I'm literally guest lecturing at a Harvard class tomorrow on systemic failures in decision making, using the Columbia and Challenger disasters as case studies, and changed my slides last night to include Artemis II because it could literally happen again.
This broken safety culture has been around since the beginning of the Shuttle program.
In 1980, Gregg Easterbrook published "Goodbye, Columbia" in The Washington Monthly [1], warning that NASA's "success-oriented planning" and political pressure were creating the conditions for catastrophe. He essentially predicted Columbia's heat shield failures in the article 1 year before the first flight.
Challenger in 1986, and the Rogers Commission identified hierarchy, communication failures, and management overriding engineering judgment.
Then Columbia happened in 2003. The CAIB found NASA had not implemented the 1986 recommendations [2].
Now Charles Camarda (who flew the first shuttle mission after Columbia and is literally a heat shield expert!) is saying it's happening again.
> This broken safety culture has been around since the beginning of the Shuttle program.
It's broken everywhere. I have worked in some dysfunctional shops and the problem I see time and time again is the people who make it into management are often egoists who don't care about anything other than the financial compensation and clout the job titles bestows upon them. That or they think management is the same as being a shotgun toting sheriff overseeing a chain gang working in the summer heat in the deep south.
I've worked with managers who would argue with you even if they knew they were wrong because they were incapable of accepting humiliation. I worked with managers who were wall flowers so afraid of confrontation or negative emotions that they covered up every issue they could in order to avoid any potential negative interaction with their superiors. That manager was also bullied by other managers and even some employees.
A lot of it is ego along with a heavy dose of machismo depending. I've seen managers let safety go right down the tubes because "don't be a such a pussy." It's a bad culture that has to go away.
A simplistic answer would be to ensure that incentives are aligned with safety and success. Then that leads to the evergreen problem of Goodhart’s Law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure).
Even if it can't ever be truly fixed, at least recognizing the issues and shining daylight on decisions for some form of accountability should be a base-level approach.
Agreed. My point was that it will forever be some kind of moving target and to expect a policy framework to guarantee "good behavior" is a mistake.
I emphatically believe that understanding the incentives of all the players is paramount because that is what will ultimately determine their behavior.
It would be cool if there were ways to have a "Game Theory Toolkit" that could be plugged into an organizations communications that could automate the defining and detecting of those unwanted behaviors.
> people who make it into management are often egoists
> they were incapable of accepting humiliation
I agree mostly but here is a different take on it: I think these are normal human feelings and behaviors - not the best of us, but not unusual either. If we want to get good things done, we need to work with and through human nature. Power corrupts everyone and shame is generally the most painful thing for humans.
Putting people in a position where they need to treat their power with absolute humility or accept humiliation (and a major blow to their careers) in order to do the right thing is going to fail 99% of the time. (I'm not saying people can't do those things and that we shouldn't work hard and aspire to them, but it's not going to happen reliably with any but a few people.) That expectation itself is a culture, organizational and managerial failure. If you see a system in which so many fail, then the problem is the system.
And when I say 'managerial' failure, I include leadership by everyone and also 'managing up'. We're all responsible for and agents of the team's results, and whatever our role we need to prevent those situations. One important tactic is to anticipate that problem and get ahead of it, putting the team in a position where the risk is proactively addressed and/or they have the flexibility to change course without 'humiliation'. We're all responsible for the team's culture.
I think many blaming others underestimate their own human nature, the effect of power on them and their willingness to endure things like humiliation. Rather than criticising others, I keep my attention on the one in the mirror and on strategies to avoid situations equally dangerous to my own character; otherwise I'll end up doing the same very human things.
EDIT: While I still agree with everything I wrote above, there is an exceptional cultural problem here, one which you'll recognize and which is common to many SV leaders, the Trump administration, and others you're familiar with (and which needs a name ...). From the document referenced in the OP by "heat shield expert and Shuttle astronaut Charles Camarda, the former Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center."
"Instead, the meeting started with his [Jared Isaacman, the new NASA Administrator's] declaration that the decision was final. We would launch Artemis II with a crew, even though the uncrewed Artemis I mission around the Moon returned with a seriously damaged heat shield, a failure in my opinion. I was not going to be allowed to present my position on why the decision was flawed. Instead, the public would hear, through the two reporters allowed to attend, the Artemis Program narrative, only one side of the story. They would be bombarded with technical information which they would have very little time to understand ...
Jared could claim transparency because the only thermal protection expert and public dissenter, me, was present. ...
I was allowed only one-day to review some of the technical documents which were not open to the public and which were classified Controlled Unclassified Information/International Traffic and Arms Regulations (CUI/ITAR) prior to the Jan.8th meeting. ..."
But in the 80s I guess there was the pressure to one-up the Soviets, so everything had to be done yesterday, but Artemis has existed most of my adult life at various levels of maturity (Orion and its predecessors certainly did), and considering its been more time spent between that famous Kennedy speech and the actual Moon landing (where there was apparently no issue with safety culture).
Considering how much humanity has allegedly advanced since then, I don't understand what are we gaining thats caused us to have to abandon safety.
The most frustrating part of the whole thing is that when you read Charles Camarda’s thoughts after his meeting with NASA in January, it could have been written in 1986 or in 2003.
It’s pretty clear at this point that the shuttle was already broken at design. But seeing the same powder keg of safety/budget/immovable time constraints applied to a totally different platform decades in the future feels like sitting through a bad movie for the third time.
What strikes is not the systemic failures. But the intense culture of secrecy.
Reports are heavily redacted. They aren't shared. Failures aren't acknowledged. Engineering models aren't released. That secrecy eventually causes what we see today.
Inviting Disaster: Lessons From the Edge of Technology was one of the texts for an aerospace class I didn't take but friends did, but honestly you can just read the book.
There are lots of frameworks for teaching safety and programs for compliance and such but they are far too easy to cargo cult if you don't appreciate safety and the need for safety culture and UNDERSTAND what failures look like.
And when you really understand the need and how significant failures happened... "state of the art" tools and practices take a back seat, they can be useful but they're just tools. What you need is people developing the appropriate vision, and with that the right things tend to follow.
Sure. Even a history of safety success contributes to this. We haven't had an accident in 3000 days, what was dangerous about this job again? Also what's this stupid policy for anyway, I've never seen anybody even come close to (non-dangerous-sounding fate) while working here.
But probably the policy is in place because it used to happen before the policy was in place. It's just not obvious to people who have never seen the consequences before.
The word "government" doesn't magically erase all the same individual & institutional incentives, ambitions, biases, & flaws that exist elsewhere.
And sometimes, the extant magical belief that "government" is different & immune lets those same human factors be ignored until they feed bigger, slower disasters that everyone is afraid to admit, because (ostensibly) "we all did this together".
The role of for-profit companies and 'shareholder' value in explaining corporate bad behavior is highly overstated. The only profit that matters is the one at the individual level (i.e., compensation, which is a form of profit, for the individual).
A government employee or a private corporation doesn't matter. To the actual humans, they are the same, in that each provides a particular compensation, tied to their decisions.
Is "Why not pay people to do their jobs correctly?" a way of voicing frustration with massive gov't incompetence? Or a way of saying that organizational incompetence is top-down?
Because the grifters are running the show. The point is not to fly to orbit/moon/mars/whatever, but shovel taxpayer money to politically well connected large aerospace contractors.
It’s fundamentally a human coordination problem that cannot be solved
The more populated and complex an organization gets it becomes impossible to maintain a singular value vector (get these people around the moon safely)
Everyone finds meta vectors (keep my job, reduce my own accountability) that maintain their own individual stability, such that if the whole thing fails they won’t feel liable
It can't be solved 100%, but it can be _mostly_ solved with systemic buy-in to the safety culture. Commercial aviation is a great example IMO.
We've spent the last several decades making sure that every single person trained to participate in commercial aviation (maintenance, pilots, attendants, ATC, ground crew) knows their role in the safety culture, and that each of them not only has the power but the _responsibility_ to act to prevent possible accidents.
The Swiss Cheese Model [1] does a great job of illustrating this principle and imparting the importance of each person's role in safety culture.
A big missing piece with manned space flight IMO is the lack of decision-making authority granted to lower staff. A junior pilot acting as first officer on their very first commercial flight with real passengers has the authority to call a go-around even if a seasoned Captain is flying the plane. AFAIK no such 'anyone can call a no-go' exists within NASA.
Safety culture requires the ability to learn from mistakes, the capability to ground planes (without that turning into a political problem), and someone to foot the bill. (Which did not always happen, Boeing MCAS with a SPoF AoA sensor without retraining. A chain of cost-cutting decisions. And of course there were usual problems with market distorting subsidies to both Boeing and Airbus.)
NASA's missions are way too big, because the science payloads are unique, so they "can't do" launch early, launch often. And then things sit in storage for years, waiting for budget. (And manned flights are in an even worse situation of course, because they are two-way.)
And there's too much sequential dependency in the marquee projects (without enough slack to be able to absorb problems if some earlier dependent outcome is unfavorable), or in other words because of time and cost constraints the projects did not include enough proper development, testing, verification.
NASA is doing too many things, and too much of it is politics. It should be more like a grant organization, rewarding cost-efficient scientific (and engineering) progress, in a specific broad area ("spaaace!"), like the NIH (but hopefully not like the NIH).
> without enough slack to be able to absorb problems if some earlier dependent outcome is unfavorable
It's strange because unmanned mission are heavy in the "under promise and over deliver" territory. They may say something like "we are sending a car to Mars for a month", but everything is over engineered to last for a year. Then it miraculously work for eleven month and it's a huge success.
Yes and... NASA space programs (doing rare, unknown things) are different than commercial aviation (doing a frequent, known thing with high safety). Best be careful applying solutions from the latter to the former.
Layering additional safety layers on top of a fundamentally misaligned organization process also generally balloons costs and delivery timelines (see: NASA).
The smarter play is to better align all stakeholders' incentives, from the top (including the president and Congress) to the bottom, to the desired outcome.
Right now most parties are working towards very different goals.
No, CRM is a disaster you clearly are not in aviation. The reliability in aviation came from incredibly strict regulation and engineering improvements, NOT from structural alignment of parties. They were forced to get safer by the government if you can believe there was a time where the government did anything useful at all.
I could go off for literally hours on this topic but suffice to say I’ve done an unbelievable amount of CRM as an officer in the United States Air Force who flew on and executed 100s of combat missions in Iraq
My friends from Shell 77 are all dead because of CRM failures
Reagan speaks with grandfatherly warmth about the importance of finding a middle ground between reasonable safety regulations and progress. In the same clip, he mentioned not knowing of any group with as little influence on politics as business.
Dog convinces owner to let it off leash. The rhetoric that charmed Americans into letting down their guard, in miniature.
Ok after looking into this in more detail, I am concerned with this mission, and the recommendation should be NOT to fly with Astronauts.
Looking at the people on the program, and specialty from the ones on this press conference [1] I see only, a bunch of check list fillers and government employees, that will cover their back with reports and third party recommendations, of the style, “I was told” or the “the technical reports said”. Its also commiserating the idiotic and irrelevant questions from most of the press present. How do these people get accredited there?
Here are some facts. When NASA flew Orion uncrewed around the Moon in 2022, the heat shield came back with deep gouges. Large chunks of Avcoat material had blown out, and three of four structural bolts had melted through. NASA own Inspector General identified three independently lethal failure modes:
- Heat shield spalling exposing the capsule to burn through
- Debris striking the parachute compartment
- Hot gas ingestion through the melted bolts
Noting the latter could cause the "breakup of the vehicle and loss of crew." Then...NASA found a credible root cause. The Avcoat was not porous enough, so pyrolysis gas built up underneath and blew pieces out, like steam cracking a lid.
Critically, areas of the Artemis I shield that were porous did not spall. But where it gets alarming is that the Artemis II heat shield was manufactured to be even less porous, a choice made before anyone knew porosity mattered.
Rather than replace it, NASA changed the reentry trajectory, instead of a skip reentry meaning dipping in, bouncing out, then re-entering, Orion will dive in steeper. The counterintuitive logic here is more intense, sustained heating actually allows the char layer to form properly and become porous enough for gas to escape, whereas the gentler intermittent heating of the skip paradoxically trapped gas. The physics reasoning is sound, but it has never been validated at full scale. As incredible as it may sound no one has flown this shield design, at this porosity, on this trajectory, at 25,000 mph lunar return speed, on a spacecraft twice the weight of Apollo.
The computer model certifying it as safe can predict crack initiation but cannot model crack propagation or the coupled multi physics material response, which is precisely what you need when your failure mode is cascading spalling that creates unpredictable hot spots and alters hypersonic airflow in ways that compound.
NASA also failed to recover the Artemis I parachutes, so there is literally zero data on whether debris impacted the system that slows the capsule from 300 mph to 15 mph for splashdown...
Perhaps most tellingly, NASA has announced its switching to an entirely new heat shield design! starting with Artemis III, simultaneously certifying this shield as safe to fly while deciding never to fly it again!
The strongest argument against crewing this flight is the simplest. NASA recently added an extra Artemis mission to its manifest, removing any programmatic need for astronauts on Artemis II.
Flying it uncrewed on the new trajectory would validate or invalidate the models at zero risk to human life, produce full-scale flight data on the actual shield at the actual porosity on the actual trajectory, and let NASA recover the parachutes to close the debris impact gap.
Then crew the next mission with data instead of models. As Camarda, a former NASA astronaut and heat shield expert has warned, this is the same organizational pattern, meaning schedule pressure, simplified models substituted for physical understanding of the system, motivated reasoning to reach a predetermined conclusion that preceded both Challenger and Columbia.
Lets say a SpaceX Dragon or Boeing Starliner came back with this level of damage, would NASA certify it for crew without an uncrewed validation flight?
NASA is risking four lives, when a straightforward, safe alternative, exists.
Those astronauts don’t have anyone that loves them at home because no way in hell would any of my loved ones let me be a sacrificial turkey in a fully automated oven.
They do, but they are not in a position to judge. Same way as the Challenger crew despite NASA and astronauts saying, "we would not fly we would not believe to be safe enough".
It seems that in modern times, humans focus on safety almost to the exclusion of everything else. As much as the more traditional salutations "godspeed" or "have a nice day", we're even more likely to hear "drive safe" or "have a safe trip" or "be safe".
We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Surely you've heard the mantra "...if it saves just one life...".
The optimal amount of tragedy is not zero. It's correct that we should accept some risk. We just need to be up-front and recognize what the safety margins really are.
> We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe.
Are we? People saying "have a safe trip" is pretty weak evidence.
The counter evidence is just about everything else going on, at least in the US. Relaxed worker safety standards, weakened environmental protections, and generally moving as fast as possible.
We have 4 kids. Before we had our 3rd, we needed to buy a new vehicle solely because we couldn't fit 3 car seats into the back of our old car. And when traveling with kids, carrying 4 gigantic car seats plus your other luggage is not exactly as easy as you might think! It essentially rules out solo parent travel with all 4 kids. Transferring car seats between two cars, or installing car seats in a taxi, is a serious pain.
Furthermore, the evidence that car seats actually benefit safety is significantly less robust than you might think. The "mountains of evidence" that do exist for things like 70% reductions in fatalities, bizarrely enough, generally compare the rate of fatalities for car seats vs completely unrestrained kids. When you compare the rate of fatalities in car seats to kids wearing adult seat belts, the bulk of the evidence suggests essentially no difference. Fatalities happen when the forces involved are catastrophic and sadly a car seat doesn't help much for kids over 2.
Even a back of the envelope comparison makes this extremely plausible: car crash fatalities for kids 9-12 have declined by 72% from 1978-2017. If car seats and car seat laws save significant numbers of lives, you'd expect that the fatality rate for kids 0-8, who are generally in car seats, to have decreased much more. But it hasn't, it declined by 73% over the same period.
Now, car seats and boosters do seem to moderately reduce non-fatal injuries - huge spread of estimates here, most clustering around 10-25%. It's reasonable for most people to use car seats or boosters most of the time based on this alone, IMO, especially for young kids. But do they justify a mandate? IMO: no. Absolutely not.
Worth mentioning that mandates probably do succeed in one thing: they reduce the number of children born at all by at least 57x more than they prevent child fatalities. Roughly 8,000 kids per year, 145,000 kids since 1980. That's with the (unlikely, as discussed above) assumption that car seats do in fact save significant numbers of lives. But it's also entirely possible that they've prevented hundreds of thousands of kids from being born, somewhat reduced the nonfatal injury rate, and saved essentially no lives.
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 (car seat mandates "led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000")
Note that both the 45% and 59% estimate for injury reduction and the 28% estimate for fatality reduction all come from one research group using a proprietary data set. Everything that's independently reproducible points towards small or zero effect on fatalities and modest effects on injuries.
But sure everything would be better if any moron was allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.
Yes, I think that we'd all be better off if every person was allowed to have their own personal values, deciding what's more important to themSELVES, rather than piling on and trying to force every one into a one-size-fits-all solution.
For my part, I'd much rather have people wishing me "have a rich and fulfilling life" rather than "be timid and careful to maximize your time even if it's boring and unrewarding".
Sure, you can disagree with my priorities, but that's the whole point. We should each be able to have our own priorities.
The evidence that car seats save lives is significantly weaker that you probably believe, as I detailed in another comment in this thread. But look: even if car seats make sense for a typical 5 year old on a typical drive in their typical car (which is a higher evidentiary burden than you might think), a mandate imposes a huge logistical tax that makes many normal things completely infeasible or impractical:
- travel with many kids (nope, physically can't carry 4 car seats plus luggage)
- using a taxi, e.g. to go see a movie (nope, can't carry a car seat into the theater)
- carpooling with other families (I'll drive them, you pick up? Nope, we'd have to shuffle car seats around.)
- rides with grandparents or other family members (sorry, we'd have to deliver the car seat to them first)
- splitting kids between two vehicles for errands (let's spend 10m wrestling car seats from one car to the other first)
The whole texture of independent childhood is altered by car seat mandates! Everything gets filtered through "is there a car seat available?". If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
> Car seats and booster seats significantly reduce the risk of fatal injury in crashes by 71% for infants and 54% for toddlers (1-4 years old), saving over 11,000 lives in the US since 1975
> Booster seats reduce the risk of serious injury for children aged 4-8 by 45% compared to seatbelts alone.
It's from the AI summary because it was the most quotable but the articles I found say pretty much the same thing. Seems pretty solid to me.
> If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
If you haven't experienced your children dying unnecessarily because it was inconvenient to make them safe it's hard to describe..
What articles did you find, exactly? What primary evidence are they basing their claims on? Many of the numbers you'll find with a google search are unclear about what they're comparing to - I believe both of the fatality numbers above (71% and 54%) are relative to completely unrestrained kids, which is not the relevant comparison.
The 45% number I specifically discuss in the other comment, but every independently reproducible study using publicly available data has found much smaller effects, around 10-25% for minor injuries and no statistically significant difference in severe injuries.
To be clear, I'm not saying "don't use car seats," I'm saying that the evidence doesn't support mandating them through age 8 (or 12!).
Our kids would be much safer if we drove everywhere at 15mph - less convenient, but it would prevent many unnecessary deaths. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do anything in the world without risk. So we're forced to balance convenience against safety every day, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not.
The evidence on car seats is extremely weak and they prevent only a handful of injuries. You'd be better off redesigning roads or having more collision protection systems in cars. As self-driving cars get better to the point where they can communicate and eliminate many human errors, there's probably no need for car seats at all. In many situations they make things more dangerous, not less.
America has been craving safety since 9/11, and it has made cowards of everybody, so in some sense I would agree.
But taking a risk regarding an unknown or to expand knowledge or actually accomplish something is one thing. Ignoring known and mitigable risks just to save money, save face, meet a deadline or please a bureaucrat is another.
Anyway these clowns even fail your criterion, because by covering up the results of the first launch/experiment, they are not being up front about a risk.
In my opinion this is a top-down, human hierarchy thing. CEOs and agency administrators create and set an organization's culture and expectations.
The irony is that a faulty heat shield is an engineering challenge that real engineers would love to tackle; all you have to do is turn them loose on the problem, let them fix it. They live for that. I find it actually aesthetically offensive that the organization and its culture has instead taught them venal, circumspect careerism, which is cowardice of a different kind.
Considering that driving (at least in the US) is a relatively unsafe means of travel compared to the alternatives, I can understand imploring someone to drive safe.
Our internal emotional thinking doesn't work very well with probabilities so it is a very common fallacy trying to reduce a probability to zero when it is completely irrational.
I feel like all the responses to your comment sort of prove its point.
As I was reading the post I was wondering along the same lines, if this is different from before. Going to space is an inherently risky activity. It's always going to be easy to write the "this is not safe" think piece, where you can either say "I told you so" or "Whew, thankfully we made it this time!" afterwards. Things like this only happen when you accept some risk and people say "yes" press forward.
All that said, not all risk is equal, and I'm trying to understand if NASA is uniquely dysfunctional now and taking needless, incidental risks.
Maybe not so much "oblivious to safety" as "oblivious to probable risk." We worry to much about low risk events (like airline flights) and don't worry enough about higher risk events (like trips-and-falls, driving a car, poor diet...)
If you're looking for programs where mistakes were not made, Apollo is not the program to choose. I highly recommend visiting Kennedy Space Center some time where they go in-depth on how close it came to never happening after Apollo I. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
That being said, I'm a big proponent of "you can't make ICBM's carrying humans 100% safe", but you sure can try your best.
Us humans do have difficulty with safety. Sometimes we are able to overcome that problem to an extent. Here are some the few examples where humans have done well with safety: FAA commercial airlines, Soyuz, ISS, Shinkansen trains, US Nuclear power post 3 mile island, Vaccines, and the Falcon 9.
I wouldn’t say humans are oblivious to safety. The Apollo program was very successful as long as you’re not related to Gus Grissom, Ed White or Roger Chaffee. But those three (preventable) deaths aside, Apollo was quite successful and figured out some huge problems.
If you’re interested in a heck of a good read, the Columbia Accident Investigation Report is a good place to start:
It looks at the safety culture in NASA and at how that safety culture ran into budget issues, time pressure and a culture that ‘it’s always been okay’. But people were aware of the problems.
There’s a really frustrating example from Columbia where engineers on the ground badly wanted to inspect the shuttle’s left wing from the ground using ground based telescopes or even observations from telescopes or any other assets. There’s footage available was an email circulated where an engineer all but begged anyone to take a look with anything. That request was not approved - they never looked.
Realistically there’s a point to be made that NASA wasn’t capable of saving those astronauts at that point. But they had a shuttle almost ready to to, they could have jettisoned its science load and possibly had a rescue of some sort available. They never looked though but alarm bells were ringing.
It’s more accurate to say people are highly aware of safety but when you get a bunch of us together, add in cognitive biases and promotion bands we can get stuck in unsafe ruts.
I'd say it's more accurate to say the people who are actually smart work as engineers. Leadership is generally engineers who were better at office politics than engineering, or just business majors etc.
So you have a group of really talented people using their talents to do awesome things, and then you have some useless idiots who are good at kissing the right asses, running the show and taking most of the credit. And that's how you end up killing astronauts, because the useless assholes in charge aren't even competent enough to recognize when they should listen to the brains of their operation. All they care about is looking good to their superiors and hitting some arbitrary deadline they've decided to set for no damn reason etc.
I haven't kept up with Artemis development but I've read extensively about Challenger and Columbia. These two parts of the article stood out to me:
> Moon-to-Mars Deputy Administrator Amit Kshatriya said: “it was very small localized areas. Interestingly, it would be much easier for us to analyze if we had larger chunks and it was more defined”. A Lockheed Martin representative on the same call added that "there was a healthy margin remaining of that virgin Avcoat. So it wasn’t like there were large, large chunks.”
Followed by:
> The Avcoat material is not designed to come out in chunks. It is supposed to char and flake off smoothly, maintaining the overall contours of the heat shield.
This is echoes both Shuttle incidents. Challenger: no gasses were supposed to make it past the o-rings no matter what, but when it became clear that gasses were escaping and the o-rings were being damaged, there was a push to suggest that it's an acceptable level.
There was a similar situation with heat shield damage and Columbia.
In both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that wasn't expected to fail in that mode /at all/.
I know the points that astronauts make about the importance of manned space exploration, but I agree with this author that it seems to make sense to run this as an unmanned mission, and probably test the new heat shield which will replace the Artemis II design in an unmanned re-entry as well.
"The Challenger accident was not caused by O-rings or temperature on the day of launch; it was caused by a deviant joint design which opened instead of closed when loaded. It was caused by mistaking analytical adequacy of a simplified test for physical understanding of the system. The solution, post Challenger, was the structural redesign of the SRB field joint and the use of the exact same O-rings."
I find that highly surprising, because "it was the O-rings" explanation seems universally believed and sanctified by no lesser authority than the Nobel prize laureate Richard Feynman.
It's the same explaination. When the SRB joints flexxed the o-rings were meant to stay in place, but the joints were defective and NASA knew the o-rings were moving. However NASA also believed the o-rings could still take the abuse, because although they were moving they were getting shoved deeper into the joint, in a way that wasn't intended but was nonetheless at least marginally effective at stopping exhaust blow-by shortly after it began. But when the o-rings were cold and stiff... they didn't move the same way, exhaust blew by them longer and cut right through. At that point the SRB turns into a cutting torch (the SRBs didn't actually explode until after the shuttle broke up and range safety sent the signal to kill the boosters.
What would happen "normally" (i.e. the normalization of deviance) was that the rotation (from the SRB joints bowing--essentially "ballooning") would create a gap, and the O-rings would get blown into that gap and ultimately seal in there
With Challenger, it was too cold, so the O-ring rubber was not malleable enough to seal into that space (like the O-ring towards the right of the diagram), so the hot gases were allowed to blow by and erode the O-ring. If they had sealed in (like the one on the left) it would have just taken the pressure but not worn away
>>I find that highly surprising, because "it was the O-rings" explanation seems universally believed and sanctified by no lesser authority than the Nobel prize laureate Richard Feynman.
Essentially you are mischaracterizing what Feynman did or say, although this is also Feynman fault :-), by doing the famous public demonstration, with the ice water in a glass [2], although even there he only said it has "significance to the problem...". In other words, we should not simplify, even for the general public, what are complex subtle engineering issues. This is also the reason why current AI, will fail spectacularly, but I digress...
Feynman documented the joint rotation problem in his written Appendix F, but his televised demonstration became the explanation...[3]
Camarda is correct here. There was a fundamentally flawed field joint design, meaning the tang-and-clevis joint opened under combustion pressure instead of closing. This meant the O-rings were being asked to chase a widening gap something the O-ring manufacturer explicitly told Thiokol O-rings were never designed to do. Joint rotation was known as early as 1977, a full nine years before the disaster.
The cold temperature made things worse by stiffening the rubber so it could not chase the gap as quickly, but O-ring erosion and blow-by were occurring on flights in warm weather too and nearly every flight in 1985 showed damage.
The proof is how they fixed. NASA redesigned the joint metal structure with a capture feature to prevent rotation, added a third O-ring for redundancy, and installed heaters but kept the exact same Viton rubber. If the O-rings were the real problem, you would change the O-rings. They did not need to.
The report [1] is public for everybody to read...but not from the NASA page... who funnily enough has a block on the link from their own page, so I had to find an alternative link...
Without being too familiar with the subject - another commenter referred to the "swiss cheese model": the O-ring design, the temperature etc. weren't the single cause, they were contributing factors, and the more contributing factors you eliminate, the more certain you can be that you won't have a repeat accident. AFAIK there weren't any more Shuttle launches at such low temperatures after that anymore either?
My recollection is that a rocket design was scaled up from one that worked, by people who didn't consider how an o-ring should be loaded in order to function properly. They inadvertently changed the design rather than simply scale it. I don't think Feynman got this wrong either. His demo was because the justifications for flight were based on the fact that failure had a temperature correlation, and they had a model representing how damaged the o-rings would be.
