tufte
Artemis II is not safe to fly
491–500 of 667 posts
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
My kids are going to be legally mandated to be in car seats until they’re about 12 years old.
Oh wow what a tragedy. You think maybe there's reasons for that mandate? Like maybe it saves children's lives? But sure everything would be better if any moron was allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.
The evidence that car seats save lives is significantly weaker that you probably believe, as I detailed in another comment in this thread. But look: even if car seats make sense for a typical 5 year old on a typical drive in their typical car (which is a higher evidentiary burden than you might think), a mandate imposes a huge logistical tax that makes many normal things completely infeasible or impractical:
- travel with many kids (nope, physically can't carry 4 car seats plus luggage)
- using a taxi, e.g. to go see a movie (nope, can't carry a car seat into the theater)
- carpooling with other families (I'll drive them, you pick up? Nope, we'd have to shuffle car seats around.)
- rides with grandparents or other family members (sorry, we'd have to deliver the car seat to them first)
- splitting kids between two vehicles for errands (let's spend 10m wrestling car seats from one car to the other first)
The whole texture of independent childhood is altered by car seat mandates! Everything gets filtered through "is there a car seat available?". If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know anything about this program, so here's a basic question: why does manufacturing need to be easier? Are they intending to mass produce these craft?
Easier to manufacture usually means easier to reproduce. With something like this, you don't want variance.
Yeah that's the second part. So do they intend manufacture these en masse? If not, why not bite the bullet and manufacture it to spec, since it seems like the honeycomb is integral to the performance? Even if they do, what are we going to do with some number of deeply flawed craft?
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#494Earlier 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?
Is "Why not pay people to do their jobs correctly?" a way of voicing frustration with massive gov't incompetence? Or a way of saying that organizational incompetence is top-down?
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#495I 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…
>In both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that wasn't expected to fail in that mode /at all/.
Because, and it speaks volumes that nobody ever circles back around to this, that is absolutely f-ing normal. If everyone ran around like the sky was falling every time some widget made it into service and some unexpected thing was noticed nothing would get done.
"hey we disassembled this gearbox and there's a little rust from condensation + chemistry = cyclic usage, we better take a look at it"
"we've taken a look at it and the corrosion is forming because X, this is fine because the surfaces that can't rust see lubricant flow and the per our calculations the maximum amount of rust into the lube is Y and since the service interval is Z this is fine, tests confirm this."
^ the above happened for a multimillion dollar per hour of downtime gearbox. That was 40yr ago. It was in fact fine. I know it was fine because they added venting suggestions to the docs and the client balked because they bought another one in the 2010s and a bunch of "we went over this when it was installed and it was fine then and the building is even more tightly humidity controlled than it was in the 1980s" back and fourth whining ensued.
You don't know how many other things they noticed when they put the shuttles into service that did in fact turn out to be perfectly fine. It's real easy to be smug in hindsight but good luck trying to pick the needle out of the haystack in advance.
Now obviously the shuttle people flubbed it and much has been writtenn about it, but the point still sands.
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#496This 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…
All of the controversy over the heat shield is obscuring the much bigger safety issue: Artemis has had only a single unmanned test flight. By contrast, the Saturn launch system had seven successful unmanned tests before being trusted with a crew, including two unmanned flights of the complete Saturn V stack. And even then, three astronauts were lost during ground testing of the crew capsule due to a critical design f…
> Artemis's closest modern counterpart, the SpaceX Starship, has had 11 test flights, several of which resulted in loss of the vehicle.
I don't think you can compare the two. Starship's risks are so high failure is almost the expected outcome, it's a trial and error based process. Starship and Artemis is an apples/oranges comparison with respect to how the programs approach risk tolerance.
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#497Earlier 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?
The role of for-profit companies and 'shareholder' value in explaining corporate bad behavior is highly overstated. The only profit that matters is the one at the individual level (i.e., compensation, which is a form of profit, for the individual).
A government employee or a private corporation doesn't matter. To the actual humans, they are the same, in that each provides a particular compensation, tied to their decisions.
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For all my feelings about Musk I would much rather step into a rocket Definitely, but we still have to figure out if Musk is such a genious or NASA is full of retards.
Neither is true IMO but musk just picked the right development model. Big space never did this because the current megaproject cost plus is just what they want, a blank check. Witn SpaceX Musk was mainly wasting his own money especially in the beginning. So it made sense. It just makes sense, it's not even a 'shortcut'. Ps yes he did get some grants but not beefy unlimited ones.
Another thing SpaceX has going for it is when their tests fail everyone just points and laughs at Musk. When a NASA launch fails the taxpayers don't want to pay for it any longer.
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
My kids are going to be legally mandated to be in car seats until they’re about 12 years old.
Oh wow what a tragedy. You think maybe there's reasons for that mandate? Like maybe it saves children's lives? But sure everything would be better if any moron was allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.
The evidence on car seats is extremely weak and they prevent only a handful of injuries. You'd be better off redesigning roads or having more collision protection systems in cars. As self-driving cars get better to the point where they can communicate and eliminate many human errors, there's probably no need for car seats at all. In many situations they make things more dangerous, not less.
Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly
#500This 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…
They have analyzed the problem with 1D non-coupled models that are so poorly matched to reality they would receive an F in a high school science class. They are YOLOing it. It is insulting that clowns like yourself continue to cover for them. NASA lowers its standards every time an accident happens. When they designed Shuttle, they intended for a failure rate of 1 in 10,000 or thereabouts. Remember, it was meant to f…
The issue with arguments like this is that people who make the claim "it's not safe!" never feel the negative consequences when everything goes to plan. They just slink away, and then when the next event happens, they cry wolf again. When they happen to be right 2 of ~130 times, they get to say "see I told you so!" and go on speaking tours about how they figured it out but NASA wouldn't listen, say they should be considered for a leadership position in NASA etc. To the people who think they are YOLO'ing it and that disaster is inevitable, they should be willing to actually put something on the line (promising never to talk about the topic again, money, etc.) and have some skin in the game. Otherwise, such claims are worthless.