July 3, 2026 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
Note: If the video on X won’t play when you click on the links below, right click and open the tweet in a new tab. The video will then play.
- Vast touts the trash container system it will have inside its single module Haven-1 station, set to launch next year
It includes eight containers with odor-control seals and vacuum venting.
- Short interview with Astra CEO Chris Kemp, touting his proposed Rocket-4’s cheap and quick launch capability
He says it will launch for $5 million, and will ship in standard 40-foot shipping containers that will allow it to be set up within 48 hours for launch anywhere. No word however on when a first test launch will take place.
- Video of Blue Origin’s crane removing the first tower module at its damaged Cape Canaveral launchpad
This tower is being de-stacked to allow each module to be repaired/modified in parallel.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
NASA wanted a moon lander — it got a fight over who gets to touch the controls
This video looks at the growing tension inside NASA’s lunar landing plan, where Starship HLS is no longer just facing delays, but an increasingly serious fight over safety, manual control, and crew survival. What makes the story hit harder is that the argument is happening while NASA is already warning that lunar landers carry the highest probability of crew loss in Artemis, with no rescue option if astronauts are stranded on the Moon. The deeper hook is what gives it teeth: this is not just a technical disagreement over controls, but a sign that the Moon return is resting on a vehicle architecture that still has major unanswered risks right at the point where failure would matter most.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/nasa-wanted-a-moon-lander-it-got-a-fight-over-who-gets-to-touch-the-controls/vi-AA26Y0bA?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=6a483d969c264ee8bdc53a175d24c16a&ei=14
This is a long podcast, but Dr Zubrin brings up something I hadn’t considered – is starship too large a vehicle to be a moon lander?
https://overcast.fm/+ABQUMvMt0Oo
Zubrin does so love him his mingy little landers. I think he spent so many years figuring out how to barely get one or two people to Mars on a shoestring that he thinks that’s the only way to go.
It doesn’t take much to get off the Moon. The LM ascent stage was a study in simplicity.
The first Starship needs to be cargo only. No white paint…just silver.
Leave it there with a plaque of Bonestell.
The steps should be an Agenda like Starship….all cargo lander…then the full craft.
SpaceX is already planning on doing test landings on the Moon before Starship lands with people. We don’t need to have a special cargo variant go first.
“Zubrin does so love him his mingy little landers. I think he spent so many years figuring out how to barely get one or two people to Mars on a shoestring that he thinks that’s the only way to go.”
I hate to say it, but it’s hard to avoid that conclusion.
The justification for such a large lander is that it is one variation on a ship that is being built anyway. The economics of a customized model of a successful* mass produced (sorta) vehicle vs a one off should be compelling. If it was a built from scratch design, it would be very different and probably smaller.
*Hopefully
Gary asked: “is starship too large a vehicle to be a moon lander?”
Answer: No, but yes. Starship is not too large to land on the Moon, but it is larger than necessary. Its size is due to being an upper stage for launch from Earth and being the entire rocket that launches from Mars for return to Earth. A lunar lander that carries 100 tons to the lunar surface need not be that large, especially if it is refueled on or near the Moon. Starship has more mass than necessary, because its structure must withstand Earth’s gravity while full of both propellant and payload, and it must withstand 4-G acceleration on its way to low Earth orbit. Less structure is necessary for lunar operations than is necessary for launch from Earth. A lighter-structured Starship cannot be built on Earth and launched into space, because it cannot withstand the forces placed on it during that launch. SpaceX is making Starship as light as possible for launch from Earth. Starship is a suboptimal lunar system.
The Gemini spacecraft and the Apollo Lunar Ascent Module were close in mass, but Gemini took a Titan II rocket to get into orbit, and the Ascent Module could put itself into lunar orbit. The difference between launching from Earth and launching from the Moon is huge. When it comes to the Moon, the rockets can be smaller, and less propellant is necessary. Returning to Earth orbit can be assisted by atmospheric aerobraking, further reducing the need for propellant than is needed for the trip up to the Moon.
