Stuff about Artemis
Some points:
- the crazy new parts are required (in-orbit refueling), but make the old parts (SLS, Orion, and Gateway) obsolete.
Some quotes:
"With this design, the minds behind SLS achieved a first in space flight, creating a rocket that is at the same time more powerful and less capable than the Saturn V. While the 1960’s giant could send 49 metric tons to the moon, SLS only manages 27 tons"
"The spacecraft arrives on the Moon laden with something like 200 tons of cryogenic propellant,[16] and like a fat man leaving an armchair, it needs every drop of that energy to get its bulk back off the surface."
"Why land a rocket the size of a building packed with moving parts? It’s hard to look at the HLS design and not think back to other times when a room full of smart NASA people talked themselves into taking major risks because the alternative was not getting to fly at all."
"It’s instructive to compare the HLS approach to the design philosophy on Apollo. Engineers on that progam were motivated by terror; no one wanted to make the mistake that would leave astronauts stranded on the moon. The weapon they used to knock down risk was simplicity. .... On Artemis, it's the other way around: the more hazardous the mission phase, the more complex the hardware."
"The real problem with Artemis is that it doesn’t think through the consequences of its own success. A working infrastructure for orbital refueling would make SLS and Orion superfluous. ... What NASA is doing is like an office worker blowing half their salary on lottery tickets while putting the other half in a pension fund. If the lottery money comes through, then there was really no need for the pension fund. But without the lottery win, there’s not enough money in the pension account to retire on. The two strategies don't make sense together."