In this video, you get a look at my live reaction to the successful launch of Artemis 1. While waiting through the launch delay, I talk about the Lego kits for Saturn V and Shuttle Discovery. How accurate are they? Are they a good Xmas gift for the space nut in your life?
Michael Siegel
Michael Siegel is an astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He blogs at his own site, and has written a novel.
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Props to the engineers at Boeing and elsewhere for getting this thing to fly, despite all of the handicaps they had to work under.
We’re still faced with the problem of figuring out where a once-per-year, $4B per launch, Earth to low lunar orbit and capsule return the best it can accomplish, vehicle fits into a sustainable crewed deep space program.Report
At SRB detachment you seemed particularly excited. Is that a delicate time?Report
SRBs are nasty things with multiple catastrophic failure modes. Until they have been successfully detached, and the main vehicle has pulled away, those risks are present. But damn, they’re a cheap source of delta-v.Report
SRBs are theoretically safe. But they were the things blew up challenger so I’m always glad to see the back of them.Report
Much of the fuss about these particular SRBs was that the manufacturer certified the segments for one year once stacked vertically. A year after these SRBs were stacked, and it was clear that the SLS launch wouldn’t happen for several months, NASA did its own calculation and announced the segments could stay stacked for a total of 23 months without unacceptable risk. NASA’s 23-month number would have expired early in December. A lot of people believed/still believe NASA was willing to take all sorts of risks, particularly on an uncrewed flight, to make the launch in the November window.
NASA has currently forbidden photographers to take pictures of the mobile launcher platform. Lots of speculation as to why. One of the two leading theories is that the SRBs did much more damage to the tower than predicted. If one of the costs of every launch is hundreds of millions of dollars repairing the launch tower, well… SpaceX did some reorganization and Starship is Gwynne Shotwell’s baby now. Gwynne’s the one who made SpaceX into a dominating launch services powerhouse. I wouldn’t bet against her hitting the schedule while SLS/Orion slides, and sitting in front of a Congressional committee demanding permission to fly their own lunar landing while they’re waiting for NASA.Report