Zubrin’s complains about the large number of Starship tankers that are needed for a Human Landing System (HLS) round trip: fourteen, by his count. He thinks that is inefficient, but fourteen launches gets a hundred tons (or so) to the lunar surface. It is at least a good start. Better efficiency can come later. That is the usual way of invention and technical advancements. First comes the basic technology and methods, then comes the improved hardware and methods.
john hare is correct that Starship was chosen because of its availability, not its efficiency. One of the reasons that it is somewhat suitable for lunar landing, as in it is unlikely to tip over, is that it has the same requirement for Mars landings and similar requirements for Earth landings. Landings and reuse are built into the Starship design.
It is worth noting that Zubrin also points out that SLS and Orion were not designed together as a coherent set, so Orion was too big for SLS for a lunar mission, unlike Apollo, where the Saturn V was more powerful than SLS, carrying 150 tons to low Earth orbit (LEO), and the capsule was smaller.
Apollo worked, because it was designed to work. From the start, it had a defined mission and the necessary tradeoffs and compromises were made to the entire system as a whole mission in order to assure that Apollo reached the Moon and returned its crew safely back to Earth.
Artemis does not work, because they threw together a bunch of parts that were not designed for any specific mission but designed for some quantity of performance. SLS was required to launch around 100 tons to LEO, limiting the capability of the combined service module and Orion spacecraft. Orion was required to carry four astronauts. Just to make SLS/Orion have the appearance of working, all the tradeoffs and compromises had to come from the parts of the lunar mission that this pair lacked.
The service module had to be made undersized and underpowered, thus incapable of putting Orion into lunar orbit. A landing system that ferries the astronauts from that non-orbit to the surface had to be made, with necessary tradeoffs and compromises in the ferry’s efficiencies due to the inadequacies of the SLS/Orion system.
SLS and Orion were designed separately, each without a mission, but with disparate requirements, explaining why they are not suitable as a team to support a mission to the Moon. Starship was also not designed to be a lunar lander, but it was designed to be a Mars lander. It is the spacecraft that SpaceX has, and since SpaceX currently plans to build its own sustainable lunar base, Starship is what SpaceX will use. At least at first.
Zubrin said that he suggested to Musk the concept of a smaller spacecraft that is launched aboard a Starship but can go to the Moon alone, a 20 ton “starboat” with 80 tons of propellants, but apparently Musk rejected that idea. Most likely because SpaceX would have to design yet another spacecraft while it is still figuring out how to do the basic functions on the Moon. I don’t blame Musk for that rejection, because it is not needed now, and SpaceX is concentrating on current needs, not on needs or efficiencies that are useful in the more distant future.
SpaceX is currently battling the rocket equation, trying to reduce the dry mass of Starship and Super Heavy in order to reduce the number of retanking launches. The company is also inventing a lightweight yet durable thermal protection that is reusable without refurbishment between flights. These are two of the current priorities for the company.
That SLS is limited is Isaacman fault for killing EUS, and the even more capable Ares V was killed by Obama.
That SLS is limited is the fault of it taking a couple of years to build each copy, being entirely disposable and costing the ruddy Earth. EUS, had it ever materialized – and worked – would have added, marginally, to any given mission’s capability but would not, in the larger scheme of things, have allowed any consequential increase in activity. Even assuming the SLS’s cadence could somehow be gotten up to once per year, one cannot do anything of any scale in space by launching a mere 40 people per decade. We launch several times that many to ISS and ISS doesn’t scale either. The scale problem would always be there with SLS, especially if, as is the actual case, one still needs entirely separate lander logistics to get SLS’s passengers to and from the lunar surface.
You comment like a guy that bought a top end car and house that leaves you so broke that you need EBT to eat.
That’s my neighbors with the Escalade.
Jeff Wright,
“That SLS is limited is Isaacman fault for killing EUS, and the even more capable Ares V was killed by Obama.”
