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Comment by just_steve_h | Hacker News Reader

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just_steve_h·

I find this essay to be well-crafted and compelling.

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I'm strongly disagreeing with some qualifications there, to the point it's hard to find where to start.

E.g. what this passage mean -

"...this single-use lander carries less payload (both up and down) than the tiny Lunar Module on Apollo 17."

? Can't Starship HLS lift more than 50 kg of rocks from the Moon?.. I'm intentionally simplifying the question.

Starship HLS can lift much more than 50kg, but since Congress/NASA requires Orion to be the return vehicle, the amount they can return is limited by that, which only has a 100kg payload return capacity (and presumably a chunk of that is going to be taken up by food, spacesuits etc).

Same with why each stay is going to have to be just ~1 week. Starship can obviously carry more than enough stuff for 2 people to live off for months. But Orion is only able to stay undocked for 21 days.

But that's not the lander's problem.

I do agree NASA's Artemis program is strange. However it's enmeshed with Starship, and that's sufficiently different story.

This. I scanned through the article saw that part and decided that a lot of the article was playing hard ball.

The other comments in this thread suggest what the author was getting at but it's not in the plain reading of the article.

I actually was put off by the know-it-all nature of the whole thing as if nasa scientists had totally not considered any of this.

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