The o-ring failure was a measurable consequence of the joint design failure. The data behind the model didn't go down to temperatures as low as that at Challenger's launch date.
For more inappropriate extrapolation to justify a decision: the data for the heat shield tile loss model was based on much less damage than sustained by Columbia (3 orders of magnitude IIRC).
Now they are looking at the same style of fallacy and don't even have a model based on damage sustained in flights.
Another parallel I haven't seen discussed here yet, though I haven't read all comments: I recall Feynman feeling like he was on the investigation panel as a prop, that the intention of the investigation was to clear NASA of any wrongdoing. They used a model, considered risks, etc. Feynman recognized the need for a clear and powerful visual to cut through an information dump and pull it to front page news. The invitation of Camarda to a presentation with a pre-determined conclusion has the same feeling. I don't know what Camarda can do to put it on a (non-HN) front page today.
Both things can be true. A better O-ring with the same joint might have prevented the disaster. A better designed joint with the same O-ring might also. Feynman knew that a little theater would go a long way. The O-ring explanation, albeit a partial explanation, made for good theater.
Using the same o-rings afterwards is surprising, I've heard that the manufacturer was surprised that they were being used for that purpose because they weren't rated for that.
Also I'm not sure the assertion is correct. If the sealant and O-Rings were adequate, the joint would not have failed. It was suboptimal, and increased risk, sure, but it in itself wasn't the reason for the accident. It was the joint and the o-rings in combination. The holes in the swiss cheese model lined up that day, and a lot of small problems combined into one big problem
>> Using the same o-rings afterwards is surprising, I've heard that the manufacturer was surprised that they were being used for that purpose because they weren't rated for that.
Surprised? One of the engineers was literally on the phone with NASA the morning of the disaster begging them not to launch. He was overruled by management.
Surprising for the management. If you are a spoiled brat who always got what it wanted if you just asked/cried you don't expect reality to come and hit you.
The sealant and O-rings were meant to keep the hot gasses inside. Simply making a joint slightly wiggly will not keep hot gasses inside. The hot gasses did not stay inside. The sealant and O-rings did not succeed in keeping the hot gasses inside (evidence: Challenger). They were not adequate
> The sealant and O-rings did not succeed in keeping the hot gasses inside (evidence: Challenger). They were not adequate
No. The whole assembly --joint, sealant and O-rings, -- failed.
"They were not adequate" - yet, after the redesign, they kept those same O-rings and declared that boosters are safe to fly, in manifest contradiction to your assertion. So your reasoning is clearly flawed.
>"They were not adequate" - yet, after the redesign, they kept those same O-rings
presumably "redesign" means some stuff changed. why is it not possible that the O-rings were inadequate for the old design, but adequate for the new design?
Exactly. They re-designed the tang and clevis joint so that the metal parts of the joint did not spread under gas pressure and the o-ring did not lose compression. They added a heater to ensure that the o-ring remained in it's usable temperature range. And added a superfluous third O-ring.
Speaking of which, has anyone ever adequately explained why Challenger's Right SRB joint temperature was measured as -13 deg C using infrared pyrometers, when the lowest ambient temperature that night was -5.5C, and the Left SRB was measured -4 C? What subcooled the right SRB?
Allan McDonald's "Truth, Lies, and O-Rings" is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to discuss the details of this particular bit of corporate and government malfeasance. It's 600 pages of technical detail and political intrigue. He suggests that a plume from a cryo vent could have impinged on the field joint and cooled the o-ring to lower than ambient temperatures. No proof though.
Yes and the reversal of safety calculations really surprised me. "The orbiter has a total fail rate of one in 1000 so this individual part is higher than 1 in 10000", something like that. Where neither premise was actually tested or verified. Just specified on paper as a requirement and then used for actual safety calculations.
I don't know how a big organisation can think like that. But I guess these calculations were ones out of millions of ones made for the project.
The bigger an organization gets, the more internal overhead it has. At some point, it would take divine intervention for important things not to get overlooked or lost at some junctions in the org chart.
I've often thought world leaders, upon election/selection, should get a free few orbits of the earth, to give them some perspective on the job they're about to undertake. Maybe offer the first one on Artemis II, a deferred one for the current US administration?
James May of Top Gear has flown with a U2 spy plane once [0][1]. When they reached to the edge of space, May said "If everybody could do that once, it would completely change the face of global politics, religion, education, everything".
I can't agree more.
Another thing I believe needs to be watched periodically is Pale Blue Dot [2].
I think you overestimate the effect that would have on the kind of people that most need that sort of humility.
Look at what happened with William Shatner and Jeff Bezos when they came back from space. Shatner started to say something about what an impactful experience it was, but Bezos cut him off and was like “Woo! Partay!” and switched his attention to a magnum of champagne.
Jeff went up two flights earlier, in July 2021 on NS-16. Shatner was on NS-18 in October.
I don't know if it's a thing that wears off, if Bezos was just in business-mode the entire time, or just didn't want someone monologuing right after getting back.
>I've often thought world leaders, upon election/selection, should get a free few orbits of the earth, to give them some perspective on the job they're about to undertake.
Perhaps, but they should also get a few free orbits of the Earth *after* their term ends, on a launch system built by whichever contractor has given the most "campaign donations" to politicians. Surely they'll trust it to be safe, right?
I would also say give them a year of free vacations in various places. Say a maximum security prison in general population, any type of dark camps, hospitals, mental institutions and care homes.
Give them the rest and recreation they need in these wonderful places.
"Houston, this is Golden One. I'm looking down on the big, beautiful, blue world. They love me down there. They all love me. I'm the greatest astronaut ever in the history of mankind. No one has ever orbited like this before."
I mean, we can probably predict what will happen based on existing data.
"I've seen things up there that are huge, absolutely huge. And let me tell you, astronauts, they came up to me, they were crying, big men crying. Earth, it's a good name, but it's not big enough, not grand enough. So, I'm thinking we rename it. How about 'The Trump Sphere'? It's got a nice ring to it, doesn't it? And let me tell you, nobody would argue with that name!"
Based on some rough numbers, NASA's budget (around $24B) would be <4% of the US's total spending on entertainment, with a pretty great return in research, engineering and education to boot.
I also looked up the NSF's 2024 budget, which, at $9B, was much lower than I expected.
There are actually a lot of really interesting discoveries on that list. I haven't thought deeply about whether it represents value for money, but I would say that that is anything but "a joke of a list."
And 'Stimulating the low-Earth orbit economy' is a joke. Spending money not as a means to an end, but as the end in itself?
Apart from the research into the effects of microgravity on humans, pretty much everything else could have been done cheaper and better without humans.
Or take this example:
> Deployment of CubeSats from station: CubeSats are one of the smallest types of satellites and provide a cheaper way to perform science and technology demonstrations in space. More than 250 CubeSats have now been deployed from the space station, jumpstarting research and satellite companies.
Cubesats are great! But you don't exactly need a manned space station to deploy them. Similar with many other 'achievements' like the 'Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer'.
See also how they don't mention any actual impact. Only stuff like "This achievement may provide insight into fundamental laws of quantum mechanics."
And this is supposed to be the list of highlights. The best they have to offer.
This is a typical argument for state intervention in the marketplace, but it is weaker if one makes different assumptions about the state of the market absent the intervention. In order to show that it was money well spent, you'd have to show that it's better to have more groups digging, and that there wouldn't have been enough diggers without GovDitch.
Also, it's NASA, so they can't come out and say "stopped soviet rocket technology and expertise from proliferating" which was a large motivator for the ISS.
Hard disagree. some of our best technologies came about to solve problems related to space travel which we later found useful for mundane problems at home. gps, digital cameras immediately come to mind. The only other phenomena I can think of with similar effects on human progress is war... I'll take a space race thanks
About war: in our universe we got the first digital computers because of military efforts during the second world war. However, without a war IBM and Konrad Zuse and others would have gotten there, too. With much less human suffering.
It's unlikely computing would have developed as quickly as it did without the Cold War. IBM's Sage and MIT's TX0 were both Cold War projects - one for a national early warning system, the other as an R&D platform for flight simulators.
Most US investment in associated tech - including the Internet - came through DARPA.
Not pointing this out because I support war, but to underline that the US doesn't have a culture of aggressive government investment in non-military R&D.
NASA and the NSF both get pocket money in budget terms. And at its height Apollo was a Cold War PR battle with the USSR that happened to funnel a lot of of money to defence contractors.
The original moon landings were not primarily motivated by science.
It doesn't, but it was, because it was tied to administration and nuclear physics and then rocketry.
Private sector doesn't do much without obvious short-term gain, and it especially doesn't do basic research. It may be good at fitting more pixels in ever thinner phones, but it wouldn't get to that point if not the government that needed number-crunching machines for better modelling of nuclear fission some 80 years earlier.
I have a hunch that space race is not for "peaceful technological progress of human race at large", or "let's see how this behaves in 0G, it might be useful for some global problems" anymore.
Well, I highly doubt that the kind of rockets they are developing for Lunar and Mars missions will be mich better, if any better at all, than current ballistic missiles armies around the world already have. Those space rockets are huge and meant to more or less safely carry people over a long distance in space. Warheads are meant to carry explosives while also being hard to detect or stop. I'm no rocket scientist, but I believe that huge space rockets would defeat the purpose, as they would consume a lot of fuel for nothing, while also being much easier to spot and stopped by shooting something at them.
So I think the opposite: we are way past the point of space exploration being directly useful for weapons.
That's not how resources work. Resources that are used for space exploration aren't magically available for anything else when you don't do space exploration. The economy is not a zero sum game and human capital is not fungible.
A rocket scientist/engineer/technician/etc at NASA is not going to work on the thing we "should" spend money on instead if tomorrow you shut down NASA's manned spaceflight programs. They'll probably go work on ads at Meta instead.
You are serious? Up until this point I thought you're writing in jest, because all the things you mention are actually good ideas - including especially funding manned space flight from entertainment budget, because:
1) It's better aligned with mission profile (inspirational, emotional, but not strictly necessary;
2) There's much more of it to go than NASA gets;
3) It would be a better use of that money than what it's currently used for.
Firstly how is this related to opportunity costs. Secondly, no one said that to create digital computer you should start a war. It's just that war is already present, regardless of you invent digital computers or space travel.
Broken window fallacy much? The amount of money spent on space race could have been spent somewhere else and you have no idea how to evaluate of this was a valid set of outcomes.
If the NFL were to somehow become involved, you can bet that they'd somehow manage to turn the financials around and get some of that sweet government money flowing in their direction, just like the dozens of taxpayer-funded or otherwise tax-advantaged stadium deals in the past 25 years that allow us to thank Big Football financially for gracing us with the presence of football teams.
It is astounding to me how such a successful, rich group of companies manage to get subsidies in quantities that groups you'd think deserve or need it more, from valuable science endeavours to orphans dying of cancer, can only dream of.
Is there any research on the effect of apparent gravitational field strength on sports? I’d be willing to bet that rocketry and artillery takes account of 50mm/s2 difference at the equator. While the difference is obviously tiny, the margins in modern sports are also miniscule.
Do Fijian rugby games see a 0.5% increase in longest drop goal distance?
I have no idea about the 0.5% increase in drop goal distance, but tongue-in-cheek, I would say only 0.5% as many attempted drop goals - given the Fijian team's emphasis on a ball-in-hand style of play instead of kicking the ball away.
On a slightly related note, I always found the games played in Pretoria in South Africa fascinating. It's 1350 m above sea level, so kicks all go 10% to 15% further (my estimate) which makes quite a difference when there are players kicking penalties from over halfway even at sea level.
just wait until influencers start flying there. Not on SLS of course. Flyby on Starship cattle class - say 100 people (500 for LEO and "SFO to Shanghai" while for Moon - several days would require better accommodations, thus 100) - at $5M/launch, 10 launches (9 of them - tankers) - thus $50M 3 day roundtrip for 100 people. Half a mil per person.
No no no. Space will be colonized. At least our local solar system will see sustained human exploration and inhabitation. This requires physical presence. This is one of those black swans which seem silly when looking forward, but obvious in retrospective. The future belongs to those who do seemingly silly things today. The first industrialists often faced ridicule because they spent time designing machines instead of doing the task and making the immediate money. Set aside your need for immediate gratification. Hard things lead to good outcomes.
> test the new heat shield which will replace the Artemis II design in an unmanned re-entry as well.
NASA desperately needs more options. They shouldn't need to expend an SLS to launch an uncrewed Orion with a test heatshield on a trajectory equivalent to a moon return. They should be able to launch that on top of a Falcon Heavy. A Falcon Heavy can launch 63 tons to LEO and a fueled Orion plus service module weights slightly north of 20 tons. An Orion mass simulator with enough attitude control mated with a FH second stage would leave a lot of delta-v to accelerate the capsule back into the atmosphere.
SpaceX is the only major operator of spaceflights in the US: more than 95% of all satellites launched are launched by SpaceX, not just in the US, but worldwide.
We have regions where we deliberately minimize light pollution, but those regions aren't immune to Elon's swarm of photobombing satellites.
Not that I don't think it's cool to have a web of spacecraft enveloping the planet and bringing high-speed communications to everyone everywhere - it's pretty impressive to point up and show a train of satellites to a kid - but astronomers have been complaining about them and they are right.
This is about going to the moon. Space-x is over budget and extremely late. It has nothing to do with the management there, only that it is better to come up with a solution without them.
I only suggested a Falcon Heavy because the rocket exists, is flight proven, and has enough capacity to shoot an Orion to any trajectory it is expected to encounter.
Imagine if NASA had the resources and the freedom to pursue a high-risk high-return strategy the same way SpaceX did. NASA can't afford high-profile failures because it needs political support to function from a Congress that doesn't understand engineering.
Now imagine the public good will if the US could have built a network of LEO satellites providing communications to everyone on Earth regardless of nationality, with equal access and funded by governments so that all their residents could have access to it for free (once they buy an antenna made in the US).
Some will say it'd be communism. I would say it could be part of a Pax Americana that doesn't involve coups, but is based on willing cooperation.
Source: I'm "on the spectrum." This often resulted in me being the skunk at the rationalization picnic, because I didn't realize the boss wanted me to rubberstamp a bad design.
I really don't understand the point of manned space exploration though?
Landing on the moon in 1969 was an extraordinary achievement, perhaps the most beautiful thing ever done by mankind. But now? What's the point exactly?
We know we can't go much further than the moon anyway (as this very same blog has demonstrated many times); what do we expect to achieve with astronauts that robots can't do?
I think it's still very important for adaptability. yes, a land rover can run for years and run thousands of experiments, but it's limited to whatever scientific probes it was equipped with. Humans are right now more flexible and could adapt experiments to findings, which would then inform the next rovers. And when the time comes that we start mining and building on the moon, a few humans will probably need to live there. So any data on human survival outside the Earth is useful data. https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov/
>In both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that wasn't expected to fail in that mode /at all/.
Because, and it speaks volumes that nobody ever circles back around to this, that is absolutely f-ing normal. If everyone ran around like the sky was falling every time some widget made it into service and some unexpected thing was noticed nothing would get done.
"hey we disassembled this gearbox and there's a little rust from condensation + chemistry = cyclic usage, we better take a look at it"
"we've taken a look at it and the corrosion is forming because X, this is fine because the surfaces that can't rust see lubricant flow and the per our calculations the maximum amount of rust into the lube is Y and since the service interval is Z this is fine, tests confirm this."
^ the above happened for a multimillion dollar per hour of downtime gearbox. That was 40yr ago. It was in fact fine. I know it was fine because they added venting suggestions to the docs and the client balked because they bought another one in the 2010s and a bunch of "we went over this when it was installed and it was fine then and the building is even more tightly humidity controlled than it was in the 1980s" back and fourth whining ensued.
You don't know how many other things they noticed when they put the shuttles into service that did in fact turn out to be perfectly fine. It's real easy to be smug in hindsight but good luck trying to pick the needle out of the haystack in advance.
Now obviously the shuttle people flubbed it and much has been writtenn about it, but the point still sands.
Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around.
And note that the OP believes it is likely (maybe very likely) that the heat shield will work fine. It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is involved.
Regardless, this is not a Challenger or Columbia situation. In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem. That's the difference, in my opinion. NASA is taking this seriously and has analyzed the problem deeply.
They are not YOLO'ing this mission, and it's somewhat insulting that people think they are.
If you play a single round of Russian roulette with a revolver, it is likely you will not die, but it is also not safe to do that. The same idea applies here.
The foam shedding/impact problem was heavily analyzed throughout the Shuttle program, and recognized as a significant risk. Read the CAIB report for a good history.
That report also describes the groupthink dynamic at NASA that made skeptical engineers "come around" for the good of the program in the past. Calling Camarda an outlier is just a different way of stating this problem.
It looks like they did some worst case testing that was reassuring, so that it isn't Russian roulette? Any comments on that? I suppose their composite testing and temperature projections could also be wrong, and their trajectory changes might not be mitigating enough for the heat shield chunking, but that's a few different things all simultaneously being wrong for a catastrophic failure to occur.
The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.
What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.
But then no spacecraft is safe to fly. We're obviously willing to accept a much higher level of risk sending humans to the moon than in other situations. I think I read somewhere at a 1 in 30 chance of them all dying was acceptable. Not too far off from Russian roulette!
Hang on, without a dog in this fight, have I asked the people who trained their whole lives to drive cool cars if this particular cool car, which they were not involved in designing or building, is safe to drive? Is that what you are asking?
They asked if the astronauts "want to risk it", not if it was actually safe. Those are very different questions. The astronauts are, in fact, the world's leading experts on whether or not they personally want to risk it, so it's not entirely unreasonable to think that they could answer that question.
It just depends on whether you think that the fact that they accept the risks is reason enough to let them fly a potentially-dangerous spacecraft.
Artemis II is not safe, at least by the standards we apply to things. It's the third flight of a capsule, on the second flight of the rocket, and the first flight of things like the life support system.
At the end of the day, one of the reasons astronauts are respected is they understand those risks, and go into space anyway. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize risks - but at some point the risk becomes acceptable, and the cost of reducing it too great.
To paraphrase a quote from Star Trek - risk is their business.
Have you bothered to ask the gambler if they want to risk it?
No offense to the astronauts of course, but asking people that have dreamed of this opportunity their whole life doesn't actually tell you all that much about the actual safety of the mission as a whole.
The astronauts are cool with it. They are basically brainwashed to rationalize exceptional trust in all of the people and components so that they are able to focus on the task at hand.
I wouldn't say brainwashed, but they're definitely aware of the political angles related to succeeding with a career at NASA and almost always agree to play ball without causing trouble for the org.
That “balanced take” severely mischaracterizes dissenting expert Camarda’s attitude, so it’s not balanced at all. Its answer to “Could the NASA engineers convince Olivas and Camarda?” is a “maybe” for Camarda, which couldn’t be further from what Camarda had to say himself, which is he was more concerned after the meeting than before.
From Camarda’s own account after the meeting:
> Hold a “transparent” meeting with invited press to “vet” the Artemis II decision with one of the most public technical dissenters, me, in attendance (Jan 8th, 2026).
> Control the one-sided narrative and bombard the attendees with the Artemis Program view
> Do not allow dissenting voices to present at the meeting
> Do not even allow the IRT or the NESC to present their findings
> Rely on the attending journalists to regurgitate the party line and witness the overwhelming consensus of knowledgeable people
"It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" and "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly" are both compatible with the probability of a disaster on reentry being 10%.
> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem.
Being pedantic, NASA management "ignored" engineers - because money.
That said, I 100% agree with you assuming:
> “We have full confidence in the Orion spacecraft and its heat shield, grounded in rigorous analysis and the work of exceptional engineers who followed the data throughout the process,” Isaacman said Thursday.
I only say assuming not that I don't believe Isaacman, but historically NASA managers have said publicly everything's fine when it wasn't and tried to throw the blame onto engineers.
With Challenger, engineers said no-go.
With Columbia, engineers had to explicitly state/sign "this is unsafe", which pushes the incentivisation the wrong direction.
So, I want to believe him, but historically it hasn't been so great to do so.
There were a lot of mistakes with Challenger and Columbia--I totally agree. But I don't think it was money. It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches (unlike some CEOs, maybe).
I think the problem with both Challenger and Columbia was that there were so many possible problems (turbine blade cracks, tiles falling off, etc.) that managers and even engineers got used to off-nominal conditions. This is the "normalization of deviance" that Diane Vaughan talked about.
Is that what's going on with the Orion heat shield? I don't think so. I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.
> It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches
It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right?
But in Challenger's case, there was very heavy pressure to launch because of delays and the rising costs. I remember in a documentary they explicitly mentioned there was a backlog of missions and STS-51 had been delayed multiple times. To rollout/fuel, costs a LOT and challenger had been out on the pad for a while. Rollback was a material risk+cost.
For columbia, yea less about money. They ignored the requests to repoint spy sats and normalized foam strikes.
> I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.
And that's the way it should be. Everything has a risk value regardless if we calculate it or not. It's never 0... (maybe accidentally going faster than light is though?) We just need to agree what it is and is acceptable.
Story time - I was a young engineer at National Instruments and I remember sitting in on a meeting where they were discussing sig figs for their new high precision DMMs. Can we guarantee 6... 7 digits? 7? and they argued that back and forth. No decisions but it really stuck with me. When you're doing bleeding edge work the lines tend to get blurry.
> It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right?
This sounds more like there is money in the room than it’s about the money. None of the decision makers personally profited from saying go. It was much more of a prestige thing.
TFA is ridiculous with its stance. Yeah, there's this aspect of the design they can't test in their labs. It might even be an important aspect. But safety isn't a boolean "safe"/"not safe", it's a risk assessment, and I'm quite sure there are 100 (or 10000) other things they didn't test for. As long as they're taking all of this into their risk calculations… it's fine.
And if it doesn't blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) will be forgotten.
And if it does blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) can suddenly claim prescience, all the while this is one of thousands of factors that went into the risk assessment. If one really wanted to claim prescience, it'd need to be a ranking of a sufficient number of failure modes.
To illustrate the problem: I hereby claim they will have a "toilet failure". Now if they actually have one, I'll claim `m4d ch0pz` in rocket engineering.
(P.S.: it's a joke but toilet failures on spacecraft are actually a serious problem, if it really happens… shit needs to go somewhere…)
> And if it doesn't blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) will be forgotten.
The HN hivemind will remember, he's a well known user with a well known site.
Let's hope there is no accident, but after the landing there will be reports anyway. We will take a look at the report of the shield and see if it shows a problem in spite it didn't explode, and compare with the prediction in the article. He may even write another article after the fly.
For comparison, I remember the Feynman appendix. One important detail was that Nasa said the the probability of accidents was 1/100000, but he concluded that it was closer to 1/100. Nobody expect to fly a hundred Artemis missions to get a good statistic. Even if the current version explosion rate is super high like 1/10, then you can probably fry a few missions without problems if you cross your fingers hard enough.
I'm not super happy with the pattern of thinking in these numbers; arguing 1/100000 vs 1/100 for "accidents" is again a boolean thing. They probably had a very specific definition, which does make this viable, but we don't have that definition here. So the numbers are meaningless to us. And not having that definition, "accidents" is a sliding scale… e.g. I'm pretty sure astronauts injured themselves banging various bodyparts against various parts of the spaceship. That's technically an accident.
And in this concrete example — the heat shield isn't boolean either. I don't know how steep the gradient between pass and fail is, but it certainly exists, and it's possible they come back successfully but with it singed significantly outside expected parameters. (Even "less than expected" would indicate a problem here IMHO.) That does mean it's not necessarily a question of having enough boolean datapoints.
A high enough threshold for "accident" is a death. In the space shuttle the "accident" rate was 2/135 that is somewhat close to 1/100, but it shows that 1/100000 is too optimistic.
You can pick a more strict safety criteria, but the result would be (something)/135 >= 2/135 > 1/100 >> 1/1000000
All of the controversy over the heat shield is obscuring the much bigger safety issue: Artemis has had only a single unmanned test flight. By contrast, the Saturn launch system had seven successful unmanned tests before being trusted with a crew, including two unmanned flights of the complete Saturn V stack. And even then, three astronauts were lost during ground testing of the crew capsule due to a critical design flaw. Artemis's closest modern counterpart, the SpaceX Starship, has had 11 test flights, several of which resulted in loss of the vehicle. There is no reason to believe that Artemis has a significantly higher reliability rate than Starship or Saturn V. Even without the heat shield controversy, this is the most dangerous mission NASA has launched since the first flight of the Space Shuttle.
> Artemis's closest modern counterpart, the SpaceX Starship, has had 11 test flights, several of which resulted in loss of the vehicle.
I don't think you can compare the two. Starship's risks are so high failure is almost the expected outcome, it's a trial and error based process. Starship and Artemis is an apples/oranges comparison with respect to how the programs approach risk tolerance.
In the space shuttle disasters the hardware had at least been used more than once. A huge lot of this one is only tried and tested on paper.
And the idea that 'if we throw this much money at it, it really must be fine' I don't buy either. Look at how that worked out for Boeing.
For all my feelings about Musk I would much rather step into a rocket that has exploded in all kinds of imaginable situations before so they know how the materials and design actually behave in real world scenarios. I do really think that is the way to go.
Another thing SpaceX has going for it is when their tests fail everyone just points and laughs at Musk. When a NASA launch fails the taxpayers don't want to pay for it any longer.
It's kind of sad that we've become so risk averse. Risks should be fully disclosed but let the adventurers adventure.
Would Columbus' ship ever have been allowed to sail in the modern day? Proximity wingsuit flying and free-climbing is legal and people choose to do it even though the probability of death is extremely high. Spaceflight is significantly safer and far more beneficial to humanity, yet we block it. No one counts the lives lost due to slowing scientific progress but we should. How much further behind would we be scientifically if Darwin hadn't ventured out on the Beagle due to endless safety reviews. Would the US be what it is today if Lewis and Clark had to prove to congress that the trip was safe?
Given the opportunity, many of us would choose to die as part of a grand adventure in service to humanity vs. wither away of old age.
I wish I could downvote this comment more than once. It's incredibly ghoulish to use the perfectly-sensible argument that modern culture is too risk-averse to handwave away known critical safety problems. Those two things are completely orthogonal. Yes, astronauts should be willing to accept that there are "unknown unknowns" and that they will be facing some amount of unquantifiable risk, and they should be celebrated for this. That does not, not at all, mean that when a mission comes back with heat shield failures we know should not have happened, and multiple Inspector-General reports say the ship is not safe, those concerns should be blown off with rambling about Charles Darwin. That's pure insanity.
Or to put it another way, if you were the manager on the day of the Challenger launch issuing the "go" command over the objections of the Thiokol engineers saying it was unsafe to launch in below-freezing temperatures, would you have done so with paeans to Christopher Columbus? That's the sense I get from your post.
>The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.
> What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.
Indeed, this is a much more balanced take. And it turns out that the OP armchair expert is assuming NASA doesn't know what they are doing or is negligent.
The OP links a document from former astronaut Charles Camarda, who NASA explicitly invited in to check their work, and who observed the press conference the Ars article comes from. He addresses every point in it, including that one. Just because an article is contrary to a strident opinion doesn't make it 'balanced'. It matters whether the actual facts are true or not.
I mean, it isn't like there are not multiple precedents for NASA to find a surprise safety issue, talk it down, and then see it literally blow up in their faces.
NASA is an institution and the incentives align with launching despite risk in cases where the risk was completely unanticipated. The project has its own momentum that it has gathered over time as it rolls down collecting opportunity costs and people tie themselves to it. If you think an astronaut would pull out of a launch because of a 5% risk of catastrophe... well you are talking about a group of people which originated from test pilot programs post-WWII where chances of blowing up with the gear was much much higher, so even though modern astronauts don't have the same direct experience, it isn't beyond reason to assume they inherent at least a bit of that bravado.
