Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday
Astronaut, as you probably know, NASA is working really hard on getting
humans back to the surface of the moon. And if all goes well, we could
see this happen as early as 2024. And although I don't personally think
that timeline is too likely to hold. We haven't seen such an ambitious timeline
for getting humans to the moon since the Apollo program, back in the 1960s, not to mention the hardware exists checks
have been written and the astronauts are training to spend time on the moon.
It's an exciting time to be alive, but unlike the Apollo program, which wound up putting 12 humans on the
surface of the moon at an astronomical cost, Artemis promises to be a sustainable
program with an eventual lunar outpost and a permanent human presence
at the Shackleton Crater on the South pole of the moon. Yeah, that's right
now we're talking. I mean, come on. This is the 21st century. You'd sure. Hope we can get back to the moon cheaper
using better technology and do it in a safer way than we did in the 1960s. Right? Right? So today we're going
to answer the question. Why does NASA think Artemis will be a
sustainable program when the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft is
so dang expensive and it's going to take at least two launches
to get humans and their lunar Landers to the moon. This can't be
more sustainable than Apollo, right? Well, we didn't even begin to
scratch the surface of the
costs in my last video about SLS versus Starship. So today we're going to really
dive into the total costs, including development,
infrastructure, and hardware, by giving SLS and Orion a full cost audit, but we'll even show you how the Apollo
and Artemis mission profiles differ, including the specific orbits and the
rendezvous and everything required to get humans to the surface of the moon. And we'll even talk about the upgraded
safety considerations and hardware involved. Once we look
at all of these details, we can answer the question over 50
years later, is the Artemis program, actually an improvement
over the Apollo program, or is NASA going completely in the wrong
direction when returning humans to the moon, let's get started. Welcome to part two of talking
about SLS and comparing it to, I guess, really everything
at this point. Part one, we really just focused on SLS versus
Starship and explaining kind of why the two programs exist at the same time. Now you don't have to watch that
video to make sense of this one, but there is a lot of stuff that will
help you understand the context and put things kind of in their place
before you watch this one. So if you haven't seen that yet,
definitely give that a watch, but we were just getting started in
that video because here's the deal, honestly, it's really,
really, really hard, almost impossible to responsibly
compare a government program with cost-plus contracting to a private
companies, incredibly ambitious, and yet to be fully developed
vehicle. So instead in part two, we're going to focus more on
comparing SLS and Orion to Apollo. Since of course the two programs have
the same goal of getting humans on the moon, but we're really going to dive into
the weeds here and now because of that, this is a long video. So you'd better
grab yourself a drink, get a notepad, find a comfy chair and get ready
for some learning. But as always, here's the timestamps for these sections.
There's links in the description. And the timeline here on YouTube is
broken up by the sections as well. And of course, there's an
article version of this video, which includes sources and methodology
for easy searching and references. []. I think a lot of people assume
Artemis is just Apollo 2.0, and we're basically just going to
repeat what NASA did in the sixties and hopefully cheaper. Well, that's
not really true at all this time. NASA is doing things quite a bit
differently and that cheaper part, certainly up for debate. If we just
look at the mission profiles here, we can get a sense for just how different
these two vehicles and programs really are, but let's start off by putting up just
the different vehicles like we did in our last video. So again, sorry, some of this is going to be just a little
bit of a repeat from the last video. There's three main vehicles
for Apollo and Artemis. These are the launch vehicle, the
lunar Lander and the command module. Of course, the launch vehicle is the rocket or
rockets that gets everything into orbit and off to the moon. It's definitely one of the most
exciting parts of each mission. And certainly it's the only thing you
can really witness with your own eyes in person. The lunar Lander
is pretty self explanatory. It's the Lander that lands on the
lunar surface hence, lunar Lander. For each and every kilogram of mass
you send to the surface of the moon, it takes almost 200 kilograms
of rocket to get it there. So you want the lunar Lander to
be as lightweight as possible. And because lunar Landers don't ever
need to fly through Earth's atmosphere, they can be super stripped down and
even have landing legs that are so weak, they wouldn't even hold the craft up
on earth because they're designed to only be used on the moon
with its lower gravity. The command module is where the astronauts
hang out during the majority of the mission, but it's especially
important during ascent and re-entry, because sitting on top of
what's essentially a giant
bomb with a nozzle is quite dangerous, having a command module that can
abort safely is generally considered a very good idea. Now, of course, I've already done way too
many videos on abort systems, including the one about the
Gemini capsule's ejection seats, another one about why space X and
Boeing are now using liquid fueled systems and even why Starship
doesn't seem to have an abort system and whether or not it should. So if you want to know
anything about abort systems, I've definitely got you covered.
And unlike the lunar Lander, the command module needs to
handle atmospheric flight, specifically the brutal reentry heat
and landing portions of the mission. For these two programs, the command
module's utilize an ablative heat shield, which intentionally flakes off material
taking heat away with it. Okay, so let's pull up both systems that
will be taking humans to the moon, starting with the command modules,
although they might look similar, the Apollo capsule and the Orion
capsule are quite different. The Orion capsule is five meters wide
versus the Apollo capsule's 3.9 meters wide and sports an impressive nine
cubic meters of habitable volume compared to 6.2 meters. So
it's around 50% more volume, and it's quite a bit more roomy obviously
and capable of up to six astronauts, although it'll probably only fly four
for the Artemis missions versus the Apollo's three, the Apollo capsule could technically
fit five astronauts for rescue missions, but just barely. But what might be
surprising is each vehicle's mass. The Orion capsule and its
service module are 26,520 kilograms fully fueled, which is surprisingly lighter than
the Apollo capsule and its service module, which are 28,800 kilograms. But just looking at these two, you can tell they're basically
backwards from each other. The Apollo command module was pretty
small and had a large service module. And Orion is pretty much
the opposite of that, a pretty large command module and
a relatively small service module. This means the Orion capsule and its
service module have much less Delta-v or the ability to change its velocity than
the Apollo capsule and service module. In fact, the Orion capsule and the service module
doesn't even have enough Delta-v to get into an out of low lunar
orbit with only around 1,200 meters per second of Delta V
versus the Apollo capsule and its service module, which had over twice as much at
around 2,800 meters per second of Delta V for those unfamiliar Delta V
is how much a spacecraft can change its velocity in space. It's a combination
of the mass of the vehicle, the mass of the payload and the mass of
the propellant mixed with the amount of fuel available to burn and
the efficiency of the engines. So you can kind of think of it
in the same way as the range of a car which factors in the
efficiency of the engine, the size of the fuel tank and how
much the car to push around. Now, if you're a little bit confused on why
we're talking about Delta-v and you still don't really get it, don't worry.
