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This topic is offered for members who may wish to post updates or to comment upon planned flights of the SLS with crew.
At four billion $USD per flight, I think it is unlikely Artemis will have more that the currently planned four flights, but this topic is available for focus on each one as they occur.
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From a NASA web site we have this preview of the manned Artemis series ...
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-fir … issions-to
Leaving Earth
The mission will launch a crew of four astronauts from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 2023 on a Block 1 configuration of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. The flight profile is called a hybrid free return trajectory. Orion will perform multiple maneuvers to raise its orbit around Earth and eventually place the crew on a lunar free return trajectory in which Earth’s gravity will naturally pull Orion back home after flying by the Moon.
The initial launch will be similar to Artemis I as SLS lofts Orion into space, and then jettisons the boosters, service module panels, and launch abort system, before the core stage engines shut down and the core stage separates from the upper stage and the spacecraft. With crew aboard this mission, Orion and the upper stage, called the interim cryogenic propulsion stage (ICPS), will then orbit Earth twice to ensure Orion’s systems are working as expected while still close to home. The spacecraft will first reach an initial orbit, flying in the shape of an ellipse, at an altitude of about 115 by 1,800 miles. The orbit will last a little over 90 minutes and will include the first firing of the ICPS to maintain Orion’s path. After the first orbit, the ICPS will raise Orion to a high-Earth orbit. This maneuver will enable the spacecraft to build up enough speed for the eventual push toward the Moon. The second, larger orbit will take approximately 42 hours with Orion flying in an ellipse between about 235 and 68,000 miles above Earth. For perspective, the International Space Station flies a nearly circular Earth orbit about 250 miles above our planet.
After the burn to enter high-Earth orbit, Orion will separate from the ICPS. The expended stage will have one final use before it is disposed through Earth’s atmosphere—the crew will use it as a target for a proximity operations demonstration. During the demonstration, mission controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston will monitor Orion as the astronauts transition the spacecraft to manual mode and pilot Orion’s flight path and orientation. The crew will use Orion’s onboard cameras and the view from the spacecraft’s windows to line up with the ICPS as they approach and back away from the stage to assess Orion’s handling qualities and related hardware and software. This demonstration will provide performance data and operational experience that cannot be readily gained on the ground in preparation for critical rendezvous, proximity operations and docking, as well as undocking operations in lunar orbit beginning on Artemis III.
Checking Critical Systems
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I'm more of a fan of Musk and I think other ideas like Private routes less old government and Space-X is the way but it looks like SLS will beat him to launch. Some alarm or pressure coolant electronic thing went off, so it won't launch until at least next month of September.
Artemis 1 launch and Orion will carry mannequins equipped with sensors.
There is also a deep space radiation astrobiology test on 'Yeast' and a number of multinational Radiation sensors for example from Europe or Japan.
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Its only unmanned to protect man from any hidden dangers that might not work as planned on a first mission. The real question is how long will it be in stand down before another mission will happen even if all goes as planned?
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The first unmanned tests
NASA officials evaluating late September launch dates for Artemis 1 moon mission
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Space Launch System vs Starship: the battle of the mega rockets continues
https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/3211 … -continues
Of course some of this is the cost and amount of time for an Artemis rocket to be launched versus how many times you need to launch a refueling operations just to go anywhere.
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NASA’s "mega moon rocket" was initially scheduled to embark on its maiden voyage to the moon and back on Aug. 29. and is now scheduled to make its third liftoff attempt on Sept. 27.
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Artemis 1 Finally Completes All Of Its Fueling Tests
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Musk looked at sites in Alaska, California, Florida, Texas and Virginia, Georgia which now has Vector Space Systems and the Vector-R rocket, successfully took sand Puerto Rico was also considered before they built the SpaceX Starbase. I wonder if Hurricane seasons added to the decision and Weather issues near site just like when Shuttle Launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida
NASA delays moon rocket launch due to potential hurricane
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NASA Wants More Spacecraft for Its Upcoming Artemis Moon Missions
NASA has requested three new spacecraft from Lockheed Martin for Artemis missions 3 through 5 with the newly announced batch of Orion spacecraft is meant for Artemis 6 to 8. Artemis 2, the Orion spacecraft will have a crew on board, but won’t land on the Moon. That’s the job of Artemis 3, in which astronauts will travel aboard Orion and touch down on the lunar surface.
