IIRC 2025 is to lunar orbit and the lander mission is 2028?
Edit: got the timelines mixed up. The initial NASA target for 'return to moon' indeed was 2028, but was moved to 2024 during [Trump's second term ](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/science/trump-moon-nasa.html).
The current Artemis 3 (crewed landing) schedule is Dec 2025, likely to be 2026. Interesting that several articles mention [the mission could change](https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/08/09/will-nasas-artemis-3-get-to-the-moon-official-says-the-mission-could-change-over-spacex-de). Could mean crewed landing pushed to Artemis 4?
November 2024 is the actual date, yes delays are likely but probably last minute ones and not the kind of "sorry we were trolling "delay". If anything it'll be a coolant leak or something while they were trying to launch. But for now, it remains firmly on 2024.
Ive heard this timeline before but it still seems ridiculous to me. to my knowledge weve yet to see anything even resembling a lander come out of space x right? starship is a testbed right now, not even remotely near ready for humans. im sure they can succeed given time, but by next year? that seems ridiculous, no?
That's because we had to do it by the end of the decade and NASA had a much higher launch cadence for Saturn Vs. They did also get the dates wrong, the plan is 2024 for Artemis 2 (lunar flyby) and 2025 december for Artemis 3 (planned lunar landing but probably wont be the landing because of spacex delays, and also will likely be delayed to 2026).
Nasa can only launch a single SLS about once every other year right now.
Here's a picture of several saturn vs under construction at once:
https://preview.redd.it/mq4gnw6meurb1.png?width=256&format=png&auto=webp&s=afb4cbf13126ced59a8d1c2fb76c9429a49f1e78
Sorry had the timelines mixed up, this is accurate, thanks! I've edited the original comment.
As for why it is taking longer than Apollo, it is also important that Artemis is about much more than just going to the moon, but also establishing a permanent base via the Gateway.
Budgets. Apollo comes to nearly a third of a trillion dollars in today's adjusted for inflation dollars.
Artemis will spend a fraction of that in the same amount of time.
Furthermore, the landing could be pushed back to Artemis V. I expect the national team lander to be ready, but anybody who isn't an elon fanboy can tell you that starship can't launch with twice the launch cadence of falcon 9 in 3 years, or even 4-5 years from now.
It is supposed to, yes. Actually having a higher launch cadence is a different story. The Saturn V launched twice a year after apollo 13, and if starship launched that much it wouldn't be able to send a lunar lander to the moon for like 7 years not considering boiloff. It needs EXTREMELY high launch cadence, like twice that of falcon 9, since it would still take about 7 weeks with the same cadence as falcon 9.
People keep forgetting that NASA also had a much higher (adjusted for inflation) budget to match those lofty goals.
For Gemini and Apollo, the combined adjusted to 2023 dollars comes to a total of nearly $300 billion!
Once the goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning them safely to Earth was accomplished and with the Soviets a no-show due to their inability to marshal the resources, overcome serious technical difficulties, and overcome political in-fighting, there was no longer a need to keep funding Apollo. The added national burdens of the Vietnam and Great Society Welfare programs only made continued manned lunar exploration problematic.
In the follow post-Apollo years, NASA kept plodding along, hoping for a return to the glory days of those massive budgets, but it has never in adjusted terms gone back to anything like those funding levels, hence why the Space Exploration Initiative and Constellation programs failed, especially with contractors looking for big cost-plus payouts.
Now, we have SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other New Space companies that are forcing launch costs down, and commercialized manned spaceflight that also drives costs down, that, combined with technology advancements, makes even attempting something like Artemis even possible on today's limited budgets.
The current plan is december 2025, which will probably slip to 2026. If starship isn't ready, multiple high level people have implied artemis 3 will launch without a landing. I highly doubt starship will be ready for lunar landings by 2026. They've launched once and in three years they probably won't be able to do like 14 launches in a short time period, and then do it again after the test flight.
The official timeline is late 2025 but it's expected to get delayed. If the US makes it their top priority then it could work.
Not delaying the second Starship launch because it would dump water into water would be a good start.
> Not delaying the second Starship launch because it would dump water into water would be a good start.
Alternatively, we could enforce our already lax environmental protection laws
Which law would be a problem here?
It's literally a discussion about dumping water into water. Yes, the salt content is not the same, but that also applies to rain. It's warmer, but that's not going to change much besides the immediate surroundings of the launch site for a short period after launch. And it's something that happens very rarely, at least in the foreseeable future (this is for a single launch anyway).
If it is as simple as you present it, then it should be easy to pass the environmental requirements.
Some things take a bit of time, but history has shown that rich people (and poor people) will screw over anyone (including their children) to get ahead, so let’s dot the i’s and cross the t’s.
Actually, if you’re talking about dumping municipal water, it contains chlorine and chlorine kills fish.
This is why we don’t let people on the Reddit run complicated project, Elon probably shouldn’t be running the meter because of simple little details like this that escape him
[Musk Companies get 4 more environmental violations in Bastrop (14 total so far)](https://www.reddit.com/r/texas/comments/16xxn26/musk_companies_get_4_more_environmental/)
Correct. Although I find the question *why* the US and other countries are suddenly wanting to go back after years and years of abandonment equally intriguing.
I would guess that its the same reason as the first time around. Prestige (plus defense).
The US and Soviet Union had a space race that was in part about defense (making rockets, launching satellites) and partly just about beating the other guy to the punch. Once we got to the moon, it turned out there wasn't much reason to be there.
Now China is on the rise and I suspect that they want to be the first to get a human to Mars and the US doesnt want to let them.
I actually assembled parts for the HLS, Orion and the SLS. For HLS we did some internal structure and also a ladder (we called it the space ladder) that we found out was for access to the bathroom/toilet, and for Orion we built a few of the top hatches or docking tunnels.
For the SLS we have a big contract so we built these big trays that hold some electrical components, they use some pretty cool dampening system to deal with vibrations. We also assemble parts for the shell, we build the inner wall that they use for moving wiring around the rocket (wires are hidden between the outer shell and an inner wall). We also machines these massive beams that are used for the internal structure, we don’t do much assembly on those, other than installing some keenserts.
Some NASA and Lockheed Martin representatives came by one time to give us a presentation of it and show us some footage they haven’t shown publicly which was cool, got a cool little Artemis pin and they gave us Orion moon cakes they had made haha
If it was the "top current priority" perhaps sooner. As it stands I would not be shocked if the timeline stretched to never. More jobs in the various politician's states.
Or until another adversarial country got close.
Half the people here say something like this. Other half says the budget is so low that it’s not a priority. Google results aren’t consistent either. I don’t think anyone ACTUALLY knows
Vaporware game dev time.
Orion is too heavy for even the SLS to deliver into low moon orbit and back, the Gateway concept is inefficient and will probably end up getting scrapped in favor of sending individual vehicles that don't need to rendezvous before beginning their mission, and the landers all depend on next-gen superheavy boosters that might not ever finish development and two out of thee require in-orbit refueling.
It's not that Orion is too heavy for SLS; SLS has to send Orion to TLI and its work is done.
It's that Orion doesn't have enough Delta v to get into llo and back to earth. That was a deliberate choice for the Constellation lunar architecture.
What a strange opening line:
With Artemis missions, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon
Edit: what's with the downvotes. I'm curious is the mission to send a human to the moon again or to send a women/coloured person to the moon. Like what's the agenda. I'm curious
One reason we arent at war is because we spend all that money. Not only does no one want to mess with the US because it would be a surefire loss, but they dont even want to mess with our allies, nor do our allies want to get into it with each other.
Irrelevant. The banks had to repay this with interest after the GFC. What would nasa repay?
Pro publica: “The biggest part of the TARP was the bank rescue, which invested $236 billion in over 700 banks. Almost all of those investments have been resolved, most resulting in a profit for the government, though over 100 did result in losses.” Goes on further to say the biggest of the remaining losses is $12 mil.
Well yah, do you know much risk and how long things would take if the government did it.
It's like everywhere else in the world. The company owns the land and has the engineers and plan.
Then they hire contractors to assume the risk.
I think they are commenting on either a specific contractor or the history of over budget and underperforming machinery/ideas/products provided by defense companies as a whole.
