Space Watch UK appears to be a spin-off of CND, and the general interconnected left wing protest scene. We can see an Extinction Rebellion logo on one of their banners here.

I get the feeling that these protesters have not given serious thought to space matters, and are not especially interested in the topic. To them, its just another facet of militaristic, colonial Western society they object to.

But lets take what they say seriously, and address the points they make.

Nuclear Moon

Space Watch have complained bitterly about some reporting on space nuclear reactors being developed in the UK.

They highlight the example of Kosmos 954, a Soviet satellite with a small reactor on board that suffered an uncontrolled reentry and burned up over Canada. They cite the fact that less than 1% of the nuclear fuel was recovered, which is true. But what they don’t mention is that the clean up ended because it was found that the remaining material was finely dispersed, its radioactivity was rapidly dropping, and it did not pose a danger to humans or the environment.

This was a concerning incident though - the Soviet government paid compensation to Canada, and was rightly criticised for losing control of a space nuclear reactor. Some of the fragments recovered were dangerously radioactive, and had they fallen on a populated area instead of a remote part of Canada, there may have been casualties.

Which brings us to their objections about this particular space reactor project - its for reactors for use on the Moon, and in it there is a statement that the reactor would only be turned on when it reached the surface of the Moon, precluding a Kosmos 954 style accident. Space Watch UK responds to this with this snark:

The scientist who has discovered how to switch radioactivity on and off should be nominated immediately for the Nobel Prize in Physics: such a discovery is an amazing breakthrough which totally rewrites all our previous understanding of the laws of nature.

We discovered how to “switch radioactivity on” back in the 1940s. It is kind of critical for all fission technologies. The point that seems to have been missed here is that a “cold” reactor, i.e. one that has not yet undergone large scale fission, has little radioactivity to it. Once the nuclear chain reaction is started and fission products appear - those are highly radioactive, and the “hot” reactor is now a radiation hazard if that material gets out. This is the elementary physics of nuclear reactors, which someone criticising them should know. And none of it “ rewrites all our previous understanding of the laws of nature”

The group is ignorant of nuclear physics here, and based on that misconception a correct reporting of the matter sounds ridiculous to them, and they mock it performatively for their (presumably equally ignorant) readers. This is an entirely unserious argument, so lets move on and see if they have done better elsewhere.

The Money Argument

In 2023, the group in its first action protested the Virgin Launch attempt from Newquay spaceport, which ultimately failed during the second stage burn. Space Watch UK opposed this flight on the grounds that some of the payloads the rocket carried were military.

Their core objection was that space should not be militarised at all, and that the UK “should be upholding and extoling the virtue of the Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967, which recognises that space is a ‘global commons’ to be used for peaceful purposes and for the benefit of all countries and humankind” (sic)

First, the militarisation of space is a done deal and can no more be rolled back than the militarisation of the air can be. It is a domain of war, as has been shown decisively in Ukraine, and that genie will not go back in the bottle. Secondly, the group seems not to understand the Outer Space Treaty. It is not, despite the hopes of groups such as this one, some kind of transnational constitution for total peace in space. It does not ban non-nuclear weapons from space, and certainly does not ban unarmed military assets such as reconnaissance satellites or military communications satellites from space.

A second plank of their objection is that they do no want commercial exploitation of space. Again, its a bit late to protest that - 18% of the UK economy relies on space services. Being charitable perhaps they mean as yet unrealised commercial activity like asteroid mining - but a small bunch of cubesats wasn’t ever going to do that.

It is hard to pin down the specifics of why they didn’t like the launch. One protester, though, held up this sign which raised the issue of opportunity costs:

I’m not sure what a “game of Star Wars” is, but the figures involved are ridiculous.

£10.3 million is essentially pocket change for a government like ours. One of the supposed better uses of this money listed is the NHS. That amount of money would run the health service for about 30 minutes. The benefits uprating in the UK this year - as in the automatic increase in existing entitlements to match inflation, not any new social spending - is £18 billion - 1800 times the value listed here, and roughly equivalent to the annual NASA budget. No social service has ever gone unfunded due to a nation spending money on space.

I believe there are several layered misconceptions here - beyond how little space missions cost next to the cost of expansive social spending. There is the idea that UK government services are starved of funding - when the reality is that most of them (notably the NHS) have their real terms budgets increased every year. There is the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy that people who work on rockets can be simply reassigned to do whatever task the protester thinks is more important. There is the notion that nothing beyond basic subsistence can be attempted while ever there is any indication of poverty in society, which if taken seriously would amount to a dismantling of society and the economy - to such an extent that it would make poverty much worse.