Maybe. What was the probability of Loss of Crew during Apollo? There were 9 crewed missions and 1 almost killed its crew (I will omit Apollo 1 for now). I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing a crew. Indeed, that was one reason given for cancelling the program.
The first Shuttle launch probably had a 1 in 4 chance of killing its crew. It was the first launch of an extremely complicated system and they sent it with a crew of two. Can you imagine NASA doing that today?
In a news conference last week, a NASA program manager estimated the Loss of Mission chance for Artemis II at between 1 in 2 and 1 in 50. They said, historically, a new rocket has a 1 in 2 chance of failure, but they learned much from Artemis I, so it's probably better than that. [Of course, that's Loss of Mission instead of Loss of Crew.]
My guess is NASA and the astronauts are comfortable with a 1 in 100 chance of Loss of Crew.
> There were 9 crewed missions and 1 almost killed its crew (I will omit Apollo 1 for now). I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing a crew.
That's not how risk analysis works.
Let's say every Apollo mission had gone flawlessly, and no one even came close to dying. Would you then say that the risk of death for future missions would be zero? No, of course not.
I thought I'd look this up. If you've had 9 successful attempts, assuming nothing has changed between them and no other prior knowledge about success probability, then Laplace’s Rule of Succession says the probability of the next mission being a success is about 83.3%, i.e. there is a 1 in 6 chance of failing next time.
> and no other prior knowledge about success probability
This phrase is misleading, as Laplace's Rule of Succession is equivalent to assuming a uniform Bayesian prior over all values of p. That is, before any experiments, a 50% chance of success. Depending on the situation, this may be roughly accurate or wildly wrong. You cannot appeal to this rule to resolve the situation.
Well, obviously if we have a better prior, then that's better. But assuming no other knowledge, and especially if we think that other people's priors could be intentionally misleading, this rule seems to offer the best estimate.
Generally speaking, you never truly have "no prior knowledge". Some relevant past experience, or "common sense", or something tips you away from "all probabilities are equally likely". I think this rule is rarely a best estimate.
> I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing a crew.
NASA computed the chance of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth” as less than 1 in 20. I would think a lot more than 1 in 20 of those failures would result in killing crew members.
Joseph Shea, the Apollo program manager, chaired the initial Apollo systems architecting team. The “calculation was made by its architecting team, assuming all elements from propulsion to rendezvous and life support were done as well or better than ever before, that 30 astronauts would be lost before 3 were returned safely to the Earth. Even to do that well, launch vehicle failure rates would have to be half those ever achieved and with untried propulsion
systems.”
The high risk of the moon landing was understood by the astronauts. Apollo 11's Command Module pilot Mike Collins described it as a “fragile daisy chain of events.” Collins and Neil Armstrong, the first man to step on the
moon, rated their chances of survival at 50-50.
The awareness of risk let to intense focus on reducing risk. “The only possible explanation for the astonishing success – no losses in space and on time – was that every participant at every level in every area far exceeded the norm of human capabilities.”
However, this appreciation of the risk was not considered appropriate for the public. During Apollo, NASA conducted a full Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) to assess the likelihood of success in “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.” The PRA indicated the chance of success was “less than 5 percent.” The NASA Administrator felt that if the results were made public, “the numbers could do irreparable harm.” The PRA effort was cancelled and NASA stayed away from numerical risk assessment as a result.
> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem.
False on both counts. Both the SRB joint design issue and the foam shedding were known, researched and dismissed very early in the shuttle program. They suspected it after STS-1 and confirmed it within a few flights.
Camarda isnt an outlier.
Lots of people left that project after the Experimental Flight Test, which was done with the honeycomb (making Avcoat truly Avcoat) in 2014. Without Avcoat, spalling was inevitable and breakoff, oh yeah.
The design change by LM, not commentedkn by Textron is like. a beehive with no honeycomb-a crystallized block of
honey.
i'll take the structural support of honeycomb any day.
It's a normalization of deviance. That is what Charlie is bringing voice to.
Many of us fear reprisals and even when talking to heads of, like with Columbia, we are
ignored.
So, Charlie is a voice of many people, not an outlier.
Absolutely not. I will not even consider the word of an organization that has repeatedly failed to learn from its past mistakes. They need to demonstrate an ability to learn first, and to do so they need to take these concerns seriously. That means no astronauts on Artemis II.
They have analyzed the problem with 1D non-coupled models that are so poorly matched to reality they would receive an F in a high school science class.
They are YOLOing it. It is insulting that clowns like yourself continue to cover for them.
NASA lowers its standards every time an accident happens. When they designed Shuttle, they intended for a failure rate of 1 in 10,000 or thereabouts.
Remember, it was meant to fly dozens of times per year. At the real failure rate, we would have lost dozens of Shuttles by now. The public would have shut NASA down in protest for massacring astronauts.
Good job moving the goalposts.
> They just slink away, and then when the next event happens, they cry wolf again. When they happen to be right 2 of ~130 times, they get to say "see I told you so!" and go on speaking tours about how they figured it out but NASA wouldn't listen, say they should be considered for a leadership position in NASA etc.
NASA does not have a single model that accurately predicts the heatshield damage. They are lying about this fact and crossing their fingers that all is okay. That might work in SWE's little AWS and GCP world, it doesn't work during hypersonic reentry. IOW they are gambling.
If you have a college degree, especially one that taught statistics, put it in a shredder and remove it from your CV. This is embarrassing.
The issue with arguments like this is that people who make the claim "it's not safe!" never feel the negative consequences when everything goes to plan. They just slink away, and then when the next event happens, they cry wolf again. When they happen to be right 2 of ~130 times, they get to say "see I told you so!" and go on speaking tours about how they figured it out but NASA wouldn't listen, say they should be considered for a leadership position in NASA etc. To the people who think they are YOLO'ing it and that disaster is inevitable, they should be willing to actually put something on the line (promising never to talk about the topic again, money, etc.) and have some skin in the game. Otherwise, such claims are worthless.
> The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe.
This take completely ignores Camarda's observations that there is a culture of fear spreading at NASA which punishes whistleblowers. I'm not saying he's 100% correct, but how can you claim such a take is truly balanced if there's a possibility one of the parties is engaging in a cover-up?
The engineers at NASA & astronauts aboard Columbia & Challenger also believed the programs were safe.
> It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is involved.
Look up the term "expected value". If pressing a button has a 10% chance of destroying Earth, it is both 1) likely that pressing it will do nothing AND 2) the case that pressing it is extremely unsafe.
"It will be the second flight of the Space Launch System (SLS), the first crewed mission of the Orion spacecraft, and the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972."
such "second/first" were ok 60 years ago. Today the only reason for that is that the SLS isn't reusable while the cost is hyper-astronomical.
Today's tech complexity, engineering culture and overall managerial processes don't allow the first/second to succeed as a rule. Even the best - Space X - has got several failed launches back then for Falcon and now for Starship.
Of course we wish success, and it will probably succeed - just like the Russian roulette so aptly mentioned in the sibling comment.
As a former NASA guy I would trust Eric Bergers measured and detailed reporting here over that blog post that says they are all going to die
As he shows that Olivas changed his mind:
“ Olivas told me he had changed his mind, expressing appreciation and admiration for the in-depth engineering work done by the NASA team. He would now fly on Orion”
Anyway we live in an age of armchair experts in youtube (who are often very smart but quick to rush to judgment without enough context)
The article explains the situation in a more balanced and fair light
Someone please answer my obvious question. We sent successful missions to the moon sixty years ago. What heat shield material was used for the Apollo capsules, and why would we need something different now? Are the Artemis mission parameters totally different in a way that requires a new design? Or was Apollo incredibly dangerous and we got lucky they didn’t all fail catastrophically? The article mentions Orion is much heavier than the Apollo capsules, does that really require a totally novel heat shield that takes $billions to develop?
The Apollo command module used Avcoat, the same material as Orion. But there are two key differences:
1. The application method is different. Apollo applied it to a metal honeycomb structure with very small cells, while Orion uses blocks of the material. (NASA tried the honeycomb approach for Orion, but it was too labor-intensive).
2. Orion is much bigger and heavier than the Apollo command module. The informal consensus is that Apollo may have been at the upper size limit for using Avcoat.
Engineering is done in the context of constraints, cost is one constraint - and its a relatively conserved constraint. Saving labor in one area allows for more care in other areas. Especially given that labor is often not cost constrained, but skill constrained, which is less elastic.
NASA is an organization that is dysfunctional and way too expensive for what it does. It then decided to use agressive cost cutting to cover up these problems.
The fix for not doing that by hand is to get a robot to do it, given the applicator is human-held, a human-strength Kuka with enough reach to cover the area it can handle before the applicator needs refurbishment of some sort which would give a good opportunity to move the robot to a new section of the heat shield.
Just out of curiosity, do we know if the honeycomb method worked before it was deemed too labor intensive? Because I'm told that using this block method results in chunks blowing out.
I'm also having a problem with this set-up: Apollo is at the upper size limit for avcoat; Orion is way bigger; use avcoat.
Reading a real front-fell-off aura from this project. It makes me wonder if spending 6% of GDP to develop and run a crewed lunar program 60 years ago and then immediately destroying the evidence, r&d artifacts, and materials fab capabilities was a good idea.
Arguably, the goal isnt to go to the moon. Thats the mission, but the goal is to improve our capabilities of space travel. Improving our understanding and engineering of heat shields is one such case
The very first Apollo attempt killed three astronauts. We would need something different now because the cold-war-crazy days are behind us, and we don't push ahead with missions that might end up in casualties.
We do push ahead with missions that might end up in casualties. It's just a matter of risk tolerance.
It's impossible to say a space flight mission has 0% chance of casualty. It might be impossible to say that for virtually any activity involving humans.
> All this would be inexplicable enough if, indeed, AVCOAT was the only known material from which heat shields could be built. But while Lockheed continues to soak the US taxpayer and play chicken with the lives of NASA’s astronauts with this “flight proven” (but completely different) design, Lockheed happily built a PICA heat shield for JPL’s large Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance, and SpaceX’s Dragon capsule also uses PICA-3.
Or Apollo development was a massive boondoggle that would never work and a small subset of those involved faked it to avoid being fired or going to prison. I know that directors of multibillion dollar projects lying to save their own skin is unheard of, but hear me out.
Artemis, launching on April Fools Day, seems like a joke waiting to happen.
> “Our test facilities can’t reach the combination of heat flux, pressure, shear stresses, etc., that an actual reentering spacecraft does. We’re always having to wait for the flight test to get the final certification that our system is good to go.”—Jeremy VanderKam, deputy manager for Orion’s heat shield, speaking in 2022
The Orion heat shield is sixteen feet across. NASA's test facilities can only test small material samples in these facilities, not capture how the entire heat shield will behave.
There were 19 successful unmanned Dragon 1 missions before Crew Dragon, and an unmanned Crew Dragon mission before the first crewed one (actually two missions, but one didn't reenter from orbit). The heat shield material and design was essentially the same and so there was a great deal of flight heritage.
In particular I don't think its physically possible to test Orion components in flight very many times. It relies on SLS which chews through 4 space-shuttle engines every time, which even with unlimited money I don't think you could acquire a large supply of very quickly.
Not only that, but it has to reach much higher altitudes in order to also reach the much higher re-entry velocities that it will have IRL. That makes testing Orion very expensive. Testing Crew Dragon was much much cheaper.
SLS is required to get Orion to the moon, but there are other options for LEO tests. Exploration Flight Test-1 was performed on a Delta IV Heavy, and Falcon Heavy is also capable of launching Orion to LEO (and now New Glenn, although that wouldn't have been an option at the time NASA needed to start work on another Orion test).
By having a much higher launch cadence and then analyzing the flight hardware afterwards.
Also, they don't have anything human rated going beyond LEO. Coming back from the moon means you're going significantly faster and thus need a better heat shield
This is a concerning read, I'm not quite sure what the driving motivation is for Artemis, but the following answered at least part of my question -
> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget
I am very not brave but I'd volunteer. The trip is far more awesome than anything I have planned for the rest of my life. And if the shield fails on reentry it would only hurt for a few seconds. So if the crew and the backups and their backups read this and have second thoughts, ping me.
Each and every one of them is fully aware that it’s a massive risk and has made their peace with that. You’re getting strapped to a giant rocket. It’s inherently dangerous
...no? It's the same as when you say you'd 'die for somebody'. I don't want to die, but if I had to die to save my family I would. That's not being suicidal. Similarly, if space is important enough to you to take this risk (which realistically is a pretty low risk!) I wouldn't call that suicidal either. I take the risk of death driving in my car every day; that's the nature of life.
That’s definitely not my point, what I meant was it’s not unreasonable for someone who’s older - maybe children have grown, at our nearing retirement, etc. - why not take a risk to fly to space?
HN generally skews towards the life-affirming/death-fearing quadrant so I don't think many will relate to you here. It still seems safer than being in an active warzone which hundreds of millions of people somehow manage to tolerate.
You would probably not IRL and if you would anyway it would just mean you're not qualified for the flight. Nasa needs smart people who wants to live and succeed their mission, not people who are ok to die because muh space exploration
But that was exactly the point I was responding to, no? If NASA was fine with skipping the astronauts, then they would just send it unmanned, not find a random volunteer.
especially not one that may chicken out ( "very not brave" ) and destroy the cabin from the inside out by any means necessary (bashing at walls, pissing in cracks, etc.)
It's been 23 years since Columbia, and there seems to be a 20-ish year rhythm to NASA disasters where the organization learns lessons, becomes more careful... and then standards potentially slip.
Well genius are there other 20 year old reusable space craft that haven't turned to plasma while trying to re-enter the earth's atmosphere that I'm not aware of?
This seems like the only one, and according TFA, it sucks.
If you are serious about moon, there should be dozen of unmanned landers setting up the infrastructure before first human landers. There should be plenty of time to test human rated stuff multiple times. This is only problem because it's second mission and right with humans. If it was 24th and first human mission all these unknowns would be solved.
Ergo the mission design is wrong, not the heat shield design.
Have you considered that would do nothing to solve Donald Trump's political problem that he promised to make boomers feel like they were reliving their halcyon days one last time?
The heatshield is not quite Avcoat. It is missing the crucial honeycomb that gives it structural integrity. I worked on EFT-1. It's test flight was gorgeous (2014). LM decided to remove the honeycomb. It is like a beehive with no honeycomb.
I changed projects bc it was obvious to that the risk was substantial, long befor Artemis was called Artemis, people said this.
I have no takes on Artemis, but just wanted to say how happy I am for another post from idlewords. Some of my most favorite articles on the internet are on that site.
A lot of the discussion overlooks or wishes to avoid an uncomfortable problem with the Artemis program: Artemis III's hardware will not be ready for the forseeable future. The program has had multiple shakeups so far. This is a program heading for cancellation.
The flight risk is surely acceptable if this is not the first flight of many but the last.
The threat of a Chinese moon landing keeps the Artemis program alive. As long as Artemis is slowly working towards the goal of eventually landing Americans on the surface of the moon and eventually building a habitat they can be injected with money and manpower whenever geopolitical or ideological demands arise. If it was canceled outright it would be much harder to react to any Chinese success
>The threat of a Chinese moon landing keeps the Artemis program alive.
I don't disagree but I also don't really get it. The US performed the feat almost 60 years ago when the technology to do it didn't exist at the beginning of the program, and people didn't even know if it would be possible.
Today it's pretty well understood as a funding challenge more than anything. And sending people with the level of automation we have available today is essentially just a political move.
There's the obvious meme of "the US used to be able to do it, but can they still do it?". That wouldn't stand in question if the US had say a Mars mission, but if all the US can show are some low earth orbit activities while China has astronauts walking the moon that makes for a great propaganda point for the Chinese. Something to the tune of "As the American empire declines, the Chinese empire rises"
But the more impactful point is that the Chinese don't want to stop at what the Apollo program accomplished. They want to build a moon base, turn it into a lunar research station and invite other countries to cooperate. If the Chinese are wildly successful on that front, cooperating with them to get access to their moon base might be very enticing. Both for research about the moon and about low gravity. If the US doesn't answer with their own moon base that might end up in a reversal of the ISS situation (where everyone except China was invited to cooperate on the ISS).
Of course we don't know whether the Chinese will be successful in those points. But so far their space program has a great track record. They did manage to build their own space stations and lunar rovers, everything after that is, as you say, mostly a funding challenge
That is equally fair. My position I suppose is that my enthusiasm has been spent on so many half-finished ambitious programs like this that it has all run out by 2026. Constellation, Asteroid Redirect, Artemis. If I was older that would include SEI.
At least this one had real missions fly if it suffers the same fate. The crew of Artemis is among the ones most aware that most space missions never happen. The anxiety of being in these astronaut classes must be unbearable, especially as the ISS ages. I don't know if this mission can maintain public confidence in the program as the world grows more chaotic and people's attentions are not focused on the sky but the ground.
I think you mean Artemis IV (the moon landing)? Artemis III is now a near Earth orbit mission to dock with whatever mockup lander SpaceX or Blue Origin can throw up in time.
Right, I forgot about that development. A very late change in program structure, and having your main lander option have an indefinite schedule is quite bad!
You're saying that as if Artemis III is going to be the first time Artemis eats delays.
What I'm seeing from Artemis recently is "good signs of life" rather than the opposite.
They acknowledged that Artemis III is "system tests" rather than "a full landing", which gives it far better chances of happening before 2030. They're trimming the fat deposits from the program by removing things like Gateway or NRHO. They're pushing for a more aggressive launch cadence. They're actually seriously bringing up "a persistent Moon base" and "manned flights every 6 months" as Artemis program goals.
This is more focus and ambition than what NASA had in actual literal decades.
I expect there are a dozen equally possible to occur catastrophic failures that the team at NASA knows about, has analyzed, and the decision has been made to take the risk and launch.
Spaceflight is complicated. We don't know everything. There is a lot of unknowns that happen everytime you light off a rocket.
It is a lot easier for Elon, as the loss is only a pile of money.
Without ever working at NASA, I expect there is a week long "risk management prior to launch" meeting where many, many issues are brought up, discussed, and decided.
> The trouble is that the heat shield on Orion blows chunks. Not in some figurative, pejorative sense, but in the sense that when NASA flew this exact mission in 2022, large pieces of material blew out of Orion’s heat shield during re-entry, leaving divots. Large bolts embedded in the heat shield also partially eroded and melted through.
Fun wording. This isn't news, concerns have been raised about Artemis II saftey in the past 3+ years since Artemis I and before then as well.
I would like to understand why it happens so often to organizations that a currupted and dyfunctional behaviour takes over. And it seems to happen more often to institutions run by governments.
Examples could be the Challenger disaster where managers overruled the engineers (who said in a meeting a launch was too dangerous) or the Boing 737max.
Also a lot of companies in germany that I experienced (as employee and as consultant) seem similiar.
One reason could be (and I saw that myself) is that there can be a situation where the best employees start leaving. It's likely natural since they can find something else easier than the others.
>I would like to understand why it happens so often to organizations that a currupted and dyfunctional behaviour takes over. And it seems to happen more often to institutions run by governments.
Most people want nothing more than to complete a job to the satisfaction of their supervisor and go home for the day. When you get large groups of people together, this will always be the majority. Mission driven folks will always be crowded out of a large organization, replaced by careerists who play the meta game.
I read something about the Challenger disaster being predicted by an engineer and they wrote a memo about the risk because they were worried about it, but it didn't get through. I wondered if this was the only memo ever about risks to the space shuttle, or if it was one of hundreds and it just got the actual cause by luck.
The only thing the author of this blog piece has to offer that’s new is his very strong personal intuition that the new design hasn’t been properly validated, without any engineering explanation about why the testing the performed won’t adequately simulate real world performance.
I’m fairly confident NASA doesn’t read Maciej’s blog. However I’m confident that many people there read the Google doc he linked to. I suggest you do too.
mechanical engineering background here. the heat shield
honeycomb → block change sounds like a classic cost/complexity
tradeoff where you lose structural integrity for easier
manufacturing.
reminds me of automotive safety recalls that trace back to
"simplified" component designs. sometimes the old complex
way was complex for a reason.
I don't know anything about this program, so here's a basic question: why does manufacturing need to be easier? Are they intending to mass produce these craft?
Yeah that's the second part. So do they intend manufacture these en masse? If not, why not bite the bullet and manufacture it to spec, since it seems like the honeycomb is integral to the performance? Even if they do, what are we going to do with some number of deeply flawed craft?
I didn’t even have a strong interest in space before the dude started writing about it. Maciej could write about literal rocks and make it worthwhile to read.
I just read one blog post ("Musk on Mars") and it was indeed excellent. He seems to have quite a small readership though, judging from the Substack reactions.
Yeah, though some posts a free. I think real problem is that he decided to start a Mars blog two weeks before SpaceX announced they are now focusing on the moon instead, and prior to that merging with xAI, effectively cancelling any Mars plans.
> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget. The charismatic new Administrator has staked his reputation on increasing launch cadence, and set an explicit goal of landing astronauts on the Moon before President Trump’s term expires in January of 2029.
So, rushing, to fulfill an arbitrary PR schedule dictated by further chasing of the yesteryears of America instead of calmly evaluating "what did we screw up, what needs to be fixed, and what can we do about it in order to bring this into reality, safely?"
"Things of quality have no fear of time" should be carved into the walls at NASA.
Why don't they use Starship, seems like Musk's company has a great record overall for designing and operating spacecraft. I asked Gemini, of course Boeing is in the picture: "NASA has contracts with multiple partners (Boeing, Lockheed Martin) for the SLS and Orion, and shifting entirely to Starship would require canceling these expensive, legally binding contracts.".
Starship has also never launched a payload as heavy as the Orion stack. It's about 60k pounds. Starship has also never even reached orbit yet. I believe it's capable but, like, it would be nice to be demoed first.
Starship has only ever lifted 44k pounds, and most of it's more successful tests operate only with 35k pounds.
“…in early 2026, NASA decided to add an additional Artemis mission to the manifest. The new Artemis III would fly in 2027 as a near-Earth mission to test docking with whatever lunar lander (Blue Origin or SpaceX) was available. The first moon landing would be pushed back to the mission after that, Artemis IV. This change removed any rationale for flying astronauts on Artemis II.”
Is there truly no engineering or science merit to flying astronauts by the Moon?
For today technology, it's as hard as flying an empty crew module with all the live keeping equipment turned on. Add Buster from Mythbuster to get more accurate data about the forces on a human.
I think SpaceX used a piece of cheese in one of their test fliying arround Earth, just to show that the temperature was never outside a confortable range. They could have user the sensor they already had, but using the cheese too is good for PR.
I wonder what the heat shield engineers actually think of this. It's my understanding that in the Challenger disaster, the engineers were aware of the problem and tried to do something about it, but management weren't having it
> The most energetic voice of public dissent has been heat shield expert and Shuttle astronaut Charles Camarda, the former Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center. [...] he ended up publishing a cri de coeur that I encourage everyone to read in full.
Lots of people have bad feelings about things. If it all turns out okay, they generally forget about the premonitions. If it goes bad, then they believe that their gut instinct is reliably correct.
When I was small, I used to have bad feelings about my parents getting in a car accident every time they went out. It never happened, and they lived into their 90s.
I was thinking of the risk of the crew capsule burning up on reentry, due to a possibly faulty heat shield — and people in charge knowing about the risk beforehand but going on with it anyway.
I had forgotten that O.J Simpson had been in the movie, to be honest.
Hypothetical to wrap my head around scope: Say we had a spacecraft that was 100% capable of launching from Earth, orbiting the moon, and landing back on Earth, but it also had the docking equipment to be compatible with ISS. Could I decide, while orbiting the moon, that I'd rather dock with the ISS instead? Is that at all feasible or is it one of those, "we're not lined up for any of this. It's basically impossible." things?
It is one of those, "we're not lined up for any of this. It's basically impossible." things
Completely different orbits, would need a ton of extra fuel, not at all possible for Artemis (or any other mission for that matter)
You’d need a load of additional propellant to insert yourself into the same orbit as the ISS on your return, which would have an exponential effect on the amount of propellant needed in the first place to get all this lot out to the moon. It would be a different vehicle.
The ISS isn't listed but the math doesn't change much for it VS the listed 250km earth orbit.
TL;DR
In space you can think of yourself as captured in an orbit. It takes a lot of energy (fuel) to boost yourself out of that orbit and flying towards some other body. But after that, you have to also expend more fuel to actually be captured by that orbit. The returning craft would have to expend energy to be captured by the earth's orbit to rendezvous with the ISS, rather than just hit earth and land.
Isn't this the exact kind of scenario where you'd hope someone from above (like, idk, the president) would block the launch?
Not that I expect that to happen, but worth keeping in mind in case something horrible happens. NASA wouldn't be the only one responsible for lost lives.
Looks like they did some reassuring testing for the worst case scenario:
The Avcoat blocks, which are about 1.5 inches thick, are laminated onto a thick composite base of the Orion spacecraft. Inside this is a titanium framework that carries the load of the vehicle. The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.
What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.
Definitely concerned to hear but I’m hopeful that the core of nasa is intact. They’re some of the kindest and smartest people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. They don’t joke around with lives on the line. I hope the best for everyone involved. I’ll be watching the launch of Artemis 2 and 3 with excitement and hope.
Each of the program managers responsible for go/no-go are to take an oath of death. If there is a loss of crew and it can be attributed to the foreknown 3 different issues (heat shield spalling, heat shield fragment impacts, bolt erosion), then you die.
"If the heat shield breaks then I will die" is the exact situation for the astronauts, and yet we still have astronauts.
In fact it's worse for the astronauts, because in this hypothetical only the heat shield failing will condemn the POs to death, whereas any critical part failing kills the astronauts
Yes, it's a much sexier job than project manager, but clearly there are some people, in some circumstances, that would accept it.
Let's not forget that, much more recently than Challenger and Columbia, NASA showed signs of launch fever in the Starliner program.
Starliner was not safe to fly either, thrusters couldn't be trusted, but Boeing and NASA managed pushed on and decided to fly anyway. The flight demonstrated that the problems were bad indeed. NASA communications pretended things were not good but not disastrous.
“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. “It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”
Still, after astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams eventually docked at the station, Boeing officials declared it a success. “We accomplished a lot, and really more than expected,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, during a post-docking news conference. “We just had an outstanding day.”
The true danger the astronauts faced on board Starliner was not publicly revealed until after they landed and flew back to Houston. In an interview with Ars, Wilmore described the tense minutes when he had to take control of Starliner as its thrusters began to fail, one after the other.
One thing that has surprised outside observers since publication of Wilmore’s harrowing experience is how NASA, knowing all of this, could have seriously entertained bringing the crew home on Starliner.
Isaacman clearly had questions as well. He began reviewing the internal report on Starliner, published last November, almost immediately after becoming the space agency administrator in December. He wanted to understand why NASA insisted publicly for so long that it would bring astronauts back on Starliner, even though there was a safe backup option with Crew Dragon.
“Pretending that that did not exist, and focusing exclusively on a single pathway, created a cultural issue that leadership should have been able to step in and course correct,” Isaacman said during the teleconference. “What levels of the organization inside of NASA did that exist at? Multiple levels, including, I would say, right up to the administrator of NASA.”
Some of NASA’s biggest lapses in judgment occurred before the crew flight test, the report found. In particular, these revolved around the second orbital flight test of Starliner, which took place two years earlier, in May 2022.
During this flight, which was declared to be successful, three of the thrusters on the Starliner Service Module failed. In hindsight, this should have raised huge red flags for what was to come during the mission of Wilmore and Williams two years later.
However, in his letter to NASA employees, Isaacman said the NASA and Boeing investigations into these failures did not push hard enough to find the root cause of the thruster failures.
And so on. Lots of parallels with the Artemis program, though in Artemis Isaacman doesn't seem to be following his own conclusions from the Starliner failure.