In addition to Dick Eagleson’s comments of 10:17 pm: Ares V had a mission: return the U.S. to the Moon. Like Project Apollo, it and Orion were being designed to work together to accomplish that mission. Obama, however, said about the Moon goal and missions: “Been there. Done that.” With that, Ares was in its death throws, literally with one last (and only) launch, and NASA was set adrift, with no real mission, just some phony baloney directive that even the scientists didn’t think was a good idea. I’m not even sure that there are museum pieces left over to remember Ares by.
It looks for all the world that Congress designed their SLS Tinkertoy™ for the purpose of putting space station modules into orbit. Others may tell you that its main purpose was to keep jobs and revenues at the existing Space Shuttle contractors, and considering the design, it would be difficult to argue otherwise (my previous sentence notwithstanding).
I will try to make that argument anyway. The lift capability of SLS seems to match the weight that we might expect of a large or heavy module. The slow launch cadence could match an expected rate needed for replacing modules on an existing space station. The high cost of each launch seems to correspond with the high cost of constructing the ISS.
It is difficult to defend the previous paragraph, because Congress never specified what they wanted to do with their pet SLS rocket. They didn’t specify cost or launch rate, so NASA and its contractors had no guidance and seemed to go for the most revenues to the contractors possible for the least work from the contractors. Congress only specified which contractors to supply the parts and the total lift capabilities of the rocket. Some other details needed to be filled in, perhaps by the real rocket scientists at NASA or perhaps by the pseudo rocket scientists in Congress.
Then some president decided to redirect NASA to the original Ares mission of returning to the Moon, but this time to stay with a permanent, constantly manned lunar base. Finally, some real progress would be made in space, and by NASA, to boot.
Unfortunately, NASA only had the inadequate SLS and the overweight Orion capsule for completing this goal, so that lack of alternatives is why they were assigned to the mission that they are wholly inadequate to do.
Spock, of Star Trek fame, said “there are always alternatives.” Fortunately, Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin wanted to go back to the Moon, too, and he had the means to create his own rockets and spacecraft to achieve his goal. Good for him. He was an alternative, albeit a commercial one rather than a government one.
Then SpaceX had some spare time on their hands as they waited the two years for the next Mars transit window. This gave them the opportunity to put their otherwise idle resources into lunar projects and Earth orbit projects, becoming a second alternative. Who knows? These new projects may help fund their Mars aspirations.
Too bad NASA has to answer to a myopic Congress.
It’s inherent to the design. EUS or no EUS, the SLS just won’t put that much mass into space. Nowhere near enough for lunar bases, let alone anything more.
It is a simpler vehicle.
Do I like that Boeing gouges?
No.
Wet workshops require a lot less hardware for reuse than Starship.
I just wish Elon would have made an SLS like hydrogen rocket that was stage-and-a-half.
I have my doubts that he can make Starship be what he wants it to be.
Jeff, wet workshops, which are a terrible idea anyway, don’t answer the question of reusable transport. If you have to build a new launch vehicle every time you want to loft something to orbit or return it, the fundamental challenges remain. Wet workshops do not offer a way to reduce the price tag of getting to space or bringing something back from it. It isn’t enough to say it’s a form of reuse. We don’t throw away our cars after every trip just because we have homes. Space stations of any sort are not a substitute for reusable transport.
The same with ‘stage-and-a-half’ hydrogen rockets. You’re clearly enamored with them, but they don’t answer the right questions. In this case, (some of) SpaceX’s questions are: how can we rapidly reuse a vehicle that can take easy advantage of raw materials on Mars? Nobody aiming for full reuse is using a hydrogen first stage. Nobody aiming for rapid reuse and low cost is using solid boosters. ‘Simpler’ is not an advantage when it means we cannot answer the right questions (and the SLS is not actually that simple from an engineering standpoint). Learn to differentiate between what is and what ought to be. You seem to struggle with that.
Thanks to all for replies. I am a stargazer, not an engineer, so I appreciate those who can provide technical commentary on this site.