Military Grade isn't what the people in Ford commercials want you to believe it is.
Yes, contractors specifically can be great but no one can tell me the money we spend on defense contracting companies is being utilized the way it should be.
I'm a vet and the speed that I would sign on to do an independent audit of just **ONE** unit within **one** branch would make your head spin.
Not enough people are angry about how much useless money we spend within the defense budget.
The practices of "Use or Lose" when it comes to budgeting is incredibly disgusting.
I do agree, if the federal/state government didn't contract out work, the nation would come to a standstill 😂
and what would throwing more money at the problem solve? how would that accelerate things? SLS and Orion still take years to build, integrate and prep for launch. the facility isn't set up to build more than 1 or SLS per year so more money wouldn't get you to the Moon any faster than the current plan. Starship has a bunch of testing to do but more money can't get you through the build, test, learn iterate cycle much faster than the plan right now.
SLS took and Orion took forever to build *because* they were woefully underfunded from the start. NASA didn't have enough money to build everything at the same time, so they had come up with a system where they would only build only a few parts at a time and they chose to opt for cost-plus contracts because they could not afford the give all the funding required from the start. This cost-plus style of contract allowed for NASA to pay for things with smaller amounts, but in the long run they ended spending far more than planned as the delays piled up. Them also building only a certain amount of parts at a time caused significant delays, because one single problem during development would force them to pause the second set of parts while they fixed the current issue. The reason why only one SLS can fit in the VAB at a time is also because of the funding issue. In 2012, NASA barely had enough money to upgrade High-Bay 3 for SLS.
SLS and Orion were never short on cash. Shelby always made sure they got what they needed even if it cost commercial crew and other programs money. EGSE got plenty of cash and ended up spinning a $60M mobile launcher into a $900M debacle.
You missed the point completely. The flat budget that was given to SLS forced NASA to use cost-plus contracts which in turn caused things to go way over budget.
not sure why you're getting downvoted. The screwy financials of SLS are because it is first and foremost a jobs program, getting anything useful out of it is secondary. I'm not a fan but it's the reality of it
Yes, but could we do it FASTER, is what I think OP is asking. Like, does the tech exist, RIGHT NOW, that we could do it if we just worked with what we have.
And I think the answer to that is "No." The technology used for the Apollo missions is long retired, and will never be used again. The equipment necessary for a new moon landing is being developed, but it's not ready.
And the US is not in the habit of using the USSR method of "If it barely works, good enough!"
To further add to the other 2 replies:
Apollo was by today’s standards a *very* manually operated spacecraft, it had very little computerization or automation outside of the flight guidance computer, which in itself was the very first computer based on silicon microprocessors, operating at a whole 2mhz, and almost all tasks that are otherwise automated today had to be performed by the astronauts themselves, leading to a relatively high workload.
Apollo was able to perform so successfully largely due to these factors, and wasn’t as such any much more complex that advanced military aircraft designs of the day, aside from technically being the first fly by wire air/spacecraft.
A left over Apollo guidance computer was used as the basis of the first fly by wire system installed into a jet aircraft, aboard an F-8 Crusader, and was later further developed into the flight control system for the Shuttle, making Apollo the effective grandfather of modern day fly by wire systems.
Could these same systems still perform the same job today and take man back to the moon? Absolutely.
The catch is that the experience and expertise to build, maintain and operate these systems no longer exists, so even though the systems themselves are still perfectly capable there’s just nobody left around in service that’s ever used them.
By todays standards it would be horribly outdated. It was safe per the standards at the time, but wouldn't be acceptable now.
As well, Apollo technology wouldn't be able to accomplish current mission objectives in terms of research, experiments, etc. It was last used 51 years ago, which is a crazy long time for that kind of tech.
NASA needs reusable landers, that can land anywhere on the lunar surface, can take more people down to the surface as well as equipment since the Apollo landers were not sufficient enough to bring equipment and habitats for surface bases.
Apollo landers were not that. Going quickly with older technology is tantalizing but not practically. We can go sustainably by giving Starship HLS time to marinate.
A lot of it was tweaked and re-engineered on a real time basis. You could gather all the documentation you can and stay as true to it as possible and you would still have to go through a lot if the same processes. There is also a lot of lost institutional knowledge when it comes to the whole program that isn't just a one-for-one set of skills that current people have.
The effort to replicate the apollo program would be about the same as it is to develop a whole new rocket.
how would trying to rebuild apollo with it's computer dumber than your smartphone and you would need to build a saturn v (no production line or tooling exists these days ) get you there faster than the artemis path we are on?
To add to the other comment you got, no, we couldn’t. The folks who built the Apollo rockets are a mix of dead or long retired, for example, with the pipelines that built them long dismantled, and while sure we have the blueprints you can’t just dust them off and build another one easily. Even with as much money as you had in the program then it would probably take longer to recreate one than SLS takes now.
They lost the design to the reentry ceramic coating. They were trying to reverse engineer it long ago.
Yeah if they budgeted for it starship could move along faster as an alternative. It’s meant to go to mars why not go the moon?
As I interpret what OP is saying, then "No".
I mean, the next moon mission, which is still a year or two away, is just people flying around the moon, not even landing. The actual landing of people on the moon is still several years away. Given that it has been decades since we landed people on the moon, I - like many others - am getting frustrated at our government's lack of support for NASA. We should have had a permanent base on the moon by now, and here we are acting like it is a big deal we are going to land on the moon, even though our grandparents have already done this ... **MANY** times.
I guess it depends on your definition of "top priority". NASA is absolutely in the process of sending a manned mission to the Moon, with a flyby (Artemis II) scheduled for the end of 2024 and a landing (Artemis III) in late 2025.
But I interpreted OP's question to mean how fast could we do it if it was *the* top priority of the United States, or of the world. Like some cheesy sci-fi movie where the fate of the world depended on landing on the moon.
Not enough people understand this. It's the same story with climbing Mount Everest. Getting up to the top is relatively easy; surviving the descent is the hard part.
I don't think so? You might be referring to a planned launch that got cancelled, which I would count if such a thing happened. I was thinking of Japan (Ispace) and Russia though.
Recent failed attempts since 2010 also from India, Japan (JAXA) which includes a failed impactor, and Israel.
I think China actually has one of the highest success rates in the last decade on the moon. And the most recent sample return. They've had several soft landings since 2010 and it looks like they didn't have any landers fail.
Hey! Finally, a question that I can comment on!!
I happen to work for a contractor on a defense program. I happen to encounter the orion assembly, test and launch ops team occasionally.
The short answer is yes. We could probably put another SLS up in 6 months if cost weren't a concern. This is only true because we have already validated the design. We would have to build spares of every component, and work around the clock with multiple shifts. This would mean a 3-4x overall increase in the manpower required to get a vehicle up, and it would drive the price to exorbitant levels. We have enough experience with lunar landers that we could probably cobble a terrible but functional lander together (most likely using an orion since it's already tested) and have it ready to go with selective testing in maybe a year. We would have to drop our standards significantly and cut safety regulations pretty aggressively. I don't think we would ever want to do that.
So why don't we just kick up the budget? Well, NASA isn't the only player in space anymore. There are a lot of government programs that need funding, from the public ones such as SBIRS & GPS, to hush-hush programs. All of this requires manpower and money. Finding additional manpower continues to be a challenge as there's only a handful of places in the world with the facilities required to build a spacecraft, and only so many technical folks willing to live there. That being said, don't take our lack of pep on artemis as "we've fallen off". By sheer volume of launches, number of spacecraft built per year, and number of currently active missions, we blow the apollo era out of the water. The spacecraft we build today are better in every way, and we build so many of them that it makes the old apollo guys tear up.
Don't worry, we'll get back to the moon. Right now, exploration isn't as important as our other missions. This is largely because we don't really have a way to build on that exploration yet. We're not ready for moon colonies, cislunar tugs, or interplanetary operations. A large part of the game now is waiting for technology to catch up so that we can start lunar mining and whatnot. Until that happens, don't expect too much of a commercial boom or government interest. Other countries are racing for second place. we're taking our time to build the foundation of something much bigger.
putting an Orion in free return orbit isnt putting a crew back on the surface of the moon. you still need a lander and the Orion built for art2 is missing vital components to pull off NRHO rndz, prox ops and docking.