It comes across as a cheap shot - because only government spending a particular speaker doesn’t like is portrayed as some kind of theft from the needy in this manner. It is an argument that presumes the thing its trying to persuade you of - that space isn’t worth doing. Unfortunately, despite its logical flaws, this kind of populist argument lands well with those concerned with poverty.

How to Respond

By writing this article, I’ve essentially given exposure to this group while refuting their arguments. Is that a good idea? Maybe, maybe not. As a society we should keep lines of communication open with those with disagree with - recent events in the UK have, I think, shown the dangers of political conversation breaking down. To that end, please consider sharing this article:

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I cannot ever see myself finding common ground with a group like Space Watch UK. Perhaps some people who might otherwise be drawn to them could be persuaded to change their minds though.

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I decided to produce a short introductory guide/reading list for people who haven’t seriously engaged with space, and space colonisation, before. And it is important to understand colonisation, because it figures heavily in the valuation of SpaceX, as is discussed in the S-1 document now available.

This article should not be taken as complete due dilligence and is not investment advice. It is purely for educational purposes.

The Problem of Space Business

A lot of the technical problems of space are either already solved, or known to be solvable without significant new technology. But space has always been expensive, and the trouble has been finding a way to pay for the implementation of the technology.

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A new book New Space Capitalism offers a more positive outlook, takes on the arguments of the doomers, and offers practical suggestions for how to shape the new frontier.

Dr. Rainer Zitelmann is a noted author in the social sciences, which gives him a different perspective than most people in this debate (such as myself) who come from STEM backgrounds and only dabble in sociology, economics and the like where they intersect with our concerns.

His core idea is a simple one - “Only when it is possible to own, buy and sell land on other celestial bodies can humans truly become a multiplanetary species”. I agree with this idea, in fact I find it so obvious on the face of it that it ought not to be necessary to write a book arguing this case - but it is necessary, because there is an entire cottage industry arguing against both private property and space colonisation, often at the same time. This is done under the banner of “ethics” or “planetary protection”, and the book details some of these arguments - such as the notion of the colonisation of uninhabited planets being “western antimineralism” i.e. prejudice against rocks, or that indigenous shamans have some prior claim to the Moon, contrary to both reason and the Outer Space Treaty. In this context, a reaffirmation of property rights, one of the basic foundations of western civilisation, is very useful.

On technical matters, Zitelmann often defers to domain experts like Robert Zubrin, John Logsdon, and Rand Simberg. I spotted a few minor mistakes in this part of the book, but nothing hugely consequential and nothing that undermines the central thesis. A novice coming to discussions of space for the first time with this book would not end up with any significant misconceptions, which is more than can be said for a lot of works in this field.

The main body of the book though regards public policy, and specifically how space exploration became trapped in a quasi-socialist, government-led paradigm after the Apollo programme, and how this is a mistake in the opinion of the author.

The Apollo Anomaly

The success of the Apollo programme is one of the most remarkable events of the 20th century. Not only did a huge government programme come in on time, and only slightly over budget, but it was a project to do something which had never been done before. When President Kennedy set the goal of the Moon, the US had around 15 minutes of spaceflight in total from Alan Shepard’s brief suborbital hop. But they did it, and astonished the world.

This has led to a “Moonshot” mentality from politicians, which Zitelmann illustrates with examples such as Richard Nixon becoming fascinated with desalination technology, and believing he could retask NASA to developing it after Apollo, as if engineers and scientists were interchangeable problem-solving units that can be arbitrarily rearranged and made to produce specific breakthroughs on demand for their political masters.

A more reasonable framing of this idea is provided by Mariana Mazzucato in her book Mission Economy, which attempts to take general lessons from Apollo to argue that big state projects can and should be organised along similar lines to solve big problems, and that indeed the state is the best vehicle for doing so. This notion is one of the largest intellectual targets of the book, and is frequently revisited. Zitelmann’s more liberal view, illustrated with numerous examples, is that in various times and places human ingenuity has flourished in spite of the state rather than because of it.