This squabble derives, in largest part, from the NASA astronaut corps still being top-heavy with test pilots. Pilots aren’t happy being passengers. They always want manual controls “just in case.” There was a decent case to be made for this viewpoint in the Apollo days when flight automation was barely past the “flint knives and bearskins” technology readiness level. The intervening half-century-plus has seriously advanced the state of that art.
In the end, I suspect there will be some sort of “manual control” setup on the first few HLS Starship landers in the same way there were modified SR-71 ejection seats for the pilot and co-pilot on the first few Shuttle missions – not because they would be terribly useful in most emergency scenarios, but out of a bureaucratic reflex for at least appearing to “do something.”
If the unmanned test landing goes well and the first few HLS Starship-based Artemis missions do likewise, I suspect the “manual controls” will be quietly deleted from future production models as was the case with the Shuttle ejection seats.
Given that both NASA’s and SpaceX’s primary lunar goals are now to build lunar bases, it also strikes me that pilots, per se, will quickly become quite a minor proportion of Luna-bound crew rosters. Building ground infrastructure is a job for hardhats, not test pilots. As SpaceX’s lunar factories are built out, the mix will begin to include a lot of factory rats too.
What pilots probably can usefully do, going forward, is fly expeditionary hoppers from the main NASA base near the lunar South Pole to sites of exploratory interest elsewhere on the lunar surface. These would be far closer in size to the Apollo-era Lunar Modules and would be things that a human being might reasonably be able to actually fly manually in a useful fashion.
Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff recounts that in the early days of Mercury, some astronauts were advocating having control of Atlas during boost.
I suspect the engineers will win out, and convince the astronauts to sit back and enjoy the ride. There’s a big ABORT button right there if you need it…
I hope that woke San Francisco-based Astra company completes its slide into bankruptcy. Recall it had “Black Lives Matter” emblazoned on its rocket and/or factory back in the height of the manic Floydapalooza days. I’m not sure how they managed to survive after several launch failures–someone in the US military must be championing this quickie shipping container scheme.
I can’t see how it would ever make sense commercially.
“He says it will launch for $5 million, and will ship in standard 40-foot shipping containers that will allow it to be set up within 48 hours for launch anywhere.”
There is absolutely no way that the tech will be misused. ‘Operation Spiderweb’; with a bigger boom.
I am starting to wonder if ASTRA is a back-channel way of giving an ICBM to a threat nation.
In other news–I found this amusing–the ozone hole helped cool Antarctica
https://phys.org/news/2026-07-antarctic-ozone-loss-drove-unexpected.html
Rocket 4 is much too small, and why would we do something so blatantly against our interests anyway?
dimmyratz
Landing cryogenically powered spacecraft on the Moon and expecting it to get the craft back in a proper lunar orbit has so many failure modes it really makes me think that no one is taking this effort seriously.
Possibly two more at most. Cryo is just one engineering problem among hundreds.
I am starting to wonder if ASTRA is a back-channel way of giving an ICBM to a threat nation.
In other news–I found this amusing–the ozone hole helped cool Antarctica
https://phys.org/news/2026-07-antarctic-ozone-loss-drove-unexpected.html
NASA didn’t just hit an asteroid — it changed the orbit of an entire system
https://www.msn.com/en-us/science/astronomy/nasa-didn-t-just-hit-an-asteroid-it-changed-the-orbit-of-an-entire-system/vi-AA21OvMq?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=6a49b0574c0f4dd28d3e2b32811de29a&ei=20
DART knocked binary asteroid pair into new orbit
Col Beausabre: I am going to request the same with you as I have with others: Please don’t post more than two links from the same source in any one quick links. In this last case, it is especially pointless: You are posting a piece of news that was reported on BtB more than a year and a half ago, in March 2025.
MSN is not a good source of space news. This is why you come here. There is thus no need to link to their generally inaccurate and late stories.
Jeff Foust has some minor nuggets regarding Blue Origin on X last night and this morning:
Link: https://x.com/i/status/2074038385489121454
If you go to that post, by the way, he has a reply with a phone shot of a presentation slide of what the initial form of the Mk2 lander is now supposed to look like. First we have seen of that.