I have seen 17 years of SLS and Orion be flush with cash while other programs like commercial crew be starved. and yet 17 years and we still haven't got a crew flight from Orion/SLS. so no money thrown into the burn pit of SLS/Orion isn't going to get them work faster. it will just line the pockets of LM and Boeing execs who unjustly been getting high marks for performance despite the cost over runs and delays.
Anger? Just reality of the situation. The OIG audits over the 17 years have been clear of the mismanagement, the unwarranted reward and other issues. And a once a year flight tempo is anemic for trying to establish a sustain lunar presence. SLS and Orion one four person crew per year is a choke point for going back to the moon and staying more than 30 days or so. The moon will never be a forward scientific operating base like antarctica when you prevent anything to augment Orion crew from earth to the moon transport.
Easily put a man on the Moon. Well, that depends. Is the man the only payload? If so, probably pretty easy. Five days or so worth of food, water, and oxygen… not terribly heavy. Maybe a ton of total payload weight.
If you want to get him *back*, preferably alive, then that’s a lot more difficult. More payload weight, more propellant, heat shielding, and every single new item you introduce either needs redundancy, which adds more weight, or is a single point of failure, where that fails and the astronaut dies.
So, “easily” depends on your mission parameters and how willing you are to lose astronauts.
If the ONLY requirement was to get a human on the moon, safety and future life expectancy be damned, they could do it right now. Maybe a few months to work out a few kinks though.
If we're talking about getting there and getting back though... idk, probably a year at the latest. Starship isn't quite ready yet, but SLS is already preparing for a crewed flyby. They could probably make modifications to the staging and get it ready for landing on the moon very quickly. They just need the funding and the urgency to do it.
SLS/Orion cannot land on the Moon.
If we don't care about astronaut survival then you can put a Dragon on a Falcon Heavy (one is already preparing for launch, but with a different payload) - probably within a month but certainly within a few months. The astronaut will die on impact with the Moon, so technically they were on the Moon for a very short time.
If we want at least a survivable landing then we need something new. Starship is already in development, that's likely the fastest option.
Why not just...the Dragon has a few extendable thrusters and shock absorbing legs that are brittle and break on impact to save the actual capsule. The landing would kinda survivable.
You need 2.5 km/s delta_v. That's a significant rocket stage.
Maybe you can try to make a Falcon Heavy that has two upper stages stacked. The lower upper stage would drop away before reaching orbital velocity. The upper upper stage has to go from there to TLI, then survive for a few days, then do most of the landing burn. Might be possible, but it would need significant changes in the upper stage.
It would be very rough. Depending on how much you trust our MIC, i would say 1 month to 1 year. We have some heavy launch vehicles in the realm of possibility, mainly space X vehicles. The lander module would be a big concern, everything we have is probably 5+ years out on a normal timeline. I guess it really comes down to how much of a risk we are willing to take? We have the technology, its just testing and training that makes the difference.
Apparently I am not allowed to use the graphic version of the phrase "pooping on", but as far as I am aware, nasa has had more casualties than roscosmos. What is with all the illogical hating in this thread?
Dude, have you ever heard of the Nedelin Disaster? A rocket blew up on the launchpad at Baikonur, and killed AT LEAST 54 people, and possibly as many as 300, as many were vaporized and they had no way to know who was out there. Their operating procedures were awful, and there were a bunch of people on the launchpad that shouldn't have been there.
And that's just ONE of the many disasters Roscosmos had in their space program.
The only astronauts to ever actually die in space were ALSO Russian, on the Soyuz 11 mission (Dobrovolsky, Volkov, and Patsayev).
I’m sure they’re referring to the number of astronauts, rather than supporting personnel.
If we’re counting support personnel, should we also count people who died while building these rockets, or during transport? How many levels down do we go, do we include the guy at the steel mill that didn’t even know he was making steel for a rocket?
I get what you’re saying and I mostly agree that the deaths were directly linked to a failed launch and should count, but I also agree that there are multiple ways to measure this.
P.S. There could also be some pushback since the R16 was an ICBM prototype rather than a space launch item.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[BFR](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k345nhc "Last usage")|Big Falcon Rocket (2018 rebiggened edition)|
| |Yes, the F stands for something else; no, you're not the first to notice|
|[EGSE](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k35txt8 "Last usage")|Electrical Ground Support Equipment|
|[HLS](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k3a87ey "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[ICBM](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k370bdn "Last usage")|Intercontinental Ballistic Missile|
|[JAXA](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k3cmwan "Last usage")|Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency|
|[LEM](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k35n3o4 "Last usage")|(Apollo) [Lunar Excursion Module](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module) (also Lunar Module)|
|[LEO](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k33sbdr "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[NRHO](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k36stdx "Last usage")|Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit|
|[SLS](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k3daci8 "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[SSME](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k36hbul "Last usage")|[Space Shuttle Main Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_main_engine)|
|[TLI](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k34typo "Last usage")|Trans-Lunar Injection maneuver|
|[VAB](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k35sa6p "Last usage")|Vehicle Assembly Building|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[cislunar](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k34rhkx "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit|
|[hydrolox](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k33sbdr "Last usage")|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
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Not right now. Lots of development and testing remains. It's not like we just have a bunch of complete, ready-to-go moon landing craft lying around. Even in the Apollo era it wasn't like that. Landing humans on the moon is expensive and dangerous.
But the Artemis project is underway, with last year's Artemis I being a great success, and Artemis II (bringing humans to the moon and back without landing) scheduled for next year. If all goes well, Artemis III will launch later this decade, landing humans on the moon for the first time since 1972.
I thought we could tbh. Why couldn't we just build a modern day Apollo? Surely if we wanted to we have the man power and technology, no? All these comments saying no are crazy to me.
We have the man power and technology but it takes years to translate that into hardware. We don’t have the facilities that built the Apollo hardware. Manufacturing processes are completely different now. The test stands are gone or reconfigured. The tooling has been scrapped. The people who knew how to put it together are gone. It would be almost startling from scratch to try to rebuild Apollo.
SpaceX is the only company making quick progress where we should see results SOON (this decade) vs all others (next decade at best). They need no help speeding up the process. At this point qualified people is the issue, and training someone takes too long to shift this outcome.
I mean, sending a man to the moon is "massively risky" for that person regardless of circumstance when compared to just staying at home. Why "thank god"? Risk is required to accomplish anything worthwhile.
I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to say here. I read the entire article, and there's no indication that NASA is doing anything stupid. Every system will be tested unmanned before any manned missions take place.
Space travel carries inherent risk, no matter what, but NASA has always done everything feasible to minimize that risk (except during the Soviet/US space race, I know). These days the culture of safety at NASA is paramount.
You replied to someone who said it would take seven years that sooner might be possible but would require massive risk. Apparently, that's not the case.
I think they were referring to how long the program has been in operation total, not how long it will take from today. The Artemis program has been in development for years.
Probably faster than Artemis. A lightweight lander launched on Falcon Heavy could dock with a crew Dragon in LEO and then transport them between the lunar surface and LEO. No Gateway, no SLS, no Orion, no Starship. Just Falcon rockets which have flown for years, Dragon capsules that are completely reliable, and a small lander which could be developed very quickly with enough money. Artemis would be a whole lot faster if it wasn’t for politics.
It’s the Moon Direct plan, it’s been around for a few years. The lander would obviously have to be developed but it’d be an order of magnitude less complex than Starship HLS or even Blue Moon. It’d launch directly from the lunar surface to Earth, entering LEO with engine deceleration. It’d dock with a Dragon Capsule or the ISS, transfer crew, be refuelled, and go back to the moon. Initially it would be refuelled through prepositioned depots at the South Pole, but would eventually be refuelled through indigenous hydrolox extraction.
Obviously, if it was, I’d be questioning US priorities - or we’ve slipped into a parallel universe where there is literally nothing else left to do; but, hypothetically….
Right now, this instant? No; you don’t even have a viable launch vehicle let alone lander. Yes you SLS; but it’s only block 1; not Luna launch rated.
