Artemis II Launch Day Updates

Not anymore. Artemis III is now a LEO systems check [1]. Comparable to Apollo 9.

(Side note: when did we switch from Arabic to Roman numerals?)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_III

Of course it is. I say this as someone who sturdied astronautics.

You’re broadly correct, though. My point is the action shifts to Hawthorne and West Texas for the next year or so. Then pivots back to NASA for Artemis IV.

What's wrong with this? Lots of launches is fine until we build the scale required to make a proper depot worthwhile. (Which, by the way, is part of Artemis's plans. Though currently it looks like a bunch of glued-together Starship tankers.)

Starship's true purpose is to compete with airlines in trans oceanic flights.

Musk has said so many times but then he intentionally obfuscates it with all the Mars and Moon talk.

But remember that you heard this before it was widely realized to be true; Starship isn't about going to Mars. Starship is about going to China.

I've been hearing this about every SpaceX project for the last twenty years.

I live in Dallas now and will be turning 50 soon, i want to catch the next Starship launch live but would have to time it perfectly to get time off of work ahead of time.

For the more adventurous and/or bilingual the beaches on the Mexican side seem to have awesome views too.

But can't you escape gravity slower, just by going higher and higher at lower speed? Like a plane? (ie not vertically, but at an angle)

Since those constraints are impossible to meet in the real world, we have to get going fast enough to coast most of the trip on inertia after the fuel runs out.

On top of that there weren’t really solar panels in the 1960s so the Service Module had to carry tons of chemicals to produce electricity, as well as extra fuel for all of that weight. As a result it was massively overbuilt compared to anything we’d try today and even so had to take an expedited flight path to the moon of 3 days in order to conserve operational lifetime. Artemis does not have nearly as severe constraints on either the Orion or the future Starship and so can afford to take a more fuel efficient 5 day coast up to the Moon and make the design tradeoffs on Orion that that entails.

To understand gravity drag think about the rocket firing just hard enough to hover 1 meter above the pad, you burn out all your fuel in 10 or 15 minutes and go nowhere...

In the other direction if you want to accelerate harder you need to make your structure stronger so you need to burn more fuel per second and have to displace some fuel in exchange for more structure and you keep doing that until you're so heavy you can't produce any more acceleration and you're all engine and structure and no fuel.

If you could drive your car straight up vertically, you'd have to cruise just for an hour or so at 100 km/h (<65 mph) until you reached space. It's not that far.

But a car's acceleration slows almost instantly. The rocket just keeps accelerating faster as the tank empties and it gets lighter. By main engine cut off it might be pulling 5G.

Even with a goal of eventually putting humans on the moon, it'd be better to do an automated run, measure everything in the cockpit, and put in sandbags and/or something to consume O2 to make sure the CO2 scrubbers are working correctly. It's maybe cruel, but a few dogs would work fine for that sort of thing. A flame would be better, but it's pretty dangerous.

The first mission in decades doesn't need to have humans in it.

Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.

But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ, and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity is much harder. Humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.

So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.

If you can fly people around the moon, then landing people on the moon is a more reasonable next step.

I agree that it may not be entirely logical, but keeping public and funding opinion positive & invested _is_ important.

edit: I thought RocketLab flew their elecron rocket around the moon a few years ago? So it's definitely doable... so again I think it's about the optics.

This is the same way that all manned spaceflight programs are conducted. You iterate and learn a little bit at a time. "Move fast and break things" doesn't work here. :)

Is that with or without spinning the chamber between rounds? The odds are worse if you spin each time. They get worse as the game goes on if you don't spin.

In the UK as a kid, when Challenger happened, our children's news programme reported it before the mainstream TV.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/sci_tech/newsid_2701000/27...

Fixes have been made to the design, but they haven't been tested in flight.

They've changed the AVCOAT to be less permeable and altered the re-entry profile.

One of the findings of Artemis I is that lack of permeability led to trapped gas pockets which expanded and blew out pieces of heat shield. The reason for the change to be less permeable is to make it easier to perform ultrasonic testing, not to improve performance.

They altered the re-entry profile on the theory that the skip period contributed to spalling, but Charles Camarda disagrees in this doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...

> Another chart which the Artemis Tiger Team did not intend to show on Jan. 8th, was the figure showing the spallation events as a function of time during the skip entry heating profiles (Figure 6.0-4 of NESC Report TI-23-0189 Vol. 1). In this figure, it was quite clear that the Program narrative they were feeding to the press, that it was the dwell time during the skip which allowed the gases generated to build up and cause the delta pressures which caused most of the spallation was, again, patently false. In fact, during the first heat pulse (t ≈ 0 to 240 sec), approximately 40-45% of all the medium to large chunks of ablator spalled off the Artemis I heatshield.

