In reply to Alex Longo.
Hi Alex, Thanks for responding.
Mike Griffin said to a Congressional committee, IIRC that USA should not use Starship for Artemis and should use government owned vehicles instead. All his other comments I interpret in that light.
During the January press conference on the delays to Artemis 2 and 3, it came across as NASA needed to delay Artemis 2 because of the issues with Orion, so they mentioned Starship and the Axiom space suits for Artemis 3 as a distraction from Orion. “Safety” was their top priority, so they can use more-testing-needed for future delays. They gave the impression that delays were business-as-usual.
I get the impression that Blue Origin, and some in NASA, would be happy to say Starship won’t be safe or on time for Artemis 3 so lets drop it and wait for the Blue Origin lander being developed for Artemis 5.
Yes, after a launch failure there is almost always a long delay for investigation. I hope that knee jerk reaction can be modified for reusable launch vehicles. eg. if a vehicle fails on its 20th launch, do new or fairly new vehicles need to be stood down ? Or, if a new vehicle fails on its first launch, do proven vehicles need to be stood down ? And, as we have seen with Falcon 9, reusable vehicles can be extremely reliable once in high cadence operation. And the reuse allows plenty of practice of transferring propellant to a depot. So all the hand wringing by Mike Griffins about the risk of multiple launches seems overdone.
Sad BTW that the commenting facility on this website (unlike most others) does not seem to allow minor corrections to recent comments.
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