To some extent I think since the challenger disaster trying to blow the whistle on safety issues at NASA has been romantacized.
For me, so long as the information is transparently discussed with the astronauts they can agree or disagree. But the task is intrinsically extremely risky.
It makes it very challenging for anyone to really know how to balance those risks.
The peak outcome (modal, mean at least) is a good outcome. But the tail is very very long with all the little ways a catastrophe can occur. I think the median outcome is also deeply in the "good" category.
The Artemis program has cost over $100 billion so far.
It doesn’t make any sense to spend that much money on something that’s still Russian roulette for the astronauts.
If the purpose of the human risk is to let the agency accomplish more, then it needs to be reflected in the cost as a drastic reduction (so you can actually spend the money on doing more). Now Artemis is the worst of both worlds.
The point is that a $100B mission that’s still dangerous and only replicates 1960s achievements is completely pointless.
If they had set out to replicate the Moon landing at much lower cost and a controlled risk, that could have been different. Now they ended up with a very expensive, unsafe, and uninteresting mission - the worst possible combination.
What I don't get is why the heck are the astronauts willing to risk their lives on something they must know by now is so dangerous? Is it really better to risk death than to risk getting fired?
Because even in the worst case what we are really talking about is just much higher risk than the government is claiming, but its still far more likely to succeed than fail. Plenty of people would take a 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 chance of dying if it meant they could walk on the moon.
To be honest I don't know how close to non-fiction "The Right Stuff" (book or film) was but if you watch it you'd maybe gain an understanding for why astronauts do these things. At least that part is believable.
> why are the astronauts willing to risk their lives
There are a lot of funerals in chapter 1 of Tom Wolfe's book, "The Right Stuff".
I suggest that some choice of profession come with a higher life-risk tolerance than others. "Accountants willing to risk their lives for the job" would be news. Firefighters, less so. Test pilots or astronauts, not much at all.
This degree of lifespan-maximization is something you might have but others don’t necessarily share. E.g. old people went to Fukushima to sort it out. “Was it really better to risk death than to risk getting fired?”
Neither of these are major risks compared to never being what you want to be.
In that case it seems all right. Certainly if I died in Apollo 1 and I cared about spaceflight and making it to the Moon before the Russians I wouldn’t see it as unworthy.
Some people go to war for the thrill of it, others do base jumping, free solo climbing and whole lot of other activities that eventually kill many of them. It is in their genes.
NASA operates as a terminal, bloated monopoly that has completely severed its feedback loops with physical reality in favor of preserving a 25-year-old architectural fantasy. The Orion heat shield is essentially a buggy hardware release being pushed into a mission-critical production environment despite the fact that its own internal telemetry is screaming about a catastrophic failure. By choosing to ignore the spalling and the melted structural bolts, the agency is deliberately discarding the engineering equivalent of core dump data to maintain a schedule that satisfies political optics rather than Newtonian physics.
The author seems to have a pretty extensive history of… strong disdain for Artemis II. While has mentioned concerns about the heat shield before it was in the context of a laundry list of complaints, and it was nowhere close to the top.
I’m not a rocket scientist, but then neither is the author.
This is actually what is thought to partially have caused the damage seen previously. The new trajectory is supposed to just have a single heating pulse instead of two.
Aerobraking causes heat cycles. Expanding and contracting a material that already has "not large, large chunks missing" doesn't seem very prudent. Even before the evidence of deterioration, I'm not sure the safety culture at NASA would reach for that any time soon when a single high-temp event would work.
I wouldn't be nearly so concerned if not for the blatant coverup and downplaying from NASA. This makes the whole situation easily pattern match to Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia, where political pressure to ignore problems and drive forward anyway got people needlessly killed.
It's not actually Avcoat.
It was changed by LM.
Thw honeycomb was removed.
Imagine a beehive with no honeycomb and a slop of honey is what you have. Crystallized/solid honey, but honey never the less.
> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget. The charismatic new Administrator has staked his reputation on increasing launch cadence, and set an explicit goal of landing astronauts on the Moon before President Trump’s term expires in January of 2029.
This is the most frustrating part. The Pentagon can fail the same audit multiple times and be missing trillions of taxpayer dollars but NASA has to move heaven and earth to show their relatively paltry $100B budget isn't going to waste. I'm tired of the double standards.
I'm pretty much with you. The fraud and waste is infuriating. But, frankly, what is the point of this program? At the risk of not being skeptical, can't we say that we conquered lunar orbit in the 1960s? I don't understand why this is some enormous scratch R&D project.
> if a commercial crew capsule (SpaceX Dragon or Boeing Starliner) returned to Earth with the kind of damage seen on Orion, NASA would insist on a redesign and an unmanned test flight to validate it.
Did they demand an unmanned flight just to prove it worked? Or did they accept an entirely new design based on modeling and ground tests and then immediately flew it with crew on board?
Then again I'm not one of those people who roots for NASA to fail for some reason.
They had a heat shield on the capsule that failed testing, so they swapped out the interchangeable heat shield for one that passed testing.
There was no entirely new design, there was no new material science, it was the same heat shield that the previous crewed capsules have used without the manufacturing defect.
> SpaceX's next Crew Dragon mission (Crew-5) will fly with a different, updated heat shield structure after a new composite substrate failed acceptance testing
I don't know what "new" or "different" or "updated" or "structure" mean then anymore.
Looking at other articles, nobody else mentions an updated structure. I think that was a misunderstanding. This was a manufacturing defect caught in testing and they used a different unit as a result.
Great read and interesting article. Hard to believe that NASA would risk astronauts lives simply to save face, but that appears to be what's going to happen.
Riskier? Didn't they all die. Maybe if you ended up with 2 stranded shuttle crews, but correct me if I'm wrong, and I probably am, but couldn't the shuttle fly without any crew?
It couldn't, for a funny reason. Everything on a Shuttle flight could be automated except lowering the landing gear just before touchdown, which had to be done by hand from inside the cockpit.
There are rumors (that I've never been able to run down) that the astronaut corps insisted on this so the Shuttle could not be flown unmanned.
And Buran(soviet copy of the shuttle) could and in fact did fly completely unmanned. In a way it's a shame the collapse of the soviet union killed that program, because a crew less shuttle would have been a huge asset to have.
I'm not surprised more people don't know about the X-37, but it's in effect the distillation of the Shuttle program to a very effective vehicle: Crewless, reusable, cheap, and effective.
Bureaucratic requirements and institutional jockeying largely ballooned the Shuttle into something it was never supposed to be.
You can do a less risky thing and die or do a more risky thing and live. What happened doesn’t determine which thing is riskier just like I can call a 1 and roll dice and land it and you can call tails and flip a coin and not get it.
The outcome doesn’t determine the risk. I agree that this kind of office politics / face savings definitely is the cause of these two things.
I'm sure I watched a documentary that said it basically wasn't feasible to launch the other shuttle. All checks and preparations would have to be done in absolute record time, with no mistakes and under timelines never attempted before. But even if they tried, you have the obvious question of - we know the core issue isn't solved and we're about to launch the second shuttle with the exact same design into orbit, if it suffers the same problem then what? But afaik the second one while important wasn't as much of a blocker as the first one. It just wasn't possible in time - it's not like the first shuttle could stay in orbit indefinitely too.
It's certainly about their lives, but it's also about not tanking the program due to catastrophic failure. The astronauts are going to do it regardless of the risk.
You seem to be ignoring the "just to save face" part. I'd argue it would be a worse thing for our bar for how safe it should be to be raised significantly from when we had been in space as a species less than a decade to now that it's been 65 years.
Saturn 5 had a flawless record. The leftover space shuttle parts which SLS is cobbled together from, not so much. SRBs are inherently dangerous, theyre designed to quickly launch nukes from silos, not people. And Orion is just a typical modern Boeing project. So far its fallen at every hurdle right?
Saturn 5 came close to catastrophic failure at least once. It had partial failures. Its sort of perfect record is mostly down to luck and not launching very many times.
Of course, six decades later, we should be able to do a lot better.
Yeah, I thought it was Starliner on top. I dont know anything about Orion then.
SLS is very crappy and disappointing, its using shitty old space shuttle tech, + its ridiculously expensive in terms of payload to orbit, but it will probably work.
I didnt know, cus I just dont give a shit about this stupid project.
They’ve killed dozens during the shuttle program , or did you forget ? Also a number during Gemini, Mercury and Appollo. Terrible safety record , and 5x worse than Soyuz . Shuttle fatality rate was 1/10. Approaching Russian roulette odds
In total, a little over one dozen astronauts died on shuttle flights (14). No astronauts died during Gemini or Mercury. Three died in a test on Apollo 1. The shuttle failure rate was nowhere close to 1/10. In fact, it was 1/67 (2 failures out of 134 flights).
By that logic, the fatality rate in NYC skyscrapers on 9/11 was something like 1500%, since there were <200 skyscrapers and ~2,700 people died.
It doesn't make any sense. Your numerator and denominator need to use the same units. The rate of fatal accidents was 2/135. The rate of crew fatalities was 14/355. The rate for crew-flight fatalities (separately counting multiple flights by the same person) was 14/852.
If you were evaluating your risk for another flight, the number of crew aboard doesn't affect the risk and it's pretty reasonable to assume that an accident results in either a 0% or 100% fatality rate, so the relevant figure would be the fatal accident rate of 2/135. If your flight follows that profile then that's your probability of dying in an accident.
That we are still using Avcoat is just silly. Pica is so much better. It really shows this design is literally from the 90s. Orian is one of those continual dumbster fire programs that literally only exists to make congress happy. It survived literally years without any reasonable mission at all. NASA had to make up missions for it to do.
Orian is everything erong with US technology development and procurment.
As someone who is actually (still) a fan of basic research, Artemis looks like a fun time for the 1% with a $100 billion dollar price tag, except that since it's only 4 astronauts and support staff, it's less than 1%. I opposed messing with NASA funding for a long time, but arguments referencing spin-off tech and so on wear thin. Spin-off occurring lately would/could only be captured by existing billionaires anyway, and without much benefit for society in general.
Humans in space are currently still a waste of time/money, largely just a big surrender to PR, space-selfies, the attention economy, and the general emphasis on "seem not be" you see elsewhere. Please just send robots, build a base, and let us know when we can put more than ~10 freaking people up there at one time. If that fails, then at least we'll have results in robotics research that can be applicable elsewhere on Earth right now as well as help us achieve the more grand ambitions later.
House is on fire, has been for a while, fuck business as usual. I honestly think all those smart people ought to be charged with things like using their operations research to improve government generally, or with larger-scale high tech job programs. If you don't want to let NASA big-brains try to fix healthcare, we could at least let them fix the DMV. Hell, let them keep their spin-offs too, so they actually want success, and have some part of their budget that won't disappear. Basic research and fundamental science is (still) something we need, but we need to be far more strategic about it.
Food for thought: The way things are going, we can definitely look forward to a NASA that's completely transformed into an informal, but publicly funded, research/telemetry arm for billionaire asteroid-mining operations, and thus more of the "public risk, private-profits" thing while we pad margins for people who are doing fine without the help. OTOH, if NASA is running asteroid mining businesses at huge profits, then they can do whatever they want with squishy volunteers as a sideshow, and maybe we'll have enough cash left over to fund basic income.
NASA's budget is 0.35% of the Federal Budget. The US Government spends the equivalent of 20 years of moon mission spending on ICE. They're spending 2x that on Iran war. They blew $200 billion in PPP Loan fraud in 2020 alone.
I'm tired of nickle and diming science funding. You had scientists like Sabine Hossenfelder cheerleading NSF cuts cause of "waste" on string theory and particle accelerators. NSF is 0.1% of the federal budget, and it has funded a remarkable number of world changing inventions over the last 40 years.
We don't spent JACK on space. Look at the huge returns from the Hubble and James Webb. Why aren't we building HUGE HUGE space telescopes as immediate followups? We should have 50 James Webb equivalents. NASA once had plans for a "Terrestial Planet Mapper", a bunch of giant space telescopes flying in formation that combine their signals for truly incredible resolution, good enough to image planets around distant solar systems to a few pixels.
We've now seen plenty of planets in the habitable zone with nearby signatures of biological precursor molecules. We've found asteroids with sugars and amino acids in them. Give NASA 10x the budget and end these damn wars. The Pentagon failed 7 audits and can't account for $2 TRILLION and we're talking about humans in space a waste? It's a drop in the bucket, and it provides a beacon for humanity to dream.
The Apollo projects created a whole generation of people who wanted to go into STEM, that's the biggest ROI.
NASA, the NSF, the NIH, et al, are not the problem. Their spending is insignificant, NASA+NSF is < 1% of the budget.
It might not seem like it, but I really am on your team. What you're missing and Sabine understands is that there is no such thing as spending that's insignificant, and whether we're talking cash or mission bandwidth, everything has opportunity costs. Exactly how many possible missions are thrown out every time we decide to send squishy humans instead of robots?
As for defense spending, to be clear I'm all for swapping the pentagon/nasa budgets, but afterwards I'd still call bullshit if I think there's gross mismanagement at NASA. Pandering to the public with space-selfies is mismanagement, even if it's brought on by desperation and shrinking budgets. I think there's a strong argument Webb was also is bad strategy / mismanagement, but it's too long to get into here.
Unfortunately, like everyone else, NASA, NSF et al do need to worry about public trust, ROI, and the dreaded question: What have you done for me lately? There's this idea that basic research must be incompatible with that sort of thing, but I disagree.
Sabine got her wish. DOGE cut NSF by 40%. Tons of scientists out of work including physicists. But she'll be ok, she only needs to pimp another ad for Brilliant.com
You think that was her wish? Typical situation is "We only get X, too much of it goes to Y, which is bad for Z". Of course X is not negotiable in an upwards direction, Y is some entrenched status-quo that's difficult to change, and Z is lots and lots of stuff. Everyone who cares about Z attacks Y because they can't increase X and don't expect they can decrease it (although sometimes just calling attention to the zone does that anyway).
DOGE is/was stupid and awful, not for their mission, but because of their methods, missing skill sets, sheer repugnant criminality, etc. As a general rule in any push for efficiency you'll be way better off exercising a little creative intelligence rather than doing straight austerity anyway. And while I don't think the entire government should be run like a business, why isn't more of it self-funding? So maybe let serious people with good intentions at NASA or NSF do DOGE-style work, creating tech or process that cuts costs for other less intellectually-gifted sections of the government, and then let them keep half of what they save the tax payers. Half of what they save could triple their budget! It's not ideal to use our best and brightest this way honestly, but house on fire, you work with what you have at hand.
While we are throwing shade towards Sabine, just want to remind readers that she's in the Epstein files and her discussions around AI are full on grifter territory.
Not only that, for truly long term perspective its about mankind survival. Even that POS musk realizes that (at least he did, not sure where his psychosis got him now and don't care much TBH).
If we stay around just Earth, we will be eventually wiped out. Maybe not in next million years (or maybe yes), but but given enough time one of many ways that would happen will happen, from the sky or from processes happening purely down here, manmade or not.
Its not rocket science, its not some magical theoretical what-if, just hard facts when digging around a bit and looking at history. Anybody who has power to change things and decides not to should be treated accordingly.
Even if mankind is lucky with everything else, in 500-800 million years the sun's increased luminosity will render Earth uninhabitable for higher life forms (as we know them) [0].
I'm literally guest lecturing at a Harvard class tomorrow on systemic failures in decision making, using the Columbia and Challenger disasters as case studies, and changed my slides last night to include Artemis II because it could literally happen again.
This broken safety culture has been around since the beginning of the Shuttle program.
In 1980, Gregg Easterbrook published "Goodbye, Columbia" in The Washington Monthly [1], warning that NASA's "success-oriented planning" and political pressure were creating the conditions for catastrophe. He essentially predicted Columbia's heat shield failures in the article 1 year before the first flight.
Challenger in 1986, and the Rogers Commission identified hierarchy, communication failures, and management overriding engineering judgment.
Then Columbia happened in 2003. The CAIB found NASA had not implemented the 1986 recommendations [2].
Now Charles Camarda (who flew the first shuttle mission after Columbia and is literally a heat shield expert!) is saying it's happening again.
[1] https://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.ht...
[2] Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Chapter 8: https://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/html/start.html
> This broken safety culture has been around since the beginning of the Shuttle program.
It's broken everywhere. I have worked in some dysfunctional shops and the problem I see time and time again is the people who make it into management are often egoists who don't care about anything other than the financial compensation and clout the job titles bestows upon them. That or they think management is the same as being a shotgun toting sheriff overseeing a chain gang working in the summer heat in the deep south.
I've worked with managers who would argue with you even if they knew they were wrong because they were incapable of accepting humiliation. I worked with managers who were wall flowers so afraid of confrontation or negative emotions that they covered up every issue they could in order to avoid any potential negative interaction with their superiors. That manager was also bullied by other managers and even some employees.
A lot of it is ego along with a heavy dose of machismo depending. I've seen managers let safety go right down the tubes because "don't be a such a pussy." It's a bad culture that has to go away.
A simplistic answer would be to ensure that incentives are aligned with safety and success. Then that leads to the evergreen problem of Goodhart’s Law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure).
Even if it can't ever be truly fixed, at least recognizing the issues and shining daylight on decisions for some form of accountability should be a base-level approach.
> Goodhart’s Law
Useful to be sure, but it's easier to game something like LOC than it is to game "product made money" and "nobody died."
Agreed. My point was that it will forever be some kind of moving target and to expect a policy framework to guarantee "good behavior" is a mistake.
I emphatically believe that understanding the incentives of all the players is paramount because that is what will ultimately determine their behavior.
It would be cool if there were ways to have a "Game Theory Toolkit" that could be plugged into an organizations communications that could automate the defining and detecting of those unwanted behaviors.
Easy, put the manager on the actual mission.
> people who make it into management are often egoists
> they were incapable of accepting humiliation
I agree mostly but here is a different take on it: I think these are normal human feelings and behaviors - not the best of us, but not unusual either. If we want to get good things done, we need to work with and through human nature. Power corrupts everyone and shame is generally the most painful thing for humans.
Putting people in a position where they need to treat their power with absolute humility or accept humiliation (and a major blow to their careers) in order to do the right thing is going to fail 99% of the time. (I'm not saying people can't do those things and that we shouldn't work hard and aspire to them, but it's not going to happen reliably with any but a few people.) That expectation itself is a culture, organizational and managerial failure. If you see a system in which so many fail, then the problem is the system.
And when I say 'managerial' failure, I include leadership by everyone and also 'managing up'. We're all responsible for and agents of the team's results, and whatever our role we need to prevent those situations. One important tactic is to anticipate that problem and get ahead of it, putting the team in a position where the risk is proactively addressed and/or they have the flexibility to change course without 'humiliation'. We're all responsible for the team's culture.
I think many blaming others underestimate their own human nature, the effect of power on them and their willingness to endure things like humiliation. Rather than criticising others, I keep my attention on the one in the mirror and on strategies to avoid situations equally dangerous to my own character; otherwise I'll end up doing the same very human things.
EDIT: While I still agree with everything I wrote above, there is an exceptional cultural problem here, one which you'll recognize and which is common to many SV leaders, the Trump administration, and others you're familiar with (and which needs a name ...). From the document referenced in the OP by "heat shield expert and Shuttle astronaut Charles Camarda, the former Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center."
"Instead, the meeting started with his [Jared Isaacman, the new NASA Administrator's] declaration that the decision was final. We would launch Artemis II with a crew, even though the uncrewed Artemis I mission around the Moon returned with a seriously damaged heat shield, a failure in my opinion. I was not going to be allowed to present my position on why the decision was flawed. Instead, the public would hear, through the two reporters allowed to attend, the Artemis Program narrative, only one side of the story. They would be bombarded with technical information which they would have very little time to understand ...
Jared could claim transparency because the only thermal protection expert and public dissenter, me, was present. ...
I was allowed only one-day to review some of the technical documents which were not open to the public and which were classified Controlled Unclassified Information/International Traffic and Arms Regulations (CUI/ITAR) prior to the Jan.8th meeting. ..."
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
But in the 80s I guess there was the pressure to one-up the Soviets, so everything had to be done yesterday, but Artemis has existed most of my adult life at various levels of maturity (Orion and its predecessors certainly did), and considering its been more time spent between that famous Kennedy speech and the actual Moon landing (where there was apparently no issue with safety culture).
Considering how much humanity has allegedly advanced since then, I don't understand what are we gaining thats caused us to have to abandon safety.
The most frustrating part of the whole thing is that when you read Charles Camarda’s thoughts after his meeting with NASA in January, it could have been written in 1986 or in 2003.
https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDU...
It’s pretty clear at this point that the shuttle was already broken at design. But seeing the same powder keg of safety/budget/immovable time constraints applied to a totally different platform decades in the future feels like sitting through a bad movie for the third time.
What strikes is not the systemic failures. But the intense culture of secrecy.
Reports are heavily redacted. They aren't shared. Failures aren't acknowledged. Engineering models aren't released. That secrecy eventually causes what we see today.
As an aside, do you have any suggestions for "state of the art" reading on safety culture?
Learn about failures.
Inviting Disaster: Lessons From the Edge of Technology was one of the texts for an aerospace class I didn't take but friends did, but honestly you can just read the book.
There are lots of frameworks for teaching safety and programs for compliance and such but they are far too easy to cargo cult if you don't appreciate safety and the need for safety culture and UNDERSTAND what failures look like.
And when you really understand the need and how significant failures happened... "state of the art" tools and practices take a back seat, they can be useful but they're just tools. What you need is people developing the appropriate vision, and with that the right things tend to follow.
I just had a conversation about engineers not understanding the need for grounding.
I'm wondering if every generation has to relearn the basics for themselves through experience.
Each generation has to make the same mistakes. Because book learning doesn't seem to do it for some things.
Sure. Even a history of safety success contributes to this. We haven't had an accident in 3000 days, what was dangerous about this job again? Also what's this stupid policy for anyway, I've never seen anybody even come close to (non-dangerous-sounding fate) while working here.
But probably the policy is in place because it used to happen before the policy was in place. It's just not obvious to people who have never seen the consequences before.
Most people are just resistant to learning (without pain).
``It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.''
Isn't NASA run by the government? Why not pay people to do their job correctly?
The word "government" doesn't magically erase all the same individual & institutional incentives, ambitions, biases, & flaws that exist elsewhere.
And sometimes, the extant magical belief that "government" is different & immune lets those same human factors be ignored until they feed bigger, slower disasters that everyone is afraid to admit, because (ostensibly) "we all did this together".
Just because you pay people doesn't mean they do their job correctly.
It just gives you the option of not paying them if they don't do their job correctly.
The role of for-profit companies and 'shareholder' value in explaining corporate bad behavior is highly overstated. The only profit that matters is the one at the individual level (i.e., compensation, which is a form of profit, for the individual).
A government employee or a private corporation doesn't matter. To the actual humans, they are the same, in that each provides a particular compensation, tied to their decisions.
Is "Why not pay people to do their jobs correctly?" a way of voicing frustration with massive gov't incompetence? Or a way of saying that organizational incompetence is top-down?
Because the grifters are running the show. The point is not to fly to orbit/moon/mars/whatever, but shovel taxpayer money to politically well connected large aerospace contractors.
It’s fundamentally a human coordination problem that cannot be solved
The more populated and complex an organization gets it becomes impossible to maintain a singular value vector (get these people around the moon safely)
Everyone finds meta vectors (keep my job, reduce my own accountability) that maintain their own individual stability, such that if the whole thing fails they won’t feel liable
It can't be solved 100%, but it can be _mostly_ solved with systemic buy-in to the safety culture. Commercial aviation is a great example IMO.
We've spent the last several decades making sure that every single person trained to participate in commercial aviation (maintenance, pilots, attendants, ATC, ground crew) knows their role in the safety culture, and that each of them not only has the power but the _responsibility_ to act to prevent possible accidents.
The Swiss Cheese Model [1] does a great job of illustrating this principle and imparting the importance of each person's role in safety culture.
A big missing piece with manned space flight IMO is the lack of decision-making authority granted to lower staff. A junior pilot acting as first officer on their very first commercial flight with real passengers has the authority to call a go-around even if a seasoned Captain is flying the plane. AFAIK no such 'anyone can call a no-go' exists within NASA.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
Safety culture requires the ability to learn from mistakes, the capability to ground planes (without that turning into a political problem), and someone to foot the bill. (Which did not always happen, Boeing MCAS with a SPoF AoA sensor without retraining. A chain of cost-cutting decisions. And of course there were usual problems with market distorting subsidies to both Boeing and Airbus.)
NASA's missions are way too big, because the science payloads are unique, so they "can't do" launch early, launch often. And then things sit in storage for years, waiting for budget. (And manned flights are in an even worse situation of course, because they are two-way.)
And there's too much sequential dependency in the marquee projects (without enough slack to be able to absorb problems if some earlier dependent outcome is unfavorable), or in other words because of time and cost constraints the projects did not include enough proper development, testing, verification.
NASA is doing too many things, and too much of it is politics. It should be more like a grant organization, rewarding cost-efficient scientific (and engineering) progress, in a specific broad area ("spaaace!"), like the NIH (but hopefully not like the NIH).
> without enough slack to be able to absorb problems if some earlier dependent outcome is unfavorable
It's strange because unmanned mission are heavy in the "under promise and over deliver" territory. They may say something like "we are sending a car to Mars for a month", but everything is over engineered to last for a year. Then it miraculously work for eleven month and it's a huge success.
Are you just now learning about propaganda?
No, it's just strange that different parts of the same organization make oposite decisions for the propaganda.
Yes and... NASA space programs (doing rare, unknown things) are different than commercial aviation (doing a frequent, known thing with high safety). Best be careful applying solutions from the latter to the former.
Layering additional safety layers on top of a fundamentally misaligned organization process also generally balloons costs and delivery timelines (see: NASA).
The smarter play is to better align all stakeholders' incentives, from the top (including the president and Congress) to the bottom, to the desired outcome.
Right now most parties are working towards very different goals.
Did you miss the Boeing 737max?
No, CRM is a disaster you clearly are not in aviation. The reliability in aviation came from incredibly strict regulation and engineering improvements, NOT from structural alignment of parties. They were forced to get safer by the government if you can believe there was a time where the government did anything useful at all.
I could go off for literally hours on this topic but suffice to say I’ve done an unbelievable amount of CRM as an officer in the United States Air Force who flew on and executed 100s of combat missions in Iraq
My friends from Shell 77 are all dead because of CRM failures
Sounds like you need to watch the Rehearsal
I am suddenly reminded of a clip I saw recently of Ronald Reagan on Johnny Carson in 1975. (https://youtu.be/CNmnmdtcdcg?si=UMpkHwOVA74Nv5P7)
Reagan speaks with grandfatherly warmth about the importance of finding a middle ground between reasonable safety regulations and progress. In the same clip, he mentioned not knowing of any group with as little influence on politics as business.
Dog convinces owner to let it off leash. The rhetoric that charmed Americans into letting down their guard, in miniature.
Ok after looking into this in more detail, I am concerned with this mission, and the recommendation should be NOT to fly with Astronauts.
Looking at the people on the program, and specialty from the ones on this press conference [1] I see only, a bunch of check list fillers and government employees, that will cover their back with reports and third party recommendations, of the style, “I was told” or the “the technical reports said”. Its also commiserating the idiotic and irrelevant questions from most of the press present. How do these people get accredited there?
Here are some facts. When NASA flew Orion uncrewed around the Moon in 2022, the heat shield came back with deep gouges. Large chunks of Avcoat material had blown out, and three of four structural bolts had melted through. NASA own Inspector General identified three independently lethal failure modes:
- Heat shield spalling exposing the capsule to burn through
- Debris striking the parachute compartment
- Hot gas ingestion through the melted bolts
Noting the latter could cause the "breakup of the vehicle and loss of crew." Then...NASA found a credible root cause. The Avcoat was not porous enough, so pyrolysis gas built up underneath and blew pieces out, like steam cracking a lid.
