So we're just gonna do For All Mankind shit? Sweet.

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Love seeing progress like this. Amazing what we can accomplish. Can hardly wait for actual manned missions.

Who has the secret solar sail?

We've even got the billionaire cutting a deal with the Russians against America's interests.

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Do we?

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Probably. Musk got a tax break with China days after his Taiwan comment. You have to wonder what he got for his Ukraine comments.

I do wonder what he could possibly get from Russia.

This is comparing a heavy lift manned-capable rocket to the falcon 9 sending a Japanese robot to the moon. Both are cool, but not comparable. The payload must either be super small or it’s gonna take a looooong time to get there with a falcon 9 right?

Edit: also I love the Teslarati photo, taken so the falcon 9 and SLS appear to be the same size. Classic Teslarati.

Yes, they secretly collaborated with SpaceX to put Roscosmos out of business and provide Ukraine with wartime communications. /s

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>This is comparing a heavy lift manned-capable rocket to the falcon 9

Technically speaking, Falcon 9 is both heavy lift and 'manned capable' - though NASA prefers 'human rated' or 'crew rated' as they're gender neutral.

So to be more accurate, this is comparing a super heavy lift lunar-crew-rated rocket to Falcon 9.

>The payload must either be super small or it’s gonna take a looooong time to get there with a falcon 9 right?

This particular lander is small because it's a secondary rideshare payload, but Falcon 9 should be capable of sending somewhere in the range of 5-6 tonnes to TLI, which I wouldn't call 'super small'.

I'd also like to note that sending payloads to the moon slowly often takes more energy, rather than less.

For example, SpaceX's recent launch of KPLO/Danuri to the moon via a ballistic transfer, which is expected to take ~4 months required accelerating to 10,521m/s, while Artemis 1 will only accelerate to about 10,100m/s and will get there in ~5 days.

If you look at this animation of Danuri's trajectory, the reason why will become obvious - it starts by going out about 4 times further than the moon (Indeed, with a max altitude of 1.56 million km it has even gone past the L1 point), then targeting the moon as it falls back down.

This approach takes a lot less fuel for the spacecraft to brake into lunar orbit than going directly there - essentially you're making the launch vehicle do more initial work so the spacecraft has to do less.

This whole deal was interesting because his relations with russia are horrible. He tried to buy refurbished ICBMs from them before founding SpaceX, they insulted him and raised prices. He then went to basically eat Roscosmos' Market share and they criminalized owning a Starlink dish in Russia.

so generally relations are not great.

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Imagine astronauts from two totally separate launches arriving at the moon, being there at the same time, then randomly seeing each other in the distance.

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