It will get less confusing, cause we're going to show
you why this matters, because this little fact right here makes
a huge difference in how each system gets astronauts to the moon and why
orbits of these two programs are extremely different. Okay. So speaking
of extremely different, let's look at the lunar Landers next. Now this is going to be fun to talk about
because we actually get to talk about four different lunar Landers. Since there's currently three lunar
Landers selected for development for the Artemis program. For the Apollo program, of course we have that iconic Apollo
lunar module sometimes called the LEM or lunar excursion module. This spidery looking vehicle produced
by Grumman stood seven meters, tall 9.4 meters wide with his
legs extended and weighed up to 16,400 kilograms, fully fueled. It could carry two astronauts to the
surface of the moon for up to 75 hours. For the Artemis program, we
have the human landing system, which is a set of commercial contracts, more akin to the commercial crew
program than it is SLS and Orion. So basically NASA left out any strict
guidelines and accepted bids that thought they could get a system to the moon
within that ambitious 2024 timeline. At the moment, we don't have a ton
of details on all these systems yet. So for now, we're just going to put up a rough size
estimation of all these systems they're intended to have up to four astronauts
for up to two weeks permission. Currently there's three
incredibly different vehicles. Although NASA might
down-select to two in 2021, the three currently chosen and into the
next phase of development are the Blue Origin led national team Dynetics and
SpaceX with a lunar version of their Starship. The national team Lander
features a Blue Origin Lander stage, a Lockheed Martin ascent stage a Northrop
Grumman transfer element vehicle and Draper developing the descent
guidance and flight avionics. The system is about two thirds reusable
with only the lunar lander portion being used once at first, although I speculate it could eventually
be refueled on the surface and if there's enough Delta-v they could
maybe reuse the Lander as well. I don't really know. The national team Lander will likely
fly on a few of Blue Origin's New Glenn rockets, but it might fly
on some other rockets, including segments being flown
as co-manifest payloads on an upgraded SLS Block 1-B we don't
really have those details yet though. The Dynetics Lander is a low slung,
perhaps wiener-dog-esque lunar lander. And it's a very unique looking thing
here with over 20 subcontractors with the most notable being Draper, Sierra
Nevada, United launch Alliance, And Thales Alenia. It features eight landing engines that
are fully reusable for multiple missions. With the only thing thrown away with
each landing is a simple pair of fuel tanks. The Lander can fit on
a single SLS 1B cargo version, or they also mentioned it could be flown
in segments on ULA's upcoming Vulcan rocket. I am not really sure
how many launches did take, but I'm guessing it have to be like at
least two Vulcans to get a Lander of that size to the moon. Lastly, to
the shock of pretty much everyone, NASA chose SpaceX's
Starship as an option too. Now this version is a lunar Lander only, and it's missing the aerodynamic
features and additional heat shielding, but also includes bonus
landing engines near the top. Now Starship's reuse confuses
me quite a bit because I mean, for sure it'd be an awesome just
outpost. Just keep that thing there. You have like a thousand cubic
meters of habitable volume. Yeah. Just land it once and never
touch it again. If you are
to refly it and reuse it, it actually has to go all the way back
to probably low earth orbit or at least Earth's orbit and be refueled through
multiple refueling flights of a Starship tanker, which is no small feat. So this does mean in order to
pull off each and every mission, including the very first one, it's
going to have to be many full stack, Super Heavy Starship
launches back to back. Now we'll get more into this in a
second. And in an upcoming video, we'll also talk about this a ton, because if we're going to be going over
all the different payload options for getting Starship stuff to the moon, including refueling Starship versus kick
stages, we're going to dive in really, really deep. I promise. After the next phase of selection and
more detailed proposals scheduled for February, 2021, we can do an update truly comparing
the three Landers in this human landing system. So just keep in mind
that for the Artemis program, each of these lunar Landers requires
its own ride to the moon and they can't be launched on the same rocket that
the astronauts will be launched on, like the Apollo program did
with the Saturn V. Lastly,
the rockets, as you know, from my last video, the Artemis program will be utilizing
the space launch system or the SLS rocket to carry the Orion capsule and
its service module to the moon. The Apollo program utilized
the mighty Saturn V, which could carry the Apollo command
module and service module and the lunar module. Now As a refresher, here's the
specs of these main rockets for the SLS. We're going to show you both the Block
1 and the Block 1B upgrade that may fly on later missions. Regardless, their lift off thrust is the
same at 39.1 Mega Newtons, which is above the Saturn
V's 35.1 Mega Newtons. The LEO capacity for SLS is
95 tons or slightly more at 97 tons for the Block 1B
and the Saturn V could put 140 tons into LEO. The upgrade to the SLS 1B doesn't change
the LEO capacity much because core stage pretty much puts the upper stage
into LEO as we'll talk about more here in a second, but by having a more
capable stage in low earth orbit, it means the trans lunar
injection capacity can increase. And we call this the TLI capacity, and it's just a measure of how much mass
can the rocket send on a trajectory to the moon, but not necessarily put
in lunar orbit or land on the moon. It's just what it can
shoot out towards the moon. And notice the Block 1B four
RL 10's on its much bigger Exploration Upper Stage
compared to the Block 1 of SLS, which only has a single RL
10 on the smaller Interim
Cryogenic Propulsion Stage. So that's why we see the difference here
with the TLI performance of SLS at 27 tons or 43 tons with the
Block 1B and the Saturn V was 48.6 tons. Yes, it's really confusing that the
less powerful Saturn V actually has more capability than SLS, but having a three-stage rocket
with two of those stages being huge high energy hydrogen
stages definitely paid off. And then of course in the Artemis program, we'll see an array of other launch