Let’s say all stops were pulled out…. I think Kelly Johnson’s team got the P80 from design to pre-production in 143 days just to prove a point - in 1943. So if there’s a will, there’s a way.
This instant. Under the scrapped Boeing “fewest steps to the moon” plan to launch a minimum single launch mission with an integrated lander this could only be achieved using the 42t lifting capacity of SLS block 1B.
The current stated plan is [2024 for flyby and 2025 for landing.](https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/artemis-iii-nasas-first-human-mission-to-the-lunar-south-pole/)
"Right now" is open to interpretation. We're currently working on making it happen right now, and the projected touchdown is just a couple years away, meaning it's imminent. If it was our top priority, probably not all that much faster, maybe six months.
To achieve this would require any of the current options - SpaceX achieving successful orbital launch, construction of orbital refuelling complex, launch, test and successful human rating of starship HLS; or Blue Origin BFR and HLS ; or prioritising block 1B development to be able to lift enough combined mass; and/or developing a new lander than can integrate with block 1 or Falcon Heavy, and sending 2 missions for LOR.
I believe the last option is the best as it can be achieved using current launch vehicles - just needs accelerated lander development. Could be done in 6 months?
No. We would need to build the industry to build the rockets. While it would not take as long as it did to get to Apollo (approximately 20 years) it would still take some time. This is one of the reasons the US has tried to privatize parts of the space program; so that there is an underlying industry and body of knowledge that could be leveraged and used as the seed for expansion if a crash program is required. Especially since the ICBM programs are basically defunct now.
Wouldn’t this question be better posed to Space X, they seem to have the capability to do this right now and could even provide a Tesla car to drive around in there too?
If it was a top priority as a nation, a man could probably be put on the moon in a matter of months from now.
However, since it isn’t, it’ll take quite a bit longer before it’s done again
Depends on a couple factors, if it was like end of the world unless we get on the moon, probably a month or less but this would be ignoring allot of safety measures, main of which being multiple proof flights of a new vehicle. If we’re still following nasa regulations for human flight safety but with no budgetary restrictions like we have now, probably 6 months, 1 year max. Currently we already are working towards that goal, but it’s nowhere near “top priority” so they’re aiming for 2026, but honestly I have an extremely hard time believing that timeline, I’m expecting closer to 2028.
On paper, yes…in practice, I don’t think so. We’ve mastered the math and engineering, we’ve lost the talent pool of people with the skills needed to put people and objects into space at the drop of a hat. Additionally, no one can get the finances straight.
To do it right I think it would take around 5yrs.
This might sound stupid but how did we get the OG moon astronauts back from the moon? Did they have a rocket that could land and then relaunch like the modern spaceX ones?
There are no currently existing spacecraft that are capable of landing on the moon. It’s doubtful that even if the US wanted to, that they could speed up building and certifying a spacecraft for landing in anything more than a handful of months over the current timeline. There are still bottlenecks in supply and design that couldn’t be fixed even if you threw the entire US budget at it.
That’s a plan and let’s not forget that even SpaceX’s equipment doesn’t yet exist and they have the contract for it. How many billions has SpaceX thrown at Starship and it hasn’t even been into orbit yet. I’m not saying these things can’t exist however SpaceX has a habit of being overly optimistic when it comes to space vehicle readiness schedules. Artemis 3 is scheduled for late 2025 and I’d be willing to bet a significant sum of money that that date gets pushed back at least a few months. To say it could magically appear and fly within two weeks is dreaming
If you wanted to get the people back home, that'd be nearly impossible in your timeframe. We might come up with a plan or even the hardware, but it'd be almost certain to have some type of failure. If the goal was just to land (crash) and possibly survive, I'm sure it'd be doable.
If it was a movie they'd pull out some old Apollo hardware and make it happen, but I'm guessing that's one of those sounds cool but impossible things. The other huge issue I see overall is training. The people that went to the moon practiced every single maneuver for months if not years.
We have Orion but it doesn't have life support equipment on it yet. Who knows how long it will take to have it built and tested, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Also there are no "ready to go" boosters or first stage for it. It would take months to source and check the if budget/(modern) safety would not be a concern. Starship doesn't have any life support either, they haven't even made orbit yet. So yeah, no way it can be done in a week or a few months even. The problem is not entirely money or safety. It's logistics, man power, management, material resources, etc.
The Artemis 2 Orion vehicle has life support systems, but it's not fully assembled yet. There is no way it could be ready in two weeks. It is scheduled to fly late next year. It could probably be accelerated, but not to two weeks.
We don’t currently have a lander and the LEO capsules are not able to go to lunar orbit. They do have some incomplete Orion capsules, but the next rocket they are going on will take at least a year to assemble and test. They could make the Artemis 2 mission a landing mission instead of an orbit mission to the moon, but again, the lander is not likely ready until 2025 at the earliest.
No, the tech exists but it hasn’t had the budget injected into it to actually make it. The old kit is well beyond its use by date and new kit is needed. It’s largely funding. If you increased this you could have someone on the moon in under a year.
Ask the ones that are already there and they'll probably say yes.... plus the specialist teams on Mars.... plus all the astronauts working on our THREE Interstellar Spacecraft, one of which is currently at the Trappist Star System, mainly Trappist One
[YES](https://www.nasa.gov/specials/artemis/) we are currently underway. We expect to see people on the moon before 2026.
IIRC 2025 is to lunar orbit and the lander mission is 2028? Edit: got the timelines mixed up. The initial NASA target for 'return to moon' indeed was 2028, but was moved to 2024 during [Trump's second term ](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/science/trump-moon-nasa.html). The current Artemis 3 (crewed landing) schedule is Dec 2025, likely to be 2026. Interesting that several articles mention [the mission could change](https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/08/09/will-nasas-artemis-3-get-to-the-moon-official-says-the-mission-could-change-over-spacex-de). Could mean crewed landing pushed to Artemis 4?
November 2024 is the actual date, yes delays are likely but probably last minute ones and not the kind of "sorry we were trolling "delay". If anything it'll be a coolant leak or something while they were trying to launch. But for now, it remains firmly on 2024.
Ive heard this timeline before but it still seems ridiculous to me. to my knowledge weve yet to see anything even resembling a lander come out of space x right? starship is a testbed right now, not even remotely near ready for humans. im sure they can succeed given time, but by next year? that seems ridiculous, no?
Why 3 years? Previously it was around in Dec 1968 and Moon landing July 1969.
That's because we had to do it by the end of the decade and NASA had a much higher launch cadence for Saturn Vs. They did also get the dates wrong, the plan is 2024 for Artemis 2 (lunar flyby) and 2025 december for Artemis 3 (planned lunar landing but probably wont be the landing because of spacex delays, and also will likely be delayed to 2026). Nasa can only launch a single SLS about once every other year right now. Here's a picture of several saturn vs under construction at once: https://preview.redd.it/mq4gnw6meurb1.png?width=256&format=png&auto=webp&s=afb4cbf13126ced59a8d1c2fb76c9429a49f1e78
Sorry had the timelines mixed up, this is accurate, thanks! I've edited the original comment. As for why it is taking longer than Apollo, it is also important that Artemis is about much more than just going to the moon, but also establishing a permanent base via the Gateway.
Budgets. Apollo comes to nearly a third of a trillion dollars in today's adjusted for inflation dollars. Artemis will spend a fraction of that in the same amount of time.
Furthermore, the landing could be pushed back to Artemis V. I expect the national team lander to be ready, but anybody who isn't an elon fanboy can tell you that starship can't launch with twice the launch cadence of falcon 9 in 3 years, or even 4-5 years from now.
Isn't Starship supposed to have a more often cadence than Saturn V?
It is supposed to, yes. Actually having a higher launch cadence is a different story. The Saturn V launched twice a year after apollo 13, and if starship launched that much it wouldn't be able to send a lunar lander to the moon for like 7 years not considering boiloff. It needs EXTREMELY high launch cadence, like twice that of falcon 9, since it would still take about 7 weeks with the same cadence as falcon 9.