> Hence, varying the trajectory would do little to prevent spallation during Artemis II. I was never shown the new, modified trajectory at the Jan. 8th meeting.

It says that it is not safe to fly. They are sending humans without having tested in real conditions that their design was sound, GIVEN that the first time they did that (without humans), it turned out that their design was unsafe.

People who want the actual details and numbers will read.

To be fair to her, she seemed to explicitly refer to what sits on top of the core stage, it just wasn't in the diagram she was gesturing to the top of at the time.

To be fair to you, I think the cryogenic comment was worse and she actually said "thousands of degrees below Fahrenheit".

The problem is they're trying to run hours of programming leading up to this launch for some reason, but aren't willing to force the experts to come in to do the commentary. They should have given her a script.

On your parenthetical point, I also agree: some really weird camera selections, and frustrating dropouts, during the crucial moments of the launch.

Nevertheless, a real triumph, and I particularly enjoyed the "full send" remark from (I think) the commander. I also really enjoy the fact that the livestream is relatively light on commentary and that most of what you hear is from mission control and the crew.

I also loved the shot of stage separation, but they cut away from that way too soon also!

As someone who has watched launches before, it is so much better when the broadcasters keep it mostly together, and know when to be silent for periods of time. He does not know how to do that.

okay what is more useful is a matter of opinion. you can disagree, but I stand by it

Or, put differently, space exploration is one of the few things "feeding the right wolf" for humanity at large.

So actually, millions of lives have massively benefited from science and technology. To be cynical in the face of all that is a personal take, not a reflection of the facts.

It would be cheaper to solve resource shortages in almost any other way. I don't really buy that explanation, at least for most wars. I think most wars today have roots that are far less rational.

Note that this applies IMO to all participants on all sides insofar as they had any role in starting or sustaining the war.

This has zero impact on American hegemony. That mission is being prosecuted in Iran and with respect to NATO.

Shudder away! We've already had both Carney and the finance minister of Singapore essentially declare Pax Americana to have ended. Everybody else is just being polite.

[EDIT: prime minister of Singapore, not finance minister]

But may be things have improved since...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Horizon

Next stop - defending the base with claymore sticks! :-)

https://www.sandboxx.us/news/featured/project-horizon-nukes-...

For that matter I suppose the terminator timeline also counts. Can't have war and inequality if you don't have humans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4

I believe that folks in the US are, by a large margin, the most highly propagandized group of people in history. It's hard to watch stuff like this.

It's not that I don't understand that comparatively space exploration is small compared to the associated costs of the boots that might hit the ground today.

Edit: remember the Kennedy speech — We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.

to me it's inspiring and gives people something to cheer for. It also keeps a lot of people employed, productive, and at least has the possibility for new innovation. When looking at the mountains and mountains of wasted taxpayer dollars I dislike these the least.

Like sports, the objective is ultimately useless except as a showcase of what humanity has to offer, and people like to see that.

Now, the military...

Let’s talk about this in terms of practicalities. The NASA budget for 2026, per Wikipedia, is $24.4B. I often find it hard to really reason about the size of federal budgets, and the impact on tax payers, but I have a thought experiment that I think helps put it into perspective. Suppose we decided to pay for the NASA budget with a new tax, just for funding NASA. And we did that in the simplest (and most unfair) possible way: a flat rate. Every working adult in the US has to pay some fixed monthly rate (so excluding children and retirees). Again, per Wikipedia, that’s around 170M people. Take the NASA budget, divide by 170M, and you get … $11.96/month.

Obviously, there’s lots of flaws in this. That’s not we pay for NASA, we have income tax as a percentage with different tax brackets. But it is a helpful way to frame how much a country is spending, normalized by population. And I think it puts a lot of things in perspective. $11.96/month is comparable to a streaming service. And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.

Hell, look at US consumer spending: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm (note that that spending is in dollars per “consumer unit,” which is I think is equivalent to an adult US worker, but there might be some caveats). Based on that, the average US consumer spends around $26.17/month on “tobacco products and smoking supplies”. I just feel it’s a little silly to worry about the NASA budget when the US consumer spends twice that on what is objectively a luxury good. At least NASA won’t give you cancer.

Well, people are often obsessed with rationality, and seek reasons to do something, but there is one reason that works almost for anything: just because. If we want to go forward, we'd better try a lot of things, including those that do not look very promising. We don't know the future, the only way to uncover it is to try. Did you hear about gradient descent? It is an algo for finding local maxima and to do its work it needs to calculate partial derivatives to choose where to go next. In reality doing things and measuring things are sometimes indistinguishable. So society would better try to move in all directions at once.

