From PCC(E):  After watching the explosion of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket last week, a rocket that is designed to help create the first human colony on the Moon, I thought to myself, “What is all this mishigass? Why do we need a human colony on the Moon? What will it tell us that unmanned exploration using drones or robotic vehicles won’t?” I couldn’t think of any answers, but I beefed about this to my friend (and reader) Jim “Bat” Batterson, who used to work for NASA.  I was surprised that he pretty much agreed with me, and wrote an email to that effect. I asked him if he could turn the email into a short post, and he gladly assented.  So here’s Bat’s take on space missions (indented):

Before Trump’s election and, really, its Project 2025 budgetary guidance, NASA spent roughly equal amounts on “human spaceflight” (also called “human exploration”) and “science”. In the NASA budget, “science” is a category that includes basic/fundamental science —mostly via grants to universities and institutes in the sub-areas of planetary science, like heliophysics, astrophysics, and earth/atmospheric science.  The areas within “science” are prioritized by “decadal” committees of experts who, every ten years, assess the possible knowledge that NASA could help create.  These needs can be very expensive, requiring the engineering of entirely new spacecraft and instrumentation needing long timelines and large teams of unique technical expertise (think space telescopes, planetary landers, comet or asteroid fly-bys). 

Human Exploration, on the other hand, deals with all endeavors in which humans go into space in rockets, capsules, and space stations.  The Mars Rover, for example, counts as “Science” and not “Human Exploration” because humans aren’t involved. 

Until this past year. Human Exploration and Science were each budgeted at about $8 billion yearly with an additional $3 billion in human spaceflight operations such as running the International Space Station.

Last year, the administration’s (i.e., the President’s) budget recommended cutting Science by about 50%(!), and raising Human Exploration by $1 billion. Congress rejected that and kept the budget as it was.  The same attempt to cut the budget was made this year, and Congress again rejected it.

The lunar moon base or colony, as well as the Mars colonization form of mental masturbation, both fit under the exploration and human spaceflight operations budget. Space telescopes, robotic missions to the planets and asteroids, earth-observing satellites and the like are generally counted in the “Science” portion of NASA’s budget.  Even if Congress again restores the full Science budget, the chaos and uncertainty brought on these multi-year efforts can easily erode NASA if talented engineers and scientists seek more stable work to support their families.

I fully agree that there is no “science” in human colonization of the Moon as opposed to using robotic rovers; and the addition of humans to the mix entails not only danger to human lives, but much extra expense.  The significant science that comes out of human exploration of space is limited to understanding the complexities of humans living and working in space. The only justification I see for a lunar base is the same as that given for the “first man in space” competition with Russia in the 1960’s:  the claim of “soft” military/international presence IF another country such as China plants their flag along with a human colony.  Adjusted for inflation, the NASA budget of the early 1960’s was three times that of today’s budgets, reflecting the more serious devotion to putting humans on the Moon in the Sixties.  You can see a good budget summary from planetary society at this link.  

By the way, using Department-of-Defense comparisons, I like to think in terms of how many aircraft0-carrier-equivalents aspects of the NASA budget represent. A new aircraft carrier these days costs around $13 billion +/- out the door.  So the cost of the of NASA Human Exploration program is on the order of a new aircraft carrier each year.

So, dear readers, both Bat and I agree that we’re wasting a lot of dough (our dough) trying to put human colonies on the Moon and on Mars. It is a performative gesture with no real scientific benefits, and only tiny and unforseeable military benefits.  That money could well be used to alleviate human problems right here on Earth.

If you have any questions about this, put them in the comments and Bat will be glad to answer them.

Here from Wikipedia is a “NASA concept art of an envisioned lunar mining facility” and, below that, an “Inflatable module for lunar base”.

Artemis II returns today, if everything works okay. As I’ve said, there are some concerns about the heat shield, but not serious concerns. The space.com article below (click on it to read) gives the details as well as several links. I’ve put its video link (the best one, I think) below. Be sure to watch it live starting about 7:40 this evening, Eastern time, as several events will occur at or during re-entry.

Jim Batterson sent this link and added a few words:

In particular item #14 talks about their egress and being carried to the Navy recovery ship by helicopter.  After the crew are safe on board the ship, I think that the capsule is simply retrieved into the ship’s onboard “well”.  The astronauts are then helicoptered to firmer terra firma.

A short excerpt:

The Artemis 2 Orion capsule will return to Earth tonight, April 10, at 8:07 p.m. EDT (0007 April 11 GMT) with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California. Returning home on the ship to end a 10-day trip to the moon are NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot), Christina Koch (mission specialist) and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen (mission specialist). You can watch the landing live on Space.com, beginning at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT). You can also follow the mission live online on our Artemis 2 mission updates page.

After an epic trip to the moon and back, it’s landing day for the four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis 2 mission. For the first time in over 53 years, astronauts are returning to Earth from the moon.

