Changes To Artemis III?
Artemis III
Keith’s note: About that Artemis III moon landing with people thing: Jim Free said yesterday “We may end up flying a different mission.” Hmm … without people? Without SpaceX Starship? Stay tuned.
11 responses to “Changes To Artemis III?”
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So they fly Apollo 8 redux on Artemis 2 what more could they do on Artemis 3 without a lander that would just waste $4B to just say they launched another SLS and Orion without SpaceX
The next best potential mission would be a visit to the Gateway PPE/HALO modules and an extended crew stay at NRHO.
Keeping a sembalance of a missions cadence is important so they would like to avoid a 3 or 4 year gap between crewed flights.
Also, the last SLS Block 1 can only stay on the ground for so long before it starts delaying the introduction of Block 1B and Artemis 4 (and all the flights after that).
If HLS starts getting delayed beyond a certain poin, say 2027 or 2028, there’s no reason to keep Artemis 3 on the ground when they could still be doing a meaningful mission in the meantime
I don’t think you can really do an extended crew stay with just HALO. You need I-HAB for that.
I-HAB could fly on a Falcon Heavy, but it would need some kind of maneuvering bus to dock it, if the Orion isn’t doing that. That turns the whole schedule to hamburger. Furthermore, Boeing will lose their minds if they can’t demonstrate co-manifesting.
Any crewed stay aboard HALO would be dependent on Orion’s ECLSS system.
Still, I suspect they could stay in NRHO for a decent amount of time in that configuration, even if not for 30 days.
I-HAB flying on Falcon Heavy without major redesign of the module is effectively out of the question at this point, but it wouldn’t be needed for Orion to dock with PPE/HALO.
Could be a good test of Orion’s docking hardware and software, which are first flying on Artemis 3.
Artemis III could stay at Gateway as long or longer than the entire mission duration in lunar orbit currently planned for Artemis III, whether or not Gateway has the I-HAB available.
The Rube-Goldberg scheme of combining cargo with crew on an SLS block 1b, as the means of delivering I-HAB during the Artemis IV mission, I bet will never happen. There are safer, cheaper, and more effective ways to deliver that Gateway module.
I don’t see why a dedicated Dragon XL cargo mission couldn’t deliver the I-HAB instead.
Most of Orion’s docking software is going to be tested on Arty 2. That’s what the 60,000km apogee HEEO is for (in addition to providing a simple abort if things go poorly on the first day). It’s going to use the ICPS as a test target for prox ops. And if the hardware has a problem, there’s something seriously wrong, since it’s just a plain ol’ vanilla NDS, isn’t it?
Wikipedia says Orion mission life is 21 days free-flying. I don’t know if that means 84 crew-days, or if it’s 10*4 + 11*2 = 62 crew-days, which would be 15 days total time with a crew of 4. I’d also expect that ECLSS for the entire HALO volume would shave a fair amount off of that number. My guess is that you couldn’t have a full crew in there for more than a week.
Agree that I-HAB on FH is a non-starter unless things get dramatically worse.
How extended does an Artemis III mission need to be? The current NASA plan is something like 6 days on the lunar surface. So including all transit times, that makes the entire Artemis III mission duration less than 18 days. Gateway wouldn’t need to contribute anything to extended life support, since the Orion has enough for 21 days.
Substituting rendezvous with Gateway for a lunar landing would fit neatly within the already limited and preliminary objectives of the Artemis III mission. No I-HAB necessary.
I fully expect that Falcon Heavy will be used for I-HAB delivery, when that day comes. Between likely delays of SLS Block 1b, plus the dangers and difficulties of co-manifesting a heavy cargo with Orion, that seems like a safe bet. If I-HAB is delivered by Falcon Heavy, then a co-manifested Dragon XL could serve as a space-tug to dock the I-HAB with Gateway. No unique maneuvering-bus required, just one off-the-production-line Dragon XL.
I’m not disputing that you can put astronauts in a HALO and leave them there for a while. The question is what they’re actually doing that’s worth the money. In HALO, the answer is, “Not much.”
I-HAB and a DXL won’t fit in the same FH fairing. In addition, even if you could manage to get I-HAB’s passive IDSS adapter to hook up to DXL’s active IDSS adapter, it wouldn’t withstand TLI injection stresses.
You could probably send a DXL separately to TLI from the I-HAB, but how would the I-HAB move from BLT to NRHO without first doing an RPOD with the DXL? And don’t tell me that you’re going to send them both to TLI at the same time and dock during the coast. That’s never been done before, and ESA isn’t going to risk their module on a hack like that.
It’s just insane to spend $4.1B in launch costs for a mission that does almost nothing.
That money is being spent anyway, most of it fixed costs and the vehicle is being built regardless of mission.
The question is do they get an actual flying mission out of that money or do they just stay on the ground with their arms crossed.
The money spent on fixed costs (which are mostly staff preservation) doesn’t go to waste as long as the pipeline of cores, SRBs, and Orions isn’t jammed up. That doesn’t happen until the Arty 4 core needs to be delivered to the Cape. That needs to be preceded by the VAB modifications and the ML2 pad integration (although I think ML2-pad could happen before Arty 3 went to the pad, as long as the changes to the fixed GSE are small and can be made backward-compatible).
That gives you, worst-case, a year of schedule slip, and likely closer to two, given that there’s some pad in core production to account for the goat rodeo that’s already expected with ML2, EUS, and I-HAB. That slack would have to be taken out of Arty 5.
But unless core and Orion actually have to stop due to a jam, the fixed costs aren’t really hurting things, because the staff is busy doing stuff that’s useful (well, useful given the predicate that SLS is useful). There are obviously maintenance costs for leaving a core, an Orion, and an unstacked set up SRBs sitting around, but they relatively trivial compared to launching the stack without a decent mission.