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Artemis II is not safe to fly

idlewords.com

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Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#171

Post by Terr_ »

antonvs wrote: post #138
bayindirh wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#172

Post by swiftcoder »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #41
idlewords wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#173

Post by Rodeoclash »

antonvs wrote: post #138
bayindirh wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Exactly what I thought of as well

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#174

Post by adrianN »

bayindirh wrote: post #140
necovek wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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“.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#175

Post by eru »

tikhonj wrote: post #163
eru wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#176

Post by eru »

shiroiuma wrote: post #123
kitd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#177

Post by aaron695 »

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…

[dead]

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#178

Post by decimalenough »

cubefox wrote: post #162
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.

It's subscribers only and costs $5/month.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#180

Post by eru »

fastball wrote: post #136
eru wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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