Years after shuttle, NASA rediscovers the perils of liquid hydrogen
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Artemis is pretty much mandated to be a junkyard wars project of building a rocket with spare parts (hence why it cost so much). Not surprising you're running into the same old issues.
Why? The article states that Space Shuttle technology is 40 years old, isn’t it more like 50.
The hope was that the Space Shuttle could be launched and boost Skylab into a higher orbit, I wonder what that future might have been like, how long would Skylab have lasted?
Lots of financial and industrial interests, constituents' jobs, donors' money, on the line.
Because the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation has not been over-thrown.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/exped...
Doing so would require a universe with different physics.
Liquid Hydrogen doesn’t seem a good choice for first stage rockets. Similar delays to the Space Shuttle launches that must be hugely expensive to have a whole team to have to standby for a few days.
Methane as used more now can be chilled more than the boiling to store the fuel when it is more dense, and is handy for reusable engines since it doesn’t produce nearly so much soot.