While it is correct that “Moonshots” are almost universally a failure, and Apollo clearly can’t be generalised to anything the current government wishes would happen, as a glaring example of a successful programme it does deserve some explanation. I have taken a shot at it myself:

There is some acknowledgement of the positive role of the state later in the book, but citing public choice theory Zitelmann ultimately rejects government-led programmes as a way to economically develop space, and prefers the state at best as a mere customer. This part I don’t (yet) agree with - I think, certainly in Europe and probably in the US and China, the private market just isn’t mature enough to stand up on its own. A well-designed government-led space initiative in the right circumstances can work - Apollo proved it - and may be the best way to get to the point where private space interests can take over fully.

Space Property

Where I am in stronger agreement is on what the final goal should be - a solar system of property rights, where the huge investments required to develop space can provide returns to those who take the risks.

This book takes a strong stand on the often-discussed issue of what the Outer Space Treaty (and its misbegotten offspring the Moon Treaty) actually says about private property claims. The final chapter challenges the many people trying to squeeze “space socialism” out of the OST after the failure of the Moon Treaty to enshrine it in international law explicitly.

The case is made well, with examples of how a real, capitalist space economy may work. But I suspect that this might be the start of the debate, not the last word. It is not so easy to separate intellectuals from what Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” that they are wise enough to centrally plan everything. Why should the vast bounty of space be left in the selfish, anarchic hands of capitalists like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, when there are people with Very Good Degrees out there who can perfectly direct resources towards the greatest collective benefit?

Too much media these days consists of people talking to people they already agree with for an hour or more, and having a lovely chat about how everyone who disagrees with them is stupid, crazy and evil. I would recommend that the anti-space crowd read this book as much as the pro-space crowd; and perhaps some of the space socialists mentioned in the book may be willing to challenge Dr. Zitelmann to a public debate.

New Space Capitalism is available to pre-order now

In these reports I’ve been tracking progress in spaceflight, and there has been much to be optimistic about. For several years, Falcon 9 has shown exponential growth at a rate comparable to Moore’s law, accelerating us towards a bright future in space. But true exponential phenomena do not exist in nature, only logistic S-curves. Sustained growth requires stacking those curves to maintain growth rates.

I first noted the signs of Falcon reaching the peak of its own curve two years ago:

That process is well set in now, but the next generation of launch vehicles expected to pick up the baton have stumbled somewhat. Where does that leave the predictions of space colonies?

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The company had been building towards a faster launch cadence, and had just demonstrated first stage reuse. The second stage anomaly from flight three had been addressed fairly rapidly, and things seemed to be going rather well for Blue Origin overall. Until suddenly they weren’t.

The loss of the vehicle and more importantly the ground infrastructure represents a huge setback for Blue Origin, but also has significant impacts on other parts of the US space program. The Artemis and Moonbase programs are now in jeopardy, multiple satellite constellations are going to be delayed, and there will be less redundancy and competition in launch for some time.

The Moon Race

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The rocket cleared the pad noticeably quicker than previous iterations, mainly due to the engines having more thrust. One engine shut down during ascent, but the flight was otherwise nominal up to stage separation. Two anomalies then happened in quick succession.

One engine on the booster seemed to explode during the boost back burn, taking out several others and precluding a complete burn and leading to the booster crashing. This is not necessarily an engine issue - prior failures on boost back have been caused by the motion of propellant in the tanks causing engines to be incorrectly fed. If the high power turbopumps of engines like Raptor ingest a gas bubble, for instance, it can destroy them. We will have to wait for more information from SpaceX to understand the root cause of the problem.

The ship lost one of its vacuum engines early in the burn, and had to complete a longer burn on 5 engines. Notably, it was still able to reach its intended target area accurately enough to be caught on camera by the buoys and drones set up there for the event. The ship made a soft landing, with a visibly intact heat shield, before falling over as expected and exploding.

The engine out precluded doing a relight test on orbit, but the payload - 20 Starlink mass simulators and two active satellites that filmed the outside of the ship - was successfully deployed by a faster, improved “PEZ dispenser”.

Overall, a partial success and a good showing for the first outing of so much new hardware.

The New Version

Starting from the top down, here are the big changes that have been made to the Starship stack.

The ship itself has a redesigned thermal protection system (TPS), most notably the clips which hold the tiles in place. The condition of the heat shield after reentry seems to have vindicated this change, as we are not seeing the tile loss we have seen on previous flights. There is also new hardware added for propellant transfer, which should be demonstrated with this version of Starship, and is essential for achieving its objectives such as the Artemis Moon landings.

