Going back to the moon......Artemis I......
 

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Scheduled for launch Saturday, March 12, 2022

More here:
https://www.nasa.gov/artemis-1

5,600,000 gallons of fuel burned in first 8 minutes
how much is that in global warming years

I really want to watch one of those launch.

It's offset from credits banked from impossible burger-turd sales.

This has been a really good year for space thingees.

I have doubts this thing will ever really get off the ground. It was supposed to fly years ago.

I'm a huge proponent of the NASA manned space program but I would hate to be one of the astronauts who's lined up to go to the moon or Mars. It's been pushed back so many times they'll probably retire before anyone actually goes.

China putting men on the moon might speed things up slightly.

It really puts into perspective how astonishing Apollo was. No country in the last 50+ years has come close to replicating what Apollo did in the 1960s!

Every kid that learns about Apollo, thinks the 1969 first landing was ancient history like the first car, or the first voyage around the world.

It will be great to see humans, and Americans going back to the moon. Maybe the Chinese trip will spur NASA's budget to get there again.

AS exciting as the space race was in the Cold War, people then were asking why. Now that having thousands of things in orbit serving us, what do we need from the moon?

I don't oppose exploring planets and space with instruments, but take the money that is costs to put men on the moon and fix what is wrong on earth.

I'm far from a scientist, but seems I remember the main byproduct of rocket fuel combustion is water. But that was from the hydrogen/oxygen fuels. Other rockets have used kerosene or methane. Again, the byproducts don't seem to be anywhere near the foul byproducts of petroleum based fuels as we know them here on the ground.

I have to agree with Glen ^^^^ as I'm currently reading John Glenn's biography. Except for the moon part, of course.

Actually, hydrocarbon production is often part of thermal management of ablative and thin film rocket nozzles .

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(ahem, hydrazine's not exactly a basket of kittens to put it mildly)

The problem is that isolating hydrogen (in particular) and oxygen is wasteful and messy. That's one big remaining hurdle to a "hydrogen economy". We're working on it though. It'll happen eventually - in many ways it's safer than gasoline, which if "invented" today would likely be a nonstarter. Solid state storage also is progressing so perhaps we won't even be dealing with rolling pressure vessels.

And yes, rockets are cool! Not sure I want a ride in one, not even sure if many of them are worth the effort and cost (I'm pretty meh on the moon thing), but nonetheless they're cool! Amazing materials science in there...

The Space Launch System is more a political tool than engineering need. Congress should not be designing rockets and then mandating they be used. We should use what is appropriate.

https://arstechnica.com/search/?ie=UTF-8&q=Space+Launch+System

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/rocket-report-india-test-fires-upper-stage-engine-astra-gets-a-takedown/2/

From the article:

NASA officials are holding out hope that the first Space Launch System launch can still take place as soon as March despite a delay in the rollout of the vehicle for a key test until mid-February, SpaceNews reports. "Hopefully, we're going to be completing all of the testing to be able to roll out for a wet dress rehearsal in February and then, hopefully, a launch in March," NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana said in a talk January 11 at the SpaceCom conference in Orlando, Florida. "That might be tight."

That might not be right ... In a separate talk, Kennedy Space Center Director Janet Petro presented a chart of major NASA missions in 2022 that showed both the wet dress rehearsal and the Artemis 1 launch taking place in the first quarter of the year. Spoiler alert: the SLS rocket is not launching in March, at least not March 2022. NASA officials would do well to be as transparent and honest with the public about this as possible.

More:

Concerned about job losses after the space shuttle retired, Congress imposed this rocket on the space agency, down to dictating its various components to ensure that space shuttle contractors such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Aerojet Rocketdyne continue to receive substantial space program funding. Each contractor was given a "cost plus" contract that ensured funding but provided little incentive for on-time delivery.

The legislation creating the Space Launch System was passed in October 2010, at which time the rocket was expected to be ready for operations in 2016. One of the key legislators behind the rocket's creation was then-Florida-Senator Bill Nelson. He relentlessly fought against the Obama administration's effort to see if private companies, such as United Launch Alliance and SpaceX, could more efficiently build a large rocket for NASA. The space agency and its traditional contractors could do the job better than anyone, he said.

"This rocket is coming in at the cost of what not only what we estimated in the NASA Authorization act, but less,” Nelson said at the time. “The cost of the rocket over a five- to six-year period in the NASA authorization bill was to be no more than $11.5 billion.” Later, he went further, saying, "If we can't do a rocket for $11.5 billion, we ought to close up shop."

More than a decade later, NASA has spent more than $20 billion to reach the launch pad. And Nelson is no longer a US Senator—he is the administrator of the space agency. The shop remains open.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/nasas-sls-rocket-will-not-fly-until-next-spring-or-more-likely-summer/

What are they sending to the moon this time, that they couldn’t build a new Apollo rocket to do the job?

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1642298864.jpg

Just dust this off ...

Hellz yeah! Thank you.

They ramped that dawg up to nine million pounds thrust to place Skylab into orbit in 1973.

Only used 7.5 million for Apollo moon shots.

China has hypersonic missiles now so the race will begin again. The most concerning thing is that a) there's never been a change of superpower without a major war and b) USA is getting squeezed on two fronts with China becoming dominant in the East and Putin rattling the sabre again about the build up of US armaments on Russia's doorstep.

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2/3's of the rocket gets thrown away as compared to Space X landing those pieces for re-use.
Artemis is a middle class welfare program with NO future, as bad as the Bullet Train in Cali.

Well, they did add a toilet.