Update:
At T -00:01:00, there was a stand down due to weather violations, which led to a scrub.
The launch of Crew-11 has now been rescheduled to launch tomorrow, August 1st, 2025, at 15:43 UTC.
New YouTube live stream
Notes:
at T+00:10:04 it looks like something black moving across the cloud layer to the right, likely some particle or condense coming down the camera lens.
at T+00:13:13 I wonder if that is the Moon, a planet, or something else to the right, among the very faintly visible stars?
I’d be interested to hear the Tenement history of the building in its final years, no doubt some people who lived there as children are still with us today.
The Tenement museum on Henrietta street is a great time capsule of that era.
“We currently have a rented orbital taxi, but no workhorse spacecraft. We haven’t set foot on the moon for the better part of a century, and the system we are developing to get there is a complete mess and would be much too expensive to operate if ever completed, while a possible alternative keeps turning into pretty fireworks blocking air traffic.”
“It is therefore perfectly reasonable that our goals be the accomplishement of these great things we’re completely missing the infrastructure for. We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because words are cheap as hell!”
Here on Earth, the main factor limiting nuclear power is the radiation hazard. To create a power generation facility of any useful capacity, you need hundreds of thousands of tonnes of shielding, and you need to site your plant well away from population centres.
On the moon, population centres are not a problem (not yet, anyway). Shielding would be more difficult - it would clearly be prohibitively expensive to send thousands of tonnes of lead, steel, and concrete from Earth. The reactor itself could be designed to be relatively lightweight, but it would have to operate without shielding - thus irradiating everything for miles around.
There doesn’t seem to be any plan to deal with such a reactor when it reaches the end of its design life, or when it breaks down and starts to leak. Presumably it will just sit there, quietly pumping out radiation for the next 20,000 years.
We have yet to establish the first long-term Lunar habitation - and already we’re proposing turning the place into a radioactive wasteland.
Don’t worry, if we iradiate the moon in to sentience somehow, we already have a solution, and we already know we defeated it; thanks to this found footage some time travellers dropped back in the early 1900s while on holiday.
And now we know why it looks like elon musk, apparently he kept mixing his semen into the materials used to build every space X rocket and capsule. Elon Musk birthing the Moon Child was actually on my apocalypse bingo card so silver linings!
That depends on a lot of factors… and Artemis seems hellbent to make each of them as unoptimised as possible.
Huh… took me a while to realize that they’re talking about starship, not about Artemis. Hooking two of those beasts together and spinning them… yeah, that’s going to be a fun adventure. Problem with starship is that by this point, after all the (so far unsuccessful) modifications to keep it from blowing up, there’s a good chance that it by now has less usable payload than falcon heavy. We don’t know for sure, because starship is proprietary technology, but there has been some pretty worrying analysis on the subject.
Starship/Super Heavy holds more fuel than Saturn V did, and the Artemis mission is funded by NASA.
If the only goal is to get humans to the Moon surface and back, we should be able to do it using only 1 rocket since Saturn V did the launch with only 1 rocket, right? It is currently 2025, and Apollo 11 was the 1960’s.
Estimates for Artemis are looking at more rockets being launched than seen here in this movie, Don’t Look Up…( i posted the entire movie with timestamp, and it won’t show, here is a clip instead)
Compared to Apollo 11…
We earthlings are not being told something important, or the Artemis missions have goals pushing beyond the Moon and Mars. Estimates reach almost 30 Super Heavy launches to get humans to the moon’s surface and back.
NASA already has a very long nose and its growing
Not so much training as just simply gathering experience. If people are to be sent to Mars, we need a whole lot of tech and procedures that have not yet been pressure tested (and we’re talking far more than just rockets here). The moon would be the ideal testbed for most of that. We’d actually have a chance to recover people from there if things go wrong…
I was only reading about Geoff Lewis a few weeks ago (its possible I found this link through a post on here already so sorry if im double posting, cant recall how I got there initially)
