Cool! As an old time NASA space junkie (and a vendor for some of their software operations), I’m stoked to hear the good news.
Let’s hope the woke folk don’t turn this into a “check off the minority box” deal!
Sure it is....
They’ve already loaded the mannequin astronaut for tests during the flight.
NASA’s ‘Moonikin’ mannequin boards Orion spacecraft for Artemis 1 moon mission
https://www.space.com/nasa-moonikin-artemis-1-mannequin-on-orion-capsule
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Only a government that prints money can afford this old-school approach which wastefully expends boosters and upper stages.
No government could have marched European civilization across the US continent in the time frame it was done. Only in the name of commerce (mostly) could it happen. No government designed or built the prairie schooners thankfully; imagine the overweight monstrosity a government agency would have come up with even in mid-19th century. It was done by entrepreneurs who had to be competitively sensible.
No government agency will produce self-sustaining off-world human civilizations. It will be done by entrepreneurs who don’t throw away their equipment after one use.
Only one month before the first official delay!
Wake up people...
It’s all about the money...
Stop wasting money on moon explorations that lead to nothing, zero, zilch...
A colossal waste of taxpayers’ hard earned money (like almost everything the government does). There isn’t anything on the moon worth the cost of getting there and back. Scientific samples were taken decades ago by the Apollo program. And nothing about the moon has changed since then. So what’s the point of going? Are they going to have a crew black lesbian transgenders and lesbians to counter the white heterosexual males who went on Apollo?
The main visual similarity with Apollo is the shape of the unit the astronats occupy and return to earth in. That was apparently determined by the “rocketless” re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere and with that the need to have a “shield” surface facing down, to protect the astronauts from the heat generated by their more-or-less falling container.
I would have thoght by now we would have advanced to fully powered re-entry to earth’s atmosphere, where a powered vehicle would not descend rapidly but instead would make successively lower orbits until it could finally land.
Maybe when we jetison the heavy fuels we know use for very small nuclear power modules our home-bound astronauts will quit “dropping” back to earth like a stone.
Epic. Mega. Ultra. MAGA.
But no mention how this accomplishes NASA’s number one mission of making Muslims feel good about themselves.
Years late and billions over budget.
I give it a 1 in 35 chance of reaching orbit. Even less for a TLB insertion.