In 2019, NASA signed a contract with Lockheed Martin to construct upwards of one dozen vehicles as part of the Orion program. The contract is an “indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract that includes a commitment to order a minimum of six and a maximum of 12 Orion spacecraft, with an ordering period through Sept. 30, 2030,” NASA wrote in a 2019 statement.
The space agency ordered the Orion spacecraft for Artemis missions 3 through 5 for $2.7 billion, with an additional $1.99 billion now being added to support Artemis missions 5 through 8.
That is a lot of cash for what was to be a reusable capsule...
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Next Artemis 1 launch attempt on schedule for mid-November
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It appears that Wednesday will be a chance to get the 4.1 billion launch, on its way finally.
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The capsule is almost back and in the news Nasa spends $57m to build towns on the moon with a contract running through 2028.
ICON has already built a 1,700-square-foot simulated Martian habitat, called Mars Dune Alpha, which NASA will use to train astronauts for long-duration missions. Ultimately, Nasa hopes to establish a base on the moon and send astronauts to Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s.
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Watch live as NASA recovers the Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft after smooth splashdown today
Now all of the scince reporting will come out slowly...
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Nice to see the update by GW Johnson in the GW Johnson Postings topic!
I saw a report that Musk is thinking about purging all the Twitter accounts that haven't been used in a while, such as 10 years.
It's been quite a while since I used my account .... it might have been as far back as 2012, when I was using it in another non-profit.
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Thinning accounts will not make twitter profitable and as fast as employees are leaving just as many are dumping twitter.
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I must be old. Never had a Twitter account. Never saw the need for it. Can barely handle email, "exrocketman", LinkedIn, and these forums. And I can only just barely cope with them.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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GW Johnson: It's Ok. There are too many options to be able to use all of them. I have email, I post here. I have a LinkedIn account but don't use it fully, just post my resume and pretty much leave it at that. My resume is posted on Monster.com. I am active on Facebook. When I got involved with politics the leader of the provincial party told me that to be in politics I need a Facebook account. That was... um... 2006? My nieces were in junior high school, they posted everything, so it was a way to keep up with them. Now my nieces are both adult, married, and one has a child. Last spring I created dating profiles on several dating websites. Found most of those websites were scams, and legitimate websites have a lot of "ladies" who are scams.
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Hi Rob:
Nice to see I am not alone in having difficulty coping with all this electronic stuff. What its developers assume is intuitively obvious, is absolutely not to older users. The older one is, the less intuitively obvious this stuff is. When I was young, telephones were rotary dial, and you asked the operator to make long distances calls for you. Gasoline was 10-25 cents a gallon, too.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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When I was young, telephones were still rotary dial. But you dialed long distance directly.
I remember as a child my parents taking us on a road trip. Gasoline prices had increased. We stopped at some rural gas station. My dad saw the price was 20-something cents per gallon. My dad thought he had a great deal, said the guy doesn't know what gas is worth. In Winnipeg the price was 80-something cents per gallon. At that time Canada was still used imperial measurements, 1 imperial gallon = 1.20 US gallons. Then the attendant gave him the price: number of gallons plus price on the pump. My dad said "WHAT!!!" The attended said it was $1.20-something but the pump didn't have that many digits so just add $1 per gallon. My dad grudgingly paid. Lesson: when you think you got a great deal, you're getting screwed. That was the first time gas was over $1 per gallon.
I remember living in this house in the 1990s. Gas was 23¢ per litre. It slowly crept to 28¢/L. When I drove to Toronto, a small town in the middle of nowhere but located on the highway so you really had to stop there to fill up. Price was 61¢/L. Prices increased, one independent gas station refused to increase prices that much. The major gas companies owned gas stations and wholesale. They tried to dictate to the independent owner how much he would charge, but he refused. He trucked gas from a depot in North Dakota. He charged 38¢/L, but corporate stations tried to charge more. He had cars lined up a block long. Corporations hated him! Tried to stop him from bringing gas from North Dakota. In the end they put him out of business. Prices immediately jumped to 61¢/L here in Winnipeg. Blatant price fixing, and the government did nothing about it. Now there's a website called Gasbuddy.com that gives you prices of every gas station in the city, updated daily, so current. They cover most major cities in the US and Canada. Cheapest gas today is $136.9/L for regular gas, most charge $149.9/L. In case you're wondering 1 US gallon = 3.7854 litres.
