Having watched Apollo 8 Christmas Eve and all the moon landings on Apollo, the whole Artemis thing is just too bizarre to believe and NASA acts like it is an amazing step forward.

The NASA transition team saw this coming in 2008, so Obama cancelled Orion & Ares I in its 1st budget request. NASA & contractors lobbied Congress crying foul & charging we were trying to ruin the space program. All this while they lied about the program’s progress.

Sadly, this is the program the vast majority of the space community wanted & seems to still want. Makes me angry too.

… If Congress had provided the requested funding, [Commercial Crew becoming operational considerably earlier] could have happened. They cut it 40% in the first 5 years. Shoveled that $ to SLS & Orion, which already received 10X as much. I know… I really need to get over my trauma. Casey’s blog was just so 💯, I’m triggered!

https://x.com/Lori_Garver/status/1985147604121092154

We should all be triggered. What an utter fiasco SLS and Orion are.

There isn’t too much that will be new to regulars here, least of all our host, Mr Zimmerman, who has written critiques of Orion’s failures numerous times, as have many others, up to and including NASA’s own OIG. But because it is so thorough (clocking in at 13,000+ words!) and because we know that Casey’s treatments like this now get read by NASA center heads and White House staff, I recommend it for your attention. There are a few factual niggles — it took SpaceX about a billion dollars for the full development of Falcon 9 with the reusability capability on the booster (that is, through Block 5) included, not just $400 million — but nothing that mitigates the savagery of his indictment of Orion. (Lockheed’s Orion team has probably spent a billion bucks just on software licenses and upgrades alone since 2006, after all.) In summary:

SLS and Orion do not meet NASA’s internal safety standards, and it’s not even close. Even with ten successful uncrewed test flights, fundamentally flawed designs would not create great enough statistical certainty on safety, and instead NASA proposes to fly Artemis II with people around the Moon, a uniquely demanding mission, in a unique configuration with a heat shield design and life support system that has never been tested before. It is quite something to have managed to engineer a spacecraft even more dangerous than Shuttle, but NASA, Boeing, and Lockheed have done it. Once again, NASA is rolling the dice on tragedy and national humiliation. […]

We don’t need to theorize about this. We have 20 years of evidence before our eyes.

Orion has failed. Now let it die before it kills us.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/

Saville: NASA actually did replace whole sections of tiles on the shuttle with carbon thermal blankets, a definite improvement. The problem as always however was that NASA treated the shuttle as an operational airplane, not a prototype development vehicle that should have been revised and upgraded significantly after every flight.

Just like SpaceX is doing with Starship.

Currently Orion can ONLY take astronauts AROUND the moon, they lack the propulsion model to go into even the silly NRHO much less go into an LLO for 10 orbits like Apollo 8 did FIFTY SEVEN years ago.

Well, now…as I understand it, the Artemis II Orion has as much delta-v and the necessary software to enter into and exit out of NRHO. But NASA has chosen not to do so on this mission in order to lower the risk profile of the mission. They made that decision pretty early on in the program.

Now, what this Orion CANNOT do is to dock with anything. Because the docking adapter and docking software are not ready yet….and anyway, it’s not necessary for this mission, since there is nothing for the Orion to dock *to*. I think this was a mistake — it means that the first lunar landing mission will also be testing all the docking systems for the very first time — but it’s yet one more example of the constraints this program operates under.

P.S. Thanks for the link to Casey’s new blog post. I had not seen it yet.

The Shuttle tiles did actually get a reformulation after some years in service to make the tiles more damage-resistant. The original formulation was soft enough that a significant number of tiles were damaged to the point of flight-unreadiness after the 747 carrier aircraft encountered some rain on an approach during one of its Shuttle transport flights.

Yet another example of the institutional constraints the Shuttle was developed under, and had to operate under. Funding limitations and political realities meant freezing so many design decisions early, and cutting off nearly all opportunities for any iteration. NASA could eventually tweak the tile design, but that only improved performance and turnaround at the margins.

Even so, we learned from the Shuttle, and SpaceX is the beneficiary of the lessons of its thermal protection systems. But SpaceX is clearly in position to learn a lot more, and implement those new lessons. NASA only built five flight article Shuttles; SpaceX will end up building hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Starships, and they’ll keep improving as they go along building them.

The Shuttle tiles did actually get a reformulation after some years in service to make the tiles more damage-resistant. The original formulation was soft enough that a significant number of tiles were damaged to the point of flight-unreadiness after the 747 carrier aircraft encountered some rain on an approach during one of its Shuttle transport flights.

Nothing was ever done to rationalize the circumstance that nearly every Shuttle tile had a bespoke shape. Where Shuttle was concerned, Eli Whitney died in vain.

Jeff Wright,

I wouldn’t worry about rain and Starship TPS tiles. They have an impermeable glassy surface on their tops and sides, unlike Shuttle tiles. The Shuttle tiles could, and did, absorb water. Starship tiles, with the “crunch-wrap” sealing their interstices, make for a water-repellant skin.

It is a complete mess. Any sane organization would stop and regroup.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a-national-disgrace/

I hope one day they become obsolete.

Until then, spacecraft will resemble something from THIS OLD HOUSE

ugh

Uhm… we already did. In 1969.

We own the moon. China can rent a couple acres from us if they want.

Artist’s illustration of a big government moon lander:
https://tinyurl.com/3cn4hfwe

“Orion and SLS are fully stacked.”

Well, almost, but not quite “fully” yet.

But that’s not the problem for you in this context. Orion and SLS can take astronauts around the Moon, but they cannot take them to the Moon’s surface. You need a lander for that.

NASA has already contracted two landers through the HLS program. They may have run into delays, just like the Grumman Apollo LM did; but there ain’t no way, Jeff, that a new lander can be developed and delivered before one of them is ready, let alone before 2030.

