NASA Artemis1 launched

The launch is at about 3:10 into video.

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No humans on that one eh?

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No humans. It’s more of a test of competition between Lockheed Martin and Musk’s returnable rocket system only the US (NASA) picks up the check. Got to keep up them Chinese.

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They’ll be on top soon enough

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@rcleven This is not the case at all. NASA has embraced participation of private industry in the space business. In fact Elon Musk’s SpaceX would not be were they are now if not for NASA proposing private startups, seed funding them, and providing assistance and valuable knowledge. Work on Orion began long before private companies were brought in for low earth orbit work. SpaceX has done an incredible job, proving themselves more than capable. That is why NASA has awarded SpaceX the contract to design and build the next Mars lander. That is definitely far outside the scope of low earth orbit work. This will be no small feat despite all of the success to date. I am rooting for SpaceX to hit another one out of the park.

As for the SLS rocket. The design choice was no doubt politically influenced. There are many people that are not in agreement with the SLS decision from day one. A good fight was had but knowledge, wisdom, and common sense lost again to politics. However, that is long behind us and the SLS, though not the first choice of many, is what we have built and is on the way to a deep orbit around the moon as I write this. That being said, SLS is the most powerful rocket ever built and so many people worked hard to make it happen up to this point. America(Orion, SLS, parachutes) and the European Union (service module) should be very proud and celebrating this part of their achievement. :beers:

I urge those interested, curious, and the doubtful to dig a little to learn about everything we stand to gain from the Artemis-1 test and the associated secondary experiment’s (cube sats, optical navigation, skip entry, heliocentric orbit around Lagrange point 1, etc.). You might start with NASA web information sites NASA.gov (not .org, and please not .com - some porn companies thought it would be funny to buy and host NASA.com . It’s NSFW the last time I accidentally went there)

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I don’t want to read, just tell me… Why haven’t we sent humans to space if we had the technology in the 60s?

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We have sent people into space. The Russian Space Station has been occupied buy American astronauts for the last decade+. We only went to the moon to beat Russia.

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Bless your heart :hugs:

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I’m not getting into that argument whether or not anybody went to the moon. But when I was in the London tech museum years ago i saw a replica of the moon landing device and my first impulse was “no f*cking way this shoe box with some kitchen foil around it could hold 2 people, the equipment for the re-launch and at the same time not fall apart”. It certainly requred big cojones to even consider.

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When I was a kid, my dad got me into a high fidelity simulator for the lunar lander. It was extremely cramped in there, even for a small kid! And every bit of space not used for the seat was wall to wall analog switches, buttons, and knobs.

If I’m remembering correctly, Blasting back off of the lunar surface didn’t take much. I believe it used a single impulse engine. In other words, it just need a short duration kick to move it fast enough away from the ground and inertia carried it up to the orbiting service module.

The foil everything was wrapped with provided radiation/thermal protection and was not subject to intense aerodynamic pressures and vibration.

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Here’s a picture half way down the page, it doesn’t really reflect the scale. I remember it was really tiny.

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Looks like cgi to me

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There was a live feed up the entire mission. A camera on each solar array panel. Most of the first pictures people were seeing were just snap shots from the live feed.

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