Critically, areas of the Artemis I shield that were porous did not spall. But where it gets alarming is that the Artemis II heat shield was manufactured to be even less porous, a choice made before anyone knew porosity mattered.
Rather than replace it, NASA changed the reentry trajectory, instead of a skip reentry meaning dipping in, bouncing out, then re-entering, Orion will dive in steeper. The counterintuitive logic here is more intense, sustained heating actually allows the char layer to form properly and become porous enough for gas to escape, whereas the gentler intermittent heating of the skip paradoxically trapped gas. The physics reasoning is sound, but it has never been validated at full scale. As incredible as it may sound no one has flown this shield design, at this porosity, on this trajectory, at 25,000 mph lunar return speed, on a spacecraft twice the weight of Apollo.
The computer model certifying it as safe can predict crack initiation but cannot model crack propagation or the coupled multi physics material response, which is precisely what you need when your failure mode is cascading spalling that creates unpredictable hot spots and alters hypersonic airflow in ways that compound.
NASA also failed to recover the Artemis I parachutes, so there is literally zero data on whether debris impacted the system that slows the capsule from 300 mph to 15 mph for splashdown...
Perhaps most tellingly, NASA has announced its switching to an entirely new heat shield design! starting with Artemis III, simultaneously certifying this shield as safe to fly while deciding never to fly it again!
The strongest argument against crewing this flight is the simplest. NASA recently added an extra Artemis mission to its manifest, removing any programmatic need for astronauts on Artemis II.
Flying it uncrewed on the new trajectory would validate or invalidate the models at zero risk to human life, produce full-scale flight data on the actual shield at the actual porosity on the actual trajectory, and let NASA recover the parachutes to close the debris impact gap.
Then crew the next mission with data instead of models. As Camarda, a former NASA astronaut and heat shield expert has warned, this is the same organizational pattern, meaning schedule pressure, simplified models substituted for physical understanding of the system, motivated reasoning to reach a predetermined conclusion that preceded both Challenger and Columbia.
Lets say a SpaceX Dragon or Boeing Starliner came back with this level of damage, would NASA certify it for crew without an uncrewed validation flight?
NASA is risking four lives, when a straightforward, safe alternative, exists.
[1] - https://youtu.be/TQH21XCsp5U
What you have written here is pretty much exactly the contents of the article we are all commenting on.
Didn't they have a crash dummy in it the last time? The data from buster should be able to tell us if the parachute worked or not.
Those astronauts don’t have anyone that loves them at home because no way in hell would any of my loved ones let me be a sacrificial turkey in a fully automated oven.
They do, but they are not in a position to judge. Same way as the Challenger crew despite NASA and astronauts saying, "we would not fly we would not believe to be safe enough".
It is bound to happen again and again considering humans are so oblivious to safety.
humans are so oblivious to safety
It seems that in modern times, humans focus on safety almost to the exclusion of everything else. As much as the more traditional salutations "godspeed" or "have a nice day", we're even more likely to hear "drive safe" or "have a safe trip" or "be safe".
We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Surely you've heard the mantra "...if it saves just one life...".
The optimal amount of tragedy is not zero. It's correct that we should accept some risk. We just need to be up-front and recognize what the safety margins really are.
> We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe.
Are we? People saying "have a safe trip" is pretty weak evidence.
The counter evidence is just about everything else going on, at least in the US. Relaxed worker safety standards, weakened environmental protections, and generally moving as fast as possible.
My kids are going to be legally mandated to be in car seats until they’re about 12 years old.
Your implied frustration at a relatively easy change backed by experts and mountains of data is another point in favor of
> humans are so oblivious to safety
We have 4 kids. Before we had our 3rd, we needed to buy a new vehicle solely because we couldn't fit 3 car seats into the back of our old car. And when traveling with kids, carrying 4 gigantic car seats plus your other luggage is not exactly as easy as you might think! It essentially rules out solo parent travel with all 4 kids. Transferring car seats between two cars, or installing car seats in a taxi, is a serious pain.
Furthermore, the evidence that car seats actually benefit safety is significantly less robust than you might think. The "mountains of evidence" that do exist for things like 70% reductions in fatalities, bizarrely enough, generally compare the rate of fatalities for car seats vs completely unrestrained kids. When you compare the rate of fatalities in car seats to kids wearing adult seat belts, the bulk of the evidence suggests essentially no difference. Fatalities happen when the forces involved are catastrophic and sadly a car seat doesn't help much for kids over 2.
Even a back of the envelope comparison makes this extremely plausible: car crash fatalities for kids 9-12 have declined by 72% from 1978-2017. If car seats and car seat laws save significant numbers of lives, you'd expect that the fatality rate for kids 0-8, who are generally in car seats, to have decreased much more. But it hasn't, it declined by 73% over the same period.
Now, car seats and boosters do seem to moderately reduce non-fatal injuries - huge spread of estimates here, most clustering around 10-25%. It's reasonable for most people to use car seats or boosters most of the time based on this alone, IMO, especially for young kids. But do they justify a mandate? IMO: no. Absolutely not.
Worth mentioning that mandates probably do succeed in one thing: they reduce the number of children born at all by at least 57x more than they prevent child fatalities. Roughly 8,000 kids per year, 145,000 kids since 1980. That's with the (unlikely, as discussed above) assumption that car seats do in fact save significant numbers of lives. But it's also entirely possible that they've prevented hundreds of thousands of kids from being born, somewhat reduced the nonfatal injury rate, and saved essentially no lives.
Citations below:
Fatality reduction with car seats or boosters:
- https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/seatbelts.pdf (found that seat belts as effective as car seats for children 2-6)
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jae.2449 (independent replication of above with different data set)
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19959729/ (no statistically significant difference between booster seats and seat belt alone for fatalities)
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16754824/ (the main counter-estimate to the above, with the 28% fatality reduction)
Non-fatal injury reductions:
- https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecinqu/v48y2010i3p521-536.html (no difference in serious injuries, ~25% reduction in least serious injury category)
- https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... (14% reduction in likelihood of injury for boosters)
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841126/ (45% estimate)
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12783914/ (59% estimate)
Reduction in birth rate from car seat mandates:
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 (car seat mandates "led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000")
Note that both the 45% and 59% estimate for injury reduction and the 28% estimate for fatality reduction all come from one research group using a proprietary data set. Everything that's independently reproducible points towards small or zero effect on fatalities and modest effects on injuries.
Considering cars are one of the top causes of death for kids (the top?), this just feels obvious.
Oh wow what a tragedy. You think maybe there's reasons for that mandate? Like maybe it saves children's lives?
But sure everything would be better if any moron was allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.
But sure everything would be better if any moron was allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.
Yes, I think that we'd all be better off if every person was allowed to have their own personal values, deciding what's more important to themSELVES, rather than piling on and trying to force every one into a one-size-fits-all solution.
For my part, I'd much rather have people wishing me "have a rich and fulfilling life" rather than "be timid and careful to maximize your time even if it's boring and unrewarding".
Sure, you can disagree with my priorities, but that's the whole point. We should each be able to have our own priorities.
The evidence that car seats save lives is significantly weaker that you probably believe, as I detailed in another comment in this thread. But look: even if car seats make sense for a typical 5 year old on a typical drive in their typical car (which is a higher evidentiary burden than you might think), a mandate imposes a huge logistical tax that makes many normal things completely infeasible or impractical:
- travel with many kids (nope, physically can't carry 4 car seats plus luggage)
- using a taxi, e.g. to go see a movie (nope, can't carry a car seat into the theater)
- carpooling with other families (I'll drive them, you pick up? Nope, we'd have to shuffle car seats around.)
- rides with grandparents or other family members (sorry, we'd have to deliver the car seat to them first)
- splitting kids between two vehicles for errands (let's spend 10m wrestling car seats from one car to the other first)
The whole texture of independent childhood is altered by car seat mandates! Everything gets filtered through "is there a car seat available?". If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
Here's what I found doing a basic Google search:
> Car seats and booster seats significantly reduce the risk of fatal injury in crashes by 71% for infants and 54% for toddlers (1-4 years old), saving over 11,000 lives in the US since 1975
> Booster seats reduce the risk of serious injury for children aged 4-8 by 45% compared to seatbelts alone.
It's from the AI summary because it was the most quotable but the articles I found say pretty much the same thing. Seems pretty solid to me.
> If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
If you haven't experienced your children dying unnecessarily because it was inconvenient to make them safe it's hard to describe..
See my comment summarizing the evidence as I understand it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47590700
What articles did you find, exactly? What primary evidence are they basing their claims on? Many of the numbers you'll find with a google search are unclear about what they're comparing to - I believe both of the fatality numbers above (71% and 54%) are relative to completely unrestrained kids, which is not the relevant comparison.
The 45% number I specifically discuss in the other comment, but every independently reproducible study using publicly available data has found much smaller effects, around 10-25% for minor injuries and no statistically significant difference in severe injuries.
To be clear, I'm not saying "don't use car seats," I'm saying that the evidence doesn't support mandating them through age 8 (or 12!).
Our kids would be much safer if we drove everywhere at 15mph - less convenient, but it would prevent many unnecessary deaths. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do anything in the world without risk. So we're forced to balance convenience against safety every day, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not.
The evidence on car seats is extremely weak and they prevent only a handful of injuries. You'd be better off redesigning roads or having more collision protection systems in cars. As self-driving cars get better to the point where they can communicate and eliminate many human errors, there's probably no need for car seats at all. In many situations they make things more dangerous, not less.
Seems strong to me, can you support this claim?
>allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.
This was not the major factor, but when things were still like that, it was not only NASA that made more forward progress than later times.
>Relaxed worker safety standards, weakened environmental protections, and generally moving as fast as possible.
These sorts of collective values (or lack thereof) make it more important that individuals focus on their own safety in day-to-day life, no?
Yes, why don't individuals who live near industrial facilities simply find their own clean air to breathe.
And workers should refuse to do unsafe work, and simply take one of the many safe jobs instead.
We don't need a childhood vaccine schedule. We just need parents to keep their kids from getting sick.
Kind of silly that we as a society even bothered with all of the dangerous safety standards to start with.
America has been craving safety since 9/11, and it has made cowards of everybody, so in some sense I would agree.
But taking a risk regarding an unknown or to expand knowledge or actually accomplish something is one thing. Ignoring known and mitigable risks just to save money, save face, meet a deadline or please a bureaucrat is another.
Anyway these clowns even fail your criterion, because by covering up the results of the first launch/experiment, they are not being up front about a risk.
In my opinion this is a top-down, human hierarchy thing. CEOs and agency administrators create and set an organization's culture and expectations.
The irony is that a faulty heat shield is an engineering challenge that real engineers would love to tackle; all you have to do is turn them loose on the problem, let them fix it. They live for that. I find it actually aesthetically offensive that the organization and its culture has instead taught them venal, circumspect careerism, which is cowardice of a different kind.
Considering that driving (at least in the US) is a relatively unsafe means of travel compared to the alternatives, I can understand imploring someone to drive safe.
Not just the US.
Rather strangely when choosing transportation options, people generally don't say "I'll take the subway it's safer", when it very much is.
On the other hand people accept things like "I have a fear of flying" much more easily than "I have a fear of cars".
Our internal emotional thinking doesn't work very well with probabilities so it is a very common fallacy trying to reduce a probability to zero when it is completely irrational.
I feel like all the responses to your comment sort of prove its point.
As I was reading the post I was wondering along the same lines, if this is different from before. Going to space is an inherently risky activity. It's always going to be easy to write the "this is not safe" think piece, where you can either say "I told you so" or "Whew, thankfully we made it this time!" afterwards. Things like this only happen when you accept some risk and people say "yes" press forward.
All that said, not all risk is equal, and I'm trying to understand if NASA is uniquely dysfunctional now and taking needless, incidental risks.
Maybe not so much "oblivious to safety" as "oblivious to probable risk." We worry to much about low risk events (like airline flights) and don't worry enough about higher risk events (like trips-and-falls, driving a car, poor diet...)
Then explain the Apollo program, and the actual printed literature that came out of the program that summarized how they were successful.
If you're looking for programs where mistakes were not made, Apollo is not the program to choose. I highly recommend visiting Kennedy Space Center some time where they go in-depth on how close it came to never happening after Apollo I. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
That being said, I'm a big proponent of "you can't make ICBM's carrying humans 100% safe", but you sure can try your best.
Apollo killed three astronauts. NASA learned some lessons from that and the rest of the program was safer, although still extremely risky.
Us humans do have difficulty with safety. Sometimes we are able to overcome that problem to an extent. Here are some the few examples where humans have done well with safety: FAA commercial airlines, Soyuz, ISS, Shinkansen trains, US Nuclear power post 3 mile island, Vaccines, and the Falcon 9.
I wouldn’t say humans are oblivious to safety. The Apollo program was very successful as long as you’re not related to Gus Grissom, Ed White or Roger Chaffee. But those three (preventable) deaths aside, Apollo was quite successful and figured out some huge problems.
If you’re interested in a heck of a good read, the Columbia Accident Investigation Report is a good place to start:
https://ehss.energy.gov/deprep/archive/documents/0308_caib_r...
It looks at the safety culture in NASA and at how that safety culture ran into budget issues, time pressure and a culture that ‘it’s always been okay’. But people were aware of the problems.
There’s a really frustrating example from Columbia where engineers on the ground badly wanted to inspect the shuttle’s left wing from the ground using ground based telescopes or even observations from telescopes or any other assets. There’s footage available was an email circulated where an engineer all but begged anyone to take a look with anything. That request was not approved - they never looked.
Realistically there’s a point to be made that NASA wasn’t capable of saving those astronauts at that point. But they had a shuttle almost ready to to, they could have jettisoned its science load and possibly had a rescue of some sort available. They never looked though but alarm bells were ringing.
It’s more accurate to say people are highly aware of safety but when you get a bunch of us together, add in cognitive biases and promotion bands we can get stuck in unsafe ruts.
I'd say it's more accurate to say the people who are actually smart work as engineers. Leadership is generally engineers who were better at office politics than engineering, or just business majors etc.
So you have a group of really talented people using their talents to do awesome things, and then you have some useless idiots who are good at kissing the right asses, running the show and taking most of the credit. And that's how you end up killing astronauts, because the useless assholes in charge aren't even competent enough to recognize when they should listen to the brains of their operation. All they care about is looking good to their superiors and hitting some arbitrary deadline they've decided to set for no damn reason etc.
I haven't kept up with Artemis development but I've read extensively about Challenger and Columbia. These two parts of the article stood out to me:
> Moon-to-Mars Deputy Administrator Amit Kshatriya said: “it was very small localized areas. Interestingly, it would be much easier for us to analyze if we had larger chunks and it was more defined”. A Lockheed Martin representative on the same call added that "there was a healthy margin remaining of that virgin Avcoat. So it wasn’t like there were large, large chunks.”
Followed by:
> The Avcoat material is not designed to come out in chunks. It is supposed to char and flake off smoothly, maintaining the overall contours of the heat shield.
This is echoes both Shuttle incidents. Challenger: no gasses were supposed to make it past the o-rings no matter what, but when it became clear that gasses were escaping and the o-rings were being damaged, there was a push to suggest that it's an acceptable level.
There was a similar situation with heat shield damage and Columbia.
In both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that wasn't expected to fail in that mode /at all/.
I know the points that astronauts make about the importance of manned space exploration, but I agree with this author that it seems to make sense to run this as an unmanned mission, and probably test the new heat shield which will replace the Artemis II design in an unmanned re-entry as well.
> Challenger: no gasses were supposed to make it past the o-rings no matter what,
> but when it became clear that gasses were escaping and the o-rings were being
> damaged, there was a push to suggest that it's an acceptable level.
Interestingly, the article<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...> by heat shield expert and Shuttle astronaut Charles Camarda, the former Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center, asserts that it was *not* the O-rings:
"The Challenger accident was not caused by O-rings or temperature on the day of launch; it was caused by a deviant joint design which opened instead of closed when loaded. It was caused by mistaking analytical adequacy of a simplified test for physical understanding of the system. The solution, post Challenger, was the structural redesign of the SRB field joint and the use of the exact same O-rings."
I find that highly surprising, because "it was the O-rings" explanation seems universally believed and sanctified by no lesser authority than the Nobel prize laureate Richard Feynman.
It's the same explaination. When the SRB joints flexxed the o-rings were meant to stay in place, but the joints were defective and NASA knew the o-rings were moving. However NASA also believed the o-rings could still take the abuse, because although they were moving they were getting shoved deeper into the joint, in a way that wasn't intended but was nonetheless at least marginally effective at stopping exhaust blow-by shortly after it began. But when the o-rings were cold and stiff... they didn't move the same way, exhaust blew by them longer and cut right through. At that point the SRB turns into a cutting torch (the SRBs didn't actually explode until after the shuttle broke up and range safety sent the signal to kill the boosters.
> However NASA also believed the o-rings could still take the abuse, because
> although they were moving they were getting shoved deeper into the joint,
Why would they be "shoved deeper," when the problem is that the joint opens wider under load?
See here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Scott-Post/publication/...
What would happen "normally" (i.e. the normalization of deviance) was that the rotation (from the SRB joints bowing--essentially "ballooning") would create a gap, and the O-rings would get blown into that gap and ultimately seal in there
With Challenger, it was too cold, so the O-ring rubber was not malleable enough to seal into that space (like the O-ring towards the right of the diagram), so the hot gases were allowed to blow by and erode the O-ring. If they had sealed in (like the one on the left) it would have just taken the pressure but not worn away
>>I find that highly surprising, because "it was the O-rings" explanation seems universally believed and sanctified by no lesser authority than the Nobel prize laureate Richard Feynman.
Essentially you are mischaracterizing what Feynman did or say, although this is also Feynman fault :-), by doing the famous public demonstration, with the ice water in a glass [2], although even there he only said it has "significance to the problem...". In other words, we should not simplify, even for the general public, what are complex subtle engineering issues. This is also the reason why current AI, will fail spectacularly, but I digress...
Feynman documented the joint rotation problem in his written Appendix F, but his televised demonstration became the explanation...[3]
Camarda is correct here. There was a fundamentally flawed field joint design, meaning the tang-and-clevis joint opened under combustion pressure instead of closing. This meant the O-rings were being asked to chase a widening gap something the O-ring manufacturer explicitly told Thiokol O-rings were never designed to do. Joint rotation was known as early as 1977, a full nine years before the disaster.
The cold temperature made things worse by stiffening the rubber so it could not chase the gap as quickly, but O-ring erosion and blow-by were occurring on flights in warm weather too and nearly every flight in 1985 showed damage.
The proof is how they fixed. NASA redesigned the joint metal structure with a capture feature to prevent rotation, added a third O-ring for redundancy, and installed heaters but kept the exact same Viton rubber. If the O-rings were the real problem, you would change the O-rings. They did not need to.
The report [1] is public for everybody to read...but not from the NASA page... who funnily enough has a block on the link from their own page, so I had to find an alternative link...
[1] - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-99hrpt1016/pdf/...
[2] - https://youtu.be/6TInWPDJhjU
[3] - https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf
That's valuable, detailed explanation, thanks.
There’s a pretty good explanation here: https://exrocketman.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-seal-failure-in...
Without being too familiar with the subject - another commenter referred to the "swiss cheese model": the O-ring design, the temperature etc. weren't the single cause, they were contributing factors, and the more contributing factors you eliminate, the more certain you can be that you won't have a repeat accident. AFAIK there weren't any more Shuttle launches at such low temperatures after that anymore either?
That's right, the accident launch was by far the coldest. They also added joint heaters.
My recollection is that a rocket design was scaled up from one that worked, by people who didn't consider how an o-ring should be loaded in order to function properly. They inadvertently changed the design rather than simply scale it. I don't think Feynman got this wrong either. His demo was because the justifications for flight were based on the fact that failure had a temperature correlation, and they had a model representing how damaged the o-rings would be.
The o-ring failure was a measurable consequence of the joint design failure. The data behind the model didn't go down to temperatures as low as that at Challenger's launch date.
For more inappropriate extrapolation to justify a decision: the data for the heat shield tile loss model was based on much less damage than sustained by Columbia (3 orders of magnitude IIRC).
Now they are looking at the same style of fallacy and don't even have a model based on damage sustained in flights.
Another parallel I haven't seen discussed here yet, though I haven't read all comments: I recall Feynman feeling like he was on the investigation panel as a prop, that the intention of the investigation was to clear NASA of any wrongdoing. They used a model, considered risks, etc. Feynman recognized the need for a clear and powerful visual to cut through an information dump and pull it to front page news. The invitation of Camarda to a presentation with a pre-determined conclusion has the same feeling. I don't know what Camarda can do to put it on a (non-HN) front page today.
Both things can be true. A better O-ring with the same joint might have prevented the disaster. A better designed joint with the same O-ring might also. Feynman knew that a little theater would go a long way. The O-ring explanation, albeit a partial explanation, made for good theater.
Using the same o-rings afterwards is surprising, I've heard that the manufacturer was surprised that they were being used for that purpose because they weren't rated for that.
Also I'm not sure the assertion is correct. If the sealant and O-Rings were adequate, the joint would not have failed. It was suboptimal, and increased risk, sure, but it in itself wasn't the reason for the accident. It was the joint and the o-rings in combination. The holes in the swiss cheese model lined up that day, and a lot of small problems combined into one big problem
>> Using the same o-rings afterwards is surprising, I've heard that the manufacturer was surprised that they were being used for that purpose because they weren't rated for that.
Not surprising if you understand what the real cause was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47585889
Surprised? One of the engineers was literally on the phone with NASA the morning of the disaster begging them not to launch. He was overruled by management.
Surprising for the management. If you are a spoiled brat who always got what it wanted if you just asked/cried you don't expect reality to come and hit you.
> If the sealant and O-Rings were adequate, the joint would not have failed.
That assertion requires some reasoning and evidence to back it.
The sealant and O-rings were meant to keep the hot gasses inside. Simply making a joint slightly wiggly will not keep hot gasses inside. The hot gasses did not stay inside. The sealant and O-rings did not succeed in keeping the hot gasses inside (evidence: Challenger). They were not adequate
> The sealant and O-rings did not succeed in keeping the hot gasses inside (evidence: Challenger). They were not adequate
No. The whole assembly --joint, sealant and O-rings, -- failed.
"They were not adequate" - yet, after the redesign, they kept those same O-rings and declared that boosters are safe to fly, in manifest contradiction to your assertion. So your reasoning is clearly flawed.
>"They were not adequate" - yet, after the redesign, they kept those same O-rings
presumably "redesign" means some stuff changed. why is it not possible that the O-rings were inadequate for the old design, but adequate for the new design?
Exactly. They re-designed the tang and clevis joint so that the metal parts of the joint did not spread under gas pressure and the o-ring did not lose compression. They added a heater to ensure that the o-ring remained in it's usable temperature range. And added a superfluous third O-ring.
Speaking of which, has anyone ever adequately explained why Challenger's Right SRB joint temperature was measured as -13 deg C using infrared pyrometers, when the lowest ambient temperature that night was -5.5C, and the Left SRB was measured -4 C? What subcooled the right SRB?
Allan McDonald's "Truth, Lies, and O-Rings" is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to discuss the details of this particular bit of corporate and government malfeasance. It's 600 pages of technical detail and political intrigue. He suggests that a plume from a cryo vent could have impinged on the field joint and cooled the o-ring to lower than ambient temperatures. No proof though.
Yes and the reversal of safety calculations really surprised me. "The orbiter has a total fail rate of one in 1000 so this individual part is higher than 1 in 10000", something like that. Where neither premise was actually tested or verified. Just specified on paper as a requirement and then used for actual safety calculations.
I don't know how a big organisation can think like that. But I guess these calculations were ones out of millions of ones made for the project.
The bigger an organization gets, the more internal overhead it has. At some point, it would take divine intervention for important things not to get overlooked or lost at some junctions in the org chart.
About the last point:
At this point in time, manned space exploration should come out of our entertainment budget. The same budget we use for football or olympic games.
I've often thought world leaders, upon election/selection, should get a free few orbits of the earth, to give them some perspective on the job they're about to undertake. Maybe offer the first one on Artemis II, a deferred one for the current US administration?
James May of Top Gear has flown with a U2 spy plane once [0][1]. When they reached to the edge of space, May said "If everybody could do that once, it would completely change the face of global politics, religion, education, everything".
I can't agree more.
Another thing I believe needs to be watched periodically is Pale Blue Dot [2].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-COlil4tos
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsZaDbxCgM
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g
I think you overestimate the effect that would have on the kind of people that most need that sort of humility.
Look at what happened with William Shatner and Jeff Bezos when they came back from space. Shatner started to say something about what an impactful experience it was, but Bezos cut him off and was like “Woo! Partay!” and switched his attention to a magnum of champagne.
Jeff went up two flights earlier, in July 2021 on NS-16. Shatner was on NS-18 in October.
I don't know if it's a thing that wears off, if Bezos was just in business-mode the entire time, or just didn't want someone monologuing right after getting back.
There's probably a strong self-selection factor going on, in terms of the kind of person that typically seeks out that kind of experience.
And if the actual U2 pilots (air force pilots and CIA operatives) had come back profoundly changed, someone might have cancelled the programme...
Astronauts are regular smart people capable of making good and bad life decisions too.
Extra tactless considering Shatner is a recovering alcoholic.
Exactly what I thought of as well
Yeah, that (and Carl Sagan) was what made me think of the idea.
"If everybody could do that once, it would completely change the face of global politics, religion, education, everything".
You could have the same effect with LSD/Psilocybin for quite a bit less $$$$.
>I've often thought world leaders, upon election/selection, should get a free few orbits of the earth, to give them some perspective on the job they're about to undertake.
Perhaps, but they should also get a few free orbits of the Earth *after* their term ends, on a launch system built by whichever contractor has given the most "campaign donations" to politicians. Surely they'll trust it to be safe, right?
That would only work for countries with a space programme.
I would also say give them a year of free vacations in various places. Say a maximum security prison in general population, any type of dark camps, hospitals, mental institutions and care homes.
Give them the rest and recreation they need in these wonderful places.
Do you think sociopaths like current 'leader' would change significantly upon such experience? I unfortunately don't share such optimism.
"Houston, this is Golden One. I'm looking down on the big, beautiful, blue world. They love me down there. They all love me. I'm the greatest astronaut ever in the history of mankind. No one has ever orbited like this before."
Yeah, you may be right.
Made me chuckle :D
Maybe he should ride on the Artemis II mission?
Strapped to one of the boosters?
You don't have to be an optimist. You have to try.
Trying and seeing what happens is also science, after all.
Scientists don't try everything. First they run it through expert critical review. This candidate wouldn't make it past the theory stage.
I mean, we can probably predict what will happen based on existing data.
"I've seen things up there that are huge, absolutely huge. And let me tell you, astronauts, they came up to me, they were crying, big men crying. Earth, it's a good name, but it's not big enough, not grand enough. So, I'm thinking we rename it. How about 'The Trump Sphere'? It's got a nice ring to it, doesn't it? And let me tell you, nobody would argue with that name!"
The point with the last bit was that they should be put in an unsafe craft.
Based on some rough numbers, NASA's budget (around $24B) would be <4% of the US's total spending on entertainment, with a pretty great return in research, engineering and education to boot.
I also looked up the NSF's 2024 budget, which, at $9B, was much lower than I expected.
NASA does both manned and unmanned stuff. Don't conflate those when you are looking at returns.
Look at this joke of a list https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/20-breakthroughs-from-... for an illustration. And those were the 20 best things they could come up with.
There are actually a lot of really interesting discoveries on that list. I haven't thought deeply about whether it represents value for money, but I would say that that is anything but "a joke of a list."
And 'Stimulating the low-Earth orbit economy' is a joke. Spending money not as a means to an end, but as the end in itself?
