NASA Isn't Telling Us Something About The Moon

we are going to the Moon in this decade that's what NASA keeps saying and that's exactly what they want you to believe NASA wouldn't lie to us though right it's not like there are any potentially massive problems with the Artemis Moon missions that they just aren't telling us about [Music] so here's the deal after many years of doing weekly space news content on this platform we start to notice some Trends develop in the way that major players like NASA and SpaceX present their ideas to the public there's always a very clearly defined and fantastic goal that makes for a great headline setting foot on the Moon flying a drone on Titan building a city on Mars something that really Sparks the imagination in a very special way that I believe only space exploration really can that's what makes it amazing but when it comes to how they plan to achieve these amazing feats of Science and Engineering we are typically lucky if we get a 30-second animation that shows a spaceship flying from point A to point B and then something cool happening at the end which is fine for the average person because that's probably all of the information that they're going to be able to handle or frankly are even interested in knowing for those of us with an above average level of interest in the subject who want to ask questions and want to know details that's typically where the stream of information begins to dry up which is frustrating because we know what the goal is and we know why it's being done but it's the how that really fascinates us we want to know how stuff works and what's crazy is that in most cases even the people in charge of the really ambitious space project don't even know how it works and that's not because they are uninformed it's because often times the logistics of actually doing the big space mission have just not been figured out yet and that's fine I have infinite faith that someone much smarter than me will figure out a solution to just about any problem but today just for fun we want to talk about some of the most glaring plot holes in NASA's most ambitious project the Artemis Moon Landing well the first thing NASA wouldn't tell you is that they can't land on the moon anymore and they really had no intention of ever doing it again this is the general state that the agency was in until Donald Trump and Mike Pence came along and pulled a JFK Moment by deciding that landing on the moon was now a top National priority and they set a very tight deadline for NASA to meat 2024 because what's the point in landing on the moon if you can't can't do it while Donald Trump is still president I assume that was the thinking at the time and through a genuinely bizarre series of events even a much delayed moon landing could still happen while Donald Trump is President anyway given an arbitrary timeline set by the election cycle NASA Engineers made a panic return to the drawing board where they desperately tried to Cobble together a plan that might just offer up even a sliver of Hope to reach the moon in 2024 what they ended up with was a recycled design concept from the Bush Jr era combined with recycled flight Hardware from the Reagan Era and thus the SLS was born they took the design to president Trump and he said yeah that looks like a rocket approved I don't know if that's what he said but I imagine Trump was very drawn to the orange color of the SLS either way what NASA may or may not have told the president at the time was that SLS couldn't actually land on the moon and it could barely even get a spacecraft to a lunar orbit we'll talk about that in a bit but SLS was the best thing that anyone at Nasa could reasonably draw up using the resources that they had at the time so when it came to deciding how the people would actually get down to the moon and get back up again they decided that someone else would figure it out I think that in NASA's mind they know that as long as everyone sees them launch the people into space on a big rocket and then if they can manage to get those people back down to earth alive then everyone will say that NASA did did a really good job so in order to address the gaping hole in their moonlanding plan the landing NASA put a big reward on the table for any private company that was willing and able to build a moonlander in this case the money was secondary it's the flex of being the company that landed people on the moon that was the real reward and who loves to flex more than obscenely wealthy billionaire CEOs the running comes down to three main competitors we have The Underdogs dtic with a deeply practical moonlander concept that was almost immediately ignored and the big dogs blue origin with their blue ball Lander that was pretty stupid and very undeveloped versus SpaceX with their starship that was pretty awesome but also very undeveloped so NASA Awards the wind to SpaceX and their plan to land the most gigantic rocket ever conceived on the moon I assume that when NASA asked SpaceX how exactly they plan on accomplishing something so wildly unprecedented SpaceX said something like we'll figure it out now there are a lot of fascinating things about the SpaceX Starship but probably the most difficult to understand and the thing that you don't actually get told often is that Starship is simultaneously the most capable rocket ever made and the most handicapped what we mean by that is anytime SpaceX talks about the capabilities of Starship they generally have to put a big asterisk next to the most impressive stats like Starship can transport 100 metric tons to the moon or Mars asterisk with orbital refilling the Starship can move 100 tons into low earth orbit easy and then if it happens to link up with an orbiting gas station and refill with cryogenic propellant then in theory it could go pretty much anywhere again I imagine that at some point NASA asked SpaceX about the whole cryogenic orbital refilling thing since no one had ever even tried this before and I guess space probably said something like we'll figure it out admittedly when I first heard about the refilling thing I assumed that you just had to launch a second ship that would meet up with the first one top off the fuel tanks and you're good to go but that is not the case Starship doesn't need a top up in low earth orbit it needs a total refill those tanks are bone dry at this point and in order to satisfy the thirst of the world's largest spaceship you need around 1,000 metric tons of propell transported into low earth orbit so just some basic math here if each Starship can carry 100 tons into orbit and we need 1,000 tons that's 10 Starships plus the gas station ship plus the one that needs to go to the moon so 12 Starships so what SpaceX isn't telling you is that Starship can transport 100 metric tons to the Moon if you first launch 11 other Starships oh and what they also don't like to explain is that the methane and oxygen propellants need to be kept very cold in order to remain in a usable liquid state and in spite of what you may have heard it can actually get very hot in space which means that a certain percentage of all the propellant that we launch into orbit is going to boil off into a useless gas that will simply be vented out into space so you might actually need closer to something like 14 or 15 Starship launches just to make one moon landing possible and SpaceX has to do this twice because they need a practice run to demonstrate that they can actually land on the moon without crashing so more like 30 star ships just for one Artemis moon landing if the first demo