#budgets

actually. i'm gonna do that right now. here's my thesis on Why Spaceflight Is Not Doing Well atm. okay. here goes. 1. Commercial Spaceflight Is Bad, Actually. there's been this shift at nasa towards Contracting Everything and less in-house manufacturing. this is costing the agency a lot of money. this is something i'm not too knowledgeable about tbh so i'll leave it here and go on to my main point for this section. stop. contracting. things. gone are the days when nasa would design, build, and launch rockets. gone are the days when nasa was a launch service provider. our space program was successful in the first place because we had a centralized organization making sure everyone was working towards a common goal, and combining their efforts. i don't think we'd've gone to the moon in the sixties if not for the ENTIRE AEROSPACE SECTOR working on the saturn v. what do we have now? spacex is doing their own thing. blue is doing their own thing. yada yada et cetera. so, here's my dream. first, nasa buys falcon nine. from now on, spacex needs to pay to launch things. not the other way around. also make transporter and bandwagon missions much cheaper for universities. second, we keep flying sls. speaking of: 2. Artemis? More Like ArtePISS whew is the artemis program is a hot mess. i'll start by saying constellation should have never been cancelled. why? because you're changing plans, and that makes things worse. also, altair was beautiful and she was my wonderful daughter and i love her what do we have now? well. okay i'll start by saying i have nothing against blue moon blue's architecture is actually pretty cool. starship hls on the other hand. well. ha. okay i think it's quite clear that the starship program is mismanaged. we're twelve flights in and there hasn't been any meaningful progress in program objectives since flight seven. raptor isn't as cutting edge as it just has no margin for safety. that thing has such a high chamber pressure i'm suprised it doesn't rip apart at the seams. oh wait. it does. raptor 3 is meant to be mass-producible, despite using the most complex engine cycle in the world. reminds me of a specific engine on a specific soviet moon rocket. spacex has a normalization of deviance problem, too. engine-out capability doesn't mean an engine out on pretty much every flight is okay. it's Very Bad acutally. also, the program keeps changing. this makes it hard for everyone to keep up. clps is so far a disaster. block 1b and 2 being cancelled is just a travesty. so, what's my plan? okay. i am suggesting another change. but by this point. it's not much of one. first, we're bringing altair and block 2 back. also gateway. each lunar mission until we get lunar refueling set up can go like this: - sls block 2 launches with altair into nrho, docks with gateway. - sls block 2 launches with orion and either a station or base module, or an mplm that can serve as extra supply and crew space for the journey to gateway. - orion docks at gateway, crew transfer to lander and station - go down to moon - go up from moon - return in orion this doesn't have the risk of over fifteen refueling flights, btw. speaking of here's a fun fact. at even just 120m per starship flight sls is more cost effective to launch things to the moon. and that's at 2.5bn per sls. i believe we can cut that down to at least 850m. 3: The ISS. okay. honestly? i think we should be doing spacelab again. it's really useful to have the capability to do research in any orbit. also we can involve esa. again. so, we can launch reusable one-use stations on a heavy lift vehicle like new glenn. reusable so longer-term experiments can be returned after humans have left. this gives us really flexible capability. gateway can give us our permanant station. 4. Give NASA More Money Please. thanks :)