Apart from the research into the effects of microgravity on humans, pretty much everything else could have been done cheaper and better without humans.
Or take this example:
> Deployment of CubeSats from station: CubeSats are one of the smallest types of satellites and provide a cheaper way to perform science and technology demonstrations in space. More than 250 CubeSats have now been deployed from the space station, jumpstarting research and satellite companies.
Cubesats are great! But you don't exactly need a manned space station to deploy them. Similar with many other 'achievements' like the 'Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer'.
See also how they don't mention any actual impact. Only stuff like "This achievement may provide insight into fundamental laws of quantum mechanics."
And this is supposed to be the list of highlights. The best they have to offer.
> Spending money not as a means to an end, but as the end in itself?
Welcome to the macroeconomics practical, where we'll dig a ditch, refill it, and count it as a productive addition to the economy both times!
If doing it lowers the cost of earth movers and gets 20 other groups to each dig their own ditch, that's actually money well spent.
No, it depends on what else you could have spent the money on. Perhaps that would have been even better?
This is a typical argument for state intervention in the marketplace, but it is weaker if one makes different assumptions about the state of the market absent the intervention. In order to show that it was money well spent, you'd have to show that it's better to have more groups digging, and that there wouldn't have been enough diggers without GovDitch.
Also, it's NASA, so they can't come out and say "stopped soviet rocket technology and expertise from proliferating" which was a large motivator for the ISS.
> with a pretty great return in research, engineering and education to boot.
If a company could spend 24B in research they would probably produce a lot more things than NASA
Absolutely! Think of the many new ways to display advertising that are being neglected while we foolishly launch people and things into space.
Well, NASA itself is a good counterexample here:
NASA could do a lot more good science, if they didn't (have to) launch primates into space.
Google's R&D budget is like $60B. Make of that what you will.
Hard disagree. some of our best technologies came about to solve problems related to space travel which we later found useful for mundane problems at home. gps, digital cameras immediately come to mind. The only other phenomena I can think of with similar effects on human progress is war... I'll take a space race thanks
Have you heard of opportunity costs?
About war: in our universe we got the first digital computers because of military efforts during the second world war. However, without a war IBM and Konrad Zuse and others would have gotten there, too. With much less human suffering.
It's unlikely computing would have developed as quickly as it did without the Cold War. IBM's Sage and MIT's TX0 were both Cold War projects - one for a national early warning system, the other as an R&D platform for flight simulators.
Most US investment in associated tech - including the Internet - came through DARPA.
Not pointing this out because I support war, but to underline that the US doesn't have a culture of aggressive government investment in non-military R&D.
NASA and the NSF both get pocket money in budget terms. And at its height Apollo was a Cold War PR battle with the USSR that happened to funnel a lot of of money to defence contractors.
The original moon landings were not primarily motivated by science.
Why does it have to be government R&D?
It doesn't, but it was, because it was tied to administration and nuclear physics and then rocketry.
Private sector doesn't do much without obvious short-term gain, and it especially doesn't do basic research. It may be good at fitting more pixels in ever thinner phones, but it wouldn't get to that point if not the government that needed number-crunching machines for better modelling of nuclear fission some 80 years earlier.
As I said, IBM and Konrad Zuse were already on the cusp of general computing.
I believe you are making the same argument: the GP prefers space race over war for large technological development at less or no human suffering.
I have a hunch that space race is not for "peaceful technological progress of human race at large", or "let's see how this behaves in 0G, it might be useful for some global problems" anymore.
It is my understanding that it always was about „rockets are good for dropping bombs on people“.
Well, I highly doubt that the kind of rockets they are developing for Lunar and Mars missions will be mich better, if any better at all, than current ballistic missiles armies around the world already have. Those space rockets are huge and meant to more or less safely carry people over a long distance in space. Warheads are meant to carry explosives while also being hard to detect or stop. I'm no rocket scientist, but I believe that huge space rockets would defeat the purpose, as they would consume a lot of fuel for nothing, while also being much easier to spot and stopped by shooting something at them.
So I think the opposite: we are way past the point of space exploration being directly useful for weapons.
Well, getting your toes cut off is better than losing your whole foot, yes.
What opportunity is being lost out on because of space exploration?
Whatever you can imagine they could spend the money on, including leaving it with the tax payer or taking on less debt.
(And, if you don't like the monetary framing: just look at the real resources spend instead.)
However I'm not nearly as harsh on unmanned space exploration.
That's not how resources work. Resources that are used for space exploration aren't magically available for anything else when you don't do space exploration. The economy is not a zero sum game and human capital is not fungible.
A rocket scientist/engineer/technician/etc at NASA is not going to work on the thing we "should" spend money on instead if tomorrow you shut down NASA's manned spaceflight programs. They'll probably go work on ads at Meta instead.
Now do the opportunity cost of AI model virtue signalling to investors for several years
As long as they mostly spend VC money, who am I to judge? It's no worse than rich people buying yachts.
Just don't spend tax payer money.
But they dodge taxes, so they're effectively spending it anyway.
Are you talking about legal tax optimisation, or illegally not paying your taxes?
You are serious? Up until this point I thought you're writing in jest, because all the things you mention are actually good ideas - including especially funding manned space flight from entertainment budget, because:
1) It's better aligned with mission profile (inspirational, emotional, but not strictly necessary;
2) There's much more of it to go than NASA gets;
3) It would be a better use of that money than what it's currently used for.
I'm saying manned spaceflight is a waste of money and resources.
We'd get more and better science by spending it on unmanned space stuff. Or you could even just leave the money with the taxpayer.
Firstly how is this related to opportunity costs. Secondly, no one said that to create digital computer you should start a war. It's just that war is already present, regardless of you invent digital computers or space travel.
Space spinoffs are grossly exaggerated.
Broken window fallacy much? The amount of money spent on space race could have been spent somewhere else and you have no idea how to evaluate of this was a valid set of outcomes.
could the government rent out monopoly grants for televised football on the moon in exchange for sponsoring manned space exploration?
If the NFL were to somehow become involved, you can bet that they'd somehow manage to turn the financials around and get some of that sweet government money flowing in their direction, just like the dozens of taxpayer-funded or otherwise tax-advantaged stadium deals in the past 25 years that allow us to thank Big Football financially for gracing us with the presence of football teams.
It is astounding to me how such a successful, rich group of companies manage to get subsidies in quantities that groups you'd think deserve or need it more, from valuable science endeavours to orphans dying of cancer, can only dream of.
Is there any research on the effect of apparent gravitational field strength on sports? I’d be willing to bet that rocketry and artillery takes account of 50mm/s2 difference at the equator. While the difference is obviously tiny, the margins in modern sports are also miniscule.
Do Fijian rugby games see a 0.5% increase in longest drop goal distance?
I have no idea about the 0.5% increase in drop goal distance, but tongue-in-cheek, I would say only 0.5% as many attempted drop goals - given the Fijian team's emphasis on a ball-in-hand style of play instead of kicking the ball away.
On a slightly related note, I always found the games played in Pretoria in South Africa fascinating. It's 1350 m above sea level, so kicks all go 10% to 15% further (my estimate) which makes quite a difference when there are players kicking penalties from over halfway even at sea level.
Which government? The moon doesn't belong to any one government.
Though the US could just do it. Who's to stop them from selling these pieces of paper?
just wait until influencers start flying there. Not on SLS of course. Flyby on Starship cattle class - say 100 people (500 for LEO and "SFO to Shanghai" while for Moon - several days would require better accommodations, thus 100) - at $5M/launch, 10 launches (9 of them - tankers) - thus $50M 3 day roundtrip for 100 people. Half a mil per person.
No no no. Space will be colonized. At least our local solar system will see sustained human exploration and inhabitation. This requires physical presence. This is one of those black swans which seem silly when looking forward, but obvious in retrospective. The future belongs to those who do seemingly silly things today. The first industrialists often faced ridicule because they spent time designing machines instead of doing the task and making the immediate money. Set aside your need for immediate gratification. Hard things lead to good outcomes.
> test the new heat shield which will replace the Artemis II design in an unmanned re-entry as well.
NASA desperately needs more options. They shouldn't need to expend an SLS to launch an uncrewed Orion with a test heatshield on a trajectory equivalent to a moon return. They should be able to launch that on top of a Falcon Heavy. A Falcon Heavy can launch 63 tons to LEO and a fueled Orion plus service module weights slightly north of 20 tons. An Orion mass simulator with enough attitude control mated with a FH second stage would leave a lot of delta-v to accelerate the capsule back into the atmosphere.
I'd prefer if we just wrote off space-x and pretend they don't exist.
SpaceX is the only major operator of spaceflights in the US: more than 95% of all satellites launched are launched by SpaceX, not just in the US, but worldwide.
That's an eye catching stat. What is the impact of starlink satellites on the number, ie what if you drop them from both numerator and denominator?
It looks like 70% of all satellites deployed in 2025 were starlink. Seems they make up over half (~65%) of all satellites currently in orbit.
> more than 95% of all satellites launched are launched by SpaceX
Another way to look at this number is that they are responsible for 95% of the light pollution caused by orbiting objects.
Lets just ban lightbulbs so we don't have light pollution.
We have regions where we deliberately minimize light pollution, but those regions aren't immune to Elon's swarm of photobombing satellites.
Not that I don't think it's cool to have a web of spacecraft enveloping the planet and bringing high-speed communications to everyone everywhere - it's pretty impressive to point up and show a train of satellites to a kid - but astronomers have been complaining about them and they are right.
why because "elon bad" ??
cut your nose off to spite your face if you want but the rest of us will recognize the importance of space-x and be grateful it is here.
This is about going to the moon. Space-x is over budget and extremely late. It has nothing to do with the management there, only that it is better to come up with a solution without them.
I only suggested a Falcon Heavy because the rocket exists, is flight proven, and has enough capacity to shoot an Orion to any trajectory it is expected to encounter.
If that was the truth I have a strong feeling your wording would be different.
Please read the https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I literally can’t even continue this thread.
Because of your personal politics?
Imagine if NASA had the resources and the freedom to pursue a high-risk high-return strategy the same way SpaceX did. NASA can't afford high-profile failures because it needs political support to function from a Congress that doesn't understand engineering.
Now imagine the public good will if the US could have built a network of LEO satellites providing communications to everyone on Earth regardless of nationality, with equal access and funded by governments so that all their residents could have access to it for free (once they buy an antenna made in the US).
Some will say it'd be communism. I would say it could be part of a Pax Americana that doesn't involve coups, but is based on willing cooperation.
Normalization of deviance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
This is when you hire someone with autism and give them a direct report.
Their inability at social cues will cut right through.
Works every time.
I'm sorry this got dinged.
It's pithy, but correct.
Source: I'm "on the spectrum." This often resulted in me being the skunk at the rationalization picnic, because I didn't realize the boss wanted me to rubberstamp a bad design.
>both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations
Happens often. Just look at the climate change discussion.
I really don't understand the point of manned space exploration though?
Landing on the moon in 1969 was an extraordinary achievement, perhaps the most beautiful thing ever done by mankind. But now? What's the point exactly?
We know we can't go much further than the moon anyway (as this very same blog has demonstrated many times); what do we expect to achieve with astronauts that robots can't do?
I think it's still very important for adaptability. yes, a land rover can run for years and run thousands of experiments, but it's limited to whatever scientific probes it was equipped with. Humans are right now more flexible and could adapt experiments to findings, which would then inform the next rovers. And when the time comes that we start mining and building on the moon, a few humans will probably need to live there. So any data on human survival outside the Earth is useful data. https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov/
At the rate robots are improving, will that still be the case in ten years?
>In both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that wasn't expected to fail in that mode /at all/.
Because, and it speaks volumes that nobody ever circles back around to this, that is absolutely f-ing normal. If everyone ran around like the sky was falling every time some widget made it into service and some unexpected thing was noticed nothing would get done.
"hey we disassembled this gearbox and there's a little rust from condensation + chemistry = cyclic usage, we better take a look at it"
"we've taken a look at it and the corrosion is forming because X, this is fine because the surfaces that can't rust see lubricant flow and the per our calculations the maximum amount of rust into the lube is Y and since the service interval is Z this is fine, tests confirm this."
^ the above happened for a multimillion dollar per hour of downtime gearbox. That was 40yr ago. It was in fact fine. I know it was fine because they added venting suggestions to the docs and the client balked because they bought another one in the 2010s and a bunch of "we went over this when it was installed and it was fine then and the building is even more tightly humidity controlled than it was in the 1980s" back and fourth whining ensued.
You don't know how many other things they noticed when they put the shuttles into service that did in fact turn out to be perfectly fine. It's real easy to be smug in hindsight but good luck trying to pick the needle out of the haystack in advance.
Now obviously the shuttle people flubbed it and much has been writtenn about it, but the point still sands.
I don't know any astronauts that push for manned space exploration. Just a few billionaires and dementia patients.
This is a more balanced take, in my opinion:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori...
Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around.
And note that the OP believes it is likely (maybe very likely) that the heat shield will work fine. It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is involved.
Regardless, this is not a Challenger or Columbia situation. In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem. That's the difference, in my opinion. NASA is taking this seriously and has analyzed the problem deeply.
They are not YOLO'ing this mission, and it's somewhat insulting that people think they are.
If you play a single round of Russian roulette with a revolver, it is likely you will not die, but it is also not safe to do that. The same idea applies here.
The foam shedding/impact problem was heavily analyzed throughout the Shuttle program, and recognized as a significant risk. Read the CAIB report for a good history.
That report also describes the groupthink dynamic at NASA that made skeptical engineers "come around" for the good of the program in the past. Calling Camarda an outlier is just a different way of stating this problem.
It looks like they did some worst case testing that was reassuring, so that it isn't Russian roulette? Any comments on that? I suppose their composite testing and temperature projections could also be wrong, and their trajectory changes might not be mitigating enough for the heat shield chunking, but that's a few different things all simultaneously being wrong for a catastrophic failure to occur.
The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.
What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.
But then no spacecraft is safe to fly. We're obviously willing to accept a much higher level of risk sending humans to the moon than in other situations. I think I read somewhere at a 1 in 30 chance of them all dying was acceptable. Not too far off from Russian roulette!
Pro tip: you’re supposed to use a revolver.
Juggle five guns after loading one.
Who says I'm not?
https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/62/1323/rare-and-un...
Have you bothered to ask the astronauts on board if they want to risk it?
You're getting clicks, they're going to the moon and there's a lot of people on Earth who would happily take any tradeoff for that.
Hang on, without a dog in this fight, have I asked the people who trained their whole lives to drive cool cars if this particular cool car, which they were not involved in designing or building, is safe to drive? Is that what you are asking?
They asked if the astronauts "want to risk it", not if it was actually safe. Those are very different questions. The astronauts are, in fact, the world's leading experts on whether or not they personally want to risk it, so it's not entirely unreasonable to think that they could answer that question.
It just depends on whether you think that the fact that they accept the risks is reason enough to let them fly a potentially-dangerous spacecraft.
This is a perfect way to put it.
Artemis II is not safe, at least by the standards we apply to things. It's the third flight of a capsule, on the second flight of the rocket, and the first flight of things like the life support system.
At the end of the day, one of the reasons astronauts are respected is they understand those risks, and go into space anyway. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize risks - but at some point the risk becomes acceptable, and the cost of reducing it too great.
To paraphrase a quote from Star Trek - risk is their business.
Taking a related quote from Dollhouse: "That is their business, but that is not their purpose."
> there's a lot of people on Earth who would happily take any tradeoff for that
That's not reassuring, though. And it isn't just about them.
Have you bothered to ask the gambler if they want to risk it?
No offense to the astronauts of course, but asking people that have dreamed of this opportunity their whole life doesn't actually tell you all that much about the actual safety of the mission as a whole.
The astronauts are cool with it. They are basically brainwashed to rationalize exceptional trust in all of the people and components so that they are able to focus on the task at hand.
I wouldn't say brainwashed, but they're definitely aware of the political angles related to succeeding with a career at NASA and almost always agree to play ball without causing trouble for the org.
That “balanced take” severely mischaracterizes dissenting expert Camarda’s attitude, so it’s not balanced at all. Its answer to “Could the NASA engineers convince Olivas and Camarda?” is a “maybe” for Camarda, which couldn’t be further from what Camarda had to say himself, which is he was more concerned after the meeting than before.
From Camarda’s own account after the meeting:
> Hold a “transparent” meeting with invited press to “vet” the Artemis II decision with one of the most public technical dissenters, me, in attendance (Jan 8th, 2026).
> Control the one-sided narrative and bombard the attendees with the Artemis Program view
> Do not allow dissenting voices to present at the meeting
> Do not even allow the IRT or the NESC to present their findings
> Rely on the attending journalists to regurgitate the party line and witness the overwhelming consensus of knowledgeable people
The whole thing is a good read https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
Characterizing someone being (slightly?) more diplomatic as “maybe convinced” is shameful.
"It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" and "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly" are both compatible with the probability of a disaster on reentry being 10%.
> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem.
Being pedantic, NASA management "ignored" engineers - because money.
That said, I 100% agree with you assuming:
> “We have full confidence in the Orion spacecraft and its heat shield, grounded in rigorous analysis and the work of exceptional engineers who followed the data throughout the process,” Isaacman said Thursday.
I only say assuming not that I don't believe Isaacman, but historically NASA managers have said publicly everything's fine when it wasn't and tried to throw the blame onto engineers.
With Challenger, engineers said no-go.
With Columbia, engineers had to explicitly state/sign "this is unsafe", which pushes the incentivisation the wrong direction.
So, I want to believe him, but historically it hasn't been so great to do so.
There were a lot of mistakes with Challenger and Columbia--I totally agree. But I don't think it was money. It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches (unlike some CEOs, maybe).
I think the problem with both Challenger and Columbia was that there were so many possible problems (turbine blade cracks, tiles falling off, etc.) that managers and even engineers got used to off-nominal conditions. This is the "normalization of deviance" that Diane Vaughan talked about.
Is that what's going on with the Orion heat shield? I don't think so. I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.
> It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches
It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right?
But in Challenger's case, there was very heavy pressure to launch because of delays and the rising costs. I remember in a documentary they explicitly mentioned there was a backlog of missions and STS-51 had been delayed multiple times. To rollout/fuel, costs a LOT and challenger had been out on the pad for a while. Rollback was a material risk+cost.
For columbia, yea less about money. They ignored the requests to repoint spy sats and normalized foam strikes.
> I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.
And that's the way it should be. Everything has a risk value regardless if we calculate it or not. It's never 0... (maybe accidentally going faster than light is though?) We just need to agree what it is and is acceptable.
Story time - I was a young engineer at National Instruments and I remember sitting in on a meeting where they were discussing sig figs for their new high precision DMMs. Can we guarantee 6... 7 digits? 7? and they argued that back and forth. No decisions but it really stuck with me. When you're doing bleeding edge work the lines tend to get blurry.
> It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right?
This sounds more like there is money in the room than it’s about the money. None of the decision makers personally profited from saying go. It was much more of a prestige thing.
man, if you need 7 digits, call HP.
TFA is ridiculous with its stance. Yeah, there's this aspect of the design they can't test in their labs. It might even be an important aspect. But safety isn't a boolean "safe"/"not safe", it's a risk assessment, and I'm quite sure there are 100 (or 10000) other things they didn't test for. As long as they're taking all of this into their risk calculations… it's fine.
And if it doesn't blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) will be forgotten.
And if it does blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) can suddenly claim prescience, all the while this is one of thousands of factors that went into the risk assessment. If one really wanted to claim prescience, it'd need to be a ranking of a sufficient number of failure modes.
To illustrate the problem: I hereby claim they will have a "toilet failure". Now if they actually have one, I'll claim `m4d ch0pz` in rocket engineering.
(P.S.: it's a joke but toilet failures on spacecraft are actually a serious problem, if it really happens… shit needs to go somewhere…)
> And if it doesn't blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) will be forgotten.
The HN hivemind will remember, he's a well known user with a well known site.
Let's hope there is no accident, but after the landing there will be reports anyway. We will take a look at the report of the shield and see if it shows a problem in spite it didn't explode, and compare with the prediction in the article. He may even write another article after the fly.
For comparison, I remember the Feynman appendix. One important detail was that Nasa said the the probability of accidents was 1/100000, but he concluded that it was closer to 1/100. Nobody expect to fly a hundred Artemis missions to get a good statistic. Even if the current version explosion rate is super high like 1/10, then you can probably fry a few missions without problems if you cross your fingers hard enough.
I'm not super happy with the pattern of thinking in these numbers; arguing 1/100000 vs 1/100 for "accidents" is again a boolean thing. They probably had a very specific definition, which does make this viable, but we don't have that definition here. So the numbers are meaningless to us. And not having that definition, "accidents" is a sliding scale… e.g. I'm pretty sure astronauts injured themselves banging various bodyparts against various parts of the spaceship. That's technically an accident.
And in this concrete example — the heat shield isn't boolean either. I don't know how steep the gradient between pass and fail is, but it certainly exists, and it's possible they come back successfully but with it singed significantly outside expected parameters. (Even "less than expected" would indicate a problem here IMHO.) That does mean it's not necessarily a question of having enough boolean datapoints.
A high enough threshold for "accident" is a death. In the space shuttle the "accident" rate was 2/135 that is somewhat close to 1/100, but it shows that 1/100000 is too optimistic.
You can pick a more strict safety criteria, but the result would be (something)/135 >= 2/135 > 1/100 >> 1/1000000
All of the controversy over the heat shield is obscuring the much bigger safety issue: Artemis has had only a single unmanned test flight. By contrast, the Saturn launch system had seven successful unmanned tests before being trusted with a crew, including two unmanned flights of the complete Saturn V stack. And even then, three astronauts were lost during ground testing of the crew capsule due to a critical design flaw. Artemis's closest modern counterpart, the SpaceX Starship, has had 11 test flights, several of which resulted in loss of the vehicle. There is no reason to believe that Artemis has a significantly higher reliability rate than Starship or Saturn V. Even without the heat shield controversy, this is the most dangerous mission NASA has launched since the first flight of the Space Shuttle.
> Artemis's closest modern counterpart, the SpaceX Starship, has had 11 test flights, several of which resulted in loss of the vehicle.
I don't think you can compare the two. Starship's risks are so high failure is almost the expected outcome, it's a trial and error based process. Starship and Artemis is an apples/oranges comparison with respect to how the programs approach risk tolerance.
In the space shuttle disasters the hardware had at least been used more than once. A huge lot of this one is only tried and tested on paper.
And the idea that 'if we throw this much money at it, it really must be fine' I don't buy either. Look at how that worked out for Boeing.
For all my feelings about Musk I would much rather step into a rocket that has exploded in all kinds of imaginable situations before so they know how the materials and design actually behave in real world scenarios. I do really think that is the way to go.
> For all my feelings about Musk I would much rather step into a rocket
Definitely, but we still have to figure out if Musk is such a genious or NASA is full of retards.
Neither is true IMO but musk just picked the right development model.
Big space never did this because the current megaproject cost plus is just what they want, a blank check.
Witn SpaceX Musk was mainly wasting his own money especially in the beginning. So it made sense. It just makes sense, it's not even a 'shortcut'.
Ps yes he did get some grants but not beefy unlimited ones.
Another thing SpaceX has going for it is when their tests fail everyone just points and laughs at Musk. When a NASA launch fails the taxpayers don't want to pay for it any longer.
It's kind of sad that we've become so risk averse. Risks should be fully disclosed but let the adventurers adventure.
Would Columbus' ship ever have been allowed to sail in the modern day? Proximity wingsuit flying and free-climbing is legal and people choose to do it even though the probability of death is extremely high. Spaceflight is significantly safer and far more beneficial to humanity, yet we block it. No one counts the lives lost due to slowing scientific progress but we should. How much further behind would we be scientifically if Darwin hadn't ventured out on the Beagle due to endless safety reviews. Would the US be what it is today if Lewis and Clark had to prove to congress that the trip was safe?
Given the opportunity, many of us would choose to die as part of a grand adventure in service to humanity vs. wither away of old age.
I wish I could downvote this comment more than once. It's incredibly ghoulish to use the perfectly-sensible argument that modern culture is too risk-averse to handwave away known critical safety problems. Those two things are completely orthogonal. Yes, astronauts should be willing to accept that there are "unknown unknowns" and that they will be facing some amount of unquantifiable risk, and they should be celebrated for this. That does not, not at all, mean that when a mission comes back with heat shield failures we know should not have happened, and multiple Inspector-General reports say the ship is not safe, those concerns should be blown off with rambling about Charles Darwin. That's pure insanity.
Or to put it another way, if you were the manager on the day of the Challenger launch issuing the "go" command over the objections of the Thiokol engineers saying it was unsafe to launch in below-freezing temperatures, would you have done so with paeans to Christopher Columbus? That's the sense I get from your post.
>The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.
> What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.
Indeed, this is a much more balanced take. And it turns out that the OP armchair expert is assuming NASA doesn't know what they are doing or is negligent.
The OP links a document from former astronaut Charles Camarda, who NASA explicitly invited in to check their work, and who observed the press conference the Ars article comes from. He addresses every point in it, including that one. Just because an article is contrary to a strident opinion doesn't make it 'balanced'. It matters whether the actual facts are true or not.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
This report from astronaut Camarda is indeed a bomb. Scaring.
I mean, it isn't like there are not multiple precedents for NASA to find a surprise safety issue, talk it down, and then see it literally blow up in their faces.
NASA is an institution and the incentives align with launching despite risk in cases where the risk was completely unanticipated. The project has its own momentum that it has gathered over time as it rolls down collecting opportunity costs and people tie themselves to it. If you think an astronaut would pull out of a launch because of a 5% risk of catastrophe... well you are talking about a group of people which originated from test pilot programs post-WWII where chances of blowing up with the gear was much much higher, so even though modern astronauts don't have the same direct experience, it isn't beyond reason to assume they inherent at least a bit of that bravado.
for human spaceflight we want a lot more than "likely" (>50%). The standard is usually "extremely likely" (~1/100 to 1/1000 chance of failure)
Maybe. What was the probability of Loss of Crew during Apollo? There were 9 crewed missions and 1 almost killed its crew (I will omit Apollo 1 for now). I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing a crew. Indeed, that was one reason given for cancelling the program.
The first Shuttle launch probably had a 1 in 4 chance of killing its crew. It was the first launch of an extremely complicated system and they sent it with a crew of two. Can you imagine NASA doing that today?
In a news conference last week, a NASA program manager estimated the Loss of Mission chance for Artemis II at between 1 in 2 and 1 in 50. They said, historically, a new rocket has a 1 in 2 chance of failure, but they learned much from Artemis I, so it's probably better than that. [Of course, that's Loss of Mission instead of Loss of Crew.]
My guess is NASA and the astronauts are comfortable with a 1 in 100 chance of Loss of Crew.
> There were 9 crewed missions and 1 almost killed its crew (I will omit Apollo 1 for now). I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing a crew.
That's not how risk analysis works.
Let's say every Apollo mission had gone flawlessly, and no one even came close to dying. Would you then say that the risk of death for future missions would be zero? No, of course not.
I thought I'd look this up. If you've had 9 successful attempts, assuming nothing has changed between them and no other prior knowledge about success probability, then Laplace’s Rule of Succession says the probability of the next mission being a success is about 83.3%, i.e. there is a 1 in 6 chance of failing next time.
> and no other prior knowledge about success probability
This phrase is misleading, as Laplace's Rule of Succession is equivalent to assuming a uniform Bayesian prior over all values of p. That is, before any experiments, a 50% chance of success. Depending on the situation, this may be roughly accurate or wildly wrong. You cannot appeal to this rule to resolve the situation.
Well, obviously if we have a better prior, then that's better. But assuming no other knowledge, and especially if we think that other people's priors could be intentionally misleading, this rule seems to offer the best estimate.
