As a science writer, I'm very familiar with the excitement of musing about humanity traveling to the moon -- I even find awe while writing about the tiniest lunar update. A headline like "The Moon Might Have a Trace of Something That Could Potentially Be Water But Probably Not" will do it for me because, at the very least, it underscores that we're far along enough in our timeline to study worlds beyond our own. It's proof that we're on the path toward spectacular, scientific breakthroughs.But the toil, planning and money that it takes to create -- let alone realize -- a moon mission often gets lost in translation.Lunar travel inspires us because the difficult middle steps feel like a means to a deserving end.NASA's Artemis I moon mission is still a go, having slowly but surely waddled through its final testing phase. But as NASA is a government agency, pretty much all the money funding this lunar dream comes from taxpayer pockets -- a fact that inevitably calls into question whether moon missions are really worth the thrill, and even the scientific advancement, they give us.nasa"s Artemis moon rocket, slated to touch space for the very first time in 2022, was supposed to launch in 2017.
It was supposed to encompass four missions, each with a price tag estimated a decade ago at $500 million -- but a 2021 audit now projects a cost of $4.1 billion per launch. That's a difference of about $3.6 billion for every cosmic ferry. At a rate of one number per second, it'd take you over a century to count to that figure. This might explain why the same audit and NASA's inspector general bluntly label the endeavor unsustainable. to the audit, those four launches at a projected $4.1 billion a pop would be on top of the about $40 billion already spent to build Artemis equipment -- items like the rocket itself, known as the Space Launch System, and the Orion spacecraft, which will hold important devices for science exploration. the Trump administration, NASA set a goal for the first Artemis crewed trip to the moon -- mission three -- for late 2024 instead of the program's initial hope of 2028, which was "just not good enough," Vice President Mike Pence said during a meeting of the National Space Council in 2019.
The accelerated timeline prompted the agency to request a "down payment" of $1.6 billion and left congressional budget with some big questions other words, it's probably going to take at least around $93 billion to bring humanity back to the moon via Artemis.management's comments echo, it's all in the name of trailblazing lunar exploration – but as it stands, remember that Artemis has yet to venture into space. But looking to the past, Garver said, "Congress and industry and many in NASA have done this before. They go along with the narrative just to get a program started, knowing it will be hard to cancel."
In a world of reusable rockets, Artemis doesn't have one
SpaceX, Blue Origin, you name it. Everyone involved in the space game wants to craft the ultimate recyclable rocket. One that you can fly to space, then bring back home like the car sitting in your driveway.
You must be logged in to post a comment.