I can't complain too much about young people using social media. I used bulletin board systems in 1981. That was before the internet existed. I used a dial-up modem at 300 BAUD. That's 300 bits per second, or 30 bytes per second. Forget trying to transfer pictures at that speed. TCP/IP protocol is the basis of the internet, it was invented in the early 1980s. You could talk about early protocols but a network used by government laboratories called ARPANET migrated to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983. That's really when TCP/IP came into existence. So TCP/IP didn't exist when I took computer science in university. The internet wasn't available to students in university until 1990 or 1991. Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) in 1981 had the same basic concept as New Mars Forum, but didn't have the graphics and was strictly local. Each BBS was accessed by telephone dial-up so people didn't call long-distance to access.
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The cheapest I ever saw was in 1954 or 1955 Grand Prairie, Texas (between Dallas and Ft. Worth). The normal price was 12.9 cents per (US) gallon. Two stations were having a gas war: it was 9.9 cents per gallon! I graduated high school and went off to college before it ever got to 30 cents per gallon.
When I was a boy, sodas came in 6-oz bottles priced at 5 to 7 cents each, and you got a penny or two back if you returned the bottle. A loaf of bread was 20 to 25 cents, and a full paper bag of groceries from the grocery store was under $5.
As they say, times change. But I don't think it's for the better. In those old days, a middle class family lived very well on one income. It did not require 2+, like it does now.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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My father was a construction worker before he met my mother. He built big things: steel bridges, steel oil storage tanks for refineries, etc. He was proud that he could point to a really big thing and say "I built that". He married at age 28, his wife was 23. They lived in a boarding house. When his wife was pregnant, he quit that job, got a job as a welder with the railroad. The reason he told me was so he could "have a life". His construction jobs were remote. Example schedule: 6 weeks working long days 7-days per week, then 2 weeks off. He would come into the city during his time off. But with the railroad he worked regular hours with evenings and weekends off, in the town of Transcona just a short drive outside the city. When his wife was in hospital to give birth to their first baby (me), a year after their wedding, he bought a 3-year-old house in a new housing development. My mother had started work at age 17, by age 22 got promoted to manager of the business office for the telephone company in they city of Brandon. They didn't have maternity leave in 1962 so she was required to resign when she got pregnant. My father was able to support a wife and 3 children on a single income. Ok, he wasn't just a welder, his title was "boiler maker" which means he was certified to weld pressure vessels. He repaired heavy equipment. But still.
I could look up the average house cost in 1962, but my point is the only difference between average house cost then and when I bought my house in 1990 is inflation. My house is small and old, it cost a lot less than the average. But using average house cost from the Winnipeg Real Estate Board, take average house cost from 1990, apply inflation, then multiply by 4.18 to get today's prices. When I say "today" I mean price for last month (November 2022). Average Canadian home in 2017 was 1,792 square feet, while in 1975 it was 1,050 square feet. My parents first house had 3 bedrooms, one bath, and 1,037 square feet. So a 70% increase in size can account for some price increase (70%), but not 4.18 times!
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This topic is off track.
I went back and looked, and I was responsible for introducing Twitter, which has nothing to do with Artemis, manned or unmanned.
http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php … 12#p204112
Because the current discussion is quite interesting, I'd like to suggest that RobertDyck and GW Johnson resume in the topic dedicated to GW Johnson. He can put anything he wants into that topic.
Let's return ** this ** topic to Artemis, and specifically to news that pertains to the upcoming (if all goes well) manned mission.
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SpaceX got a contract for a lunar lander for Artemis. Any progress? They seem to be stuck, the orbital test launch of Starship still hasn't happened.
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No as the starship BFR combination has not launched and he is too busy with his twitter mess.
Which gets us back to months and possibly a year ago we did the analyzing of the stubby legs are not able to land on the moon or mars without a landing pad created.
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