vehicles from Starship to Vulcan to New Glenn. And who knows maybe even some new
rockets or smaller rockets might end up playing a part in the program. So these two programs have extremely
different hardware choices and capabilities. So you'd probably think these
hardware choices affect the missions. They sure do and boy are they different! As you might know, getting to the moon isn't as simple
as just pointing a rocket straight up blasting into space and slowing
down when you get to the moon. Getting to the moon is
not a straight shot. It requires some orbital mechanics and
a few maneuvers to precisely get you there. So we're going to show
you the mission profiles here. And here's a little side note. This is going to be kind of the eventual
ish standard flight profile of SLS getting into its near rectilinear
halo orbit. But as of right now, the first two or maybe three missions
to the moon will either be flybys or slightly different orbits until
the lunar gateway is parked there. But if the words is near rectilinear
halo orbit sounds super confusing and intimidating, don't worry
by the end of this section, you'll understand how it's different and
why it's being chosen by NASA for the Artemis missions. So quick disclosure, our timeline and our numbers are probably
going to be a little bit off because Artemis doesn't even have
these things published yet. And the first two or three missions will
probably be quite a bit different than this, but this is just a generic what eventually
Artemis will likely be doing to get into that near rectilinear halo orbit, but even our Apollo profile here is kind
of generic since each and every mission had some unique variances. So let's put both missions together
and compare them side by side, which would theoretically be possible
because SLS will take off from LC-39B and the Saturn V took
off almost exclusively from LC-39A. Apollo 10 was the only Saturn V
mission to launch from LC-39B. At lift off the Saturn V of course, ran on its five mighty F1 engines. The SLS will fire up its
four RS-25 main engines, and then light it's massive solid
rocket boosters when it's time to go. And lift off! The two rockets ascend pretty much
vertically at first to punch through the atmosphere, but they also pitch over down
range to start accelerating horizontally because
after all to get to space, you can just go up out of the
atmosphere, but to stay in space, you have to go sideways really, really
fast. After two minutes and six seconds, the SLS's side boosters run
out of fuel and our jettisoned. At two minutes and 39 seconds, the Saturn V loses its first
stage the S-1C and lights up its second stage the S-11. The SLS will run it's core stage
and four RS-25's from sea level nearly to orbit cutting
off at eight minutes, putting the upper stage and Orion into a
highly elliptical suborbital trajectory with an apogee of up to
almost 2000 kilometers. They do this to discard the core stage, so it can burn up on reentry while still
getting as much performance out of it as possible. The Space
Shuttle did something similar, leaving the external fuel tank on a
suborbital trajectory at separation. The Saturn V S-II ran out of fuel just
shy of orbit at eight minutes and 56 seconds into flight and
required the third stage, the S-IVB to fire for about two
and a half more minutes until 11 minutes and 23 ish seconds to get
itself into its parking orbit of 160 kilometers by 160 kilometers. The upper stage of SLS will do an orbit
raise maneuver at its highest point or Apogee. And it'll bring up its perigee or lowest
point from a suborbital trajectory to around 160 kilometers or so
within the first hour of launch. This is called the perigee
raise maneuver or PRM. And it's what actually puts the Orion
into orbit while allowing the core stage to reenter. So now we've got our two spacecraft in
wildly different orbits around earth, preparing for their trans
lunar injection or TLI. This is where they light up their
engines and raise the orbit to basically intersect with where the moon will be. Artemis missions after Artemis II
will do this on the first orbit, only about an hour and
a half after launch, but the burn will take a long time, about 18 minutes long because
of the low thrust that RL-10-B2 engine, the Apollo missions did their TLI
via a 350 second burn with its single J-2 engine on the S-IVB at
2 hours and 44 minutes after having orbited the earth
one and a half times. As those of you who have played Kerbal
space program hopefully know you actually raise your orbit ahead of
where the moon is currently, specifically 67 degrees ahead for earth. And thanks to the orbital mechanics, your spacecraft will get to the moon
at the same time as when the moon gets there. But just to make this animation
and graphic look more simple, we're keeping the moon in a relative
position to the earth because animating where it is continually throughout
the mission gets very, very confusing. So just know if you raised your
orbit where the moon currently is, you'd miss it by a lot. Within the first
hour of the coast phase to the moon, the Apollo mission did something
that's still pretty unique. The command module with its large service
module would detach from the S-IVB upper stage and the S-IVB would open
up a fairing that held the lunar Lander. Then the command module would turn
around and dock with the lunar Lander and extract it from the upper stage.
Once the two spacecraft were joined, they do some midcourse correction burns
to target about a hundred kilometers above the lunar surface on
the far side of the moon. Now we're going to zoom out
here and believe it or not, this is the actual scale
of the Earth and the Moon, their size and distance is correct. Good thing we have high definition
and 4K monitors and TVs, because it's really hard to even
see them together at this scale. But since you don't often get to see
these missions drawn out like this to scale, I thought it'd be really
cool to actually draw it right, so you can get this perspective of how
far away the moon really is from earth. It's pretty crazy. Isn't
it? In fact, check this! Watch how long it takes a beam of light
or a radio transmission to get from earth to the moon. And back at this scale, we can actually watch it go back
and forth in real time. Yes, this is real time. So that distance is what caused the
transmission delays on the Apollo program. After a few days of coasting, next up
will be the orbital insertion burn. This is where the spacecraft slows down
enough to be captured into lunar orbit. If the spacecraft's motor doesn't
fire and it doesn't slow down, the spacecraft could
get slung out on orbit, putting it really far away from Earth.