I’m still massively skeptical about Blue Origin’s timelines, but hey, more power to ’em if they can pull any of them off.
I am also skeptical, but my skepticism is of the kind that they’ll manage it, I will be delighted if I’m proven wrong. I would much rather be wrong rather than right here. What they are attempting is still worthwhile.
This “Ellie in Space” video, linked rather obscurely through “MSN” (not quite without attribution), tells an interesting story about the old divide between the “Soviet system” (where cosmonauts are mostly-passive passengers, in mostly ground-controlled or automatic spacecraft) and the “American system” (where astronauts are given considerable manual piloting control over what the spacecraft does, alongside considerable, ever-better automatic assistance or even remote control)…
…as it’s playing out between SpaceX and NASA (again, see the history of ‘Crew’ Dragon) over Starship HLS; with SpaceX on the “Soviet” side (minimal astronaut controls), and NASA on the “American” side (basic controls at the very least, like the simple rotational/translational ones now tested good in space on Orion during Artemis 2).
This isn’t nearly as crazy as it sounds, once you remember SpaceX came to manned spaceflight in the first place through an upgrade and “man-rating” of its pre-existing, necessarily robotic, (Cargo) Dragon 1 and 2. So their entire (and by then considerable) previous base of work and experience of spacecraft involved either automatic or ground control. It must be hard to think of astronauts as more than an atypically precious and demanding sort of cargo — especially in the not-so-conscious ‘habits of thought’ sense.
Add to that the likely “The future is autonomous!!” background soundtrack playing most of the time, most places at SpaceX, and it begins to sound close to inevitable this company might want to treat astronauts more like Soviet-system cosmonauts. So far, so relatively logical; or understandable at the very least.
What did surprise me was seeing two comments (with several more ‘upvote’ approvals) above, featuring scathing (often implicit) criticism of the American system, and of NASA for supporting it, or even insisting on it.
Calling the old controversy over local piloting vs. strict remote or automatic control a “squabble” due to NASA being “top-heavy with test pilots” and implying any sort of manual controls, if ever installed, were essentially “out of a bureaucratic reflex for at least appearing to ‘do something'” and would all be swiftly and quietly removed once Soviet-esque, purely automatic, control systems were (apparently inevitably) proven perfect, in no more than a few flights. (I’ll just note here Apollo 8,9,10,11, and 12 flew ‘just fine’ with a flawed oxygen-tank design. Then a further mistake ‘fried’ a voltage regulator during pre-flight checkout, and gave us the Apollo 13 we all remember, in place of Apollo’s third lunar landing.)
As if our American system itself were somehow bizarrely unreasonable, or had always been some sort of mad historical oddity — as if it were only natural for all astronauts, like ideal cosmonauts, to “sit back and enjoy the ride” (that’s another direct quote, from the other comment above).
The sheer intensity of hillarity and ridicule heaped on NASA’s reported request/requirement for backup manual controls, of some sort or other, on its Starship Human Landing System for Artemis 4, not only gave me pause.
It annoyed me, indeed outright infuriated me. I remember Apollo 11 quite well from real time; and though I didn’t understand what was happening in full detail (I was far younger then, of course), I know how crucial Neil Armstrong’s timely intervention likely really was. Though of course we’ll never know just how bad that ‘surprise’ boulder field would have been, if Armstrong and Aldrin had chosen (or been forced) to “sit back and enjoy the ride” on full automatic straight through to touchdown, or whatever.
(Of course, since the ascent stage was a separate system, likely he could have ‘just’ boosted back to orbit — if maybe with some orbital-dynamics complications — indeed saving his crew but dooming the landing mission.)
That override was possible not only because the controls existed for him to use, but also because he’d done quite extensive training to do it well (some of that in a dodgy flying LEM simulator that eventually crashed in service). And yes, Neil Armstrong came to his Apollo days as a former test pilot — which at least used to be an honorable profession, not some sort of crude sign-on-his-back invitation to derision.
Will Artemis 4 enjoy the same sort of advantages? That seems in question.
