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404 points voxleone | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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bahmboo ◴[] No.45660320[source]
"The president and I want to get to the moon in this president's term" - Sean Duffy NASA administrator.

A scary way to set a schedule on a complex project with lives at stake. They don't care though.

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thegrim33 ◴[] No.45660527[source]
The Artemis plan was originally to return to moon by 2024, and the first crewed flight is still planned for next year, so it seems entirely reasonable for a President that's in office from 2024 and 2028 to want it to actually happen within that time frame. Since, you know, that's been the established and agreed upon plan for nearly a decade now.
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caconym_ ◴[] No.45660832[source]
2024 was never considered remotely realistic by anybody in the "industry"---it was a purely political deadline and the will/funding was not there to achieve it.

Today (AFAIK) 2028 is considered quite aggressive, mostly due to the lack of progress on Starship, and the facts driving that conclusion are not any more amenable to change via political pressure than they were last time.

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chrisco255 ◴[] No.45660892[source]
There is no reason to consider anytime frame beyond what NASA did it in in the 60s "unreasonable". They were still using slide rules for goodness sake. We've got now 50+ years of space flight experience under our belt.

Bean counters make excuses. Put the right people in the right places and shit gets done.

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1. AshleyGrant ◴[] No.45660952[source]
Unless we're willing to expend resources on the level we did in the 60s then it is absolutely unreasonable. Computers instead of slide rules doesn't matter at all.
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2. chrisco255 ◴[] No.45665366[source]
I'll repeat what I said above because this is an oft-repeated fallacy:

We don't expect each new nuclear warhead to cost as much as the Manhattan Project did relative to the national budget. Likewise, after 60 years of technological development beyond what we had in the 60s, there is no reason to expect a modern day lunar mission to cost the same relatively.

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3. caconym_ ◴[] No.45675649[source]
> there is no reason to expect a modern day lunar mission to cost the same relatively

By some rough math, the cost of the Artemis program as a fraction of national budget is on the order of 1/10 that of Apollo in its day (comparing entire program costs to national budgets in representative years). So no, I'm not sure anyone would expect (or accept) that, and indeed it does not seem to be the case. It would be even cheaper if Congress had not mandated that SLS be built from repurposed STS parts (and later that Artemis fly on SLS), and if Congress and the executive branch had generally maintained a realistic and consistent vision for the program since work on it began (arguably with Constellation in the 2000s).