ship doesn't crash except the other thing that SpaceX doesn't want to tell you is that their current version of Starship which again is by far the largest and most powerful rocket ever launched can only actually move like 50 metric tons into orbit at best so in order to get the ad advertised capability we have to wait for Starship V2 which you guessed it is an even bigger and more powerful rocket of course they haven't built Starship V2 yet they haven't even figured out how to get V1 to fly in a straight line which is going to need to be sorted before we can even think about getting these things to line up and dock in outer space Oh and the only way to make any of this even reasonably affordable is to have the Starship land on the earth after coming back from space so that it can be used again in like a day or so and I'm not saying that the people at SpaceX who are much smarter than me can't figure this out I'm just pointing out that they haven't done that yet in spite of what you may have heard we are officially announcing our new space race Discord server where you can meet hundreds of like-minded space enthusiasts right now click the link in the description to join the fastest growing space community on Discord okay so let's imagine that all of this wildly complicated rocket at stuff that we just talked about stuff that is only possible in theory and has yet to actually be done in real life let's say that all of it gets figured out and it all happens within the next 2 years because NASA is literally still saying that Artemis 3 will launch in 2026 so unless they aren't telling us something like the whole mission architecture especially the Starship is way behind schedule then I guess we just need to go ahead with that so our four astronauts Blast Off heroically in NASA's SLS and they set cour for the moon kind of the crew module is going to be heading into a very weird orbit around the Moon called the near rectal linear Halo orbit which means that instead of circling around the moon like you'd expect the orbit and crew module is going to be moving in a big long oval shape that only comes close to the Moon once every 6 days NASA will tell you that the reason they chose this was for better line of sight Communications between the crew and the Earth which is true but what they don't like to tell you is that the SLS doesn't have enough power to send the crew module into a lower orbit because the lower you get down into the moon's gravity well the more energy you need to get back out and there's just not enough fuel on board to accomplish that so it's out here in this super long orbit through empty space that the crew meet up with their starship Lander only two of the four astronauts get to land on the moon the other two are going to spend the next week in a metal box floating through the void of space together I'm sure they'll be fine now the Starship needs to perform a deorbit burn to get down to the lunar surface this is where we find out if it's possible to cold start a cryogenic turbo pump driven rocket engine that's been hanging out in space for days or weeks this is another one of the long list of things that have never been done before typically for an engine that we want to light in space we' choose a pressure-fed hypergolic design which uses self-combusting fuel that's the most simple most foolproof method for starting a rocket engine as long as your two propellants can touch each other the engine will burn the SpaceX Raptor on board Starship however is the most complex dual turbo pump system that has ever been used in a rocket of any kind so there's a possibility that it could prove difficult to relight in space but they'll figure it out here's the thing about that big loopy orbit that they're in if anything does go wrong with The Landing procedure and they need to abort then they won't even get another shot at the moon for 6 days same goes for trying to get back up again which would be significantly worse this economy orbit only provides a small window for critical operations that absolutely cannot be missed I might even call it a bit dangerous but NASA won't so it's probably fine now our Starship is making its way down to the surface of the Moon it's time to land how do we do that well we don't as in the people don't the ship has to land it self autonomously which is sketchy back in the Apollo era NASA built a testing rig for the astronauts so that they could practice Landing the lunar module by hand and this was not a computer simulation it was a real flying machine with a jet engine Neil Armstrong almost died in this thing but it gave them an opportunity to learn the manual controls so that it didn't matter if the guidance computer worked or not they would still have a fair shot at landing on the moon and in many cases the guidance computer didn't work but every pilot made it down safely now in the modern era we have this Starship rocket that is so incredibly tall and relatively skinny it's not like any other flying machine ever made and it can't be flown manually it's just not possible the pilot would be 50 ft up with no ability to look down and see what was happening at the base of the rocket it's not like a modern computer can't fail to land on the moon we've seen it many times in recent years from many different space agencies India Japan Russia of course the intuitive machines Lander is a great example of what can happen to a tall skinny vehicle that doesn't stick The Landing it tips over and I can guarantee you that there are very smart people at intuitive machines much smarter than me and you and they thought that they had it all figured out but even they didn't now we haven't even seen a proper landing gear design from SpaceX for the Starship they don't even want to use landing gear on Earth they're going to try and catch the rocket with a giant Tower mechanism which of course no one has done before because that's insane but they're going to have to start getting very real about Landing legs very soon and they're going to need to be sturdy and stable and what the hell even happens if the ship lands on uneven ground there needs to be a powerful self-leveling system just to avoid a very predictable catastrophe and then once safely landed on the surface of the Moon all that our astronauts need to do is descend 50 ft in an elevator to reach the surface that should be fine though it's not like we've never used an elevator on the moon before and we haven't even talked about the Dust but that's a story for another day now just to clarify because I know people are going off in the comments right now this is not me sitting here and calling any of these things stupid this is me admitting that I am stupid because all of the problems that we just talked about seem so utterly impossible to solve with my feeble excuse for a brain and only after you recognize that you can be truly humbled by just how smart these people are who work at Nasa and SpaceX who sit down at their desk every day and figure this stuff out I still have infinite faith in their ability to do that

Channel: The Space Race

Views: 353,424

Keywords: nasa, artemis, artemis 3, spacex, spacex starship, starship, spacex moon landing, nasa moon landing, moon landing, nasa problem, artemis program, orbital refilling, orbital refueling, nasa delay, moon mission, blue origin, elon musk, jeff bezos, moon lander, apollo, nasa funding, donald trump, space race, sls, nasa sls, orion, nasa orion capsule, near rectilinear halo orbit, nrho, artemis problem

Id: eJ3dsXP839U

Length: 15min 14sec (914 seconds)

Published: Sat May 25 2024