NASA unveils new moon suit
forth.news
forth.news
Here's the official NASA channel video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5KnOtI4fS3U
Also NYTimes and CBS News articles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/science/nasa-moon-suit-as...
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/nasa-axiom-space-spacesuit-...
Yes, this is my site -- though I am not the author. We are a news feed for news, trying to recreate the social media experience (brevity, following who you want, etc) with a feed populated exclusively by journalists.
You can click on any author's name to see their bio, affiliations, and other threads.
With a name like forth.news I expected the programming language but instead I found a namespace collision.
So there has been very tangible progress in the form of Artemis 1, plus the schedule is to get people back on the moon in two years. Obviously it could be delayed, but we're pretty clearly out of the realm of a theoretical moon landing and into planning/implementation for a specifically planned and approved NASA mission. I would definitely put money on humans on the moon in well under 5 years.
Wikipedia article about Artemis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program
At this point it's widely accepted the SLS design is already obsolete with no reuse, is wildly expensive, and is extremely delayed.
But it creates a lot of jobs in areas where congressmen want to get reelected, so they keep it going.
Sooner or later it will die and Starship will take over, but it's going milk many more billions before then.
Then again, most of it that wasn't run-down and/or broken just felt like a big, ugly, defense contractor trade show (complete with the kind of hilariously-terrible graphical collages & infographics that end up in military powerpoint slides), so that's in keeping with the rest of the vibe. Gross, definitely do not recommend. If you can convince them to let you into just the Saturn V hangar at half-off the normal ticket price, that'd be worth it.
It costs $2.2 BILLION per launch, and it only launches ~once per year.
That doesn't sound like "some good use" to me.
There is no way they'll have a lander ready by then. They spent 10 years and $1B just to develop a suit before giving up. The lander RFP only went out in 2019. Their primary selection is a massive tower that's going to land on an uneven rocky surface and use the same engines to take off. There's way too much risk involved for them to ever meet that date. Apollo 12 landed on the edge of a crater with enough tilt that they were close to aborting the mission. If that happens with a starship they're all dead.
Maybe just full MR and forget about the visor? That way we can see the aliens sneaking up on them as they blindly bumble around deceived by their advanced technology.
Yes, I'm joking. But really there are reasons to do MR/VR in space due to the huge dynamic range and availability of non-visible spectra. The huge clear face shield looks like a point of failure (as are joints etc). At the same time, I expect once there is MR for some cheesy horror movie to use it to arouse innate human fears of the unseen. One could always flip a covering visor up to see, if there were a failure... and once part of your space suit is failing, you've already got problems!
SLS has already launched its test flight. Starship HLS (the lander) is funded and in development.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/spacesuit-for-nasa-s-artemis-ii...
Maybe a white suit gets dirty easily from the regolith anyway so they went with dark to start with ?
We're still using the same approach as in the 1960's. No reusable rocket, no in-situ resource utilization, no new breakthrough tech.
What's the point of returning? To prove we haven't regressed since the 60's?
Essentially the same point that we had in 60s, to be stepping stone for greater things.
Artemis is basically rebooting the manned space program, and that inevitably includes retracing some past steps to regain the position. Progress is not always a linear straightforward thing, occasionally there are setbacks and losses.
So the exitement for Artemis is not just for the mission itself, but more for it being a sign of manned space programs getting attention again, hopefully this time on a more sustainable basis than Apollo.