"Crackling" Sound Heard from Rocket Exhaust
Bear, you asked: Why was it so hard?
1) Artemis is to be a manned mission and
2) NASA is really out of practice inventing something new, so
3) they defaulted to recreating the Apollo mission.
The Artemis program was initiated to essentially re-create the capability demonstrated fifty years ago by NASA in the abandoned Apollo mission. The magnificent achievements of the Apollo program died from lack interest and lack of funding. All the hardware went into museums and all the engineers retired. The Space Shuttle came and went as our answer to getting lots of big stuff like the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. Suddenly we had no way to support anything like a new Moonshot.
Meanwhile, within the time frame of the Artemis project, Space-X went from a startup to what it is today by innovating a method of building a space launch capability by focussing on reusability and very rapid incremental development. They built a rocket, it failed, they learned, they built a better one and launched it and it too failed but they learned some more. And this they did this over and over …. without a single US Congressional review …. until their low cost, reusable, reliable boosters are winning most of the business.
The Artemis mission was started because NASA realized that once again a massive booster was required to send a heavy collection of space vehicles to the Moon …. just like the Apollo mission. NASA approached it in Typical, hide-bound fashion, “just like the Apollo project”, with Congress watching every step. They relied on old, proven designs, making few innovations, taking no risks. Example, the Artemis core engines are the same ones that were developed decades ago for the Space Shuttle.
NASA did not rethinking the Moon mission. For example, rather than send all the components to Earth orbit on lots of reasonable sized boosters, assembling and fueling them there and then head to the Moon. Instead, the Artemis project is re-doing what Apollo did …. stack everything up together on a massive booster and lift it all at one go.
An example of the problem: On top of the Artemis stack at takeoff is an elaborate, expensive Emergency Launch Abort system designed to yank the payload capsule with people in it out of harms way if things go sideways. Just like Apollo. Perhaps they could just ship the astronauts to the space station and then to the trans-lunar vehicle and capsule already waiting, fully fueled, safely in orbit with the rest of the kit.
Good news, our lunar plans do include establishing a “space station”: orbiting the Moon and moving between that and the surface with smaller vehicles.
Fingers crossed that NASA triumphs with Artemis. They surely worked hard to achieve this launch.
