- Nov 26, 2019
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Who says it's not possible to do today? The problem is building ships that protect life are very expensive. The way they did things in the 60s would have to be all upgraded but what is the motivation and reason to send men to the moon now?
Indeed the way things was done in the 60s has been upgraded; we have the spacecraft now, SLS, which is derived from the Project Orion / Constellation program initiated in the Bush administration, which Obama cancelled, and then resurrected but with a more boring name “Space Launch System” because politics I guess?, and that hardware has completed and unmanned circum-lunar flight, and the first manned Artemis mission is in final preprations; it should happen this next year (2024).
And there is also Starship from SpaceX, which is still in the prototype stage; it has yet to reach orbit but they are making progress in that at least in their second launch they didn’t blow up the launch pad, and also they successfully staged (there was a successful separation between the first stage and the Starship vehicle itself). Given that SpaceX has a proven record of delivering very reliable and extremely reusable spacecraft, including the Crew Dragon spacecraft which first flew to the ISS in 2020, and the Dragon unmanned cargo ferry which flew a few years earlier, and the Falcon and Falcon Heavy rockets, which are reusable, and which land on automated recovery platforms in the ocean, a huge advance in reusability, truly impressive, i think Starship will probably make it into production, unless Elon Musk were to become absorbed in a criminal scandal of epic proportions enough to where the government would allow its most dependable provider of space launch services to fail, which seems unlikely (even if they went after Musk personally, he is arguably not essential to SpaceX and is probably holding them back at this point, for example, if I recall, it was his idea to not build a more heavily reinforced launch pad for the Starship mission last spring, which resulted in devastation, as he underestimated the effect that turning on lighting so many powerful rocket engines would cause in terms of acoustic effects, heat damage and so on; the first launch pad was obliterated.
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