I watched it and I'm not really sure what his message is, or at least how it would apply to Artemis.
What's the point of the scoreboard? Of course Artemis hasn't landed people on the Moon yet. It started 6 years ago, the contract for the first lander is from 2021, and Artemis doesn't have the 4% of the federal funding Apollo had. Asking for a Moon landing now would be absurd.
He suggests to do Artemis more like Apollo, but Artemis is explicitly not a repetition of Apollo. NASA doesn't want missions that put two astronauts on the Moon for a few days. The goal is long-term missions and exploration, working towards a future Moon base.
He discusses how Apollo did meaningful but not too ambitious steps with every mission and then thinks Artemis is doing too much per mission. For crewed missions you don't have much of a choice with SLS only flying once every 1-2 years. If you want to send 10 crews on preparation missions then your project takes 10-20 years, i.e. it's going to get cancelled at some point. It's not the 1960s any more, however, today uncrewed spacecraft can test most of the things crewed spacecraft can. If we include these then there are many smaller steps towards a lunar landing:
* Getting Starship to orbit
* Recovering booster and/or ship
* Reusing booster and maybe the ship
* Demonstrating propellant transfer in orbit
* An uncrewed landing on the Moon (and presumably a take-off demonstration)
* Dock to Orion and repeat that with crew
Meanwhile SLS/Orion do their own three-step program:
* Orbit the Moon without crew, return to Earth (Artemis 1, completed).
* Fly around the Moon with crew, return to Earth (Artemis 2).
* Orbit the Moon with crew, dock with Starship to transfer two astronauts, wait for them to return, return to Earth (Artemis 3).
The Apollo lander needed a real-life lander simulation because (a) simulators were bad and (b) the pilots actually piloted the spacecraft. We didn't have high resolution surface images and we didn't have live image processing to spot obstacles on the ground. Today we have both. Starship won't be landed manually. There will be a big red "abort landing" button, you don't need to fly to train for that.
We don't know how many refueling flights Starship will need, yes. So what? We have an upper limit, and so far nothing suggests that limit would be broken. Future performance improvements can lower the number of flights needed, which means we don't have a specific number yet. I can't see how the option to save flights would be a bad thing.
So let's look at the summary points at 1:01:40:
- "Look at the mission differently." - that's implying everyone is wrong about the mission now. Bold statement. Unless he wants people who are right to be less right in the future.
- "In a world of talkers, be a thinker and a doer." - sure, but it's ironic given that he is a talker.
- "Ask the hard questions." - I agree, but that doesn't need a 1 hour talk. I don't see him ask many hard questions in the talk. Why NRHO to meet up with the lander is an excellent question, and he discusses that - unfortunately it's too late to change that now. Why SLS at all is a question he never mentions. Probably because the talk is in Alabama, he is from Alabama, and most of his aerospace contacts are in Alabama. Can you guess which state is most dependent on SLS jobs? Why did NASA wait until 2020 to start contracts for the lander as the most difficult component, with less than 1/10 of the budget for the vehicle that has an easier job? I don't see him ask that either.
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Avio accidentally scrapped two tanks needed to fly Vega - before flying the final Vega.