The top of the Superheavy booster is notably different. Instead of a disposable hot staging ring there is an integrated structure, and the four grid fins have been replaced by three in a ‘T’ shape. This reduces the weight of the booster, but given how the boost back anomaly seems connected with the hot staging, it may be a focus of fixes in the future. At the base of the booster, shielding around the engines has been stripped back, with the engines themselves redesigned to contain failures.

The raptor engines themselves on both stages are new designs - providing a significant boost to thrust and a small boost to specific impulse. The new engines are also lighter, and have simplified much of the plumbing and moved into inside the engine.

On the ground side, V3 launches from an entirely new pad. Instead of a launch stand over a flat pad, there is now a deeper flame trench to manage the exhaust. The deluge system which dampens the impact with huge quantities of water is also substantially scaled up.

Recent third party photographs have shown the stand holding up well to the launch, with what appears to be only cosmetic damage.

What’s Next

The extent of the changes led to a substantial stand down of the program, and provided that correcting the booster issue on Flight 12 does not require too much of a redesign, the company should be able to get back to more regular flights.

The usual time between previous Starship flights was about 50 days. If that were to be the case for the V3 test campaign, we would expect to see Flight 13 in July, and a total of 5 launches in 2026.

This timeline is probably optimistic for the next launch, but if SpaceX continues to improve there may be acceleration in the latter half of this year. The bear case is continuing anomalies during test flights, or the booster needing a fundamental rework - the bull case is that they reach orbit with Flight 14, recover booster and ship, and reuse a full stack before the end of the year. It’s going to be an important year for the company either way.

Human expansion into space is a continuous process, that is already underway, but society tends not to react to gradual processes, but to landmark events. As the public tends to ignore space news for years until some big event - Artemis II, the first Starship booster catch etc. - they will likely not keep track of continued progress in space habitation until events force them to pay attention.

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And when the first child is born in space, everyone will ask “what does this mean?”

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After last months Ignition event, NASA released a book containing a loose road map for the technologies and capabilities they believe need to be developed by industry in order to realise the vision of a permanent lunar base.

The document follows with NASAs three phase plan for the Moon; and in phase three that includes using the lunar regolith, which is what I’m going to be talking about here. Industry has not had much time yet to respond to the NASA pivot; but many companies have already been working on various schemes for some time, and I’ll discuss those here.

I’m discussing both privately held and publicly traded companies here, and nothing here should be taken as investment advice. The information below is purely for educational purposes.

Glass Domes

I have written about Skyeports before - they have a novel concept to blow glass made from lunar regolith into very large structures. They have been receiving funds from NASA since I last mentioned them to develop this technology, and have produced some demonstrators on Earth with simulated lunar regolith, including a blowing inside a vacuum chamber.

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While only one of these rockets sent a crew to the Moon, the other two will be indirectly involved in the Artemis program - both are due to fly robotic landers to the Moon this year.

I’ve covered the Artemis mission extensively this month so won’t say much more about it here, and focus on commercial matters. The launch industry is in something of a transition at the moment - we are seeing more signs pointing towards the end of Falcon, and new competitors coming along, two of which I’ll highlight today.

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Recently the Canadian government announced the passage of a Space Launch Act to facilitate launch from it’s territory. As a Brit I have little stake in Canadian politics, and I only found out about this when my X feed filled up with invective being fired at this act on the basis that it was either not possible, or extremely difficult, or commercially infeasible, to launch from anywhere in Canada due to it being too far north. As one commentator put it:

Does anyone in Ottawa understand basic physics?

It's significantly easier (ie, cheaper) to launch to space from near the equator.

That's why Europe's space port is in French Guiana.

Anyone launching from Canada is either an idiot or expecting massive government subsidies.

This may sound like a knock down argument to a non-expert. And indeed it received many appreciative responses who were happy to see through the physics-defying “scam” and feel smart. But it really is clinging on to one small factoid and drawing very wrong conclusions from it.

Getting to Orbit

To get to orbit a rocket needs to achieve a velocity horizontal to the ground of about 7.8 kilometres/second. Rockets launch vertically to get out of the thick part of the Earth’s atmosphere before gaining much speed, and to reach the target altitude - but horizontal velocity is the name of the game. Air resistance and gravity losses add to the cost of getting to orbit - so ultimately you need a bit over 9 km/s of Δv in total. But most of that is horizontal velocity.

