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If they did that, they'd be left with Orion at Geostationary Transfer Orbit at best. Falcon Heavy doesn't have the delta-V to send Orion to the Moon.Now if SLS was replaced with an FH with Orion on top…
How do astronauts get to/from Orion/Starship if they don't dock? EVA?Orion and the ICPS aren't designed for orbital docking
Orion and ICPS are not designed for docking, but there is a international standard for vehicle docking, and Crew Dragon, Orion and Crew Starship will all support that style of docking. There is enough docking of crewed vehicles to each other for that standard to exist, but we just don't dock rocket stages like ICPS to stuff. Like I said, we traditionally stack them on the ground, then separate them during the mission, never to be used again.How do astronauts get to/from Orion/Starship if they don't dock? EVA?
Cool article, thank you.Seems like perhaps the right place for this:
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As NASA watches Starship closely, here’s what the agency wants to see next
"What happens if I don't have a Human Landing System available to execute a mission?"arstechnica.com
I think @TunaBug was picking up on Eric saying that the government was concerned specifically about SpaceX delivering, then never presented anything to back up that assertion. Koerner was perfectly neutral in her comments. It was sloppy journalism by Eric. In the comment section he says that he was just about to go on a three day break, and wanted to get two articles out before he left. I suspect that he was more focused on his break than that article.The article seemed fair to me. It’s not about the many critical things that have to happen for Artemis III, it’s about Starship and HLS progress. The statement from Koerner is pretty reasonable.
I fear how the government would skew the march of progress in space. Hopefully, SpaceX can point out to the politicians how solving the fundamental problems results in the greatest wins - as opposed to flash-in-the-pan programs like Apollo. Of course, that would then place a lot of public pressure on SpaceX to get it done.As that year approaches, pressure on NASA will grow to land first; or to put it another way, some US politicians will drive increasing political hysteria over “losing the Moon to China”.
As ever, I worry about China playing the long game versus the United States. Are they going to do to us what we did to the Soviet Union? Where you keep raising the bar of national competition until the other guy folds? Why would we care about China on the Moon when we don't seem to care about the United States on the Moon?
The good news is that, with the success of IFT-4, Starship launch cadence looks set to increase significantly. I think we are going to see remarkable progress from SpaceX.