That's terrifying. So because of this, Apollo missions usually aimed
at a free return trajectory, meaning if nothing happened, the moon's gravitational pull slings
the spacecraft right back to earth, but from Apollo 12 and on after
a systems checkout post TLI, they would do a course correction
and target their landing sites. But it wouldn't be a free return
trajectory after that point. Because the Apollo missions generally
aimed for a free return trajectory, their initial Apogee around
earth was higher beyond the moon, which despite being a
longer total orbital period, it does mean that they'll actually get
to the moon quicker than Artemis will. So although both vehicles
will end up orbiting the moon, Artemis and Apollo orbit the moon
in completely different ways. The Apollo program also did something
that was not really ideal because they would perform the spacecraft's lunar
orbit insertion while on the far side of the moon, there was no communication during
the entire six minute burn that put the astronauts into lunar
orbit for the Apollo program. This would usually occur a little
after three days from launch the Apollo service module would first put the
crew into a parking orbit of about 100 kilometers by 300 kilometers or so before
eventually circularized and closer to a hundred kilometers by a hundred
kilometers around the moon. And they were kind of
equatorial ish in nature. Instead of going around
the far side of the moon, Artemis will aim just about 100 kilometers
above the North pole of the moon. After about four to five
days getting to the moon, the Artemis missions will
do their insertion burn, but they won't ever end up
in a circular orbit. In fact, because of its small service
module and low Delta-v, the Orion capsule will barely
get into lunar orbit at all. It'll eventually be a highly elliptical
orbit of about 3,000 kilometers by around 70,000 kilometers
and only requires about 250 m/s of Delta-v to get into this orbit. But this might vary mission to mission
until there's eventually the Lunar Gateway parked in that orbit. This particular orbit is that near
rectilinear halo orbit that we've been talking about or NRHO. And it has a
pretty big advantage for crew safety. Its unique orbit allows the spacecraft
to be in constant contact with mission control back on earth, because it never goes behind the moon
from Earth's vantage point and NRHO's elliptical orbits go over the
North and South poles of the moon, but the orbit is also
perpendicular to the Earth, so the Earth can always
see the spacecraft. The closest point of the
orbit is at the North pole, which means the spacecraft spends the
majority of its time South of the moon with orbital periods lasting 6 to 8 days, versus the Apollo programs two-ish hours, believe it or not a spacecraft or a
space station can stay in this orbit with relatively little station keeping, since the earth pulls at it
equally the entire orbit. It naturally wants to stay in the same
orientation regardless of where the moon is relative to the Earth.
Unlike the Apollo missions, which landed all over the moon
ranging between 26 degrees North and 9 degrees South, the Artemis missions will all land
on the South pole of the moon at the Shackleton crater. Once the vehicles
were in their wildly different orbits, they'll hang out there for a bit of
time. In the case of the Apollo missions, they would usually spend around a day
in lunar orbit before the crew of two would depart the command module and
fire up the lunar Lander and begin their landing phase. Artemis' journey from here will be quite
a bit different compared to Apollo. Once in lunar orbit, the Orion spacecraft will dock to either
the upcoming Gateway that we keep kind of talking about, but not really, that's planned to be permanently
in NRHO or until that's ready, it'll dock with the Lunar Lander,
which will meet it in NRHO. The crew of two to four that's to land
on the moon will then transfer it to the human landing system and undock
from either gateway or Orion. Once the human landing system is
above the North pole of the moon, it'll lower its apoapsis, or apolune, and put the vehicle into a circular
polar orbit around the moon. Now that we have both Landers in a
more circular orbit and we're ready to land, the actual landing phase
should be pretty similar. They basically slow down just enough
so their trajectory intercepts their targeted landing site, and then they'll burn until
they eventually touch down
softly, right on target. Okay. So as we mentioned before, the duration of hanging out on the moon
can and will vary a lot from Apollo topping off at around 3 days to
Artemis planning up to two weeks per mission, but now let's just fast forward
and pretend it's time to get home. Well from here, the two
programs are pretty similar.
The lunar Lander, or again, maybe just an ascent stage will take off
from the lunar surface once it's lined up with the command module
so it can rendezvous with it. The Artemis missions will likely park in
a low lunar orbit before raising their orbits to match the Orion or gateway
and get into that Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit. Again, the Apollo lunar module would only use
the ascent stage to get into lunar orbit and would do so with a single burn
that lasted just over seven minutes. It would then circularize its orbit
at its apolune using just the reaction control system. Otherwise
known as the RCS thrusters. After the Apollo lunar Lander would dock
with the Command Module and transfer over all of its moon goodies. The lunar ascent module was jettisoned
as the crew prepared for the trans earth injection. This again, would occur on the far side of the moon
away from radio communications during the entire two and a half
minute burn. But back to Orion, it'll do something fairly similar after
it's undocked from either the gateway or the human landing system and prepare
for its trans Earth injection. However, the ascent stage, instead of
being jettisoned or discarded, it's intended to be reused. And
I think that's pretty awesome. Orion will do a 220 ish meters per second
burn while flying over the North pole of the moon. And again, because of
that Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit, it'll be within line of
sight and communication with
the earth the entire time. So it'll take about the same amount of
time to get back from the moon as it did to get to the moon for each mission. It took about three days for the Apollo
missions to get back and it'll take around five days to return
home for Orion before reentry. Each vehicle will discard their service
module and flip facing heat shield first then just like you might remember from
that video I made about how you returned from orbit. The Earth's atmosphere
does the rest of the work. Like I said, despite the destination being the same
and the hardware looking quite similar, these two programs go about
actually getting to the
moon in incredibly different ways. So I guess this brings up the question
is the Artemis program really any safer. [Inaudible]. Why haven't we gone back
to the moon since 1972? It's a very common question. And
there's a handful of reasons, way too many to go into right now, but perhaps the most common thought is
why don't we just rebuild the Saturn five and the Apollo capsule
do it all over again? Well, it doesn't take too long to realize that
the way we went to the moon with the Apollo program was incredibly risky. And in hindsight NASA maybe dodged
a bullet while driving a car on two wheels on the edge of a cliff inside of
a tornado while buying lottery tickets. But oddly enough, the hindsight risks weren't nearly
as bad as the calculated risks of the Apollo program, which were wait for it 5%, 5% chance of surviving going to
the moon and coming home safely. Uh, yeah. Well, that's the numerical estimate for the
probability of success beginning of the program, not good, but this
was a race to the moon. And fortunately it went much
better than a 5% chance of success, but still a lot of things went wrong and
you don't have to be too familiar with the Apollo program to know how close
almost every single mission came to full blown catastrophe
at one point or another. Here's a short list of just a
few notable events. Of course, there's the Apollo 1 incident, which tragically led to the loss of