If you are on the equator, you are moving eastwards at 465 metres/second already. At French Guiana, the closest space port to the equator at only 5 degrees north, the eastwards velocity is 463m/s. At Kennedy Space Centre, 28.5 degrees north, it is 410 m/s and at Baikonur, 46 degrees north, it is only 324m/s.

The argument goes that, while this is only a small fraction of the total speed required, the tyranny of the rocket equation kicks in and it means that the equatorial site has a huge advantage in putting material into orbit - so much so that only an idiot will build a northerly launch site.

But the truth is quite different.

It is rare for a rocket to launch due east. The only condition where you can do this is if the inclination of the target orbit is exactly equal to the latitude of the launch site. Once your launch azimuth deviates from due east, the already small advantage you get from rotational velocity is reduced. By the time you are flying due north, into a polar orbit, the boost is actually a penalty to your Δv because it needs to be cancelled out to reach your target orbit, which has zero eastward velocity. It is a small one, and not significant at all in practice, but it undermines the assertion that eastward velocity is always good. Beyond a 90 degree angle, when orbits become retrograde (such as a sun synchronous orbit, typically about 98 degrees inclined) the penalty imposed by eastward motion gets greater. So technically, it is easier to launch as far north as possible.

Nobody is clamoring for launch sites in the arctic circle though - the most northerly major spaceport is Plesetsk, near to Archangelsk in Russia. At 63 degrees north it is just sub-arctic. This is because the impact of eastward velocity is not really that great whereas the cost of operating in polar regions is.

But then why does it go the other way around? Why does ESA go to all the trouble of operating a near equatorial launch site far from it’s workforce and industrial base, with all the logistic headaches that brings?

Plane Changes

The key insight in how launch sites relate to orbits has nothing to do with the rotation of the Earth. It is all about inclination.

ArianeSpace carved out it’s commercial niche by launching satellites to geostationary orbit - a high altitude 0 degree inclination orbit. They also got costs down by pioneering dual manifesting of satellites. Prior to Falcon 9 taking the industry by storm, Ariane 5 was the market leader in the most lucrative part of the launch sector.

The near equatorial launch site was helpful to getting to this profitable equatorial orbit. To get to a geostationary orbit from Kennedy Space Centre would require about 400m/s extra Δv relative to Kourou, while getting there from Baikonur would require an extra 900m/s (although some clever Russia orbital dynamics can shave about 100m/s off that, but it is beyond the scope of this argument). However, the difference in eastward velocity only accounts for 50m/s and 140m/s respectively of the total difference. What causes the rest?

To get to a geostationary orbit (GEO) you start in a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). This is an elliptical orbit with the perigee in LEO, or where your booster injected you into orbit, and the apogee at the altitude of GEO. Crucially, this transfer orbit is not equatorial - it is whatever plane is convenient to reach from your launch site. When you reach apogee, you perform a burn which simultaneously circularises your orbit and also changes it’s plane to 0 degrees. Almost the entire difference in difficulty getting to GEO is in this plane change.

This might seem like splitting hairs - because an equatorial site still comes out on top, even if it is for a very different reason than claimed. But in reality there are many other valuable orbits out there. GEO is not even commercially dominant any more - LEO constellations are the new thing, and they use significantly higher inclination orbits to get good coverage:

There is also a substantial market for sun-synchronous orbits, which are good for Earth observations and are also attractive for the proposed on-orbit data centres, due to being able to align them such that they almost never go into eclipse and thus have constant reliable solar power.

So the utility of a launch site for flying these commercial missions is not it’s latitude - it is whether or not the azimuth needed to reach the target orbit is available from that site. If the latitude is higher than the inclination a “dogleg” launch is required which does add Δv, but given there are profitable target orbits all the way up to sun-synchronous orbits at 98 degrees, there is no site that can be excluded on these grounds. Having a clear range in a set of useful azimuths is a lot more critical for site selection than mindlessly minimising latitude - as are many other factors, such as logistics and weather.

Why This Matters

I have been campaigning for some time for an indigenous launch capability in the UK, from the UK mainland. We do possess an overseas territory, Ascension Island, which lies almost exactly on the equator, but it is small, remote and operating there would impose significant costs. So I prefer launch from the British Isles. The government agrees, and has thus put money into Saxavord spaceport. This will host a launch by a German company RFA later this year, but I want to see British launch vehicles, and much larger vehicles, to pursue a more robust British space program.

