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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you. Back with space historian Robert Zimmerman. His website is behind the Black dot com linked up at Coast tocoastam dot com. Robert, what's the update with the Artemis program to get us back to the Moon?
I would strongly expect that the NASA components of that, that's the SOLS rocket and the Orion capsule are going to be canceled sometime in the next year. The NASA spend like sixty billion dollars on these thing about it and making it like a half a dozen capsules, and the rockeymond isn't paid something like between twenty five and thirty billion dollars to make a half another capsules. You yeah, right, I mean, when you think about it in those terms,
it's absurd. And the same thing with the SLS rocket. The rocket each launch, depending on who you ask, they estimate the cost of each launch is somewhere between one and four billion dollars each launch. And the cumbersome design of the SOLS rocket means you can do launches more than at best, and it's really never going to be this at best once a year, more likely once every two or three years. You want to have a space program a program once again, you can't do it with
that kind of turnout. It's just not conceivable. It it's just not fast enough. Right now, SpaceX is developing Starship Super Heavy, which is more capable than SLS, is going to cost a tenth of the money, I mean, maybe more than that. Like we're talking about only a few million dollars a launch, three usable million, not billion. And it's designed to be manned. It is going to be used as the lunar lander when the NASA eventually gets
to the and so this is definitely the future. And I really do expect that the problems in the SLS Orion program in Artomius are significant and were worrisome. NASA is planning to fly the next mission of Artemis on SLS using an Orion capsule with a crew on board, and they want to fly it around the Moon and back to Earth. However, there are serious questions about the heat shield that Orion uses on return to Earth. In the first unmanned flight in twenty two, Ryan came back.
He came back seriously damaged it. Boy had been a crew on board, they would not have been earth But the damage was serious with one of my large chunk sections of that heat shield came off. Never seen damage like that before, and there are a lot of reasons why, but NASA has made the decision that the first manned mission with Orion, they're going to use the same heat shield. They're not going to introduce the changes until the next mission. On top of that, the Orion capsule that flew that
unmanned mission did not have an environmental system. In other words, there were no people on boards, they didn't bother and stall one. The first time Orion's environmental habitable system to keep people alive is going to be used is on the very first time people fly in Orion. These are the kind of things that FAA does not allow SpaceX to do, and for good reason, and SpaceX agrees you
should know what you're doing. And so because of the various issues with the heat shield and with the environmental system and issues with SLS, NASA decided about a month ago to delay that first unmanned that first manned mission around the Moon, delay it from the end of this this year to the spring of twenty six, about a three to four months away. I already said on my website the minute they made that announcement that twenty six
launch date is not realistic. It's not going to happen, because it's traditionally this program is they were supposed to be launching by twenty fifteen, establishing a base on the Moon in twenty fifteen. They didn't get their first launch up until twenty two, seven years later, and that's now two years later, three years later, and they still haven't
done a second launch. No man mission, it's for sure, and so I really am expecting that Jack eisaman In, Jared Isisamgan who's now in going to be in charge of NASA. He's a private sector guy, a billionaire. He's talked about how he just doesn't like how NASA operates and when it comes to building things. I really think he's going to take a step in and make some force,
some major changes in the entire program. This does not mean Artomist will go away, or our goal to go to the Moon will go away, but it will change. I have recommended in essays on my website that NASA stop trying to be China to the Moon. We've already gotten there. We don't have to prove anything. But what we should do is be focused on doing whatever we can to build this aerospace industry in space. Get it as robust as possible, because if you do, and this
is where the space stations come in. If you do, then you have the capabilities to do anything you want in the Solar System much more effectively, much more quickly. It might start a little slower, but before you're done, you'll be wiping the floor with the Chinese, the British, everybody else. So that's what I have suggested they do, and I think we'll do some variation there. It's going to be a political decision because canceling sos a lot
of money goes to professional districts. I say he won't have a problem because because these private rocket companies, they're sending money to many districts also, and if you get them going, you kind of won't have anything to play about.
Companies like SpaceX get their brain power. Did they rob it from NASA?
Absolutely not.
No.
Actually, I would say that almost nobody at SpaceX has come from NASA because NASA teaches the wrong lessons. It teaches process has to be followed. It teaches you don't do you don't build, fly fail, build again, fly fail, build again. You know, actually fly rockets and see how they work and fix it. NASA follows the philosophy whereby you have to design it so well that it might take a decade to design it. But when you fly, you don't need many test missions. You've done it all
on the computer. Not only do I think that approach is bad because you really never computer can never cover you in every aspect. It's much slower and much more expensive. And that way of working is not something that SpaceX
wants or any of these private companies. What they instead want is young people coming out of colleges who have had who in college were given the chance to play with engineering, to cut metal, to build things, build satellites, small satellites, build engines, a variety of things, just to learn how that's done and then get into the roll up in their shoulders and actually build things for these companies.
Now a NASA has provided a thing relatively few people to these companies, and I think that's generally been a good thing.
