This episode might well be titled “Smarter Every Day’s Destin Sandlin vs. NASA’s ‘Dumber Every Way’ Artemis Program”. Sandlin, speaking to a meeting of the American Astronautical Society in Huntsville, Alabama titled “Advancing Space: From LEO to Lunar and Beyond”, dissects the absurdity of NASA’s Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon. Some of the insane aspects of this project have been discussed here, particularly on the thread “Space Launch System: The Hits Just Keep On Coming”, which began in November 2021 and most recently (2023-12-01) discussed a just-issued U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on Artemis which estimated its goal of landing a crew on the lunar surface was unlikely to be achieved before 2027.
While the GAO report accepts the architecture chosen for the project as a given and examines budgetary and schedule considerations in accomplishing it, Sandlin (who while not producing YouTube videos is a real-world missile engineer and currently Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alabama, Huntsville) examines the project through the eyes of an engineer, drawing insights from the 1971 NASA technical report “What Made Apollo a Success” [PDF full text, 86 pages, available at link], a collection of eight articles originally published in Astronautics & Aeronautics written by Apollo Project senior managers.
By the standards of Apollo, Artemis looks less like a rational plan for lunar exploration and settlement than something cobbled up by Acme Corporation for a certain coyote client’s endless quest for poultry dinner. Consider: while Apollo’s command and service modules entered low lunar orbit before transferring crew to the lunar module for descent to the surface, the Artemis Orion spacecraft adopts a “near-rectilinear halo orbit” (NRHO) in the Earth-Moon system, then uses a separate Human Landing System craft to travel to the surface. Because the NRHO spends most of its time distant from the Moon, it could take days to rescue a crew in trouble on the Moon, while with Apollo the mother ship was never more than one two-hour lunar orbit away. For later missions, NASA plans to put a “gateway” in NRHO to transfer crew to the landing craft.
Why all of this complexity? Well, because the Orion spacecraft, flying more than fifty years after Apollo, lacks the delta-v to enter low lunar orbit and return. Why is this? Because NASA didn’t have the money to design an Apollo-style service module for Orion, and instead is using a pint size module cobbled together by the European Space Agency out of pieces designed for the now-obsolete Automated Transfer Vehicle once used to launch cargo to the International Space Station.
This, in turn, requires a complex lander, and the Human Landing System planned for the Artemis III mission, which is supposed to make the first landing, is based upon the SpaceX Starship, which will require refuelling in Earth orbit to reach the vicinity of the Moon. That, in turn, will require multiple launches of a Starship tanker craft (yet to be designed and demonstrated)—how many launches?—nobody knows: estimates are as high as fifteen or maybe even more. And for each tanker flight, there will have to be a transfer of cryogenic propellants (liquid oxygen and methane) from tanker to the lunar lander, something which has never been demonstrated at all during the entire history of space flight. And all of this will require routine operation of Starship, which has yet to reach orbit, not to mention recovering the first stage booster and tanker upper stage, which will be required to achieve the launch cadence needed to refill the lunar lander stage before its propellants boil off.
All of this is widely known among the space community, who are watching NASA sleep-walking toward disaster with the kind of blind arrogance that led to the Apollo 1 fire and Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia accidents, while boasting of their “Mega Moon Rocket” frankenstitched together from used Shuttle parts which has less payload to orbit capacity than the Saturn V which first flew in 1967. But it took Destin Sandlin to speak these unspoken truths before an audience of NASA and contractor personnel, and say “shame on you” if they had not even bothered to read the lessons of those who made Apollo a success and would probably be laughing out loud if asked to review NASA’s Artemis architecture.
Robert Zubrin famously observed that while once NASA spent money to fly missions, now it flies missions in order to spend money. Artemis is the creation of politicians, and boasts of having more than 1,100 contractors spread all over the U.S. gobbling up taxpayer dollars to build this ACME throwaway moon rocket.
In subsequent comments I will post reaction to Sandlin’s talk from various observers of the space scene.