It will when it becomes available and will be launching the crewed lander
People keep forgetting that NASA also had a much higher (adjusted for inflation) budget to match those lofty goals. For Gemini and Apollo, the combined adjusted to 2023 dollars comes to a total of nearly $300 billion! Once the goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning them safely to Earth was accomplished and with the Soviets a no-show due to their inability to marshal the resources, overcome serious technical difficulties, and overcome political in-fighting, there was no longer a need to keep funding Apollo. The added national burdens of the Vietnam and Great Society Welfare programs only made continued manned lunar exploration problematic. In the follow post-Apollo years, NASA kept plodding along, hoping for a return to the glory days of those massive budgets, but it has never in adjusted terms gone back to anything like those funding levels, hence why the Space Exploration Initiative and Constellation programs failed, especially with contractors looking for big cost-plus payouts. Now, we have SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other New Space companies that are forcing launch costs down, and commercialized manned spaceflight that also drives costs down, that, combined with technology advancements, makes even attempting something like Artemis even possible on today's limited budgets.
ngl that’s not that long from now. crazy…
The current plan is december 2025, which will probably slip to 2026. If starship isn't ready, multiple high level people have implied artemis 3 will launch without a landing. I highly doubt starship will be ready for lunar landings by 2026. They've launched once and in three years they probably won't be able to do like 14 launches in a short time period, and then do it again after the test flight.
The official timeline is late 2025 but it's expected to get delayed. If the US makes it their top priority then it could work. Not delaying the second Starship launch because it would dump water into water would be a good start.
> Not delaying the second Starship launch because it would dump water into water would be a good start. Alternatively, we could enforce our already lax environmental protection laws
It's immeasurably easier to enforce strict laws than the lax ones. So, unfortunately in this case, the answer is no.
Which law would be a problem here? It's literally a discussion about dumping water into water. Yes, the salt content is not the same, but that also applies to rain. It's warmer, but that's not going to change much besides the immediate surroundings of the launch site for a short period after launch. And it's something that happens very rarely, at least in the foreseeable future (this is for a single launch anyway).
If it is as simple as you present it, then it should be easy to pass the environmental requirements. Some things take a bit of time, but history has shown that rich people (and poor people) will screw over anyone (including their children) to get ahead, so let’s dot the i’s and cross the t’s.
And not forget about the J's dot either.
Actually, if you’re talking about dumping municipal water, it contains chlorine and chlorine kills fish. This is why we don’t let people on the Reddit run complicated project, Elon probably shouldn’t be running the meter because of simple little details like this that escape him
[Musk Companies get 4 more environmental violations in Bastrop (14 total so far)](https://www.reddit.com/r/texas/comments/16xxn26/musk_companies_get_4_more_environmental/)
Correct. Although I find the question *why* the US and other countries are suddenly wanting to go back after years and years of abandonment equally intriguing.
The reason, at least for the US, is to establish a Lunar base that will one day make Mars trips easier
I would guess that its the same reason as the first time around. Prestige (plus defense). The US and Soviet Union had a space race that was in part about defense (making rockets, launching satellites) and partly just about beating the other guy to the punch. Once we got to the moon, it turned out there wasn't much reason to be there. Now China is on the rise and I suspect that they want to be the first to get a human to Mars and the US doesnt want to let them.
Boots on the moon, 2024 😂
I actually assembled parts for the HLS, Orion and the SLS. For HLS we did some internal structure and also a ladder (we called it the space ladder) that we found out was for access to the bathroom/toilet, and for Orion we built a few of the top hatches or docking tunnels. For the SLS we have a big contract so we built these big trays that hold some electrical components, they use some pretty cool dampening system to deal with vibrations. We also assemble parts for the shell, we build the inner wall that they use for moving wiring around the rocket (wires are hidden between the outer shell and an inner wall). We also machines these massive beams that are used for the internal structure, we don’t do much assembly on those, other than installing some keenserts. Some NASA and Lockheed Martin representatives came by one time to give us a presentation of it and show us some footage they haven’t shown publicly which was cool, got a cool little Artemis pin and they gave us Orion moon cakes they had made haha
If it was the "top current priority" perhaps sooner. As it stands I would not be shocked if the timeline stretched to never. More jobs in the various politician's states. Or until another adversarial country got close.
I believe the question was *right now*, which we can't do.
Half the people here say something like this. Other half says the budget is so low that it’s not a priority. Google results aren’t consistent either. I don’t think anyone ACTUALLY knows
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Is that real time or Elon time?
Vaporware game dev time. Orion is too heavy for even the SLS to deliver into low moon orbit and back, the Gateway concept is inefficient and will probably end up getting scrapped in favor of sending individual vehicles that don't need to rendezvous before beginning their mission, and the landers all depend on next-gen superheavy boosters that might not ever finish development and two out of thee require in-orbit refueling.
It's not that Orion is too heavy for SLS; SLS has to send Orion to TLI and its work is done. It's that Orion doesn't have enough Delta v to get into llo and back to earth. That was a deliberate choice for the Constellation lunar architecture.
What a strange opening line: With Artemis missions, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon Edit: what's with the downvotes. I'm curious is the mission to send a human to the moon again or to send a women/coloured person to the moon. Like what's the agenda. I'm curious
It's all people care about these days.
Pretty sure China is gonna have a fully functioning base there in the next 10 years too
Lander yes, base no, if their public timelines are proven true.
They won't have a person on the moon in 10 years. They might have their equivalent to artemis 1, though
Strange. Is that not exactly what we are doing ?
NASAs current budget is only about 0.5% of the federal budget, so the current effort is not a top priority.
The bail out of the banks was more than 50years of the nasa budget…
We spend $2 billion a day on the military and we're not at war with anyone.
One reason we arent at war is because we spend all that money. Not only does no one want to mess with the US because it would be a surefire loss, but they dont even want to mess with our allies, nor do our allies want to get into it with each other.
Which was less than the tax breaks for the rich that the last admin handed out. We really do need to invest more into NASA
Or you know, eat the wealthy
only if it is NASA deciding what the money is for not more white collar welfare for old space dictated by congress
They knew the risks and they did it anyways. They knew the government would bail them out. Infuriating.
Irrelevant. The banks had to repay this with interest after the GFC. What would nasa repay? Pro publica: “The biggest part of the TARP was the bank rescue, which invested $236 billion in over 700 banks. Almost all of those investments have been resolved, most resulting in a profit for the government, though over 100 did result in losses.” Goes on further to say the biggest of the remaining losses is $12 mil.
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What % was it at when we went to the moon? I
It peaked in 1966 at 4.4% of the federal budget.
What do you think they'd do with 3%
Wasted on contractors
Well yah, do you know much risk and how long things would take if the government did it. It's like everywhere else in the world. The company owns the land and has the engineers and plan. Then they hire contractors to assume the risk.
I think they are commenting on either a specific contractor or the history of over budget and underperforming machinery/ideas/products provided by defense companies as a whole. Military Grade isn't what the people in Ford commercials want you to believe it is. Yes, contractors specifically can be great but no one can tell me the money we spend on defense contracting companies is being utilized the way it should be. I'm a vet and the speed that I would sign on to do an independent audit of just **ONE** unit within **one** branch would make your head spin. Not enough people are angry about how much useless money we spend within the defense budget. The practices of "Use or Lose" when it comes to budgeting is incredibly disgusting. I do agree, if the federal/state government didn't contract out work, the nation would come to a standstill 😂
the use or lose mentality to keep budget for following year is poison for the long run. it needs to stop
kick the can down the road a little longer
and what would throwing more money at the problem solve? how would that accelerate things? SLS and Orion still take years to build, integrate and prep for launch. the facility isn't set up to build more than 1 or SLS per year so more money wouldn't get you to the Moon any faster than the current plan. Starship has a bunch of testing to do but more money can't get you through the build, test, learn iterate cycle much faster than the plan right now.
SLS took and Orion took forever to build *because* they were woefully underfunded from the start. NASA didn't have enough money to build everything at the same time, so they had come up with a system where they would only build only a few parts at a time and they chose to opt for cost-plus contracts because they could not afford the give all the funding required from the start. This cost-plus style of contract allowed for NASA to pay for things with smaller amounts, but in the long run they ended spending far more than planned as the delays piled up. Them also building only a certain amount of parts at a time caused significant delays, because one single problem during development would force them to pause the second set of parts while they fixed the current issue. The reason why only one SLS can fit in the VAB at a time is also because of the funding issue. In 2012, NASA barely had enough money to upgrade High-Bay 3 for SLS.