three astronauts before the mission even started. It was just a
training mission, uh, but that led to the reconsideration
of a pure oxygen environment, but also changed the pace for NASA
and really kind of reiterated their safety considerations. Or of course, even famous Apollo 11
had a bunch of problems. The computer set off multiple alarms,
right before landing on the moon, which almost caused the
entire system to fail, not to mention the switch that activated
the ascent stage to get off for the moon got broken on
return from the moonwalk. Buzz Aldrin had to use a felt pen
to ensure the circuit breaker was in the correct position, ensuring they
could fire up the ascent motor. Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice
on ascent and it almost caused the abort of the mission. Yes, this of course is
where that famous SCE to AUX came from, which saved the mission. Apollo 13 was a mission that by
all accounts should have been lost, but thanks to excellent
communication, quick thinking, determination and the plucky nature
of mission control and the crew, they managed to make it home safely. Apollo 15 only had two of its three
parachutes open on reentry when returning resulting in a rougher than normal
landing and had one more failed, it would have likely led to the loss
of crew. And so on and so on and so on. NASA got really lucky that
they took such big risks, but also reaped huge rewards. Modern day NASA is much more aware
of what failures do to a program, especially one that doesn't have seemingly
unlimited funding and support like the Apollo program did. The two Space Shuttle disasters were
not only huge tragedies for the crew, the families and those
involved in the missions, but they were horrible politically
and jeopardized NASA's funding and future programs. But as the space
shuttle program was being laid out, NASA changed the way they
certified and calculated risks. So nowadays NASA calculates the
exact failure rate of each and every single component and evaluates the
risk involved in each component, sub-component and system failing.
Okay. Okay. That's all great. Sure. NASA now knows how to
calculate risk better, and it'd be safe to assume
that the Orion capsule, SLS and all other vehicles involved in
Artemis will adhere to a much higher safety standard. So here's a few fun, tangible upgrades in safety
and performance to the Orion
capsule compared to the Apollo capsule as a good example
of some of those changes. Orion Has a massive upgrade
and its aluminum pressure
vessel with not only a new alloy, it's also friction stir welded
for maximum strength and fewer defects. These upgrades allow the pressure vessel
of Orion to be reused up to 10 times. The Apollo capsule ran on fuel cells, which famously all got knocked out
during the Apollo 13 mission and power consumption was one of the biggest
factors in getting the crew home safely. Orion will instead run
on solar power and 120 volt lithium ion batteries. Of course the interface and the
computers have had a massive overhaul, as you can probably imagine. The interface is no longer heavy
mechanical switches and hardware. It's instead sleek, lightweight, and highly configurable computers with
minimal mechanical switches only about 60. And yeah, of course the computers on Orion
are substantially upgraded from the computers from 50 years ago. Orion's computer is over a thousand
times more powerful and there's redundant computers compared to Apollo. Orion can communicate with the TDRS
satellites or the tracking and data relay satellite system using
phased array antennas. And it can communicate
with ground sites as well. Navigation is massively upgraded
because Orion can utilize modern day GPS satellites when close to Earth
and when far away from earth, it has automatic star tracking equipment
that's much more advanced than those on the ISS even. Even the docking system has a new
Tridar or 3D laser range and a highly upgraded camera as well, which
will enable auto docking. The thermal protection system features
similar silica tiles to the space shuttle on the sidewalls of the spacecraft. And it has the largest
ablative heat shield ever
built at five meters across and weighing a whopping 450 kilograms.
The seats in the Orion capsule, although they frankly look like a
downgrade tinker toy version of the Apollo seats, they're much lighter and can actually
absorb more impact on landing. The parachutes are upgraded, of course, but even the way they're deployed
are now run off redundant sensors. Apollo relied on barometric sensors
only to determine chute activations. Orion will have GPS and inertial
measurement units as well. Orion will even have better
radiation shielding with materials, better suited to absorbing
and deflecting radiation, but there's also considerations to make
a temporary shelter in case of severe radiation storms. Okay. Okay. So NASA has a lot of new
safety considerations and
has made the upgrades you'd expect to Orion to make
it much safer than Apollo, but how much does all this
increased safety cost us? What happened to this new
sustainable program? Well, the cost rabbit hole was about to begin... Let's actually peel these onion
layers back here and get really, really deep into this because why not? And in our last video we made
some pretty blanket assumptions. So we should probably dig deeper into
this because talking about price is insanely hard when programs
include development, operations, and hardware. Now here's the deal we had to of course
take some assumptions in order to calculate some of this stuff. So to project into the future to get
a sense of how much some of this stuff costs. That being said here is a real rough
and conservative estimate of how much Artemis will cost from Artemis
I through Artemis 8. To date, the SLS program has
cost about $16 billion. And Orion has cost about
$12.5 billion if you count from only 2011 on. So not including the five
years of development during
the Constellation program. Now based on the Office of Inspector
General's report in 2020 on the cost and future costs of SLS Orion, the mobile
launch tower and infrastructure, we can project what will
take to get us to Artemis 1, the first uncrewed flight
around the moon. By Artemis 1, the SLS program will have spent
about $18.3 billion and the Orion program will have gone
through about 13.6 billion. But now some of that budget has
already gone into purchasing a future missions and hardware. The first flight
with humans is Artemis II, which again, features an SLS and an Orion capsule
going out around the moon on a free return trajectory. And again,
based on the OIG report, if that happens in 2023, NASA will have spent
about 38.4 billion on the program in total. That
doesn't sound good, does it? But hold on here comes some
good-ish news. Now, at this point, the program will have a
more stable production line
and NASA has already agreed to purchase SLS boosters at $870,000,000 and 3 more Orion capsules at $900 million. After that Orion will
come down to $750 million. Now being conservative with
these numbers and annual budgets. If NASA only spends about $300
million a year to run an operate SLS and about $200 million to run
an operate the Orion program, we can project all the
way out to Artemis 8. Assuming we get one mission per
year after Artemis II for a total of about 51.6 billion or about 6.5 billion per mission. But of course there's one very important
thing missing from numbers so far that will make landing on the moon
possible. That's the lunar Lander, Oh right. That might be necessary. NASA has already budgeted $4 billion
for the first year of the human landing system portion
of the Artemis program. Now a conservative estimate of the
amount of money it'll take to finish the project, get the first Lander built and single
rocket or multiple rockets to carry the Lander system out for
Artemis three would be $10 billion. And again, that's
a very conservative estimate. So now let's add the lunar Lander, the
launch and the annual program costs, which would be about $3 billion a year. And once the human landing systems are
up and running and in a reusable state, we can lower the cost of
operations to only 500 million, which would help factor in general program
costs and refueling launches and all those other considerations.