Generally speaking, you never truly have "no prior knowledge". Some relevant past experience, or "common sense", or something tips you away from "all probabilities are equally likely". I think this rule is rarely a best estimate.
If you only look at this data it would be the most reasonable guess.
Of course one should also analyze the technical sytems involved and then it is clear that 0% failure is not reasonable.
Bayes rule has existed for nearly 300 years, there is no excuse for ‘only look[ing] at this data’ and that is NEVER a reasonable thing to do.
> I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing a crew.
NASA computed the chance of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth” as less than 1 in 20. I would think a lot more than 1 in 20 of those failures would result in killing crew members.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190002249/downloads/20...:
“Appreciating and deemphasizing risk in Apollo
Joseph Shea, the Apollo program manager, chaired the initial Apollo systems architecting team. The “calculation was made by its architecting team, assuming all elements from propulsion to rendezvous and life support were done as well or better than ever before, that 30 astronauts would be lost before 3 were returned safely to the Earth. Even to do that well, launch vehicle failure rates would have to be half those ever achieved and with untried propulsion systems.”
The high risk of the moon landing was understood by the astronauts. Apollo 11's Command Module pilot Mike Collins described it as a “fragile daisy chain of events.” Collins and Neil Armstrong, the first man to step on the moon, rated their chances of survival at 50-50.
The awareness of risk let to intense focus on reducing risk. “The only possible explanation for the astonishing success – no losses in space and on time – was that every participant at every level in every area far exceeded the norm of human capabilities.”
However, this appreciation of the risk was not considered appropriate for the public. During Apollo, NASA conducted a full Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) to assess the likelihood of success in “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.” The PRA indicated the chance of success was “less than 5 percent.” The NASA Administrator felt that if the results were made public, “the numbers could do irreparable harm.” The PRA effort was cancelled and NASA stayed away from numerical risk assessment as a result.
1/100 is absolutely terrible. Shuttle had 1.5% failure rate. Bonkers.
[edit]
For comparison, commercial aviation has something like 1 in 5.8m or 6x 9's of reliability.
It's not terrible for space flight. Flying a rocket to the moon and commercial aviation are obviously very different things.
> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem.
False on both counts. Both the SRB joint design issue and the foam shedding were known, researched and dismissed very early in the shuttle program. They suspected it after STS-1 and confirmed it within a few flights.
It is easy to reconcile these two statements.
The "likely" in "likely ...to land safely" and "likely to work fine" is not nearly good enough.
Camarda isnt an outlier. Lots of people left that project after the Experimental Flight Test, which was done with the honeycomb (making Avcoat truly Avcoat) in 2014. Without Avcoat, spalling was inevitable and breakoff, oh yeah.
The design change by LM, not commentedkn by Textron is like. a beehive with no honeycomb-a crystallized block of honey.
i'll take the structural support of honeycomb any day.
It's a normalization of deviance. That is what Charlie is bringing voice to. Many of us fear reprisals and even when talking to heads of, like with Columbia, we are ignored.
So, Charlie is a voice of many people, not an outlier.
Absolutely not. I will not even consider the word of an organization that has repeatedly failed to learn from its past mistakes. They need to demonstrate an ability to learn first, and to do so they need to take these concerns seriously. That means no astronauts on Artemis II.
> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem.
Problems with the O-Rings had been known and on the morning before the challenger launched the engineers begged management to delay the launch.
They have analyzed the problem with 1D non-coupled models that are so poorly matched to reality they would receive an F in a high school science class.
They are YOLOing it. It is insulting that clowns like yourself continue to cover for them.
NASA lowers its standards every time an accident happens. When they designed Shuttle, they intended for a failure rate of 1 in 10,000 or thereabouts.
Remember, it was meant to fly dozens of times per year. At the real failure rate, we would have lost dozens of Shuttles by now. The public would have shut NASA down in protest for massacring astronauts.
Good job moving the goalposts.
> They just slink away, and then when the next event happens, they cry wolf again. When they happen to be right 2 of ~130 times, they get to say "see I told you so!" and go on speaking tours about how they figured it out but NASA wouldn't listen, say they should be considered for a leadership position in NASA etc.
NASA does not have a single model that accurately predicts the heatshield damage. They are lying about this fact and crossing their fingers that all is okay. That might work in SWE's little AWS and GCP world, it doesn't work during hypersonic reentry. IOW they are gambling.
If you have a college degree, especially one that taught statistics, put it in a shredder and remove it from your CV. This is embarrassing.
The issue with arguments like this is that people who make the claim "it's not safe!" never feel the negative consequences when everything goes to plan. They just slink away, and then when the next event happens, they cry wolf again. When they happen to be right 2 of ~130 times, they get to say "see I told you so!" and go on speaking tours about how they figured it out but NASA wouldn't listen, say they should be considered for a leadership position in NASA etc. To the people who think they are YOLO'ing it and that disaster is inevitable, they should be willing to actually put something on the line (promising never to talk about the topic again, money, etc.) and have some skin in the game. Otherwise, such claims are worthless.
Minor nitpick: OP didn't say "maybe very likely". He said "hopefully very likely". They are, in my mind, different things.
> The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe.
This take completely ignores Camarda's observations that there is a culture of fear spreading at NASA which punishes whistleblowers. I'm not saying he's 100% correct, but how can you claim such a take is truly balanced if there's a possibility one of the parties is engaging in a cover-up?
The engineers at NASA & astronauts aboard Columbia & Challenger also believed the programs were safe.
> It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is involved.
Look up the term "expected value". If pressing a button has a 10% chance of destroying Earth, it is both 1) likely that pressing it will do nothing AND 2) the case that pressing it is extremely unsafe.
>The engineers at NASA believe it is safe.
it doesn't matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II
"It will be the second flight of the Space Launch System (SLS), the first crewed mission of the Orion spacecraft, and the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972."
such "second/first" were ok 60 years ago. Today the only reason for that is that the SLS isn't reusable while the cost is hyper-astronomical.
Today's tech complexity, engineering culture and overall managerial processes don't allow the first/second to succeed as a rule. Even the best - Space X - has got several failed launches back then for Falcon and now for Starship.
Of course we wish success, and it will probably succeed - just like the Russian roulette so aptly mentioned in the sibling comment.
As a former NASA guy I would trust Eric Bergers measured and detailed reporting here over that blog post that says they are all going to die
As he shows that Olivas changed his mind:
“ Olivas told me he had changed his mind, expressing appreciation and admiration for the in-depth engineering work done by the NASA team. He would now fly on Orion”
Anyway we live in an age of armchair experts in youtube (who are often very smart but quick to rush to judgment without enough context)
The article explains the situation in a more balanced and fair light
How about former NASA engineer Charles Camarda? Linked from the article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
I agree, this report from astronaut Camarda should really alarm NASA.
Someone please answer my obvious question. We sent successful missions to the moon sixty years ago. What heat shield material was used for the Apollo capsules, and why would we need something different now? Are the Artemis mission parameters totally different in a way that requires a new design? Or was Apollo incredibly dangerous and we got lucky they didn’t all fail catastrophically? The article mentions Orion is much heavier than the Apollo capsules, does that really require a totally novel heat shield that takes $billions to develop?
The Apollo command module used Avcoat, the same material as Orion. But there are two key differences:
1. The application method is different. Apollo applied it to a metal honeycomb structure with very small cells, while Orion uses blocks of the material. (NASA tried the honeycomb approach for Orion, but it was too labor-intensive).
2. Orion is much bigger and heavier than the Apollo command module. The informal consensus is that Apollo may have been at the upper size limit for using Avcoat.
> NASA tried the honeycomb approach for Orion, but it was too labor-intensive
So cost cutting, as always.
Engineering is done in the context of constraints, cost is one constraint - and its a relatively conserved constraint. Saving labor in one area allows for more care in other areas. Especially given that labor is often not cost constrained, but skill constrained, which is less elastic.
You would be the first person to ever accuse the Orion program of cutting costs.
More precise would be:
NASA is an organization that is dysfunctional and way too expensive for what it does. It then decided to use agressive cost cutting to cover up these problems.
There's different kinds of costs: cost to the government, and cost to actually build the thing.
The contractor has no trouble inflating the first one whenever they can, but they want to strip the second one to the bone to maximize profits.
For the Apollo spacecrafts:
> The paste-like material was gunned into each of the 330,000 cells of the fiberglass honeycomb individually, a process taking about six months. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCOAT#Apollo_Command_Module
The fix for not doing that by hand is to get a robot to do it, given the applicator is human-held, a human-strength Kuka with enough reach to cover the area it can handle before the applicator needs refurbishment of some sort which would give a good opportunity to move the robot to a new section of the heat shield.
Thats what engineering is. If you dont have to consider cost or labor, a lot of engineering becomes much easier.
Apollo was ridiculously expensive. it was a proof of concept, but not sustainable for long term exploration
How expensive in comparison to the nuclear submarines or nuclear carriers?
The Apollo program cost about as much as 22 Gerald Ford class nuclear carriers.
Amortized over the whole program, each launch cost the same as building 2 Gerald Ford class nuclear carriers, or $26 billion USD.
> How expensive in comparison to the nuclear submarines or nuclear carriers?
SLS already costs about as much as a nuclear submarine. Per launch.
At its peak the Apollo program was about 6% of US GDP.
About 4% of the federal budget and 6% of discretionary spending at its peak, not of GDP.
Still a very high number, but nowhere near the military-budget-levels you're talking about.
Labor intensive methods aren't automatically better: you have more manual steps which must be done perfectly and validated etc.
How reliable is this information?
Just out of curiosity, do we know if the honeycomb method worked before it was deemed too labor intensive? Because I'm told that using this block method results in chunks blowing out.
I'm also having a problem with this set-up: Apollo is at the upper size limit for avcoat; Orion is way bigger; use avcoat.
Reading a real front-fell-off aura from this project. It makes me wonder if spending 6% of GDP to develop and run a crewed lunar program 60 years ago and then immediately destroying the evidence, r&d artifacts, and materials fab capabilities was a good idea.
too labor intensive - each launch already costs like $1bn, how bad can it be
As explained in the article, it’s typical margin cutting.
In this document (thats also linked in the main article) you find a great explanation to your question.
The original design used a honeycomb structure, because problems with cracking and gas permeability had been known (in the 1960s).
On the other hand it would be more labor intensive to build it in that way.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
Arguably, the goal isnt to go to the moon. Thats the mission, but the goal is to improve our capabilities of space travel. Improving our understanding and engineering of heat shields is one such case
The very first Apollo attempt killed three astronauts. We would need something different now because the cold-war-crazy days are behind us, and we don't push ahead with missions that might end up in casualties.
We do push ahead with missions that might end up in casualties. It's just a matter of risk tolerance.
It's impossible to say a space flight mission has 0% chance of casualty. It might be impossible to say that for virtually any activity involving humans.
Related - what does SpaceX Dragon use for heat shield material and can it be used on Orion?
PICA-3, per https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-sp...
> All this would be inexplicable enough if, indeed, AVCOAT was the only known material from which heat shields could be built. But while Lockheed continues to soak the US taxpayer and play chicken with the lives of NASA’s astronauts with this “flight proven” (but completely different) design, Lockheed happily built a PICA heat shield for JPL’s large Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance, and SpaceX’s Dragon capsule also uses PICA-3.
Or Apollo development was a massive boondoggle that would never work and a small subset of those involved faked it to avoid being fired or going to prison. I know that directors of multibillion dollar projects lying to save their own skin is unheard of, but hear me out.
Artemis, launching on April Fools Day, seems like a joke waiting to happen.
> “Our test facilities can’t reach the combination of heat flux, pressure, shear stresses, etc., that an actual reentering spacecraft does. We’re always having to wait for the flight test to get the final certification that our system is good to go.”—Jeremy VanderKam, deputy manager for Orion’s heat shield, speaking in 2022
This is a strange claim, considering NASA used to have 2 facilities that were capable of this - one at Johnson and one at Ames. They were consolidated (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160001258/downloads/20...) but it seems like the Arc Jet Complex at Ames is still operational https://www.nasa.gov/ames/arcjet-complex/
The Orion heat shield is sixteen feet across. NASA's test facilities can only test small material samples in these facilities, not capture how the entire heat shield will behave.
How does SpaceX test it? Have they needed to solve this problem?
There were 19 successful unmanned Dragon 1 missions before Crew Dragon, and an unmanned Crew Dragon mission before the first crewed one (actually two missions, but one didn't reenter from orbit). The heat shield material and design was essentially the same and so there was a great deal of flight heritage.
In particular I don't think its physically possible to test Orion components in flight very many times. It relies on SLS which chews through 4 space-shuttle engines every time, which even with unlimited money I don't think you could acquire a large supply of very quickly.
Not only that, but it has to reach much higher altitudes in order to also reach the much higher re-entry velocities that it will have IRL. That makes testing Orion very expensive. Testing Crew Dragon was much much cheaper.
SLS is required to get Orion to the moon, but there are other options for LEO tests. Exploration Flight Test-1 was performed on a Delta IV Heavy, and Falcon Heavy is also capable of launching Orion to LEO (and now New Glenn, although that wouldn't have been an option at the time NASA needed to start work on another Orion test).
By having a much higher launch cadence and then analyzing the flight hardware afterwards.
Also, they don't have anything human rated going beyond LEO. Coming back from the moon means you're going significantly faster and thus need a better heat shield
... so the real problem is that to get back and slow down nicely would require so much more launch mass, right?
(By slow down I mean to change to an orbit that has more drag and wouldn't take forever to return to Earth.)
They do iterative flight testing. Starship is I believe on its twelfth flight test; the first one was in 2023.
Crew Dragon flew an automated demo flight before flying with crew. It was proceeded by 20 flights of Dragon 1 over 10 years.
Starship's heatshield has already been tested full-up half a dozen times. Many changes have been made as a result.
SpaceX tests these in prod. Kinda like Artemis I did.
And this is actually a decent strategy, but you can only really do this when you have lots of unmanned flights.
Nothing stops you from doing this with manned flights except that it's not culturally accepted currently.
But maybe that changes as NASA will demonstrate with artemis 2 and 3 (which will then use another newly desiged heat shield).
By blowing up unmanned spacecraft and letting the ones that survive catch fire?
SpaceX has a reusable launch vehicle, so they could afford to fly a whole mess of unmanned flights before they stuck a human in there
They launch rockets
This is a concerning read, I'm not quite sure what the driving motivation is for Artemis, but the following answered at least part of my question -
> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget
I understand why NASA might be a little antsy but 100B over 25 years doesn't seem like a lot for America for a long horizon project.
It's 100b just to begin - the full bill would be multiples of that.
And there are options now.
I am very not brave but I'd volunteer. The trip is far more awesome than anything I have planned for the rest of my life. And if the shield fails on reentry it would only hurt for a few seconds. So if the crew and the backups and their backups read this and have second thoughts, ping me.
I'm sure the other astronauts are really looking forward to fly with a person showing signs of suicidal ideation.
Suicide ideation and someone willing to take massive risks for something awesome are very different things
I'm sure the other astronauts are really looking forward to fly with a person showing signs of tolerating massive risks.
Each and every one of them is fully aware that it’s a massive risk and has made their peace with that. You’re getting strapped to a giant rocket. It’s inherently dangerous
I don’t actually think astronauts take massive risks. They take massively well-understood and meticulously mitigated risks.
Maybe this is a perspective or semantics thing, but I think it’s distinct and important. They’re not Mavericks they’re Icemans.
> They take massively well-understood and meticulously mitigated risks.
Hopefully they're well-understood and meticulously mitigated risks. Because if they're not... well there's always modern day Boeing.
Right, so let's add more risk by flying side by side with some nutjob with no regard for their own life. Sounds reasonable.
> The trip is far more awesome than anything I have planned for the rest of my life.
If you would give your live for a single awsome trip (and you would still have multiple years to live), then you are likely suicidal.
Even if it is rational because your live sucks so hard, I would still have to classify you as suicidal.
Is jumping on a grenade to save another person suicidal? Or is it just a matter of you not agreeing with the rational?
...no? It's the same as when you say you'd 'die for somebody'. I don't want to die, but if I had to die to save my family I would. That's not being suicidal. Similarly, if space is important enough to you to take this risk (which realistically is a pretty low risk!) I wouldn't call that suicidal either. I take the risk of death driving in my car every day; that's the nature of life.
I read this as "accepting a risk of death in exchange for getting to have the incredible experience of flying to the Moon", not that they want to die.
There are different outlooks on risk, but the attitude can certainly be described as cavalier towards life, and may signal something stronger.
This is an interesting comment -- your life is precious brother, you might have something in store down the road :)
Depending on one's age, maybe not honestly? (Not the OP)
If they’re that age, they’re not qualified to be in the crew anyway.
John Glenn was 77 when he flew on the Space Shuttle...
In your opinion: at what age does someone become unworthy of life?
That’s definitely not my point, what I meant was it’s not unreasonable for someone who’s older - maybe children have grown, at our nearing retirement, etc. - why not take a risk to fly to space?
My theory is that this is something I’d say/do aged 20, and laugh at aged 60. I’m slightly closer to 60 and am into the ‘No’ zone.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
I wonder how many young minds were twisted by old hypocrites.
the old lie
The young die.
I too played rome total war!
I haven't, but I read the Wilfred Owen poem about young men dying for nothing in WW1.
HN generally skews towards the life-affirming/death-fearing quadrant so I don't think many will relate to you here. It still seems safer than being in an active warzone which hundreds of millions of people somehow manage to tolerate.
You would probably not IRL and if you would anyway it would just mean you're not qualified for the flight. Nasa needs smart people who wants to live and succeed their mission, not people who are ok to die because muh space exploration
> I am very not brave but I'd volunteer.
>> Artemis II could fly just as easily without astronauts on board
I think they were saying they would sign up just for the experience, even if it's unnecessary to the program.
But that was exactly the point I was responding to, no? If NASA was fine with skipping the astronauts, then they would just send it unmanned, not find a random volunteer.
especially not one that may chicken out ( "very not brave" ) and destroy the cabin from the inside out by any means necessary (bashing at walls, pissing in cracks, etc.)
Data points that worry me:
02/1967 - Apollo 1 fire
01/1986 - Challenger disaster (19 yrs later)
02/2003 - Columbia disaster (17 yrs later)
It's been 23 years since Columbia, and there seems to be a 20-ish year rhythm to NASA disasters where the organization learns lessons, becomes more careful... and then standards potentially slip.
> This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and the first time the 20-year-old Orion capsule flies with people on board.
THEY REUSE THESE CAPSULES?!
They do not, except for some of the avionics.
That makes me feel better.
This whole project seems pretty lame.
Um, yeah. Welcome to the 21'st century, did you enjoy your long nap?
Well genius are there other 20 year old reusable space craft that haven't turned to plasma while trying to re-enter the earth's atmosphere that I'm not aware of?
This seems like the only one, and according TFA, it sucks.
If you are serious about moon, there should be dozen of unmanned landers setting up the infrastructure before first human landers. There should be plenty of time to test human rated stuff multiple times. This is only problem because it's second mission and right with humans. If it was 24th and first human mission all these unknowns would be solved.
Ergo the mission design is wrong, not the heat shield design.
Have you considered that would do nothing to solve Donald Trump's political problem that he promised to make boomers feel like they were reliving their halcyon days one last time?
The heatshield is not quite Avcoat. It is missing the crucial honeycomb that gives it structural integrity. I worked on EFT-1. It's test flight was gorgeous (2014). LM decided to remove the honeycomb. It is like a beehive with no honeycomb.
I changed projects bc it was obvious to that the risk was substantial, long befor Artemis was called Artemis, people said this.
Sorry, I had to google it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_Flight_Test-1
> [...] previously known as Orion Flight Test 1 [...] Without a crew, it was launched on December 5, 2014 [...]
I have no takes on Artemis, but just wanted to say how happy I am for another post from idlewords. Some of my most favorite articles on the internet are on that site.
Thank you! Like NASA, I hope to up my operational tempo.
A lot of the discussion overlooks or wishes to avoid an uncomfortable problem with the Artemis program: Artemis III's hardware will not be ready for the forseeable future. The program has had multiple shakeups so far. This is a program heading for cancellation.
The flight risk is surely acceptable if this is not the first flight of many but the last.
The threat of a Chinese moon landing keeps the Artemis program alive. As long as Artemis is slowly working towards the goal of eventually landing Americans on the surface of the moon and eventually building a habitat they can be injected with money and manpower whenever geopolitical or ideological demands arise. If it was canceled outright it would be much harder to react to any Chinese success
>The threat of a Chinese moon landing keeps the Artemis program alive.
I don't disagree but I also don't really get it. The US performed the feat almost 60 years ago when the technology to do it didn't exist at the beginning of the program, and people didn't even know if it would be possible.
Today it's pretty well understood as a funding challenge more than anything. And sending people with the level of automation we have available today is essentially just a political move.
There's the obvious meme of "the US used to be able to do it, but can they still do it?". That wouldn't stand in question if the US had say a Mars mission, but if all the US can show are some low earth orbit activities while China has astronauts walking the moon that makes for a great propaganda point for the Chinese. Something to the tune of "As the American empire declines, the Chinese empire rises"
But the more impactful point is that the Chinese don't want to stop at what the Apollo program accomplished. They want to build a moon base, turn it into a lunar research station and invite other countries to cooperate. If the Chinese are wildly successful on that front, cooperating with them to get access to their moon base might be very enticing. Both for research about the moon and about low gravity. If the US doesn't answer with their own moon base that might end up in a reversal of the ISS situation (where everyone except China was invited to cooperate on the ISS).
Of course we don't know whether the Chinese will be successful in those points. But so far their space program has a great track record. They did manage to build their own space stations and lunar rovers, everything after that is, as you say, mostly a funding challenge
> Today it's pretty well understood as a funding challenge more than anything.
I'm not sure this is true. We had very good scientists and engineers at that time.
> The threat of a Chinese moon landing
Maybe I’m naive, but what is the threat here?
> If it was canceled outright it would be much harder to react to any Chinese success
I feel like the appropriate reaction would be to congratulate China.
We need more people like you in government
I understand the point you’re making, but if this is a programme doomed to achieve nothing, that makes the risk even less acceptable.
That is equally fair. My position I suppose is that my enthusiasm has been spent on so many half-finished ambitious programs like this that it has all run out by 2026. Constellation, Asteroid Redirect, Artemis. If I was older that would include SEI.
At least this one had real missions fly if it suffers the same fate. The crew of Artemis is among the ones most aware that most space missions never happen. The anxiety of being in these astronaut classes must be unbearable, especially as the ISS ages. I don't know if this mission can maintain public confidence in the program as the world grows more chaotic and people's attentions are not focused on the sky but the ground.
I think you mean Artemis IV (the moon landing)? Artemis III is now a near Earth orbit mission to dock with whatever mockup lander SpaceX or Blue Origin can throw up in time.
Right, I forgot about that development. A very late change in program structure, and having your main lander option have an indefinite schedule is quite bad!
You're saying that as if Artemis III is going to be the first time Artemis eats delays.
What I'm seeing from Artemis recently is "good signs of life" rather than the opposite.
They acknowledged that Artemis III is "system tests" rather than "a full landing", which gives it far better chances of happening before 2030. They're trimming the fat deposits from the program by removing things like Gateway or NRHO. They're pushing for a more aggressive launch cadence. They're actually seriously bringing up "a persistent Moon base" and "manned flights every 6 months" as Artemis program goals.
This is more focus and ambition than what NASA had in actual literal decades.
I expect there are a dozen equally possible to occur catastrophic failures that the team at NASA knows about, has analyzed, and the decision has been made to take the risk and launch.
Spaceflight is complicated. We don't know everything. There is a lot of unknowns that happen everytime you light off a rocket.
It is a lot easier for Elon, as the loss is only a pile of money.
Without ever working at NASA, I expect there is a week long "risk management prior to launch" meeting where many, many issues are brought up, discussed, and decided.
> The trouble is that the heat shield on Orion blows chunks. Not in some figurative, pejorative sense, but in the sense that when NASA flew this exact mission in 2022, large pieces of material blew out of Orion’s heat shield during re-entry, leaving divots. Large bolts embedded in the heat shield also partially eroded and melted through.
Fun wording. This isn't news, concerns have been raised about Artemis II saftey in the past 3+ years since Artemis I and before then as well.
The point of the blog post is that those concerns have not been adequately addressed.
I think the point is to re-roll as many times as needed for clout.
The blog post points or the flawed spacecraft? /s
I would like to understand why it happens so often to organizations that a currupted and dyfunctional behaviour takes over. And it seems to happen more often to institutions run by governments.
Examples could be the Challenger disaster where managers overruled the engineers (who said in a meeting a launch was too dangerous) or the Boing 737max. Also a lot of companies in germany that I experienced (as employee and as consultant) seem similiar.
One reason could be (and I saw that myself) is that there can be a situation where the best employees start leaving. It's likely natural since they can find something else easier than the others.
> And it seems to happen more often to institutions run by governments.
I've snorted my coffee. I happens to any organization that's run by people who are only in it for power, not outcomes.
>I would like to understand why it happens so often to organizations that a currupted and dyfunctional behaviour takes over. And it seems to happen more often to institutions run by governments.
Most people want nothing more than to complete a job to the satisfaction of their supervisor and go home for the day. When you get large groups of people together, this will always be the majority. Mission driven folks will always be crowded out of a large organization, replaced by careerists who play the meta game.
Where are the mission driven people and what are they doing? (just asking for a friend ;)
So would you say that every large organization is doomed?
I read something about the Challenger disaster being predicted by an engineer and they wrote a memo about the risk because they were worried about it, but it didn't get through. I wondered if this was the only memo ever about risks to the space shuttle, or if it was one of hundreds and it just got the actual cause by luck.
Does anyone know any more about this?
The article seems compelling, but experience tells me to get both sides of a story before judging.
Anyone know if there's a detailed response from NASA to the article?
There’s been plenty of coverage of this issue, and this article discusses some of the changed they made: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/the-artemis-...
The only thing the author of this blog piece has to offer that’s new is his very strong personal intuition that the new design hasn’t been properly validated, without any engineering explanation about why the testing the performed won’t adequately simulate real world performance.
Their testing procedures failed to predict the char loss before the flight, so they don't seem very reliable.
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/03/30/nasas-artemis...
"countdown clock started ticking down" "to a targeted launch time of 6:24 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1."
I’m fairly confident NASA doesn’t read Maciej’s blog. However I’m confident that many people there read the Google doc he linked to. I suggest you do too.
While I appreciate independent bloggers, I think that the HackerNews community should expect big claims, like a NASA cover up:
> NASA’s initial instinct was to cover up the problem.
to at least warrant a link.
mechanical engineering background here. the heat shield honeycomb → block change sounds like a classic cost/complexity tradeoff where you lose structural integrity for easier manufacturing.
reminds me of automotive safety recalls that trace back to "simplified" component designs. sometimes the old complex way was complex for a reason.
I don't know anything about this program, so here's a basic question: why does manufacturing need to be easier? Are they intending to mass produce these craft?
Easier to manufacture usually means easier to reproduce. With something like this, you don't want variance.
Yeah that's the second part. So do they intend manufacture these en masse? If not, why not bite the bullet and manufacture it to spec, since it seems like the honeycomb is integral to the performance? Even if they do, what are we going to do with some number of deeply flawed craft?
Maciej now has a Mars newsletter, which I obviously subscribed to immediately: https://mceglowski.substack.com/
I didn’t even have a strong interest in space before the dude started writing about it. Maciej could write about literal rocks and make it worthwhile to read.
I just read one blog post ("Musk on Mars") and it was indeed excellent. He seems to have quite a small readership though, judging from the Substack reactions.
It's subscribers only and costs $5/month.
Yeah, though some posts a free. I think real problem is that he decided to start a Mars blog two weeks before SpaceX announced they are now focusing on the moon instead, and prior to that merging with xAI, effectively cancelling any Mars plans.
> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget. The charismatic new Administrator has staked his reputation on increasing launch cadence, and set an explicit goal of landing astronauts on the Moon before President Trump’s term expires in January of 2029.
So, rushing, to fulfill an arbitrary PR schedule dictated by further chasing of the yesteryears of America instead of calmly evaluating "what did we screw up, what needs to be fixed, and what can we do about it in order to bring this into reality, safely?"
"Things of quality have no fear of time" should be carved into the walls at NASA.
Why don't they use Starship, seems like Musk's company has a great record overall for designing and operating spacecraft. I asked Gemini, of course Boeing is in the picture: "NASA has contracts with multiple partners (Boeing, Lockheed Martin) for the SLS and Orion, and shifting entirely to Starship would require canceling these expensive, legally binding contracts.".
Starship explodes
Starship has also never launched a payload as heavy as the Orion stack. It's about 60k pounds. Starship has also never even reached orbit yet. I believe it's capable but, like, it would be nice to be demoed first.
Starship has only ever lifted 44k pounds, and most of it's more successful tests operate only with 35k pounds.
“…in early 2026, NASA decided to add an additional Artemis mission to the manifest. The new Artemis III would fly in 2027 as a near-Earth mission to test docking with whatever lunar lander (Blue Origin or SpaceX) was available. The first moon landing would be pushed back to the mission after that, Artemis IV. This change removed any rationale for flying astronauts on Artemis II.”
Is there truly no engineering or science merit to flying astronauts by the Moon?
For today technology, it's as hard as flying an empty crew module with all the live keeping equipment turned on. Add Buster from Mythbuster to get more accurate data about the forces on a human.
I think SpaceX used a piece of cheese in one of their test fliying arround Earth, just to show that the temperature was never outside a confortable range. They could have user the sensor they already had, but using the cheese too is good for PR.
I wonder what the heat shield engineers actually think of this. It's my understanding that in the Challenger disaster, the engineers were aware of the problem and tried to do something about it, but management weren't having it
> The most energetic voice of public dissent has been heat shield expert and Shuttle astronaut Charles Camarda, the former Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center. [...] he ended up publishing a cri de coeur that I encourage everyone to read in full.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
Never thought I would randomly run into Idle Words again but here we are !
And this is definitely concerning stuff
I have a bad feeling about this project.
It reminds me of both the movies Capricorn 1 and Iron Sky ... and not in any good way.
Lots of people have bad feelings about things. If it all turns out okay, they generally forget about the premonitions. If it goes bad, then they believe that their gut instinct is reliably correct.
When I was small, I used to have bad feelings about my parents getting in a car accident every time they went out. It never happened, and they lived into their 90s.
But this mission does not have O.J. Simpson. Does it ?
I was thinking of the risk of the crew capsule burning up on reentry, due to a possibly faulty heat shield — and people in charge knowing about the risk beforehand but going on with it anyway.
I had forgotten that O.J Simpson had been in the movie, to be honest.
Hypothetical to wrap my head around scope: Say we had a spacecraft that was 100% capable of launching from Earth, orbiting the moon, and landing back on Earth, but it also had the docking equipment to be compatible with ISS. Could I decide, while orbiting the moon, that I'd rather dock with the ISS instead? Is that at all feasible or is it one of those, "we're not lined up for any of this. It's basically impossible." things?
It is one of those, "we're not lined up for any of this. It's basically impossible." things Completely different orbits, would need a ton of extra fuel, not at all possible for Artemis (or any other mission for that matter)
You’d need a load of additional propellant to insert yourself into the same orbit as the ISS on your return, which would have an exponential effect on the amount of propellant needed in the first place to get all this lot out to the moon. It would be a different vehicle.
Your comment is dead for some reason but let me help.
Orbital mechanics are not something you can just intuit, but are pretty simple.
Learn about Delta V. Play some Kerbal space program. View this diagram:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_sy...
The ISS isn't listed but the math doesn't change much for it VS the listed 250km earth orbit.
TL;DR
In space you can think of yourself as captured in an orbit. It takes a lot of energy (fuel) to boost yourself out of that orbit and flying towards some other body. But after that, you have to also expend more fuel to actually be captured by that orbit. The returning craft would have to expend energy to be captured by the earth's orbit to rendezvous with the ISS, rather than just hit earth and land.
it doesnt matter, they have to produce some kind of result at this point lets go get em up there
Isn't this the exact kind of scenario where you'd hope someone from above (like, idk, the president) would block the launch?
Not that I expect that to happen, but worth keeping in mind in case something horrible happens. NASA wouldn't be the only one responsible for lost lives.
Isn’t any flight into space risky? I doubt that the first flights were safer than this one.
Related: NASA's Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage by Casey Handmer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794242
Is Orion’s heat shield really safe? New NASA chief conducts final review on eve of flight. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori...
Looks like they did some reassuring testing for the worst case scenario:
Definitely concerned to hear but I’m hopeful that the core of nasa is intact. They’re some of the kindest and smartest people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. They don’t joke around with lives on the line. I hope the best for everyone involved. I’ll be watching the launch of Artemis 2 and 3 with excitement and hope.
NASA’s track record says otherwise, no? Challenger and Columbia come to mind.
I'm nowhere near qualified to say if the design is not safe, but I'm suprised the article doesn't mention that some heat shields are designed to indeed, blow chunks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry#Ablative
This one is an ablative heat shield, but it’s supposed to flake off gracefully, not break off in large chunks.
Each of the program managers responsible for go/no-go are to take an oath of death. If there is a loss of crew and it can be attributed to the foreknown 3 different issues (heat shield spalling, heat shield fragment impacts, bolt erosion), then you die.
I think if that were the rule, all the program managers would just quit and there would be no manned spaceflight anymore.
"If the heat shield breaks then I will die" is the exact situation for the astronauts, and yet we still have astronauts.
In fact it's worse for the astronauts, because in this hypothetical only the heat shield failing will condemn the POs to death, whereas any critical part failing kills the astronauts
Yes, it's a much sexier job than project manager, but clearly there are some people, in some circumstances, that would accept it.
> But do we really have to wait for astronauts to die to re-learn the same lessons a third time?
Humans don't seem to learn in the way we think or what them to
Let's not forget that, much more recently than Challenger and Columbia, NASA showed signs of launch fever in the Starliner program.
Starliner was not safe to fly either, thrusters couldn't be trusted, but Boeing and NASA managed pushed on and decided to fly anyway. The flight demonstrated that the problems were bad indeed. NASA communications pretended things were not good but not disastrous.
Turns out things were much worse than NASA and Boeing wanted to admit: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/nasa-chief-classifies-...
“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. “It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”
Still, after astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams eventually docked at the station, Boeing officials declared it a success. “We accomplished a lot, and really more than expected,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, during a post-docking news conference. “We just had an outstanding day.”
The true danger the astronauts faced on board Starliner was not publicly revealed until after they landed and flew back to Houston. In an interview with Ars, Wilmore described the tense minutes when he had to take control of Starliner as its thrusters began to fail, one after the other.
One thing that has surprised outside observers since publication of Wilmore’s harrowing experience is how NASA, knowing all of this, could have seriously entertained bringing the crew home on Starliner.
Isaacman clearly had questions as well. He began reviewing the internal report on Starliner, published last November, almost immediately after becoming the space agency administrator in December. He wanted to understand why NASA insisted publicly for so long that it would bring astronauts back on Starliner, even though there was a safe backup option with Crew Dragon.
“Pretending that that did not exist, and focusing exclusively on a single pathway, created a cultural issue that leadership should have been able to step in and course correct,” Isaacman said during the teleconference. “What levels of the organization inside of NASA did that exist at? Multiple levels, including, I would say, right up to the administrator of NASA.”
Some of NASA’s biggest lapses in judgment occurred before the crew flight test, the report found. In particular, these revolved around the second orbital flight test of Starliner, which took place two years earlier, in May 2022.
During this flight, which was declared to be successful, three of the thrusters on the Starliner Service Module failed. In hindsight, this should have raised huge red flags for what was to come during the mission of Wilmore and Williams two years later.
However, in his letter to NASA employees, Isaacman said the NASA and Boeing investigations into these failures did not push hard enough to find the root cause of the thruster failures.
And so on. Lots of parallels with the Artemis program, though in Artemis Isaacman doesn't seem to be following his own conclusions from the Starliner failure.
To some extent I think since the challenger disaster trying to blow the whistle on safety issues at NASA has been romantacized.
For me, so long as the information is transparently discussed with the astronauts they can agree or disagree. But the task is intrinsically extremely risky.
It makes it very challenging for anyone to really know how to balance those risks.
The peak outcome (modal, mean at least) is a good outcome. But the tail is very very long with all the little ways a catastrophe can occur. I think the median outcome is also deeply in the "good" category.
And we sample this curve a few times a decade!
The Artemis program has cost over $100 billion so far.
It doesn’t make any sense to spend that much money on something that’s still Russian roulette for the astronauts.
If the purpose of the human risk is to let the agency accomplish more, then it needs to be reflected in the cost as a drastic reduction (so you can actually spend the money on doing more). Now Artemis is the worst of both worlds.
If you need expect perfection then we will never have a space mission.
Let the astronauts give informed consent. If they mission is to dangerous for NASA then we can only hope, ISRO, CNSA or ROSCOSMOS will go.
The point is that a $100B mission that’s still dangerous and only replicates 1960s achievements is completely pointless.
If they had set out to replicate the Moon landing at much lower cost and a controlled risk, that could have been different. Now they ended up with a very expensive, unsafe, and uninteresting mission - the worst possible combination.
So what's your point? Spend more on a project that is complete but not up to your standard?
Or Extend the mission to something novel? Some how without ballooning the project?
Neither is possible in the slightest.
For what it's worth the Apollo program adjusted for inflation is pushing 200bn USD compared to Artemis 100bn.
The Artemis programme is far safer than the Apollo program in terms of risk, Apollo sampled a much flatter high risk curve just 7 times.
Bottom line let the Astronauts decide what they consider safe enough they're very smart people and deserve to be allowed to give informed consent.
Right or wrong about this, none of us can do much about it at this point. The die is cast. I guess we'll just wait and see.
What I don't get is why the heck are the astronauts willing to risk their lives on something they must know by now is so dangerous? Is it really better to risk death than to risk getting fired?
There aren't many people left who've been that close to the moon. Lots of people would love to be on that list.
Because even in the worst case what we are really talking about is just much higher risk than the government is claiming, but its still far more likely to succeed than fail. Plenty of people would take a 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 chance of dying if it meant they could walk on the moon.
To be honest I don't know how close to non-fiction "The Right Stuff" (book or film) was but if you watch it you'd maybe gain an understanding for why astronauts do these things. At least that part is believable.
> why are the astronauts willing to risk their lives
There are a lot of funerals in chapter 1 of Tom Wolfe's book, "The Right Stuff".
I suggest that some choice of profession come with a higher life-risk tolerance than others. "Accountants willing to risk their lives for the job" would be news. Firefighters, less so. Test pilots or astronauts, not much at all.
This degree of lifespan-maximization is something you might have but others don’t necessarily share. E.g. old people went to Fukushima to sort it out. “Was it really better to risk death than to risk getting fired?”
Neither of these are major risks compared to never being what you want to be.
> Neither of these are major risks compared to never being what you want to be.
I want you to repeat those words as you melt away re-entering the atmosphere.
That’s not my purpose so dying that way doesn’t seem that appealing.
Replace it with whatever you consider “worth dying for”.
In that case it seems all right. Certainly if I died in Apollo 1 and I cared about spaceflight and making it to the Moon before the Russians I wouldn’t see it as unworthy.
The Shuttle deaths no problem.
Some people go to war for the thrill of it, others do base jumping, free solo climbing and whole lot of other activities that eventually kill many of them. It is in their genes.
NASA operates as a terminal, bloated monopoly that has completely severed its feedback loops with physical reality in favor of preserving a 25-year-old architectural fantasy. The Orion heat shield is essentially a buggy hardware release being pushed into a mission-critical production environment despite the fact that its own internal telemetry is screaming about a catastrophic failure. By choosing to ignore the spalling and the melted structural bolts, the agency is deliberately discarding the engineering equivalent of core dump data to maintain a schedule that satisfies political optics rather than Newtonian physics.
It's really hard to parse that out over the backdrop of a fascist regime that thinks time ended in the 60s, and we should turn back the clock.
One thing I'm missing here, did the heat shield actually burn through on the earlier test or not?
Fortunately, the most likely outcome is another indefinite delay at the last minute.
tufte
The author seems to have a pretty extensive history of… strong disdain for Artemis II. While has mentioned concerns about the heat shield before it was in the context of a laundry list of complaints, and it was nowhere close to the top.
I’m not a rocket scientist, but then neither is the author.
If I recall correctly the Author worked at NASA.
I never worked at NASA. Maybe you're confusing me with Casey Handmer, who has also written on this topic?
Which somehow is supposed to make him more authoritative than NASA itself?
This comment in dripping with elitism. We trusted the rocket scientists and what did that get us? The Challenger disaster. /s
Sean Duffy:
"do not let safety be the enemy of progress"
aka some of you may die but I'm okay with that and will sleep fine
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/interim-nasa-head-tells...
Does it count as inclusion if we blow up the most gender and race diverse crew in history?
Can't they do a few loops around the planet and skim only the upper atmosphere? always worked well for me on kerbal space program, haha
This is actually what is thought to partially have caused the damage seen previously. The new trajectory is supposed to just have a single heating pulse instead of two.
Aerobraking causes heat cycles. Expanding and contracting a material that already has "not large, large chunks missing" doesn't seem very prudent. Even before the evidence of deterioration, I'm not sure the safety culture at NASA would reach for that any time soon when a single high-temp event would work.
interesting; obviously kerbal space logic does not apply to the real world... thanks for the explainer as to why
I wouldn't be nearly so concerned if not for the blatant coverup and downplaying from NASA. This makes the whole situation easily pattern match to Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia, where political pressure to ignore problems and drive forward anyway got people needlessly killed.
Welcome back, Maciej!
It's not actually Avcoat. It was changed by LM. Thw honeycomb was removed. Imagine a beehive with no honeycomb and a slop of honey is what you have. Crystallized/solid honey, but honey never the less.
How much of this is Trump trying to look good by rushing the program asap?
> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget. The charismatic new Administrator has staked his reputation on increasing launch cadence, and set an explicit goal of landing astronauts on the Moon before President Trump’s term expires in January of 2029.
This is the most frustrating part. The Pentagon can fail the same audit multiple times and be missing trillions of taxpayer dollars but NASA has to move heaven and earth to show their relatively paltry $100B budget isn't going to waste. I'm tired of the double standards.
I'm pretty much with you. The fraud and waste is infuriating. But, frankly, what is the point of this program? At the risk of not being skeptical, can't we say that we conquered lunar orbit in the 1960s? I don't understand why this is some enormous scratch R&D project.
> if a commercial crew capsule (SpaceX Dragon or Boeing Starliner) returned to Earth with the kind of damage seen on Orion, NASA would insist on a redesign and an unmanned test flight to validate it.
Are you sure about that?
https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/05/24/spacex-swapping-heat-s...
Your link says it failed in testing, not in flight.
Did they demand an unmanned flight just to prove it worked? Or did they accept an entirely new design based on modeling and ground tests and then immediately flew it with crew on board?
Then again I'm not one of those people who roots for NASA to fail for some reason.
None of what you’re saying happened.
They had a heat shield on the capsule that failed testing, so they swapped out the interchangeable heat shield for one that passed testing.
There was no entirely new design, there was no new material science, it was the same heat shield that the previous crewed capsules have used without the manufacturing defect.
> SpaceX's next Crew Dragon mission (Crew-5) will fly with a different, updated heat shield structure after a new composite substrate failed acceptance testing
I don't know what "new" or "different" or "updated" or "structure" mean then anymore.
Looking at other articles, nobody else mentions an updated structure. I think that was a misunderstanding. This was a manufacturing defect caught in testing and they used a different unit as a result.
Great read and interesting article. Hard to believe that NASA would risk astronauts lives simply to save face, but that appears to be what's going to happen.
But that’s exactly what happened with Challenger
And Columbia, too, when they made the decision to reenter without inspection, and reenter instead of waiting for rescue.
A rescue was impractical and potentially riskier no?
Riskier? Didn't they all die. Maybe if you ended up with 2 stranded shuttle crews, but correct me if I'm wrong, and I probably am, but couldn't the shuttle fly without any crew?
It couldn't, for a funny reason. Everything on a Shuttle flight could be automated except lowering the landing gear just before touchdown, which had to be done by hand from inside the cockpit.
There are rumors (that I've never been able to run down) that the astronaut corps insisted on this so the Shuttle could not be flown unmanned.
And Buran(soviet copy of the shuttle) could and in fact did fly completely unmanned. In a way it's a shame the collapse of the soviet union killed that program, because a crew less shuttle would have been a huge asset to have.
I'm not surprised more people don't know about the X-37, but it's in effect the distillation of the Shuttle program to a very effective vehicle: Crewless, reusable, cheap, and effective.
Bureaucratic requirements and institutional jockeying largely ballooned the Shuttle into something it was never supposed to be.
You can do a less risky thing and die or do a more risky thing and live. What happened doesn’t determine which thing is riskier just like I can call a 1 and roll dice and land it and you can call tails and flip a coin and not get it.
The outcome doesn’t determine the risk. I agree that this kind of office politics / face savings definitely is the cause of these two things.
I'm sure I watched a documentary that said it basically wasn't feasible to launch the other shuttle. All checks and preparations would have to be done in absolute record time, with no mistakes and under timelines never attempted before. But even if they tried, you have the obvious question of - we know the core issue isn't solved and we're about to launch the second shuttle with the exact same design into orbit, if it suffers the same problem then what? But afaik the second one while important wasn't as much of a blocker as the first one. It just wasn't possible in time - it's not like the first shuttle could stay in orbit indefinitely too.
Astronauts are smart folks. They can vote with their feet.
It's certainly about their lives, but it's also about not tanking the program due to catastrophic failure. The astronauts are going to do it regardless of the risk.
What a horrible (preventable) position to be in, though.
Was there ever a risk-free spaceflight? Pretty sure even with this finding this flight would be safer than any Apollo.
You seem to be ignoring the "just to save face" part. I'd argue it would be a worse thing for our bar for how safe it should be to be raised significantly from when we had been in space as a species less than a decade to now that it's been 65 years.
Never risk free , but Soyuz hardly lost any crew over its 50+ years
2/156 lost for Soyuz in 59 years, 2/135 for Space Shuttle in 30 years. Same rate. People often underestimate how intense STS actually was.
The 2 were early, and fewer lives were lost. The shuttle was unnecessarily risky , and NASA was aware from its inception
Yeah, and where is it now?
The next two Soyuz launches are this Wednesday and Saturday.
Saturn 5 had a flawless record. The leftover space shuttle parts which SLS is cobbled together from, not so much. SRBs are inherently dangerous, theyre designed to quickly launch nukes from silos, not people. And Orion is just a typical modern Boeing project. So far its fallen at every hurdle right?
Saturn 5 came close to catastrophic failure at least once. It had partial failures. Its sort of perfect record is mostly down to luck and not launching very many times.
Of course, six decades later, we should be able to do a lot better.
Orion is a Lockheed (CM) and Airbus (ESM) project.
Yeah, I thought it was Starliner on top. I dont know anything about Orion then. SLS is very crappy and disappointing, its using shitty old space shuttle tech, + its ridiculously expensive in terms of payload to orbit, but it will probably work.
I didnt know, cus I just dont give a shit about this stupid project.
They’ve killed dozens during the shuttle program , or did you forget ? Also a number during Gemini, Mercury and Appollo. Terrible safety record , and 5x worse than Soyuz . Shuttle fatality rate was 1/10. Approaching Russian roulette odds
In total, a little over one dozen astronauts died on shuttle flights (14). No astronauts died during Gemini or Mercury. Three died in a test on Apollo 1. The shuttle failure rate was nowhere close to 1/10. In fact, it was 1/67 (2 failures out of 134 flights).
>They’ve killed dozens during the shuttle program
Columbia and Challenger crew totaled 14, who else are you referring to?
Oh 14 totally acceptable
It’s the American roulette
*Freedom Roulette
135 missions, 2 fatal accidents, that’s not 1/10.
It is if you’re dead
That... doesn't make any sense.
If the odds were only 1% , how did 14 people die ?
You’re not including the lives in your risk assessment .
There were 135 events and 14 people died .
If you were asked to join mission 136 would you say yes or no?
Which risk profile fits: 1% fatality or 10%?
By that logic, the fatality rate in NYC skyscrapers on 9/11 was something like 1500%, since there were <200 skyscrapers and ~2,700 people died.
It doesn't make any sense. Your numerator and denominator need to use the same units. The rate of fatal accidents was 2/135. The rate of crew fatalities was 14/355. The rate for crew-flight fatalities (separately counting multiple flights by the same person) was 14/852.
If you were evaluating your risk for another flight, the number of crew aboard doesn't affect the risk and it's pretty reasonable to assume that an accident results in either a 0% or 100% fatality rate, so the relevant figure would be the fatal accident rate of 2/135. If your flight follows that profile then that's your probability of dying in an accident.
You still haven't explained how so many died and why the program ended.
I didn't and don't intend to. I was just addressing your incorrect figures.
Wat
That we are still using Avcoat is just silly. Pica is so much better. It really shows this design is literally from the 90s. Orian is one of those continual dumbster fire programs that literally only exists to make congress happy. It survived literally years without any reasonable mission at all. NASA had to make up missions for it to do.
Orian is everything erong with US technology development and procurment.
> Notice: Only variables should be passed by reference in /Users/maciej/Code/iw/site/month.php on line 8
if author is reading this, you should fix this maybe.
I'm sorry it bugs you!
oh come on. NASA would never ignore or cover up critical flight safety issues!
/s
As someone who is actually (still) a fan of basic research, Artemis looks like a fun time for the 1% with a $100 billion dollar price tag, except that since it's only 4 astronauts and support staff, it's less than 1%. I opposed messing with NASA funding for a long time, but arguments referencing spin-off tech and so on wear thin. Spin-off occurring lately would/could only be captured by existing billionaires anyway, and without much benefit for society in general.
Humans in space are currently still a waste of time/money, largely just a big surrender to PR, space-selfies, the attention economy, and the general emphasis on "seem not be" you see elsewhere. Please just send robots, build a base, and let us know when we can put more than ~10 freaking people up there at one time. If that fails, then at least we'll have results in robotics research that can be applicable elsewhere on Earth right now as well as help us achieve the more grand ambitions later.
House is on fire, has been for a while, fuck business as usual. I honestly think all those smart people ought to be charged with things like using their operations research to improve government generally, or with larger-scale high tech job programs. If you don't want to let NASA big-brains try to fix healthcare, we could at least let them fix the DMV. Hell, let them keep their spin-offs too, so they actually want success, and have some part of their budget that won't disappear. Basic research and fundamental science is (still) something we need, but we need to be far more strategic about it.
Food for thought: The way things are going, we can definitely look forward to a NASA that's completely transformed into an informal, but publicly funded, research/telemetry arm for billionaire asteroid-mining operations, and thus more of the "public risk, private-profits" thing while we pad margins for people who are doing fine without the help. OTOH, if NASA is running asteroid mining businesses at huge profits, then they can do whatever they want with squishy volunteers as a sideshow, and maybe we'll have enough cash left over to fund basic income.
NASA's budget is 0.35% of the Federal Budget. The US Government spends the equivalent of 20 years of moon mission spending on ICE. They're spending 2x that on Iran war. They blew $200 billion in PPP Loan fraud in 2020 alone.
I'm tired of nickle and diming science funding. You had scientists like Sabine Hossenfelder cheerleading NSF cuts cause of "waste" on string theory and particle accelerators. NSF is 0.1% of the federal budget, and it has funded a remarkable number of world changing inventions over the last 40 years.
We don't spent JACK on space. Look at the huge returns from the Hubble and James Webb. Why aren't we building HUGE HUGE space telescopes as immediate followups? We should have 50 James Webb equivalents. NASA once had plans for a "Terrestial Planet Mapper", a bunch of giant space telescopes flying in formation that combine their signals for truly incredible resolution, good enough to image planets around distant solar systems to a few pixels.
We've now seen plenty of planets in the habitable zone with nearby signatures of biological precursor molecules. We've found asteroids with sugars and amino acids in them. Give NASA 10x the budget and end these damn wars. The Pentagon failed 7 audits and can't account for $2 TRILLION and we're talking about humans in space a waste? It's a drop in the bucket, and it provides a beacon for humanity to dream.
The Apollo projects created a whole generation of people who wanted to go into STEM, that's the biggest ROI.
NASA, the NSF, the NIH, et al, are not the problem. Their spending is insignificant, NASA+NSF is < 1% of the budget.
It might not seem like it, but I really am on your team. What you're missing and Sabine understands is that there is no such thing as spending that's insignificant, and whether we're talking cash or mission bandwidth, everything has opportunity costs. Exactly how many possible missions are thrown out every time we decide to send squishy humans instead of robots?
As for defense spending, to be clear I'm all for swapping the pentagon/nasa budgets, but afterwards I'd still call bullshit if I think there's gross mismanagement at NASA. Pandering to the public with space-selfies is mismanagement, even if it's brought on by desperation and shrinking budgets. I think there's a strong argument Webb was also is bad strategy / mismanagement, but it's too long to get into here.
Unfortunately, like everyone else, NASA, NSF et al do need to worry about public trust, ROI, and the dreaded question: What have you done for me lately? There's this idea that basic research must be incompatible with that sort of thing, but I disagree.
Sabine got her wish. DOGE cut NSF by 40%. Tons of scientists out of work including physicists. But she'll be ok, she only needs to pimp another ad for Brilliant.com
> Sabine got her wish. DOGE cut NSF by 40%.
You think that was her wish? Typical situation is "We only get X, too much of it goes to Y, which is bad for Z". Of course X is not negotiable in an upwards direction, Y is some entrenched status-quo that's difficult to change, and Z is lots and lots of stuff. Everyone who cares about Z attacks Y because they can't increase X and don't expect they can decrease it (although sometimes just calling attention to the zone does that anyway).
DOGE is/was stupid and awful, not for their mission, but because of their methods, missing skill sets, sheer repugnant criminality, etc. As a general rule in any push for efficiency you'll be way better off exercising a little creative intelligence rather than doing straight austerity anyway. And while I don't think the entire government should be run like a business, why isn't more of it self-funding? So maybe let serious people with good intentions at NASA or NSF do DOGE-style work, creating tech or process that cuts costs for other less intellectually-gifted sections of the government, and then let them keep half of what they save the tax payers. Half of what they save could triple their budget! It's not ideal to use our best and brightest this way honestly, but house on fire, you work with what you have at hand.
And? What significant development in the last decades came out of science and not out of industry labs?
While we are throwing shade towards Sabine, just want to remind readers that she's in the Epstein files and her discussions around AI are full on grifter territory.
> it provides a beacon for humanity to dream
Not only that, for truly long term perspective its about mankind survival. Even that POS musk realizes that (at least he did, not sure where his psychosis got him now and don't care much TBH).
If we stay around just Earth, we will be eventually wiped out. Maybe not in next million years (or maybe yes), but but given enough time one of many ways that would happen will happen, from the sky or from processes happening purely down here, manmade or not.
Its not rocket science, its not some magical theoretical what-if, just hard facts when digging around a bit and looking at history. Anybody who has power to change things and decides not to should be treated accordingly.
Even if mankind is lucky with everything else, in 500-800 million years the sun's increased luminosity will render Earth uninhabitable for higher life forms (as we know them) [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
The more things change, the more they stay the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon
I’d love to see a new law requiring the NASA Administrator (a political appointee) to be a member of the first crewed flight of a new program.