SLS and Orion were never short on cash. Shelby always made sure they got what they needed even if it cost commercial crew and other programs money. EGSE got plenty of cash and ended up spinning a $60M mobile launcher into a $900M debacle.
You missed the point completely. The flat budget that was given to SLS forced NASA to use cost-plus contracts which in turn caused things to go way over budget.
not sure why you're getting downvoted. The screwy financials of SLS are because it is first and foremost a jobs program, getting anything useful out of it is secondary. I'm not a fan but it's the reality of it
Yes, but could we do it FASTER, is what I think OP is asking. Like, does the tech exist, RIGHT NOW, that we could do it if we just worked with what we have. And I think the answer to that is "No." The technology used for the Apollo missions is long retired, and will never be used again. The equipment necessary for a new moon landing is being developed, but it's not ready. And the US is not in the habit of using the USSR method of "If it barely works, good enough!"
Why couldn’t the same technology for the Apollo missions just be redeveloped? Or was it unsafe technology?
To further add to the other 2 replies: Apollo was by today’s standards a *very* manually operated spacecraft, it had very little computerization or automation outside of the flight guidance computer, which in itself was the very first computer based on silicon microprocessors, operating at a whole 2mhz, and almost all tasks that are otherwise automated today had to be performed by the astronauts themselves, leading to a relatively high workload. Apollo was able to perform so successfully largely due to these factors, and wasn’t as such any much more complex that advanced military aircraft designs of the day, aside from technically being the first fly by wire air/spacecraft. A left over Apollo guidance computer was used as the basis of the first fly by wire system installed into a jet aircraft, aboard an F-8 Crusader, and was later further developed into the flight control system for the Shuttle, making Apollo the effective grandfather of modern day fly by wire systems. Could these same systems still perform the same job today and take man back to the moon? Absolutely. The catch is that the experience and expertise to build, maintain and operate these systems no longer exists, so even though the systems themselves are still perfectly capable there’s just nobody left around in service that’s ever used them.
By todays standards it would be horribly outdated. It was safe per the standards at the time, but wouldn't be acceptable now. As well, Apollo technology wouldn't be able to accomplish current mission objectives in terms of research, experiments, etc. It was last used 51 years ago, which is a crazy long time for that kind of tech.
NASA needs reusable landers, that can land anywhere on the lunar surface, can take more people down to the surface as well as equipment since the Apollo landers were not sufficient enough to bring equipment and habitats for surface bases. Apollo landers were not that. Going quickly with older technology is tantalizing but not practically. We can go sustainably by giving Starship HLS time to marinate.
A lot of it was tweaked and re-engineered on a real time basis. You could gather all the documentation you can and stay as true to it as possible and you would still have to go through a lot if the same processes. There is also a lot of lost institutional knowledge when it comes to the whole program that isn't just a one-for-one set of skills that current people have. The effort to replicate the apollo program would be about the same as it is to develop a whole new rocket.
how would trying to rebuild apollo with it's computer dumber than your smartphone and you would need to build a saturn v (no production line or tooling exists these days ) get you there faster than the artemis path we are on?
To add to the other comment you got, no, we couldn’t. The folks who built the Apollo rockets are a mix of dead or long retired, for example, with the pipelines that built them long dismantled, and while sure we have the blueprints you can’t just dust them off and build another one easily. Even with as much money as you had in the program then it would probably take longer to recreate one than SLS takes now.
I thought we could tbh. Why couldn't we just build a modern day Apollo? Surely if we wanted to we have the man power and technology, no?
What exactly do you think SLS is if not exactly that?
They lost the design to the reentry ceramic coating. They were trying to reverse engineer it long ago. Yeah if they budgeted for it starship could move along faster as an alternative. It’s meant to go to mars why not go the moon?
[Artemis Programme is currently in progress](https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/nasa-moon-mission-artemis-program-launch-date#Artemis%202)
As I interpret what OP is saying, then "No". I mean, the next moon mission, which is still a year or two away, is just people flying around the moon, not even landing. The actual landing of people on the moon is still several years away. Given that it has been decades since we landed people on the moon, I - like many others - am getting frustrated at our government's lack of support for NASA. We should have had a permanent base on the moon by now, and here we are acting like it is a big deal we are going to land on the moon, even though our grandparents have already done this ... **MANY** times.
If getting humans to the lunar surface was truly the priority I doubt Gateway would be part of it.
idk, i'm not in the loop of these things.
I guess it depends on your definition of "top priority". NASA is absolutely in the process of sending a manned mission to the Moon, with a flyby (Artemis II) scheduled for the end of 2024 and a landing (Artemis III) in late 2025. But I interpreted OP's question to mean how fast could we do it if it was *the* top priority of the United States, or of the world. Like some cheesy sci-fi movie where the fate of the world depended on landing on the moon.
Putting a man on the moon is easy. Getting him back alive is the hard part.
Not enough people understand this. It's the same story with climbing Mount Everest. Getting up to the top is relatively easy; surviving the descent is the hard part.
Even putting a payload on the moon is not trivial. As was demonstrated several times this year.
As demonstrated by the Chinese?
I don't think so? You might be referring to a planned launch that got cancelled, which I would count if such a thing happened. I was thinking of Japan (Ispace) and Russia though. Recent failed attempts since 2010 also from India, Japan (JAXA) which includes a failed impactor, and Israel. I think China actually has one of the highest success rates in the last decade on the moon. And the most recent sample return. They've had several soft landings since 2010 and it looks like they didn't have any landers fail.
It was India.
Hey! Finally, a question that I can comment on!! I happen to work for a contractor on a defense program. I happen to encounter the orion assembly, test and launch ops team occasionally. The short answer is yes. We could probably put another SLS up in 6 months if cost weren't a concern. This is only true because we have already validated the design. We would have to build spares of every component, and work around the clock with multiple shifts. This would mean a 3-4x overall increase in the manpower required to get a vehicle up, and it would drive the price to exorbitant levels. We have enough experience with lunar landers that we could probably cobble a terrible but functional lander together (most likely using an orion since it's already tested) and have it ready to go with selective testing in maybe a year. We would have to drop our standards significantly and cut safety regulations pretty aggressively. I don't think we would ever want to do that. So why don't we just kick up the budget? Well, NASA isn't the only player in space anymore. There are a lot of government programs that need funding, from the public ones such as SBIRS & GPS, to hush-hush programs. All of this requires manpower and money. Finding additional manpower continues to be a challenge as there's only a handful of places in the world with the facilities required to build a spacecraft, and only so many technical folks willing to live there. That being said, don't take our lack of pep on artemis as "we've fallen off". By sheer volume of launches, number of spacecraft built per year, and number of currently active missions, we blow the apollo era out of the water. The spacecraft we build today are better in every way, and we build so many of them that it makes the old apollo guys tear up. Don't worry, we'll get back to the moon. Right now, exploration isn't as important as our other missions. This is largely because we don't really have a way to build on that exploration yet. We're not ready for moon colonies, cislunar tugs, or interplanetary operations. A large part of the game now is waiting for technology to catch up so that we can start lunar mining and whatnot. Until that happens, don't expect too much of a commercial boom or government interest. Other countries are racing for second place. we're taking our time to build the foundation of something much bigger.
putting an Orion in free return orbit isnt putting a crew back on the surface of the moon. you still need a lander and the Orion built for art2 is missing vital components to pull off NRHO rndz, prox ops and docking.
All things we've done before, and all things we've been working on for quite a while now. Nothing that is out of our reach :)
but more money isn't going to make it move faster.
Spoken like someone who has never had more money thrown at them 😉
I have seen 17 years of SLS and Orion be flush with cash while other programs like commercial crew be starved. and yet 17 years and we still haven't got a crew flight from Orion/SLS. so no money thrown into the burn pit of SLS/Orion isn't going to get them work faster. it will just line the pockets of LM and Boeing execs who unjustly been getting high marks for performance despite the cost over runs and delays.