The dismissive laugh-riot attitude makes me think, candidly, of White Star Lines’ reaction to chief designer Thomas Andrews’ request for a full load of lifeboats for his RMS Titanic: “It makes the decks look too cluttered” or some such. (And of what happened next, and consequently.)
The purpose of many/most safety measures and systems is not and should not be that they are used or useful in routine operation — that is greatly to be avoided, since if they are so used and useful, something else is going as routinely (and often seriously) wrong, in a way that needs to stop.
From what I know, the Artemis 4 HLS-Starship will be quite literally the second model ever to fly — the first will be an unmanned “Demo” flight; and the Artemis 3 craft will be a Starship with at least a docking ring for the Orion capsule, with perhaps-only-possibly some modest sort of pressurizable “vestibule” behind it. (So, not relevant.) Serial # 002.
This means the whole Artemis 4 crew will indeed be test pilots, in a very real sense; though I expect only one person will hold the title ‘pilot’. So, yeah, let’s do listen to old test pilots; not treat them as our 21st century equivalent of ‘Yankee Doodle’ as seen by proper British gentles. (“No true gentleman has hand controls in his spaceship! How… common!”)
And as I hope I’ve noted already (using a historical example), landing on the Moon is a different kind of mission than ‘merely’ boosting into orbit or approaching a space station. Launching into a given orbit from a given place and time, is a straightforward problem to solve for the “best” way to get there (really a parametrized set of very similar solutions). Not a whole lot of scope for pilot manual “improvement” except negatively. The problem of rendezvous and docking can be approached slowly and carefully, with almost unlimited time, quite unlike a lunar landing trajectory. Gemini 6 and 7 managed that one just fine, indeed almost effortlessly.
A Starship, by previous descriptions, ought to be able to carry something like dozens of people in full-out passenger mode. Surely it’s not a wild extravagance to devote one seat to a pilot, who can intervene if and only if actually needed? Or should we prefer the ‘all or nothing’ approach of giving our so-called ‘pilot’ nothing to work with but a “big ABORT button right there if you need it” (another actual quote)?
We do “stand on the shoulders of giants” today. Our capabilities are so much bigger, in almost every way. It’s so easy for some of us to dismiss the cutting-edge devices, and simple human competence, of yesteryear as “stone knives and bearskins” — and yes, I know it’s a “Star Trek” quote from one particular episode, but remember, that used to be high-tech too. Often of a very survival-oriented kind.
Indeed, it’s so easy to get dazzled by present achievement or (especially) predicted, and thus maybe never-real, future glory we forget how hard things are.
Since “Pride goeth before a fall” — please, please, please can we forego the smug, dismissive “modern” pride, in favor of a wary humility? At least to start with, as we finally tiptoe back into deep space?
Having manual controls does lose us chic modern “cool factor” and “style points.” And yes, it’s essential for us to train our pilots how to use them, well.
But is any of that “cool” truly any more important… than all the rest?
Let me guess: You actually think humans should also be able to drive their own cars! What a fascist!
Just kidding. I second your comment entirely, as it also points to the same attitude when it comes to autonomous automobiles.
Yeah, that’s me, Deplorable as the mid-summer day is long…
And yes to the self-driving humans. As a character said, in a story on another website I frequent, “I also prefer to wipe my own nose, at least most of the time.”
I actually wasn’t kidding about being slow-fuse furious, though quite likely that shows. And often that means I write, it’s weird but usually constructive.
Quoting from “the cutting room floor” of a previous version of the above:
Furthermore, do we really want to scrap, at this late date, our American system of local, piloted control — in favor of the Soviet system? There are obvious advantages to a company like SpaceX to going proprietary and single-self-source — ‘pilots come in black boxes we own, end of story.’ One disadvantage of SpaceX’s dominance, that such monkeyshines have gone as far as they have with Dragon (“crew hands off point”!); though it’s far more the shortfall of achievement on everyone else’s part, than anything (amazing, wildly-impressive) SpaceX has done or not done, monopoly-wise.
