One month after the launch, this article has aged extremely poorly, just some examples:
“NASA in particular is left with some hard choices arising from choosing Starship as its sole lunar lander for the Artemis III mission.”: Now NASA has selected a 2nd lander from Blue Origin, yet this 2nd lander shares many of the attributes of Starship HLS: It also requires a new still not flown launch vehicle (New Glenn, which is even more delayed than Starship), it also require orbital refilling of cryogenic propellant (liquid hydrogen in this case, harder than liquid methane used by Starship), it also requires multiple launches. So there’s zero chance this new lander would have been faster to develop than Starship.
“Some of that work may, likely will, require additional federal government participation.”: Wrong, SpaceX is busy repairing the launch pad, no additional federal government participation is needed, they’re just doing it.
“The failure of the booster’s guidance & control to detect that the booster was off its normal ascent trajectory, that it was looping during its ascent, and to terminate the flight for a full 1 m 19 s that the booster performed over 3 loop de loops is another issue that will have to be addressed.”: Also wrong, as Elon explained in his twitter spaces interview, FTS activated normally, there is no GNC failure to detect that the booster is off course, it’s just FTS explosive is not powerful enough to break apart the booster immediately.
“More critically for the aspirations of future crewed flight is the failure of the Starship, the launch abort system for the Starship stack, to abort when the booster experienced issues during ascent or when the booster went off its nominal trajectory. Whether this was due to the booster’s own systems not detecting an issue or with Starship remains to be determined.”: Again explained by Elon that this was never programmed into the software for this test, because they want Starship to reenter at a precise location near Hawaii, they don’t want to separate Starship unless they’re sure it can hit the target.
“For the first time in American spaceflight history, the goals of the space program, in the case of Artemis III to land astronauts once again on the Moon’s surface, are hitched to the progress of a single space company over which NASA has little or no control.”: This is just as wrong one month ago as it is now, but this rhetoric is so wrong I have to comment on it: No, it’s not the first time NASA depends on a single company, Orion depends on Lockheed Martin – a single company, SLS core stage depends on Boeing – a simple company, SLS booster depends on Northrop Grumman – also a single company.
“It is worth reminding that the Starship lunar lander has no descent abort capability. “: First of all, it’s wrong, Starship HLS does have descent abort capability. Second, NASA just selected Blue Moon as 2nd HLS lander, and it’s also a single stage lander just like Starship, and if you think Starship doesn’t have “descent abort capability”, Blue Moon doesn’t have it either, so clearly NASA doesn’t think this is an issue.
from Comments for AmericaSpace https://ift.tt/H3NoYzE
via World Space Info
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