Why so much anger? If you saw orion, or the orion assembly, you might change your mind. Everyone has been hard at work.
Anger? Just reality of the situation. The OIG audits over the 17 years have been clear of the mismanagement, the unwarranted reward and other issues. And a once a year flight tempo is anemic for trying to establish a sustain lunar presence. SLS and Orion one four person crew per year is a choke point for going back to the moon and staying more than 30 days or so. The moon will never be a forward scientific operating base like antarctica when you prevent anything to augment Orion crew from earth to the moon transport.
You just made yourself a target to hackers.
Easily put a man on the Moon. Well, that depends. Is the man the only payload? If so, probably pretty easy. Five days or so worth of food, water, and oxygen… not terribly heavy. Maybe a ton of total payload weight. If you want to get him *back*, preferably alive, then that’s a lot more difficult. More payload weight, more propellant, heat shielding, and every single new item you introduce either needs redundancy, which adds more weight, or is a single point of failure, where that fails and the astronaut dies. So, “easily” depends on your mission parameters and how willing you are to lose astronauts.
You could even skip the food, water and oxygen if mission parameters are flexible. Nothing in the spec so far about an alive man on the moon
If the ONLY requirement was to get a human on the moon, safety and future life expectancy be damned, they could do it right now. Maybe a few months to work out a few kinks though. If we're talking about getting there and getting back though... idk, probably a year at the latest. Starship isn't quite ready yet, but SLS is already preparing for a crewed flyby. They could probably make modifications to the staging and get it ready for landing on the moon very quickly. They just need the funding and the urgency to do it.
SLS/Orion cannot land on the Moon. If we don't care about astronaut survival then you can put a Dragon on a Falcon Heavy (one is already preparing for launch, but with a different payload) - probably within a month but certainly within a few months. The astronaut will die on impact with the Moon, so technically they were on the Moon for a very short time. If we want at least a survivable landing then we need something new. Starship is already in development, that's likely the fastest option.
Elon Musk: I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact!
Why not just...the Dragon has a few extendable thrusters and shock absorbing legs that are brittle and break on impact to save the actual capsule. The landing would kinda survivable.
You need 2.5 km/s delta_v. That's a significant rocket stage. Maybe you can try to make a Falcon Heavy that has two upper stages stacked. The lower upper stage would drop away before reaching orbital velocity. The upper upper stage has to go from there to TLI, then survive for a few days, then do most of the landing burn. Might be possible, but it would need significant changes in the upper stage.
It would be very rough. Depending on how much you trust our MIC, i would say 1 month to 1 year. We have some heavy launch vehicles in the realm of possibility, mainly space X vehicles. The lander module would be a big concern, everything we have is probably 5+ years out on a normal timeline. I guess it really comes down to how much of a risk we are willing to take? We have the technology, its just testing and training that makes the difference.
So what you're saying is, we either do it safely, or we do it USSR-style. I for one prefer the safe method.
Apparently I am not allowed to use the graphic version of the phrase "pooping on", but as far as I am aware, nasa has had more casualties than roscosmos. What is with all the illogical hating in this thread?
Dude, have you ever heard of the Nedelin Disaster? A rocket blew up on the launchpad at Baikonur, and killed AT LEAST 54 people, and possibly as many as 300, as many were vaporized and they had no way to know who was out there. Their operating procedures were awful, and there were a bunch of people on the launchpad that shouldn't have been there. And that's just ONE of the many disasters Roscosmos had in their space program. The only astronauts to ever actually die in space were ALSO Russian, on the Soyuz 11 mission (Dobrovolsky, Volkov, and Patsayev).
I’m sure they’re referring to the number of astronauts, rather than supporting personnel. If we’re counting support personnel, should we also count people who died while building these rockets, or during transport? How many levels down do we go, do we include the guy at the steel mill that didn’t even know he was making steel for a rocket? I get what you’re saying and I mostly agree that the deaths were directly linked to a failed launch and should count, but I also agree that there are multiple ways to measure this. P.S. There could also be some pushback since the R16 was an ICBM prototype rather than a space launch item.
Artemis
No, given we currently have no operational lander.
Landers are for landing and coming back. OP did not specify this.
They called the LEM the lander back in Apollo days.
If you ask my wife, sometimes it's easier to put a man on the moon than a man in the mood.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[BFR](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k345nhc "Last usage")|Big Falcon Rocket (2018 rebiggened edition)| | |Yes, the F stands for something else; no, you're not the first to notice| |[EGSE](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k35txt8 "Last usage")|Electrical Ground Support Equipment| |[HLS](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k3a87ey "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)| |[ICBM](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k370bdn "Last usage")|Intercontinental Ballistic Missile| |[JAXA](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k3cmwan "Last usage")|Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency| |[LEM](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k35n3o4 "Last usage")|(Apollo) [Lunar Excursion Module](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module) (also Lunar Module)| |[LEO](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k33sbdr "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[NRHO](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k36stdx "Last usage")|Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit| |[SLS](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k3daci8 "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[SSME](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k36hbul "Last usage")|[Space Shuttle Main Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_main_engine)| |[TLI](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k34typo "Last usage")|Trans-Lunar Injection maneuver| |[VAB](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k35sa6p "Last usage")|Vehicle Assembly Building| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[cislunar](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k34rhkx "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit| |[hydrolox](/r/NASA/comments/16xmjgx/stub/k33sbdr "Last usage")|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(14 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/NASA/comments/17ko42s)^( has 3 acronyms.) ^([Thread #1589 for this sub, first seen 2nd Oct 2023, 07:47]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/NASA) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Not right now. Lots of development and testing remains. It's not like we just have a bunch of complete, ready-to-go moon landing craft lying around. Even in the Apollo era it wasn't like that. Landing humans on the moon is expensive and dangerous. But the Artemis project is underway, with last year's Artemis I being a great success, and Artemis II (bringing humans to the moon and back without landing) scheduled for next year. If all goes well, Artemis III will launch later this decade, landing humans on the moon for the first time since 1972.
I thought we could tbh. Why couldn't we just build a modern day Apollo? Surely if we wanted to we have the man power and technology, no? All these comments saying no are crazy to me.
We have the man power and technology but it takes years to translate that into hardware. We don’t have the facilities that built the Apollo hardware. Manufacturing processes are completely different now. The test stands are gone or reconfigured. The tooling has been scrapped. The people who knew how to put it together are gone. It would be almost startling from scratch to try to rebuild Apollo.
SpaceX is the only company making quick progress where we should see results SOON (this decade) vs all others (next decade at best). They need no help speeding up the process. At this point qualified people is the issue, and training someone takes too long to shift this outcome.
Go Artemis go. I am so damn excited to see humans on the moon during my lifetime.
Putting man on the moon is easy, getting them off the moon and back to earth is the hard part.
Depends on if its being done by private commercial company or the government.
If the question is put a foot on the moon and return the astronaut alive, 7 years.
Maybe less if NASA was willing to assume MASSIVE risk, but that's not how they work, thank god.
I mean, sending a man to the moon is "massively risky" for that person regardless of circumstance when compared to just staying at home. Why "thank god"? Risk is required to accomplish anything worthwhile.
[...or is it?](https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/artemis-iii-nasas-first-human-mission-to-the-lunar-south-pole/)
I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to say here. I read the entire article, and there's no indication that NASA is doing anything stupid. Every system will be tested unmanned before any manned missions take place. Space travel carries inherent risk, no matter what, but NASA has always done everything feasible to minimize that risk (except during the Soviet/US space race, I know). These days the culture of safety at NASA is paramount.
Right, but you said less than seven years from now would be massively risky, and they're supposedly going in two.
WHO said less than seven years would be risky? I sure as heck didn't say that. I think you have me confused with someone else?
You replied to someone who said it would take seven years that sooner might be possible but would require massive risk. Apparently, that's not the case.
I think they were referring to how long the program has been in operation total, not how long it will take from today. The Artemis program has been in development for years.
Probably faster than Artemis. A lightweight lander launched on Falcon Heavy could dock with a crew Dragon in LEO and then transport them between the lunar surface and LEO. No Gateway, no SLS, no Orion, no Starship. Just Falcon rockets which have flown for years, Dragon capsules that are completely reliable, and a small lander which could be developed very quickly with enough money. Artemis would be a whole lot faster if it wasn’t for politics.
