman and next man" on the moon by 2024, and from there begin sending missions to Mars. It's an ambitious goal for an outfit that's been hitching rides with the Russians for almost a decade. Realistically, Artemis is not going to the moon in five years, or twenty-five. (I'll accept bets.) Artemis likely won't even put a woman into low-Earth orbit in five years. I've said that the US is out of the manned space business for good, and that hasn't changed. The only reason to re-evaluate that stance would be a united national push for a re-invigorated space program. Interestingly, that subject was recently in the news.

In a hearing on Wednesday, Rep. José Serrano (D-NY), chairman of the House subcommittee that appropriates funds for NASA, cited the potential astronomical cost of the space agency’s lunar program. He claimed that some experts have estimated that it could cost more than $25 billion over the next five years, and that money will be hard to justify, especially since many other government programs are in need of funds.

He also did not see the reason for accelerating the deadline for the landing, which NASA had originally slated for 2028. “Another concern that I have is a lack of a serious justification for such a cost since NASA has already programmed the lunar landing mission for 2028,” Serrano said in the hearing. “Why does it suddenly need to speed up the clock by four years — time that is needed to carry out a successful program from a science and safety perspective? To a lot of members, the motivation appears to be just a political one, giving President Trump a Moon landing in a possible second term, should he be reelected.”

Vice President Mike Pence challenged NASA in March to put humans back on the Moon within the next five years “by any means necessary.” As a result, NASA revamped its human lunar exploration plans to fit the more difficult deadline, and it named the initiative Artemis. Through the program, the space agency aims to put the first woman on the lunar surface to meet the 2024 deadline.

The Democrats who organized a March for Science to protest Trump's election now support defunding science initiatives to make Trump look bad. We expect nothing less from them, but the blatant display of hypocrisy is jarring nevertheless. It's the same pattern we see consistently.

1. Abandoning all stated principles to get Drumpf now
2. Get some things right inadvertently (the space plan is unrealistic)
3. Yet still blunder into the opposite of the intended effect

The Mike Pence 5-Year challenge will fail. So why do Democrats want to give him a perfectly valid excuse for it by obstructing the scientific funding they prattle on about? The smart play would be to fund it lavishly, then blame the inevitable failures on mismanagement by the administration. They could even leverage concessions out of the president and aerospace contractors for doing so. But they aren't very smart. And there's no where near the downside that they imagine. Even if Trump pulls some miracle and gets a racially diverse set of representatives from all 212 genders onto the lunar surface by re-election day, he will just come off looking like Boomer President Supreme, reliving the glory days of the late 1960s. No one actually cares. Had you heard of Project Artemis?? I didn't think so.

The country that's too woke to erect a pedestrian bridge, navigate warships through shipping lanes, or even keep the lights on is not going to start racking up space victories. The moon seems ambitious, so why don't they start with landing a woman on the ISS by 2024? Well, there was a program in place for just that called Constellation, and it was canceled by President Obama in 2010. We failed to put woman into low-Earth orbit, so we'll try for the moon instead. You have to hand it to Trump/Pence for bravado, but there's a big problem clouding their judgment, which will come to a head if America really decides to get serious about this moon business.

The dilemma that arises is, if America was able to put men on the moon in the 1960s, on short notice, with primitive electronics, and with no precedent to follow, surely we can repeat the process today and improve upon it. Well, there's a reason why it isn't so, and it's a bitter pill for most Americans to swallow - particularly those who were alive in the 1960s. Understand that we did not actually send men to the moon fifty years ago, and the current predicament starts to clear up. If you find that impossible to accept, then at least allow yourself to entertain the notion. The mission planners at NASA are certainly acting as if the space race never happened, and it seems to be an open secret in some segments of the space industry.

Artemis planners talk of problems to be solved before manned lunar missions can occur, such as the dangers of space radiation and high-speed re-entry. Don't they know that the Apollo 13 crewed survived the Van Allen belts while hunkered down in the LEM - basically just tin foil held together by scotch tape? Also of note is the staggered rollout of the new launch system, where the final phase is of less capacity than the Saturn V. Why not just start building Saturn rockets again? The normal response will be that they want a sustainable launch platform, yet the estimated launch cost of the new system is not that much lower that the inflation-adjusted cost of the Saturn and, considering that those kinds of predicted costs are always grossly underestimated, building Saturn rockets would likely be cheaper in operations, let alone R&D.

There are other delays that cannot be blamed on the lack of a heavy-duty rocket. Artemis I is a planned mission to take an unmanned Orion spacecraft out to lunar orbit and back. Originally scheduled for 2018, it was delayed to July 2019, and then been delayed again with an "aggressive" schedule for launch in November 2020. Delayed year after year for a mission that was not even deemed necessary by Apollo planners. It's curious how many decades NASA will spend re-inventing technology half a century old before the world starts to grow suspicious. While claims of a government lunar conspiracy may seem outrageous, they lead to some pretty straight-forward predictions. Test missions will reveal surprising dangers and difficulties that should have been encountered by Apollo. More likely than that, however, is that the programs will be continually delayed until eventually they are quietly terminated. A public failure of re-entry tests would be stunning. The national priority is in maintaining the Apollo myth at all costs, including the cost of the complete stagnation of human space travel. It is the reason that the world's only superpower is now in the embarrassing position of bumming rides from its adversary, and why all our ambitious projects fail - the common assumptions about our capabilities are invalid.