The troubling thing, though, is that the kind of informed discussion about going back to the moon on this and other forums never quite seems to percolate to the decision makers in Congress or in the White House. When, short of Richard Feynman and the Challenger post mortem, have we ever witnessed such a substantive, reality-based hearing in committee? Granted, Mr. Musk and his colleagues may end up going back to the moon on their own anyway, but I still believe that we would be better off if our thinking about such things were more congruent with reality and more reflective of some kind of shared vision about our future*. Including the vision that, yes, we are that kind of country and culture, and we are going to let *capitalism and individual initiative* do what they do best.

*This is from the Google AI overview, and I find little to disagree with:

“The phrase ‘without vision, the people perish’ is a biblical proverb from Proverbs 29:18 that means a lack of foresight, goals, or direction leads to a society or individual becoming aimless and failing. This proverb is often interpreted in a few ways: that a lack of goals leads to stagnation and a loss of purpose, or in a more literal sense that it refers to a need for divine or prophetic guidance for a society to avoid moral decay and unrestrained behavior.”

Both Kennedy’s New Frontier (even if wrongheaded from Robert’s POV) and the flight of Apollo VIII were inspirational in times of darkness and doubt, and most of us need such things. And a few (reality-based) Fireside Chats wouldn’t hurt, either.

Entirely correct – and I do mean entirely.

There were all sorts of shenanigans with Artemis 1 between completion of stacking and the actual launch, including failed wet dress rehearsals, multiple GSE bothers and anguishing over whether or not to have the thing hide in the VAB from a hurricane. Starships are much tougher and far easier to move around as they are moved empty – The SLS-Orion stacks include massive tonnages of solid propellant. Hence the need for what amounts to world-class mining equipment to move them around. Starships travel much more quickly on commodity multi-axle transporters. Whisking a Starship stack off the pad and back to shelter in the event of approaching bad weather is a no-brainer because running it back to cover, then out again after the wind passes is no big deal.

It’s pretty much guaranteed that at least some of the same sorts of delays will afflict Artemis 2. If it goes in 1Q 2026 I will be very surprised.

Everything else you say is true too. Duffy has publicly called Elon out and SpaceX will now proceed Moonward at flank speed using entirely its own hardware, if necessary – and it likely will be – to shorten the schedule. There will now be a Starship-based substitute for the SLS-Orion stack – a subset of the Mars armada crew carrier – that will be able to meet HLS Starship in a much closer lunar orbit than NRHO. HLS Starship won’t have to mooch around waiting for its partner Starship like it would for Orion either. My guess is that the two Starships will fill up in LEO from two different depots, then travel Moonward in formation.

Fun times ahead. I hope the first earnest of future intent SpaceX shows us is an IFT-12 flight of a V3 Starship stack from Starbase Pad 2 before the end of this year.

And NASA will go away too.

Now what matters is whether the company can keep them in place and whether there is damage that would be fatal or harmful to a crew if they should fall off.

If you insist upon perfection, then you will be waiting until someone finds or invents unobtanium. You also would not fly Artemis II crewed.

Dick Eagleson: Yup. What a concept! Standardize the tile design! By jove, its so radical no wonder no NASA person could conceive it!

Just because Orion and SLS are stacked doesn’t mean squat. There are so many things that could go wrong that the projected February 2026 launch date most probably will not happen. With the status of the Orion heat shield, NASA is betting the lives of 4 astronauts on a very definite unknown. If things go wrong Artemis will go away. In most respects Artemis is just a redo of the Apollo. And despite Duffy’s bluster, there will be no Blue Origen lander before 2030.

As long as SpaceX is not hampered by government or legal abuse, they will have a proven lander by 2028 for Artemis. And if Starship is man-rated by then, they may fly their own Moon mission. And if Artemis III is delayed, SpaceX may go ahead and beat both the U.S. and Chinese governments to the Moon.

SpaceX’s ability to mass-produce TPS tiles is also related to its having designed Starship to employ mostly three or four standard tile sizes and shapes with the number of uniquely-shaped tiles kept to a minimum. Each of Shuttle’s tiles, in contrast, was pretty much unique.

Dick and Jeff: There is also the manufacturing component. NASA never could manufacture its tiles efficiently or cheaply or quickly. Replacing the tiles was difficult and slow.

SpaceX now has a factory producing tiles quickly in the thousands.

The thermal conductivity of TPS tiles at “cold-ish” temperatures doesn’t really matter much.

Very low thermal conductivity at very high temperatures was pretty much mandatory for the Shuttle given its aluminum airframe. Starship’s stainless steel hull can stand a lot more heat so there is more latitude to trade thermal conductivity for other desirable TPS tile properties such as, say, durability.

Over at NSF we read about a difference between Shuttle and Starship tiles:
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50748.msg2730574#msg2730574
Do the tiles on Starship have 65x worse thermal conductivity than the Space Shuttle?

all units are (W/m-K)

Space Shuttle Tiles: https://tpsx.arc.nasa.gov/MaterialProperty?id=1&property=4

.013 at 255K
.289 at 1533K

TUFI: https://tpsx.arc.nasa.gov/MaterialProperty?id=8&property=3

.843 at 255K
1.6 at 1505K

I find it hard to believe the Starship tiles have 65x worse thermal conductivity than the Space shuttle tiles at cold-ish temperatures and 5.5x worse at 1500K?

“Are we sure the TUFI (material #8) is really what’s on the Starship?”

–Now, that is either true or it isn’t.

If it isn’t true—maybe you could get away with Lunar Starship one day.

It is not ready to go to the Moon.

Orion and SLS are fully stacked.

Once again, your Libertarian bias has blinded you.