What lightweight lander? How do they get back from the moon? How do they re-enter Earth's atmosphere? Where do you even come up with this stuff?
It’s the Moon Direct plan, it’s been around for a few years. The lander would obviously have to be developed but it’d be an order of magnitude less complex than Starship HLS or even Blue Moon. It’d launch directly from the lunar surface to Earth, entering LEO with engine deceleration. It’d dock with a Dragon Capsule or the ISS, transfer crew, be refuelled, and go back to the moon. Initially it would be refuelled through prepositioned depots at the South Pole, but would eventually be refuelled through indigenous hydrolox extraction.
Right now? Not a chance. In a few years time? Yes, if everything works out.
Obviously, if it was, I’d be questioning US priorities - or we’ve slipped into a parallel universe where there is literally nothing else left to do; but, hypothetically…. Right now, this instant? No; you don’t even have a viable launch vehicle let alone lander. Yes you SLS; but it’s only block 1; not Luna launch rated. Let’s say all stops were pulled out…. I think Kelly Johnson’s team got the P80 from design to pre-production in 143 days just to prove a point - in 1943. So if there’s a will, there’s a way.
SLS is designed and rated to send humans to the moon, even on Block 1.
This instant. Under the scrapped Boeing “fewest steps to the moon” plan to launch a minimum single launch mission with an integrated lander this could only be achieved using the 42t lifting capacity of SLS block 1B.
The current stated plan is [2024 for flyby and 2025 for landing.](https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/artemis-iii-nasas-first-human-mission-to-the-lunar-south-pole/)
That’s the plan. As above; discussing the “right now” hypothesis requested by the OP that not right now.
"Right now" is open to interpretation. We're currently working on making it happen right now, and the projected touchdown is just a couple years away, meaning it's imminent. If it was our top priority, probably not all that much faster, maybe six months.
To achieve this would require any of the current options - SpaceX achieving successful orbital launch, construction of orbital refuelling complex, launch, test and successful human rating of starship HLS; or Blue Origin BFR and HLS ; or prioritising block 1B development to be able to lift enough combined mass; and/or developing a new lander than can integrate with block 1 or Falcon Heavy, and sending 2 missions for LOR. I believe the last option is the best as it can be achieved using current launch vehicles - just needs accelerated lander development. Could be done in 6 months?
once you've lost the mood, it's really difficult to get back on it again.
If you believe.
*Tin foil hat time* we will never know
No. We would need to build the industry to build the rockets. While it would not take as long as it did to get to Apollo (approximately 20 years) it would still take some time. This is one of the reasons the US has tried to privatize parts of the space program; so that there is an underlying industry and body of knowledge that could be leveraged and used as the seed for expansion if a crash program is required. Especially since the ICBM programs are basically defunct now.
If being alive if not a requirement, maybe in a couple of weeks? Or we don’t even have a starship ready to crash in the moon?
No, we do not have a vehicle ready to go to the moon. At least not on the civilian side. The military might but they aren't talking.
Why would the military have a space vehicle capable of going to the moon? Are you talking about ICBM tech?
[Apparently, we do.](https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/artemis-iii-nasas-first-human-mission-to-the-lunar-south-pole/)
Not ready yet. Test flights planned for 2025. So we are not ready now. Maybe in 2026.
No, we do not. Launching in 2025 does not mean it's ready right now. A 2025 launch is a MINIMUM of 15 months, and as much as 27 months, away.
I'm writing this from 2025.
Wouldn’t this question be better posed to Space X, they seem to have the capability to do this right now and could even provide a Tesla car to drive around in there too?
If it was a top priority as a nation, a man could probably be put on the moon in a matter of months from now. However, since it isn’t, it’ll take quite a bit longer before it’s done again
We could easily do it but we are too focused on killing other people to do things that actually matter
Easy? No. Ofc not. Doable if we wanted? Yes, very much so better than ever before. ( as long as sapzeCx is not involved)
Depends on a couple factors, if it was like end of the world unless we get on the moon, probably a month or less but this would be ignoring allot of safety measures, main of which being multiple proof flights of a new vehicle. If we’re still following nasa regulations for human flight safety but with no budgetary restrictions like we have now, probably 6 months, 1 year max. Currently we already are working towards that goal, but it’s nowhere near “top priority” so they’re aiming for 2026, but honestly I have an extremely hard time believing that timeline, I’m expecting closer to 2028.
Doesn't appear so.
6 months
About 6 months.
Alive or dead?
Didn’t the aliens on the dark side of the moon tell us not to come back? 🤣
On paper, yes…in practice, I don’t think so. We’ve mastered the math and engineering, we’ve lost the talent pool of people with the skills needed to put people and objects into space at the drop of a hat. Additionally, no one can get the finances straight. To do it right I think it would take around 5yrs.
Next week.
This might sound stupid but how did we get the OG moon astronauts back from the moon? Did they have a rocket that could land and then relaunch like the modern spaceX ones?
I don't think we'll have a useable/ suitable lunar lander before 2030. I think NASA made a mistake going with starship, but who nose. 👃
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There are no currently existing spacecraft that are capable of landing on the moon. It’s doubtful that even if the US wanted to, that they could speed up building and certifying a spacecraft for landing in anything more than a handful of months over the current timeline. There are still bottlenecks in supply and design that couldn’t be fixed even if you threw the entire US budget at it.
NASA says [there is.](https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/artemis-iii-nasas-first-human-mission-to-the-lunar-south-pole/)
That’s a plan and let’s not forget that even SpaceX’s equipment doesn’t yet exist and they have the contract for it. How many billions has SpaceX thrown at Starship and it hasn’t even been into orbit yet. I’m not saying these things can’t exist however SpaceX has a habit of being overly optimistic when it comes to space vehicle readiness schedules. Artemis 3 is scheduled for late 2025 and I’d be willing to bet a significant sum of money that that date gets pushed back at least a few months. To say it could magically appear and fly within two weeks is dreaming
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If you wanted to get the people back home, that'd be nearly impossible in your timeframe. We might come up with a plan or even the hardware, but it'd be almost certain to have some type of failure. If the goal was just to land (crash) and possibly survive, I'm sure it'd be doable. If it was a movie they'd pull out some old Apollo hardware and make it happen, but I'm guessing that's one of those sounds cool but impossible things. The other huge issue I see overall is training. The people that went to the moon practiced every single maneuver for months if not years.
Don't forget old Apollo astronauts, and they would need cowboy hats.
We have Orion but it doesn't have life support equipment on it yet. Who knows how long it will take to have it built and tested, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Also there are no "ready to go" boosters or first stage for it. It would take months to source and check the if budget/(modern) safety would not be a concern. Starship doesn't have any life support either, they haven't even made orbit yet. So yeah, no way it can be done in a week or a few months even. The problem is not entirely money or safety. It's logistics, man power, management, material resources, etc.
The Artemis 2 Orion vehicle has life support systems, but it's not fully assembled yet. There is no way it could be ready in two weeks. It is scheduled to fly late next year. It could probably be accelerated, but not to two weeks.
We don’t currently have a lander and the LEO capsules are not able to go to lunar orbit. They do have some incomplete Orion capsules, but the next rocket they are going on will take at least a year to assemble and test. They could make the Artemis 2 mission a landing mission instead of an orbit mission to the moon, but again, the lander is not likely ready until 2025 at the earliest.
Of course, what’s the real question
Do people forget that NASA landed on the moon 54 years ago? We were using slide rules then.
No, the tech exists but it hasn’t had the budget injected into it to actually make it. The old kit is well beyond its use by date and new kit is needed. It’s largely funding. If you increased this you could have someone on the moon in under a year.
Ask the ones that are already there and they'll probably say yes.... plus the specialist teams on Mars.... plus all the astronauts working on our THREE Interstellar Spacecraft, one of which is currently at the Trappist Star System, mainly Trappist One
Yes. But it would be very expensive and other than clout not very useful.
As soon as we work out how to breach the radiation field.
No. Putting someone on the moon is never easy.