Artemis VS Apollo: Is NASA's Artemis program actually "sustainable?"

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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.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 43 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/FIakBeard πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Sep 13 2020 πŸ—«︎ replies

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.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 16 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/lowrads πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Sep 13 2020 πŸ—«︎ replies

If SLS would make such technological leap as Apollo program then it would have to be a star trek spacecraft...

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 9 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/chlebseby πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Sep 13 2020 πŸ—«︎ replies

oRanGe rOcKt BaD

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 12 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/mariobryt πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Sep 13 2020 πŸ—«︎ replies

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?

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 7 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/1ryan116 πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Sep 14 2020 πŸ—«︎ replies

Who would win?

The most powerful currently flying rocket, fully expendable able to take more than 60 tons to LEO, or one hydrogen boi?

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 3 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/FatherOfGold πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Sep 14 2020 πŸ—«︎ replies

Makes me sad they are going to throw these reusable shuttle engines in the drink.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 2 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/Hammocktour πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Sep 15 2020 πŸ—«︎ replies
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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 and get your thoughts on videos and see little sneak peeks and see the scripts and stuff before I shoot, consider becoming a Patreon supporter where you'll gain access to our exclusive subreddit, our exclusive discord channel and exclusive monthly live streams by heading over to patreon.com/everydayastronaut. And while you're online, be sure and check out my web store for awesome shirts like this lunar mission shirt, which is really cool. And on the back, it even has the Apollo Lunar Lander, but we have lots of other really cool merchandise, including brand new Full Flow Staged Combustion Cycle hoodies, future Martian T-shirts new key chains, lots of awesome stuff. So just shop around. I promise you'll find some really cool stuff at everydayastronaut.com/shop. Thanks everybody that's going to do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. Bringing space down to Earth for everyday people.
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Channel: Everyday Astronaut
Views: 394,961
Rating: 4.9579816 out of 5
Keywords: SLS vs Saturn V, Saturn V Apollo program, Apollo program vs artemis program, what is the artemis program, NASA artemis program, Artemis mission details, Artemis moon. mission, SLS and Orion vs Saturn V, Orion capsule vs Apollo Capsule, Starship vs SLS, SLS vs Starship Lunar, Starship Lunar lander, Starship Human Landing System, Elon Musk lunar starship, Tim Dodd, Everyday Astronaut, 2024 moon mission, Artemis mission profile, NRHO, Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit, SLS cost
Id: 9O15vipueLs
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 62min 12sec (3732 seconds)
Published: Sun Sep 13 2020
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