451–460 of 667 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
``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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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.
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 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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/62/1323/rare-and-un...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
I'm not sure this is true. We had very good scientists and engineers at that time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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…
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 fai…
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.