But returning from deep space is no easy feat, especially for the Artemis 2 astronauts, who are the first crew to fly on NASA’s Orion spacecraft. The most harrowing part of the journey lies ahead: a fiery 13-minute plunge through Earth’s atmosphere at about 24,000 mph (38,600 kph) that will subject them to temperatures of up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius) with only their heat shield for protection and parachutes to slow down.

“Every system we’ve demonstrated over the past nine days — life support, navigation, propulsion, communications — all of it depends on the final minutes of flight,” NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya told reporters Thursday (April 9). “We have high confidence in the system, in the heat shield, and the parachutes and the recovery system that we’ve put together.”

Watch it all below:

When the two American astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams were stranded at the International Space Station (ISS) last June because their return vehicle had a problem that could not be fixed, I wailed to my friend Jim Batterson (a former employee at NASA) that they were going to die.  How could they survive if they couldn’t get back? Batterson (“Bat”) reassured me that there were plenty of vehicles that could bring them home, and there was nothing to worry about.  But their one-week visit turned into nine months of waiting, and my wailing increased. (To be sure, they did seem happy to have an extended stay on the ISS, since they like being in space.)

Well, it now looks like they’re coming home, so I have one less thing (among millions!) to worry about. I got the good news from Bat yesterday in an email, and asked him to expand it as a post, but also to keep some of the wording in his orginal email to me, which is beneath the asterisks. Bat’s post, original and fleshed out, are indented.

In 2014, contracts were awarded to SpaceX and to Boeing to each develop ways to take human crews to the International Space Station (ISS) and return them safely to Earth.  SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule was developed and has been operating successfully since 2020. It’s also used (along with Russian vehicles) to effect crew rotations of the ISS about every six months.  The Boeing Starliner capsule, after much delay, underwent a crewed test flight to ISS last June with two senior NASA astronauts onboard: Barry (Butch) Wilmore and Sunita (Suni) Williams.  The mission called for them to rendezvous and dock with the ISS and to stay aboard ISS for a week. But unexpected anomalies on the Starliner during rendezvous and docking led to NASA delaying their return until Boeing could understand and fix the cause of the anomalies.

After several months of testing both the docked Starliner and ground-based models, the problem was neither understood nor resolved, to NASA’s satisfaction. The astronauts could not be safely returned on this vehicle, so Starliner returned to Earth, uncrewed, in September 2024, having a soft landing in the New Mexico desert.  Astronauts Butch and Suni, as veterans of previous ISS missions, were integrated into the standing ISS crew to work and await the appearance of two future capsule seats for return to Earth.

Those seats finally appeared when the Crew 9 SpaceX capsule with two astronauts and two empty seats docked with the ISS in Septemberl, 2024.  The Crew 9 capsule is scheduled to undock and return to Earth with four astronauts—including Butch and Suni—in the next week or so.  Meanwhile four fresh astronauts (Crew 10) are scheduled to launch in a SpaceX capsule on Wednesday, March 12 and spend a week getting the ISS duties handed over to them.

This has been an excellent use of the ISS as a “safe haven” for astronauts, an idea that came about after the Columbia Shuttle accident for situations in which there are safety concerns about a return vehicle, allowing astronauts to await a rescue vehicle or simply another set of available return seats.  While there is constant danger in space, NASA decided that spending time on the ISS was deemed safer than returning on the Boeing Starliner ship.

************

But now Bat is worried that I might have been right: the returning astronauts might be in some danger. From Bat’s original post:

But NOW: Jerry,

You may have been right all along, as it is unfortunately turning out.

Now I also worry about Butch and Suni.  USA Today described tomorrow’s launch (Wednesday March 12 at 7:48 PM EDT – I usually go to Space.com to get a link or C-SPAN may carry it) of Crew-10, the replacement for Butch and Suni and the two Crew9 astronauts as routine. But Jeebus…nothing about human spaceflight is routine, and as soon as people start thinking it is, we are closer to losing a crew due to inattention. Then there is Musk, who in the past few weeks has exploded two suborbital spacecraft, raining debris down on the National Airspace System and on populated Caribbean islands, leading to significant flight delays and endangering 100’s if not 1000’s of air passengers.  I am convinced that Musk’s inattention to his launches led to at least the second failure and maybe both since it appears to me that he is the kind of hands-on boss whose constant physical presence makes a huge difference. So with him running all over the world as Trump’s chief of federal gov’t chaos, his space operations are running on autopilot for maybe the first time.  Both the booster rocket and the capsule for Crew 10 tomorrow are SpaceX products as is the Crew 9 capsule, currently docked at Station, which Butch and Suni are scheduled to return to Earth in sometime in the next several days.

And of course NASA has just announced a Reduction in Force per Trump’s and Musk’s actions, which has to get pretty much everyone’s (in NASA) attention.

Here’s Butch and Suni talking about their return. Look how her hair stands up in zero gravity!