Posted on 09/24/2022 3:06:14 PM PDT by Reno89519
While average Americans are excited the United States is planning to send people back to the moon through NASA’s Artemis project, the space agency’s inspector general said the cost is “unsustainable,” Fox News reported.
NASA Inspector General Paul K. Martin predicted that the first four missions will cost $4.1 billion each and told Congress that price "strikes us as unsustainable."
He projected that by 2025, NASA will have spent $93 billion on the Artemis lunar program.
The price tag is far more than the space agency’s lunar program was projected to cost a decade ago, CNBC reported.
In 2012, NASA officials estimated each mission would cost about $500 million, with the first rocket shooting off in 2017.
Now, the cost has increased eightfold, according to the NASA auditor.
Artemis I was originally scheduled to take off the last week of August but weather and hardware concerns postponed the launch.
NASA engineers had been unable to get the engines to the proper temperature range required to start them at liftoff, Fox News reported.
Launch controllers also had to deal with storms in the area that delayed propellant loading operations, as well as “a leak at the quick disconnect on the 8-inch line used to fill and drain core stage liquid hydrogen and a hydrogen leak from a valve used to vent the propellant from the core stage intertank,” Fox News reported.
Just dump all of the politicians including dufus nelson and make Elon Musk the head of NASA then sit back and watch how quick and cheap we get to the moon.
Politicians kept this mess with Boeing going to keep lining their pockets by spreading the project out over several states. Now Boeing is being fined 200 million for their lies about the 737 Max and how many billions has Boeing been given for their Starliner that couldn’t make it out of sub orbit.
So for heading to the current estimate of 93 billion what the hell do we have to show for it, a big old leaky rocket built with 4 decade old technology that might fly some day.
I'm without a clue, scratching my head. Please try to help me understand what happened in the last half century.
For the record, the below museum artifact was 1960s tech, good enough for living human moon landings, [round trip!] engineered mainly with slide rules, and using less computing power than inside a modern $20 pocket calculator.
So, then: Funding Ukraine is unsustainable? /s
What could SpaceX do with $93 billion
If we can give $83B to Ukraine, why can’t we go back to the moon?
Exactly.🤨
You can engineer almost anything, given an unlimited budget.
The benefits of the space program have been tremendous.
However, it is time to commercialize space, and reap the benefits of capitalism and competition.
It would be nice to have something like the homestead bill for the solar system.
> While average Americans are excited the United States is planning to send people back to the moon... <
I’m an average American (I guess) and I’m not excited by the project. It’s like Queen Isabella sending Columbus to explore Antartica. Bragging rights would be involved. But there’s really not much to see there.
I’d rather the money be spent to repair bridges, upgrade VA hospitals, etc.
The money isn’t being blasted into space,most of it stays right here on earth.🙄
I'm fairly certain that the "average American" couldn't care less about going back to the moon. Inflation, the mass psychosis fantasy of "climate change", the desire of a substantial fraction of the country to turn the USA into Venezuela, the rampant levels of violent crime, the uncontrolled influx of criminals from south of the border, etc. all are of higher concern to the "average American" than some government boondoggle to sent a team of LBQRSTUVWXYZ, black, brown, (everything EXCEPT white straight males) transgendered weirdos to the moon. Now if we could send Fauxcahantas on a one way ticket that might be a good thing.
What changed was largely Nixon sabotaging NASA, and the fact that NASA effectively was the nationalization of almost everything related to space. As a result they sabotaged every private effort for forty years.
NASA probably won’t make it back to the moon. Even if they do, there is no way they will ever make it to Mars. They will continue to be both lavishly funded and completely irrelevant.
“In 1973, we were all sure we’d be on Mars by 2001”
YUUP!
Wha happened...the shuttle that ate $1B every time it launched. And couldn’t get any higher then ISS orbit altitude...and then had two SERIOUS failures in 15 years of operations.
As for “What changed?”
Aw c’mon man...you know that in the back room, Wise Wakanda Engineers were slavin’ away over paper calculations integrating the trajectory equations by hand, Hollywood told us so!
PS
A few minutes ago Boeing managed to get the last DIVH off the pad at SLC6, and if ya check out the personnel in the firing room, it’s umm...rather like the early 70’s, cept they got a few female types...not the Wakanda brand tho. Guess they’ll be hearin’ about that...
https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/09/24/delta-4-heavy-nrol-91-mission-status-center/
LOL. So true. Touché.
“And that room today would be filled with every variation of woke possible and zero-percent of the brainpower delivered years ago.”
You pretty much nailed it.
There was a time in Aerospace when only the very best survived. I grew up in and excelled in that environment.
Be they Asian Indian, Vietnamese, white, female, or whatever you were only there because you were the best. Not because of some government policy or mandated quota. If you didn’t perform you got laid off at the first opportunity.
Go teach school somewhere. Those that can do, do, those that can’t, teach.
Are you saying the Artemis budget is too low?
I agree that private Musk Falcons are going up with the reliability of Henry Ford’s Model T’s, and I surely get that. Private is better, sure. I watch night launches blasting into they sky every other week, when they are on a NE trajectory. (I can’t see all the others going SE.)
But why can’t NASA build another Saturn V+ that works, 50 years on, given all the massive advances in computing power, metallurgy, composite tech etc etc since 1970?
Sometimes I feel we are going in the “devolution” direction of savages in Central America, who come upon old jungle-covered Mayan pyramids, and don’t have clue who built them or how.
Dumb and dumber. Idiocracy.
It’s not a good feeling, America getting stupider and less capable.
It all stays right here on earth, BUT it doesn't stay in the pockets of the people who actually earned it. It goes to fund some large number of engineers who would be better used designing things that are actually useful, and of course the lion's share goes to government apparatchicks who do nothing at al of any use.
The space race culminated just at the time the Media was taking over the country, and working hard to make the USA the United Socialist States of America.
They could not do this with the USA ascendant in space.
The leftist State Department was heavily involved in keeping us from using space as a military platform to keep ahead of the Russians.
The Globalists were very firm in insisting the USA be gradually reduced in power to make a world government possible.
The red on the inside, green on the outside enviromentalists worked hard to reduce/disable/demonize technological advancement.
The Chinese, a little late to the game, have been working overtime to "capture the elite" to make sure the ruling class in the USA see what needs to be done to advance Chinese power. They are well paid for their efforts in support of China.
The policy decisions in support of the above agendas have been accumulating for decades.
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