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psud ,

The current Artemis 4 plan

Gateway

  • Two modules launched together to lunar near rectilinear halo orbit (NHRO)

Lander

  1. Starship lander launches to LEO
  2. Some large number of starship tankers (or few tankers doing many flights) refuel the lander
  3. Lander flies to NRHO, docks with gateway

Transport

  1. Crew launch and fly to NHRO in Orion
  2. Orion rendezvous with gateway
  3. Crew land using the lander, do stuff
  4. Crew ascend to NHRO in lander
  5. Lander rendezvous with gateway
  6. Crew return to Earth in Orion
echodot ,

But I think Artemis 3 is slated to be the first human mission to the moon that actually lands and that’s pre gateway station so presumably they don’t actually need the space station presumably they can just dock directly to the lander which makes you wonder why they’re even building the station.

The plan has come under a fair amount of criticism for being overly complicated while at the same time not really having any extra operational capacitys over Apollo. Mostly this seems to be a cluge for the fact that starship (the lander is basically just starship with mods) isn’t human rated and obviously NASA has no information on the timeline as to when that will happen, assuming it happens at all. Combined with the fact that Congress insisted that NASA reuse the shuttle engines presumably because they mistakenly assumed that would save money or something. So now they need to build a launcher.

Oh, and they only have enough shuttle engines for three or four SLS rockets anyway so the whole thing isn’t even particularly long lived.

The whole plan is just weird.

psud ,

Yeah, I think when they decided they needed gateway station they thought they would be using a much smaller lander

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