A lot of people believe that to fly to the Moon is a good idea. Maybe they believe it due to emotional reasons, but it is good enough for me, because it allows to concentrate enough resources to do it.

> the resources are better used for other purposes

It is much better use for $$$ than the war with Iran. I believe that the war have eaten more then Artemis already, and... Voltaire said "perfect is an enemy of good". The Moon maybe not the perfect way to use resources, but it is good at least.

It unites Americans towards a cause.

The engineering advancements have commercial applications.

And at the most basic level, it's a jobs program. Look at how many Americans are working because of this.

Most of the other big news events are ones where people get severely hurt, and political ones where one partly loses.

With this, we can look up at the moon, and say "Humanity did that."

But sending a human? That feels more real. If we have the power to go alive to the moon, we also have the power to go even further. And we lost it, now we are reclaiming it.

And it doesn't matter to me what I think of the US government - this is progress for all of humanity. Also the comment section on the youtube stream is interesting - lot's of different flags are posted, sending good wishes from all around the world, low effort comments otherwise of course, but largely positive. (Very rare I think)

So, more rockets into space please and less on earth.

More importantly, challenges like space exploration help drive knowledge and our economy; and are critical for national prestigue.

(And, most people don't focus on this, space exploration is a way for the US to demonstrate its military technology in a non-antagonistic way. There's a lot of overlap in space exploration technology and miliary technology.)

Sure, if we lived in a purely utilitarian world, there's some merit to the argument that space exploration is a waste of resources that could be more efficiently used elsewhere. We don't live in a utilitarian world though, and instead we have the same (and in reality much, much larger) amounts of money and resources that get spent on this moon mission being spent instead on bombing the Middle East with nothing to show for it other than an impending global economic crisis.

Could the money spent on Artemis be spent somewhere better? Probably, but how about we start with not burning through 38 billion (and rising!) on a farcical boondoggle of a military operation whose only effects so far are increases in the cost of literally everything? The first WEEK of the war cost 11 billion[1], but when it comes to NASA we're suddenly penny-pinching?

And that's talking pure monetary expenditure, without even going into the human lives lost, the lessening of sanctions on Russia (which will in turn cause even more suffering in Ukraine), or the halting of trade through the Suez, etc. etc. etc.

From where I'm standing, even if Artemis turns out to be a complete and utter disaster with not a single benefit of any kind coming out of it, the worst possible case scenario is a few astronauts die and we wasted a few billion (and I guess NASA gets shut down). That's of course us working under the assumption that there won't be a single novel scientific discovery of any kind, or that we will learn absolutely nothing from these missions.

The current unjustified war the US is waging on the other hand has already killed thousands of people, and will continue harming every single person on this earth through the economic fallout alone. The US is quite literally setting money on fire with every single bomb they drop over Iran. And the true worst case scenario that I can easily imagine happening is nukes getting dropped and all the consequences that follow from that.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/world/middleeast/iran-war...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Redefinition_a...

Of course this is a drop in the bucket, the entire science research apparatus of the United States is being burned to the ground[2]. This administration is doing to the future of scientific research what the Mongols did to Baghdad.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/climate/nasa-goddard-libr...

[2] https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-026-00088-9/index.ht...

I mean, newly shaped and partly reformulated.

Avcoat was “originally created…for the Apollo program” [1]. (“A reformulated version was used for the initial Orion heat shield and later for a redesigned Orion heat shield.”) The new things are Orion’s size and weight and the size of the tiles. All of which has precedented flight in Artemis I.

At the end of the day, I’m going to trust the astronauts. This issue was openly discussed, despite NASA’s original—and fair to criticize—instinct to cover it up. While any manned reëntry is a nail biter, I don’t think this one is especially so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCOAT

Which are, I will note, being expended on this single launch, despite being designed, built, and functioning over decades as re-usable engines.

This isn't good.

But hurray Moon missions, I guess. Pity we're causing the entire World Economy to collapse with a unneeded war.

Aren’t they still well above anything in the history of human space flight?

We keep treating these systems in popular discourse as airliners. They’re not. They’re experimental craft. With mass production maybe SpaceX can bring launch closer to general aviation. But the notion that any loss of life is intolerable is (a) unsustainably expensive and (b) not a view shared by the lives actually at risk.

If Elon ran this project "without bloat", there is probably a 70% chance that the vehicle would have exploded, much in the way of his Starship and early Falcon vehicles.

I'll repeat that there are a lot of problems, but it's not nearly as bad as some people on the internet make it out to be.