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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

#441

Post by budman1 »

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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#442

Post by jedc »

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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#444

Post by randomNumber7 »

turtletontine wrote: post #74

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 mu…

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...

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#445

Post by throw7 »

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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#446

Post by losvedir »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #332
actimod wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#447

Post by randomNumber7 »

idlewords wrote: post #102
wiseowise wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NASA tried the honeycomb approach for Orion, but it was too labor-intensive So cost cutting, as always.

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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#448

Post by inaros »

iwontberude wrote: post #416
inaros wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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".

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#449

Post by MichaelDickens »

throw7 wrote: post #445

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.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#450

Post by randomNumber7 »

eru wrote: post #69
margalabargala wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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