Why shouldn’t we have pilots ‘flying’ a Starship-full of workers to their jobs building a Moonbase, able to intervene at need? Is it featherbedding? (Even Yuri Gagarin got “Korolyov’s Key” to literally unlock at least a few manual controls on that first orbital flight — or so the legend runs.)
This “American system” is more like “intelligence amplification” — where so-called “AI tools” are complements and assistants to the human worker, as opposed to “artificial intelligence” Soviet-style competitors designed, built, and operated to maximize “autonomy” for machines, at the expense of autonomy and freedom of action for people. (And more truly, beneath the surface, to maximize autonomy and control by those people who control the machines, most of all.) There does not need to be such a tension between automation and human action, or a “squabble” as it’s so dismissively put. Though, given history to date, likely there always will be.
[end quote]
(Do feel free to add anything you know, about that old “key” story…)
Hello Lambert,
The comparison to the old opposition between Soviet and American HSF vehicle controls is an interesting one, but it does get tricky.
1) The Soviet reliance on automation was always hobbled by the fact that their automated systems were not all that reliable. That stands them in some serious contrast to SpaceX, who are pretty arguably better at this kind of thing than anyone else ever has been.
2) You yourself bring up the second difficulty: Dragon 1 had flown a whole bunch of times before Dragon 2 ever flew with crew — 22 times, 21 of them docking with ISS — whereas Starship HLS will only have made one landing and takeoff on the Moon before Artemis IV tried it with crew. Yes, the baseline Starship system will have launched dozens of times before Artemis IV, but actually landing an HLS variant on another world with zero atmosphere will represent an operation with little flight heritage. So, it’s not *unreasonable* for NASA and its astronaut corps to be more restless with the idea automated landings than they were with Crew Dragon.
3) A third difficulty is that we outside observers know little about how possible a fully or mostly manual landing of Starship HLS will be, given its enormous size, complexity, and fineness. I’m assuming NASA has some educated basis for thinking that *some* level of manual control (beyond an “Abort Landing” button) is feasible given that they keep arguing for it. But how much?
4) In the long run, as Dick Eagleson implied, one assumes that automation won’t be such a big deal, once landing pads equipped with lidars, beacons, and lunar positioning satellite networks are all in place and the HLS’s have built up records of flight heritage and refinement. But that’s something we won’t have for the first few Artemis missions.
On the topic of automated or human-controlled lunar landings, I suspect that SpaceX’s desire is to reduce the training needed to fly Starship in favor of training for working on Mars or the Moon.
NASA almost certainly desires a contingency plan for any and all possible problems, including the need for a manual landing.
I like the essay and the thinking from Lambert’s Problem, because he and Richard M, consider many factors, but I think that the two organizations are looking at the same problem with different intentions in mind.
I, too, believe that once there are flat and level concrete landing pads with plenty of guidance systems for accurate landings, then maybe NASA will relax its desire for manned landings in favor of more specialists in the field.
The desire of NASA to have a manual option on lunar landings raises an interesting point. Who is training for this? The Apollo astronauts did a lot of test landings using the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV), better known by the astronauts as a “flying bedstead.” It was designed to mimic lunar landing conditions and simulate actual landings. Armstrong crashed one during a test, ejecting to save himself.
As far as I know, no such training is planned. I bet they are considering computer simulations as a replacement. Thus, even if the landers have a manual option, the pilots will have no such flying experience in the real world. This is NOT a good thing.
“…but I think that the two organizations are looking at the same problem with different intentions in mind. “
Yes, and maybe even worse. Now I’m literally wondering if SpaceX and NASA even share a common answer to “what is a manned spaceship?”
It may be, SpaceX: “It’s a vehicle that flies itself in space and carries people safely inside.”
NASA: “It’s a vehicle that people fly in space and that often can fly itself.” (Note the Shuttle could not complete even a first test mission unmanned.).
Now imagine those two different definitions propagating down into institutional standards and understandings, software and hardware deep architectures… yeah, that kind of mess.