NASA Publishes Artemis Plan to Land First Woman, Next Man on Moon in 2024 | Hacker News Reader

NASA Publishes Artemis Plan to Land First Woman, Next Man on Moon in 2024

nasa.gov

18 pointsaluket11 comments

Is 2024 enough time to achieve this? I'd love to see this happen.

This is so fucking stupid. We've already put humans on the Moon, 50 years ago. Does it really matter if it was a man or a woman? Why waste time going to the Moon again, instead of, say, working on getting to Mars?

Do we have the industrial base and skilled workforce to actually get to Mars?

Doing something we've done before is one way to ramp that capacity before taking the next step.

Yes we still do have the capacity to go to the Moon. It's not like we've stopped developing space-related technology. There are dozens of rocket launches each year, we have people manning the ISS all the time.

The way I see it NASA is not really looking for a challenge here. Quite the opposite: they had budget cuts the last few years, so they are are looking for easy money, trying to cash out on the whole political correctness craze, #metoo, etc. Congressmen have to approve the funding for this mission, otherwise they can be publicly shamed for promoting patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.

Congress is the one that has dictated the rules that NASA is operating under for Artemis, so blame them for what is essentially a corporate bonanza for Boeing and others.

And no we do not currently have a rocket capable of putting a large payload on the moon, it requires significantly more DeltaV to put something on the moon(238,900 miles) than ISS(250 miles up). Falcon Heavy maybe could do it, but hey that would cut into Boeing profits.

No, we don't have capacity to go to the Moon.

How'd you define the capacity? There is no production of heavy launchers of Saturn-V class, and existing (somewhat, just a couple of launches) Falcon Heavy is not enough, at least not without, say, multiple launches. There is no production of a spacecraft capable of landing to the Moon with humans and safely getting them back, at least to the orbit around the Moon. It's questionable if Crew Dragon can fly to Moon orbit and back to Earth. On the other hand, all of that could be developed - but so everything could be developed starting, say, 1940 - yet we won't say we had the capacity to go to the Moon in 1940.

We can develop everything needed, to the quality surpassing 1960-s, way faster than in 1960, given enough funding. But - there are caveats: "can" doesn't mean "already did", "way faster" doesn't mean "arbitrarily fast, e.g. by December, 2020", and "given enough funding" is being looked at differently than when JFK made his announcement.

So... it's at least quite doubtful that a reasonable definition of "capacity" allows saying "we still do have the capacity to go to the Moon".

Currently, the push to become a multi-planetary species is just as much about marketing and it is about the technology. We need people excited for space so they go into fields where they can advance our ability to do stuff in space.

Finally putting a woman on the moon will give a face to young girls to look up to. That will bring a whole new set of smart people into the field. It’s not like we’re giving up on Mars because of it.

Venturing beyond the Van Allen belts risks radiation damage to egg cells [0]. Not sure this is worth being excited about.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31885235/

Maybe the first woman on the moon already has children or doesn't want children in the first place. Or maybe the risk is worth it to her to have the opportunity to make history? Or she just stores eggs and goes the route of in-vitro.

All of the above is possible. However, we should not lie (by omission) to gullible young people that space travel is safe. It is not and in the time frame of ARTEMIS, won't be.

Well now that we’re sending women out there, there’s a good reason to solve it.

I’m sure there are a million other risks for going to the moon, seems a little reductive to say women shouldn’t go because it affects their eggs. They are more likely to die on their trip than if they didn’t go, yet we still send men.

Just like every other issue, we’ll solve them. But we don’t just give up.

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