u/Qualified-Astronomer

ISS is gonna be decommissioned in 5 years and NASA seems fully focused and allocating all their resources on building a moon base instead of building a new space station so does that mean we’re approaching the end of an era of US astronauts living in Low Earth Orbit. Once the moon base is done it’s looking like whenever NASA launches astronauts it will be to the moon instead of LEO, probably doing their space based research there instead of the ISS. There may be commercial space stations but I doubt NASA will use them often as it will be much smaller and less capable in the interim at least, they might send a crew every once in a while but it seems most focus will be on sending astronauts to the moon base.

I’ve been following this program for way too long now to know that everything that can go wrong will go wrong. You can develop the most complex rocket only for the simplest system to give way. A COPV already exploded on Booster 18. I hope it doesn’t happen again but have a feeling it might

Please if you’re an Xai employee, raise the issue of humans getting suspended for inauthentic behavior, faulty emails saying you’re account has been restored even when its still suspended. This is a major issue, take responsibility and fix this issue or please raise it with the company.

Don’t know if this is the right sub is a genuine question I have because it’s confusing to me. Look at what America did to Iran on Day 1, they killed like 40 of their leaders. I’m curious as to why Russia doesn’t do that to Ukraine because from their perspective it should cause chaos within the ranks. I know they regularly strike Kyiv with drones/missiles but they don’t seem to strike the political buildings. Additionally, Kyiv is close to the Belarus border so why doesn’t Russia send a ground invasion there and try to topple the leadership. I know they tried and failed back in 2022 but from their perspective wouldn’t it make sense to focus troops there rather than the East flank, especially if Putins goal is, as he puts it, to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO?

Artemis 2 generated national and international attention. Now I’m not taking anything from the astronauts, of course they are very brave and talented to do what they did and serve as an inspiration to many. But all the attention is on them and they’re deemed as the heros, which they are, but none of the attention is given to the engineers on the ground who made the mission possible. People act like the astronauts built the rocket. It is incredibly difficult to build a rocket to go to the moon, to build the capsule, to calculate all the trajectories, to perfect re entry etc. Yet the engineers aren’t even talked about or mentioned by the media or even the average person. Artemis 2 is inspiring people to be astronauts but I wished they inspired people to be engineers as well because this mission is not possible without them. They may operate in the background but they were the ones that designed the mission.

So NASA recently has decided to research nuclear propulsion. They’ve announced the freedom reactor which is nuclear electric propulsion and I’m not sure if they are doing anything nuclear thermal related (maybe DRACO). But do you think we should be allocating NASA’s already limited funds to nuclear propulsion research, do you support that? Or should be allocated elsewhere in space. There are arguments that nuclear propulsion is unnecessary since chemical rockets are so good and if the benefit of nuclear is worth doing the research behind it.

Im asssuming we all saw the SpaceX documentary in which they revealed the 33 Engine Static Fire was an abort, to all our surprises since everyone reported it was a success. Anyways that probably means they have to redo static fires right and then reinspect engines so that prolly means Flight 12 in June? Then that would mean orbit in August? Ship Catch October? And maybe if we’re lucky propellant transfer in December but idk SpaceX has seem to dropped the ball evryone was predicting like 10 flights this year remeber EverydayAstronauts poll

As far as I’m aware, funds, mission plans and legal requirements are allocated up through Artemis V. But what comes after that considering they’ll probably retire SLS then because of its cost per launch? The landers are from private companies but the Orion capsule to deliver crew can only be launched from SLS so how will crew get to the landers?