However, again, this is a very rough and
conservative estimate. Luckily, these services will be
fixed price contracts. So once we know the actual costs, it will be virtually impossible
to have costs overruns. So now running the math on the cost
of the program divided by the mission. Artemis 1 would cost about $32 billion
and Artemis II would come down to about $19.2 billion, but Artemis III would bring the
cost to around $16.9 billion because of that lunar Lander. If
Artemis gets down to Artemis 8, they could get down below $9 billion, average cost for each mission when
you factor in the development costs. Luckily because a lot of these systems
and the landers would be reused and repurposed, the cost could actually
go down quite a bit from there, especially when you're depreciating all
of the development costs from there on out, but reusing the hardware could really
bring that cost down to something a lot more reasonable. But of course this
all still sounds pretty expensive, but we don't really have
anything to compare it to yet. So how do the costs compare
to the Apollo program? The Apollo program costs about
$28 billion between 1961 and 1973, according to a very thorough
report by the Planetary Society. In today's money, that's
about $283 billion. But this insane cost wasn't just
for the missions to the moon. This includes all Gemini
launches, lunar probes, all Apollo development and
launches, all Saturn 1's, Saturn 1B's and Saturn V
development and launches up until 1973. But that also includes the entire modern
infrastructure that is the Kennedy Space Center, including of course the
Vehicle Assembly Building the launch pads, the crawlers, the Press Site, and
dozens of huge office buildings. Plus basically everything at the
Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, the ground tracking stations, the Stennis Cpace Center for
testing the rocket engines, almost everything out at Marshall Space
Center and so on and so on and so on. Okay. So basically everything NASA was built
during the Apollo era with some of that $283 billion. The Apollo program got us a lot
more than footprints on the moon. But if we break that down to just the
actual physical cost of the Saturn V, the Apollo command and service modules
and the lunar Landers development and building budget seen here, that total comes out to be
over half that at around 155 billion in today's dollars. Okay. So now we're about to do
something incredibly stupid
and try and compare apples to light bulbs or something here.
And just be forewarned, there's almost no way to fairly compare these two, but nevertheless reminder, all costs are shown
adjusted for today's dollar. If you take the $38.3 billion spent to
develop and build the Apollo command and service module and its share
of costs from the guidance, navigation and instrumentation and
divide it by the 34 articles that were built, tested and flown, and you get a real rough per unit
estimate of $1.4 billion in today's dollars. Then if we take the lunar
modules $23 billion for development building and its share of guidance, navigation and instrumentation divided
by the 25 articles that were built, tested and flown, and we end up with about
$1.3 billion in today's dollars. And lastly, the Saturn V, if we take the total
development cost of $66, 6.1 billion plus its share of engine
development and divide it by the 17 that were built, tested and flown, we get about $4.5 billion
per Saturn V. Now, if we assume we'll get to Artemis 8, we can take the program costs
of Orion at $21.8 billion, then divide it by the 20 or so units
that will have been built tested, and some flown. We get a total price of
$1.1 billion per unit. Then the wildcard here,
the human landing system. If we take what will likely be at
least $17.5 billion by Artemis 8 and figure a total of let's say 12
units that will have been built tested, and some flown, we get a total of $1.5 billion per Lander. But again, this also does account for the rockets
that will get them to the moon too. And notice that I did factor in 12
units, even though we don't need one, especially for the first
two missions of Artemis, there might be multiple Landers involved
by this point because some of them are going to do some un-crewed flight tests. Some of them might be sitting on
the surface doing other things, but that might be almost all they ever
end up building because don't forget these are going to be at least
partially or even maybe fully reusable. So it would actually get
cheaper and cheaper by a lot. The more times they're
used. And now lastly, SLS let's take the $29.8 billion
and then divide that by the 10 articles that will have been built.
Some just tested and some are flown. And we end up with a total
cost of about $3 billion per rocket. That's interesting. Now there were substantially more flights
and physical hardware units built, tested and flown during the Apollo era
than there are today for the Artemis missions. But then again, everything
was more expensive back then. I mean, they had to pretty much invent
everything from scratch. You'd really hope we can make a cheaper
spacecraft and rockets today than we could over 50 years ago. And
again, it might be easy to say, well, look at how much more we got
out of the Apollo program. Considering we started from scratch. It's going to take us roughly the
same amount of money and time to do it again in the 21st century.
