#us space program

Gemini Vll as seen from Gemini Vl on the day the two craft performed the first American rendezvous in space, December 15, 1965.

Not a surprise at all. The vehicle SpaceX has put forward has not flown to earth orbit yet, let alone being man rated or going as far as the moon. Blue Origin has never flown in space. (No their sounding rocket doesn’t count.) Their New Glenn rocket won’t fly until next year and their lander will be developed from what they learn from that.

I will give Blue Origin credit, their lunar lander vehicle at least looks, on paper, to have had some thought put into it for the rough and uneven lunar terrain. I look at the picture above of how SpaceX thinks their vehicle will look on the moon and laugh. It looks like some illustration from a pulp science fiction magazine in the 1950s. The lunar surface is way too rough. You try to land a top heavy pencil like that on end on the moon and it will just fall over.

I am a huge proponant of getting people out into space. We’ve spun in low earth orbit for far too long. The Artemis program though is the wrong design, put together for the wrong reasons, out of surplus shuttle parts. It is too expensive and will not be able to sustain the launch frequency required to have a sustained lunar program.

Space Race...