When I raise this, I sometimes get asked a question about latitude, and if it is asked nicely I explain why it is not a problem as best as I can. Other times though, including one especially egregious opinion piece in one of our tabloid papers, I get called a “moron” for even suggesting it - by someone ignorant of all the actual physics I outlined above. Someone writing in a paper has a wider audience than my mere newsletter, and thus may be able to convince the public. There is a risk that public policy might be steered by people too stupid to understand how little they understand about spaceflight, to the detriment of the nation. Some quick snark about how only stupid people don’t understand the need for low latitude launch sites is a lot quicker to write than the explanations I offer above.

This has been summarised in Brandolini’s Law - “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it”. This unfortunate fact is a boon for cranks, hack journalists, self-described skeptics and con artists. All I can do is put in the work here, and hope that the truth can slowly make it’s way through the public consciousness and disarm the blowhards.

And yet, I heard a substantial amount of negative commentary on the matter. Was this just all noise and clickbait? Who actually opposes space exploration and colonisation, and is it really a popular position? One place to look was in my own home country of Great Britain, where polling had ostensibly not been as positive. Aside from a small contribution to ESA, this was not a British mission and British taxpayers were not on the hook for its costs, but that doesn’t usually stop us having opinions on things, and I thought it might be useful to understand why we aren’t as positive about it as Americans in order to understand more general opposition.

As Artemis II blasted off, the polling company YouGov published a survey of Britons asking if they would consider visiting the Moon. The response, as reported, were fairly negative. One part that got much attention was respondents reasons for not wanting to visit the Moon, even if safety was assured.

I have, however, looked at the tables for this survey and the picture is more complex than first appears. But it does raise the issue of if there is enough popular support to sustain current programs - or to start new ones in countries like the UK, which lag behind in space capabilities.

I’m going to be discussing opposition to the mission itself here - some opposed Artemis II on valid technical and programmatic grounds whilst generally being in favour of human spaceflight to the Moon and beyond. Nor am I going to address the crazy people who think its fake. Here we are strictly talking about those who think we should not go to the Moon for moral, political or economic reasons.

Snark

To get something out of the way, some people are against spaceflight for bad reasons - they have got “Musk Derangement Syndrome”, or they just like dunking on something others enjoy, or because they know hostility and snark get clicks. Vice offers a prime example here:

This writer has simply jumped on the word “colonialism” without considering how it’s negatives do not apply to an uninhabited solar system. This lets him just regurgitate rehearsed talking points about this in order to pass something off as criticism, and get online engagement.

This wasn’t the worst example though. On Sky News, a Guardian columnist just dismissed the entire thing out of hand, whilst utterly failing to understand what the mission was about - nobody expects to find life on the Moon:

Zoe Williams is generally an unpleasant and not very bright commentator; her previous contributions include the assertion that democracies don’t use nuclear weapons, which may come as a shock to the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a lazy three paragraph opinion piece on Katy Perry going to space, in which two of the paragraphs were criticism of her appearance. I’ll not waste any more time and energy on her, and move on to some actual substantive criticisms

Criticism

In terms of genuine intellectual criticism, there is the old trope that humans are pointless in space and it is better to send robots. In this case, it is the Astronomer Royal Martin Rees making this argument in The Guardian.

This argument has been made consistently since the dawn of the space age - but it was especially intense in the aftermath of the Moon landing. The Soviet answer to the Saturn V, the N-1, failed before first stage separation on every attempt to launch it. They use the smaller Proton rocket to launch some advanced (for the time) robotic probes, including two nuclear powered rovers and three automated sample return missions. In their propaganda they denied ever having been attempting to send humans to the Moon, and insisted their robotic program was better.

The argument is flawed in two ways; first, it assumes that science is the only reason to send humans to other planets. It is not - colonisation and economic development are the main aims, and this encompasses all aspects of human activity, including science. Secondly, the notion that robots are better at science than humans is only ever argued in a situation where humans are not present at all to compete - e.g. on the surface of Mars. It is notable that science on Earth still involves humans in fieldwork, and will do for the foreseeable future.