Artemis isn't Apollo 2.0, despite it being Apollo's
sister in Greek mythology, Artemis is substantially safer
roomier and designed to spend a lot more time on the surface of the moon. Now we didn't really even get into this
since mission planning is still very much up in the air with
the Artemis program, but even the shortest missions
for Artemis will be nearly a week long or over twice as long as Apollo 17, the longest lunar mission to date. And Artemis can potentially take up to
four astronauts to the moon at a time for up to two weeks per mission. It could end up being over
10 times cheaper dollar per
hour for each human hour on the surface of the moon compared
to the Apollo program. Okay. So maybe what Artemis lacks an
actual cost savings and timely schedules it makes up for in just
sheer raw time and capabilities on the moon. So maybe we should look at some of the
things that slowed down and made SLS and Orion so over budget in the past
and see if we're doomed to see more of this stuff going
forward in the future. And now, the moment you've probably
all been waiting for a rant. I think one of the biggest frustrations
I have with the Artemis program besides SLS's ridiculous costs and the fact that
it is barely even capable of getting Orion to the moon, it's the fact that it's using
hardware that's not only been mostly developed, but it's even pulling from an existing
inventory of hardware to use as the basis of the vehicle. Now it's not the
fact that they're reusing old hardware. I mean, in theory, that makes sense. And of course you'd really only
do this to save money, right? So I guess that's where there's just
such a big disconnect for me between the reuse of parts, contracts and infrastructure
and the cost because boy are there some costs
The solid rocket boosters, which literally have all of the
hardware necessary to make a whopping 16 boosters has cost $2.4 billion, $2.4 billion to take some
empty shells of existing boosters and refurbish and upgrade
them to be five segment boosters. Yes, of course they had to change
out to a new propellant. Yes, they had to upgrade some
avionics and a plug, but for $2.4 billion, you would've thought that they had
started from scratch and built an entirely brand new type of rocket
booster. And oddly enough, Northrup Grumman claims when they
get to the replacement booster, the BOLE booster, which is basically their core state
of the Omega rocket [rest in peace], they'll be able to produce those brand
new boosters cheaper than the original reused ones. Or look at the RS-25's, Aerojet received $570 million
just to revamp the RS-25D's to be recertified for flight. I mean, yes, there was a lot of work
that went into this. I mean, testing dozens of engines and
recertifying them for new profiles, but again, the hardware already existed and to
spend over half a billion dollars to get some engines ready to fly that
have already flown on the Space Shuttle is just kind of hard to swallow. And NASA has officially paid
for 24 more RS-25s for a total of $3.5 billion, which includes $1 billion to
restart production after the restart. And the initial six engines, $1.8 billion was spent
for just 18 engines. So the cost per engine after all of
that stuff is about a hundred million dollars. Yep. That's about as expensive as a
reusable Falcon Heavy for just one engine. Or there's the Interim Cryogenic Upper
Stage that will cost right around half a billion dollars for three
units and one test unit. So we're looking at an upper
stage that will cost about $125 million just for the upper stage. Or what about
the mobile launch tower? I didn't even want to get started
on the mobile launch tower. This one tower has wound up costing about $1 billion. Yup. This steel constructed
tower with some, uh, umbilicals hold downs and the crew
access arm has somehow ended up costing over half as much as
the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. How,
how does that happen? You could literally stack the nearly $1
billion that it took to build the mobile launch tower and it would
literally reach space. But lastly, maybe the most damning thing has been the
amount of money Boeing has received to build the core stage. Boeing has received about
$6.7 billion to design build and test just two core stages. How is that possible? This is
what I don't get. And I'm sorry. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Yes, they are using a new material. Yes. They set up the world's largest friction
stir welder and had some problems with it. Yes. A tornado ripped through
Michoud. Yes, they dropped a tank once. Whoops. But still that's just ridiculous. Why was there not a much more firm
price cap on all this that put a little fire under Boeing's butt to get
this all done on time and at a better price. Frankly, NASA is going to have to make up for SLS
as costs because at best as less costs are irresponsible and
frustrating at worse, it's a blatant misuse of taxpayer
money and feels borderline criminal. It took until 2019 before
NASA's newest administrator. Jim Bridenstine really came in and
finally whipped things into shape. Jim started threatening to use commercial
rockets to get us to the moon by 2024. And Boeing seemed to get the memo
because all of a sudden we saw them finally get into gear. But should he have just followed
through with that threat? What options are there really
in the commercial world
that can do the job of SLS and Orion? Well, we'll
save that for part three, when we look at what could actually
do the same amount of work and safely replace SLS for getting
humans to and from the moon, we'll go over all the commercial options,
including Starship and Falcon Heavy, since you guys ask me
about this all the time, and we actually look at the feasibility
and the costs associated with those. But now just a reminder
for all of us, me included, if your blood is boiling,
like mine is right now, and if you need an understanding of
why there's that cost plus contract, remember to go rewatch the last video
about SLS and Starship to help put all of that into perspective. But in reality, it is a necessary evil to ensure
that this stuff actually happens. But now speaking of commercial options, let's talk about the good
parts of the Artemis program. So now onto the good parts of
the Artemis program. No, no, actually I take that back for all the
negativity and cost overruns we're seeing with SLS. I actually honestly am really glad that
we're going to have that capability. I don't want it canceled before we
have another readily available vehicle. So although insanely insanely
frustrating and expensive SLS is a good thing right now. Okay. So let's try that again onto the
better part of the Artemis program, the Human Landing System, which will utilize the fixed price
contracting scheme that we talked about in that last video, but it's awesome to see NASA utilizing
it on a more ambitious scale. After all NASA didn't really give any
direction on how these companies were to build their Landers. They didn't
say how big or small to make them. They didn't which rockets they
had to take them to the moon, but they just really let the companies
innovate and submit proposals. So again, this is much more akin to
the commercial crew program. NASA had a set of requirements and
accepted proposals through this commercial partnership, it'll allow for multiple
partners to innovate and deliver. So we can always have some non
commonality and redundancy in providers. Redundancy is
after all a very good thing, just like with the Commercial Crew
Program, how we have Boeing and SpaceX, which have completely different
parts and different providers, no commonality really between
those two systems at all. And that's a good thing
because as we know, Boeing's had some problems and they're
really behind schedule while SpaceX is able to continue
fulfilling NASA's missions. But of course there's still some
unknowns because we don't know the exact numbers here on how much the
human landing system will cost. So we can't really project if it's going
to make up for the cost of SLS yet. But my gut feeling is if Artemis
truly becomes a sustained and continually funded project, and if
the Landers end up being reused, they could be a huge win for NASA. I
mean, even the least reusable vehicle, Blue Origins' National Team Lander, only ditches the descent stage and
reuses both the orbital tug stage and the ascent stage, which means there's potential to save a
lot of money when you don't throw away 100% of your billion dollar
Lunar Lander with each and every mission. And then you have Starship, which if fully reusable and
launched on a fully reusable rocket, which of course is the plan, it could end up being a
huge cost savings with the potential to truly change
the game. So unlike Apollo, which had very little chance of
becoming cheaper as time went on, the Artemis program is built
around the evolving technologies, reuse and eventual cost savings. So the longer the program lasts
the cheaper and more sustainable, it should actually get.
