Fortunately, the most likely outcome is another indefinite delay at the last minute.
Artemis II is not safe to fly
381–390 of 667 posts
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#382I 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 don't know any astronauts that push for manned space exploration. Just a few billionaires and dementia patients.
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#383I 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…
>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 a…
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?
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#385Someone 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 mu…
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.
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 jus…
> 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.
>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?
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an aside, do you have any suggestions for "state of the art" reading on safety culture?
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.
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Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#388NASA 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 spall…
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.
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 _responsibil…
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
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#390I'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 Mo…
> 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.