In a separate editorial, as well as reiterating the above, the paper made this argument:

Rather than serving to remind us of Earth’s preciousness, there is a risk that the £100bn Artemis programme is a dangerous distraction from the urgency of finding ways to live within the ecological limits of the world we already have

First lets flag the cost figure used here - this is the total programme cost since its inception. The cost of this particular mission on its own is around $4 billion. Aggregating the entire cost since 2012 is done purely to make it sound as expensive as possible. If we were to, for instance, aggregate the spending of the NHS over that period and convert it to dollars, the figure would be around $2,700 billion.

Part of this intentional inflation of costs is to justify the use of the word “distraction” - as if there is a huge opportunity cost to Artemis. There is not - the flight of Artemis II cost each American taxpayer about $12. The cost to the UK readers of the Guardian is basically zero. What this editorial is worried about distracting from is an apparently Malthusian crisis they are convinced is real - but that they provide no evidence or argument for, let alone justify as “urgent”. This whole paragraph is written with a set of very dubious assumptions about the world that the authors are not used to being challenged. Define ecological limits? How close are we actually to them, to make it urgent? And why is this not in fact an argument for space colonisation, so we can move population and industry off Earth and reduce the trade-off between human needs and our desires to maintain ecosystems? This lazy sort of argument exemplifies why people must familiarise themselves with disagreement before staking out their position in this manner.

The coverage from the Guardian isn’t all negative of course; there is this piece which contrasts the touching tributes of the mission to dead friends and colleagues with the violence currently going on on Earth, and describes Artemis as “the best of humanity”.

The Artemis Generation

Looking at the tables for the YouGov poll, it’s clear that the younger generations are consistently more supportive of space in all questions than older ones. Part of this might be timeline realism - many questions ask if some milestone will happen “in your lifetime” which obviously means something quite different to a 70 year old than a 20 year old. The largest gap in opinion is between men and women though. The first question about interest in space is perfectly reversed; for men 62% interested versus 37% uninterested, and for women 37% interested versus 62% uninterested. The pattern repeats throughout the survey. This is something that the space colonisation movement has to address - a colony without women is by definition not able to sustain itself.

In terms of socioeconomic class, the survey divides respondents into “Higher”, “Intermediate” and “Routine”. What is interesting here is that when asked about the importance of various activities in space, the most negative responses came from the “Intermediate” class in the majority of the questions, especially pronounced where the overall opinion was most negative:

Breaking down by question, there was a positive responses came across almost all groups on the importance of maintaining a physical presence of space of some kind (the question gives the example of the ISS), with majority support across all social classes and both sexes. This may indicate a status quo bias; if someone is neither strong pro- nor anti- space, they might think there is no need to do more or less than we currently do.

Two very categories with very positive responses were “Maintains the system of communications satellites orbiting the Earth” at 82-10 important vs not important, and “Explores space for scientific purposes” at 73-21. They both maintained positive ratios across all groups asked.

What this suggests, to me, is that ordinary people are happy to see money spend on space activities that are purposeful. It hasn’t been widely explained to them what exactly the point of going to the Moon or Mars is - except perhaps in the most abstract terms.

I think that YouGov presented their results with a needlessly negative spin; looking at this alongside some of the articles mentioned above it seems to me that the anti-space movement is very much top down; some loud voices purporting to speak for the ordinary, common sense person but in fact not being especially representative. It should also be noted that journalists as a profession tend to draw from the “Intermediate” group above, so are likely to some extent to report the bias of that group.

I assume those reading this far are mostly in agreement with me; and so what we should all be doing is bypassing the Malthusians, blowhards and the haters, speaking directly to as many people as possible, and letting them know your reasons for going to the Moon and beyond. The surveys mentioned here indicate to me this is an easily winnable debate.

If you know anybody who would still like to catch up with this mission, please share this with them.

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Given the issues that were discovered after the reentry of Artemis I, this mission was delayed substantially and a new reentry trajectory was planned. The decision was taken not to change the heat shield, as this would delay the mission even further. A modified heat shield will fly on Artemis III, and NASA believes Artemis II can still be successful with the older design if it flies a different trajectory.

Before I get on to that, one last update on the trajectory of Integrity as it accelerates towards Earth:

During the mission NASA have been publishing updated ephemris data - the position and velocity of the spacecraft at each point in time - as corrective burns and the lunar gravity have altered it.

