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Argentina signs Artemis Accord.

NASA director Bill Nelson added that he believes the United States and China are in a new “space race” as both countries seek to explore the South Pole of the moon. “Satellite imagery has confirmed that there is ice on parts of the moon. If you have water in abundance then you have hydrogen and oxygen, you have rocket fuel,” Nelson said, referring to the two elements’ use in the fuel formula. “And that is why China has announced it’s going to the South Pole. Our mission is one of peaceful purposes for all people. You decide what China’s mission is. I’m not going to say.”

SteelBird said:

So far as I know, the Chandrayaan3 took off on July 14 but the soft landing is planned for Aug 23 or 24. Further, the mission life is one moon day or 14 earth days. It makes me wonder;
1. How come the mission is so short lived? India spent billions of dollars for staying on the moon for just two weeks?

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To last longer than one moon night, the craft need to hibernate which still takes some electricity. There should also be some source of heat to keep components running. Semiconductors do not run at extreme temperature. I think Chang'e uses RHU.

Chandrayaan3 seems not having these things.

SteelBird said:

2. The distance between earth and moon is roughly 384K+ km and speed of space rocket is roughly 40K km/h. This means a rocket could arrive at the moon atmosphere in roughly 10 hours. Why it takes longer than one month to land on the moon?

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LVM3-M4 has a low payload to mass ratio, in other words a lot of dead weight. This means that at almost every stage of its flight, it accelerate very slowly, therefor longer time and distance to reach escape velocity. The distance is achieved by many loops around earth.

Another reason for taking loops is to adjust trojectory (aiming to the moon). For comparison, the early Chang'e missions took 3 or 4 loops before heading to the moon, later one went to the moon without loop because adjustment was not needed any more.

Luna 25 livestream:

anzha said:

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Interesting that the anticipated landing dates are 21, 23 and 24. Chandrayaan 3 is aiming at 23.

Boeing's Starliner has been a disaster. It is suffering from the gross incompetence Boeing's program management is exhibiting across the board. Before going off on the whole topic, let's highlight the Starliner fiasco:

First off, they have lost $1.1 BILLION on it:

2Q23 loss alone was $257M:

The first launch has been delayed to 2024:

But! Boeing is totally confident they can get their 6 launches done. uh huh:

However, will they actually fly before the ISS is retired in 2030? I mean, it's 7 years away now and Boeing is how many years behind?

RSC Energia demonstrated the new capabilities of the Russian Orbital Station at the Army-2023 International Military-Technical Forum.