Originally Posted by
ORAC
All seemed so very retro.
Totally throw away boosters, totally throw away booster - including the 4 Shuttle main engines at $500M each. Only a few seconds of onboard video before cutting back to a ground camera trying to keep a small dot in the middle if the screen.
All building up to an eventual launch where SpaceX launch a couple of totally reusable boosters and Starships to refuel in orbit before taking their lunar lander to the moon to RV with Artemis to shuttle the crew to the surface, bring them back up, then refuel the lander for the next landing before recovering the Starship back to earth to be used again.
Sort of like a historic re-enactment where you have a copy of Columbus ship being filmed by a modern support ship as it leaves harbour and shuttling the crew about using their tender when they need to get go ashore…
ORAC, you put into words what I was thinking--a blast from the past. Unlike watching recent SpaceX flights, I felt no excitement watching the launch.
I know if we're going back to the moon "to stay", we need a more robust system than the one-time Apollo style lander. This combination of SLS/Orion and Starship and landers and gateways just seems to be a cobbled-together mess. Perhaps it's the cynic in me, but it seems to be designed primarily to ensure there's a piece of the pie for all the usual suspects.