• greygore@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    Just a reminder that Musk’s original timeline to Mars was to launch in 2024 and land this year. Meanwhile, the Starship rocket(s) meant to accomplish this, as well as the lunar landings have only just had 6 successful launches out of 11 attempts.

    Furthermore, none of those launches even attempted low earth orbit (LEO) which is roughly 120+ miles up. The delta-v to go to the moon is much lower, but the fuel for that has to get into LEO first, along with fuel for descent, ascent, and the trip back to Earth. The Apollo missions accomplished this by using a truly colossal rocket, the Saturn V. Incidentally, the Soviet’s approach was the N1, which blew up on all four attempts to launch it. While Starship is planned to be as big or bigger than the Saturn V, which much greater payload capacity, the actual lunar module (LEM) was a much smaller craft and was left at the moon to avoid return fuel, while the Starship lander is the rocket itself (or the top stage) and meant to be returnable.

    In order to achieve this, it will need much more fuel and therefore can’t fly a single rocket to accomplish this. SpaceX plans to accomplish this via refueling in space, a novel technology that has yet to be demonstrated and therefore adds more uncertainty into their time budget to work out the kinks. All of this brings into question the timelines for Artemis as extremely optimistic.

    Of course, the original goal (for Musk) was to go to Mars, which is like the jump from LEO to lunar landing, as the distance jumps from 120+ miles to 250,000 miles and then to 140,000,000 miles. Additionally, you can reach the moon in 3 days, while a trip to Mars takes 9 months. The difficulty curve is exponential and they’re nowhere close to this goal. Naturally, Musk is “50/50 confident” that they can launch a mission in 2026 in remarks made this year.

    All of this to say - while SpaceX has some incredibly smart engineers who are passionate about what they do, Elon Musk is a liar and a fraud who has an abysmal track record of ridiculously optimistic timeline predictions and should never be trusted.