It's baked into the program, which is awesome. Artemis versus Apollo. Honestly, a part of me just really wishes that
NASA had rebuilt the Saturn V found ways to make it cheaper than before,
and just done things the old way, because it seems really
hard to justify SLS. If reusing the literal leftover hardware
that's sitting on shelves was meant to make the rocket more cost
effective. It sure didn't help. And then once they had to open up
new and old lines of manufacturing, why not just build F-1's and
the whole Saturn V with slightly updated and modern technology. It's also a shame that Orion has such a
small and relatively incapable service module since SLS can't even take
anything bigger the moon for now. Of course, if it gets upgraded,
it could eventually do more, but still, it's still less even with the
Block 1B than the Saturn V. But it just feels like
this is the 21st century , the rockets should by no
measure be going backwards. They shouldn't be less
capable and more expensive. We should be getting cheaper
and more capable rockets. And I know it doesn't really feel like it, but by the time you actually factor in
all of the development costs and the different development rockets, SLS is actually cheaper than the Saturn V. Especially if you only consider the
Saturn V's that flew and subtract the development costs, the SLS
will be substantially cheaper, almost any way you cut it. But as far as the Artemis
program as a whole is concerned, NASA is strongly leaning
into the commercial sector. And I think that's going to be a huge win. And although NASA has already ordered
up way more SLS's than I think any of us would prefer it, at least ensures we won't have a gap
in provider coverage like the nine year gap the US had when the shuttle
program ended before the Commercial Crew Program was ready to
fly. And this is vital. It's too easy for NASA to get the carpet
pulled out from underneath them with each and every administration change.
So by committing to something, even if it's expensive, it at
least gets the ball rolling. But when comparing Apollo to the
Artemis program a lot has changed, but perhaps the biggest change is
the risks themselves because the risks have shifted. The Apollo program's biggest
risks were with human lives. Whereas the Artemis program's
biggest risk is more of a funding risk and the constant
fear of cancellation. And maybe that just isn't as sexy. After all NASA had what
feels like unlimited funding
to get the Apollo program sprinting ahead of the Soviet Union. And now NASA has to play far more
politics to ensure a program's survival. I think my generation and future
generations just craves the excitement, the pace and the innovation
of the Apollo era. And we just ended up scratching our
heads at why everything is taking so long for what feels like bad
sequel to the first movie. After all, there is no way you can deny that
the Apollo program isn't easily, one of humanity's greatest
achievements to date. It might forever be one of the biggest
bookmark moments in the history books. I mean, it's absolutely incredible that humans
figured all this stuff out at a time when computers here's where the size of a room
and most calculations done by a slide rule. So to even compare the two programs
side by side is maybe a bit unfair, but since we haven't seen
humans on the moon in 50 years, it is important to weigh in all the facts
to see if we're actually going to do it this time, or if we're just going to get our hopes
up and we're going watch another program get canceled and see another
decade slip between our fingers. It's just a weird convergence in history
that by the time we have a program up and running that can actually
return humans to the moon, it just so happens that the commercial
industry is booming and it has matured to the point of being
able to do so much of the work. And it starts to make the program that's
been in the works for almost a decade, suddenly look 45 years old. But the good news is that just by
having these vehicles paid for, it helps ensure the success of the
many commercial partners involved and other future commercial
partners. So to me, Artemis, isn't Apollo 2.0. Artemis is more like the first commercial
flights across the Atlantic on the FW 200 condor compared to Charles Lindbergh's
daring and dangerous flight on his single engine spirit of St. Louis. Artemis is setting itself up to
be sustainable in a different way. Hopefully aligning the program to
survive multiple administrations while paving the way for cheaper and more
competitive commercial options. And that's definitely something to be
excited about. So what are your thoughts? Do you think the Artemis program is a
step in the right direction or do you feel like NASA is moving backwards and
should have just completely redone the Apollo program? Do you think this wacky structure will
end up making Artemis successful long run or do you think it'll cancel before
any humans make it to the moon? Let me know your thoughts
in the comments below. Did you guys those awesome 3D
renders that were used in the video? Those were from Casper Stanley. You
definitely have to find him on Twitter. He has some awesome work.
He's constantly making really, really impressive things. So be sure and give him a follow on
Twitter and also check out his awesome rocket Explorer App as well. Of course, I owe a huge thank you to my Patreon
supporters for helping make this and all other everyday astronaut content possible. If you want to help me script and research
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It was good, SLS doesn't seem quite as outrageous when compared with Apollo. But still, we could be doing so much better.
For 18 billion dollars, the Falcon Heavy program could have put 200 payloads into orbit with booster reuse.
At that price point, SpX probably could afford to give them (read: us) a discount on a couple of expendable launches for the heavier odds and ends.
We could have assembled vehicles, depots and whatever else in orbit, sent up crew via Dragon, or with a stopover at ISS. The program could be well along this year, and accruing orbital and transorbital infrastructure that would be lowering the costs on future missions.
We still can.
If SLS would make such technological leap as Apollo program then it would have to be a star trek spacecraft...
oRanGe rOcKt BaD
Tim has me thinking, if lunar starship has to refuel a bunch of times in LEO, then Go all the way to the moon, land then go all the way back to Leo to be fueled again, why couldn’t SpaceX dock to a Crew dragon to starship in Leo? And if they could just send up a crew dragon, did SpaceX just make Sls irrelevant and convince NASA to fund it for them?
Who would win?
The most powerful currently flying rocket, fully expendable able to take more than 60 tons to LEO, or one hydrogen boi?
Makes me sad they are going to throw these reusable shuttle engines in the drink.