These changes are very small, and I chose not to show them on the main trajectory plot and just use the latest one, as the differences would be substantially less than the with of the line. Even zooming in on the entry interface portion at Earth, it looks as if the initial trans-lunar burn was very good.

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During the Apollo missions, keeping the crew safe from solar flares mostly relied on forecasting - thankfully no major even occurred during a mission, but a large one did occur in August 1972 between Apollo 16 and Apollo 17. There was a procedure to move to the part of the Command and Service Module where the spacecraft structure would provide most shielding, but this would not have been a full mitigation. Things work differently for Artemis though.

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At the same time, NASA have downloaded and released images taken during the flyby. One of the ones which has captivated the public most is the “Earthset” image. My favourite version of this is the wider shot:

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What they saw was not quite the same as what the crew of Apollo 8 saw - Integrity passed the Moon at a significantly higher altitude, and the Earth was in a different phase at the time. There was also not the tension in this blackout that there was the first time Apollo 8 passed behind the Moon, because on that mission they had to perform a rocket burn during the blackout to place themselves into a low Lunar orbit, and mission control had no way of knowing if it had succeeded until they reestablished contact.

I have some thoughts on the messages for Earth that the crew transmitted before and after blackout, but first I’ll drill down on some details about the flyby itself.

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The Moon is now quite large in the window, and the crew have already begun visual observations of it.

At the current distance of the spacecraft, around 366,000 km at the time of writing, there is notable lag in radio communications due to the speed of light. Another way to write their distance would be as 1.2 light seconds, so a round trip signal to them takes 2.4 seconds. You may notice in live conversations with the crew this delay in their response.

Approaching the Moon

I’ve now plotted the Moon on the orbit diagram; it will pass through the centre of the loop when Artemis II is at the very bottom of the orbit as shown. It might not seem as if the two objects will intersect, but bear in mind that Integrity is slowing down significantly at this point.

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The life support system of the capsule ultimately responds to the presence of humans; for example, someone has to be breathing out carbon dioxide for the scrubbers to remove. So the crew can be thought of as part of the system themselves, and part of the process of testing it.

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There had been complaints about both the temperature and humidity in the capsule being too low, both of which were resolved. The lower humidity in particular makes the performance of the carbon dioxide scrubbers worse. Somewhat more concerning, there was another anomaly with the on board toilet. In a worst case scenario the crew is able to relieve themselves into special bags, but fortunately the problem was fixed.

Aside from debugging issues with the life support systems, the crew exercised using a flywheel system to provide resistance, while mission control monitored any vibrations this caused in the spacecraft.

The Halfway Point

Integrity passed the halfway point to the Moon, in terms of distance, early today. At the time of writing it is even closer according to the most current tracking data:

The Moon has not yet entered this plot; it will appear tomorrow.

So far the trajectory is excellent; the trans-lunar injection burn was accurate enough that the error was only 0.8 metres/second, small enough that mission control decided to cancel today’s course correction.

The spacecraft slows as it gets further from Earth, so the closest approach will still not be for another three days. The crew are already preparing for this though, and spend some time testing how the spacecraft will be configured at the time of flyby, in terms of arrangement of cameras and orientation.

Space in Space

There was a conversation between Mission Specialist Christina Koch and mission control today about where to store some waste bags. The capsule is packed with supplies, and aside from the venting overboard of urine and excess CO2, all of the waste the crew produces must remain inside. So generally, waste has to be placed into the lockers that contained the supplies being used up.

As can be seen above, it is fairly cramped inside, but not that much by space capsule standards. The habitable volume of the spacecraft is about 9.3 cubic metres, shared between 4 astronauts. In comparison, an Apollo capsule had about 5.8 cubic metres shared between 3 astronauts. That means 2.2 cubic metres per crew in Orion compared to 1.9 cubic metres per crew in Apollo - the extra room being what allows facilities such as the dedicated toilet, exercise machine etc.

However, this is a lot less roomy than the Space Shuttle, which provided 8.9 cubic metres per crew, or as much as 14.7 cubic metres when flying with its Spacelab or Spacehab modules[1]. If Orion is going to be involved in deep space missions longer than this one, it will have to dock with something larger.

Yesterday I previewed some discussion of the broader Artemis plan; that will be in tomorrows update, as I ended up having more to discuss here than I thought. If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to follow along with the mission.

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[1] Cohen, M., Testing the Celentano Curve: An Empirical Survey of Predictions for Human Spacecraft Pressurized Volume