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Artemis II is not safe to fly

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Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#161

Post by YetAnotherNick »

eru wrote: post #106
cultofmetatron wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#162

Post by cubefox »

dmazin wrote: post #134

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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#163

Post by tikhonj »

eru wrote: post #66
oritron wrote: post #25

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…

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.

Based on some rough numbers, NASA's budget (around $24B) would be I also looked up the NSF's 2024 budget, which, at $9B, was much lower than I expected.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#164

Post by discreteevent »

bayindirh wrote: post #129
kakacik wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think sociopaths like current 'leader' would change significantly upon such experience? I unfortunately don't share such optimism.

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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#165

Post by pie_flavor »

sgt wrote: post #158
GMoromisato wrote: post #77

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 r…

>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 Orio…

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...

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#166

Post by pie_flavor »

AIorNot wrote: post #153
GMoromisato wrote: post #77

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 r…

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 v…

How about former NASA engineer Charles Camarda? Linked from the article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#167

Post by Dr_Incelheimer »

delichon wrote: post #22

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.

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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#168

Post by renewiltord »

wiseowise wrote: post #92
renewiltord wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#169

Post by Eisenstein »

sgt wrote: post #158
GMoromisato wrote: post #77

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 r…

>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 Orio…

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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#170

Post by bambax »

oritron wrote: post #25

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…

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?

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