But with all the experience that the NASA engineers had over the years, getting to the moon and vice versa and everything else. We didn't tap into that.
He's probably George. Let's put some time on this. The engineers that got us to the moon and landed in the nineteen sixties, they're all gone. They're all retired, passed on. Many of them were in private companies like Grummin, which is no longer in business and you know, was absorbed
by other companies. The companies that exist now that used to be the big space companies that did all that stuff are companies like boe I don't need to talk at great length about the problem that Boeing has right now. They have been unable to get anything accomplished with Starline and their manned capsule. It's just disgraceful the kind of mistakes they have made. And so I think that that kind of talent isn't there. One of the things SpaceX has done and all these startups is it's tapped into
the young generation. There's a story, for example what I covered. SpaceX wanted to get some new software people who's developing reusability and landing. They went to a game conference, a video game conference where there's a lot of software people and it asked anyone who is working on space. We've got some software needs to be written, and you guys can come at this with a different approach and you know how to write software. And they got some people
from that. Those they look in different places, and of course everyone would like to work in space, and you know SpaceX is the top, so they get the people. No NASA. And when I give talks to colleges, I can repeatedly tell them why of the students there don't get a job at NASA, You're going to be in a dead end. Get jobs in these private companies. You'll cut metal, you'll build things, you'll fly things, you'll have a lot more fun, and you'll have a career in space.
Think about sols once again. At Orion, they've been building that damn rocket and capsule now for twenty years and it's ugly flown. If you're an engineer, you spent your whole career and you're now retiring in university. So the thing take off, the people on board, that's not satisfactory. So yeah, I NASA what we have this. Unfortunately, there's still a cultural attitude that NASA is the top, the one, the gray, they're the ones to talk to. They are not.
And the last thing that should be happening is depending on NASA to engineer anything, build anything, or design anything. Where NASA should be doing, which is now doing mostly is if it wants to get a lure land to science instruments on the Moon, it hires a private company to do it, like Blue Ghosts from Fireflight. It's gonna fly and we got two. They put the NASA instruments
on it. NASA gets to do the research. But this is a private company that has its Luna land and it's making money on it because it it rented some of the payload space to this Japanese private Luna landa company it can so that they can fly as well. And so we're gonna have two landers and they're privately so they're privately owned. And so yeah, NASA is NASA is not the agency it was in the nineteen sixties and it hasn't been for probably five decades.
What's going on with missions to Mars?
All right? So we have two rovers on Mars right now that are functioning, Curiosity and Perseverance. I cover them on a regular basis because especially Curiosity, it is roaming amid mountains and we've never had a rover really roving about mid mountains on a mountain side. So the views of spectacular and I always approached this from a first
point of view. I think my readers will prefer that as well, you know, so I post pictures to try to get a sense of that Curiosity's been there for more than a more than a decade and it's still functioning and working well. It's climbing mount shop in Gale Crater and it's doing really good work, and it's once again the views of spectacular the other over perseverance, it has finally left the crater to zero that it landed within.
It landed in zero crater because there was this delta that had flown in through a gap in the Creator's rim that filled part of the crater floor, and it was very intriguing to look at from orbite images. While they spent the last two or three years since landing
exploring that delta and the rim of the crater. They've now climbed the rim and they've climbed down onto the other side and they're moving west into a region of more that is known to have a great deal of minerals of potential mining value and they're going to be exploring that area at length. That the area west of zero Crator is a very high potential mining region and Pervance is going to explore that over the next few years.
It's exciting, though, isn't it.
Oh gosh? You know, when I look at pictures coming back from Curiosity and I post them, I don't see other websites doing this that cover space, and I'm surprised. You know, on almost a weekly basis, I can post a spectacular image showing the barren, alien environment and landscape of Mars and from the positions that we've never had spacecraft in before. You know, all the early rovers landed in very flat, safe places, so the views were not
particularly interesting. Curiosity and Perseverance are in are in very interesting terrain, producing very cool visuals. So I posted because yes, it's exciting. It's it's science fiction but real, you know. And I am surprised that I seem to be the only one in the space business who does this on a regular basis. But I do, and it's really fun when I do it. It's it's like the last one for Carrio. People go to my website and do a search for curiosity. You'll see a lot of those pictures.
The last one was looking out on their future route along the side of the mountain. That's contoying along the side of the mountain right now, and in the distance you could see, of course, the rim of the crater twenty thirty miles away in the age and the floor of the crater, and they're like two thousand feet up from the floor right now, So up there they're climbing.
Are we going to continue to land on asteroids?
Robert, Well, there are no, there are no. Let mean we phrase that we have right now one mission heading towards the potentially dangerous asteroid Apolfice. That's the Osiris Rex mission renamed Osias apex. It it went to Benu, it got samples, it delivered defense of samples to Earth, and then they repurposed it to go to to Apolfas now is potentially dangerous. It will make a close fly by the Earth in twenty nine. It's not expected to be able to hit the Earth for at least two hundred
more years, if not many more years after that. Is so, the dangerous is slim.
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