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Artemis II is not safe to fly

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Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#511

Post by gtowey »

pstuart wrote: post #455
MisterTea wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 simplistic answer would be to ensure that incentives are aligned with safety and success. Then that leads to the evergreen problem of Goodhart’s Law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure). 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.

Easy, put the manager on the actual mission.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#512

Post by wat10000 »

tonymet wrote: post #473
wat10000 wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, the fatality rate in NYC skyscrapers on 9/11 was something like 1500%, since there were It doesn't make any sense. Your numerator and denominator need to use the same units. The rate of fatal accidents was 2/135. The rate of crew fatalities was 14/355. The rate for crew-flight fatalities (separately counting multiple flights by the same person) was 14/852. If you were evaluating your risk for another f…

You still haven't explained how so many died and why the program ended.

I didn't and don't intend to. I was just addressing your incorrect figures.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#513

Post by aeternum »

GMoromisato wrote: post #77

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…

It's kind of sad that we've become so risk averse. Risks should be fully disclosed but let the adventurers adventure.

Would Columbus' ship ever have been allowed to sail in the modern day? Proximity wingsuit flying and free-climbing is legal and people choose to do it even though the probability of death is extremely high. Spaceflight is significantly safer and far more beneficial to humanity, yet we block it. No one counts the lives lost due to slowing scientific progress but we should. How much further behind would we be scientifically if Darwin hadn't ventured out on the Beagle due to endless safety reviews. Would the US be what it is today if Lewis and Clark had to prove to congress that the trip was safe?

Given the opportunity, many of us would choose to die as part of a grand adventure in service to humanity vs. wither away of old age.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#515

Post by poopmonster »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #389
njovin wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am suddenly reminded of a clip I saw recently of Ronald Reagan on Johnny Carson in 1975. (https://youtu.be/CNmnmdtcdcg?si=UMpkHwOVA74Nv5P7)

Reagan speaks with grandfatherly warmth about the importance of finding a middle ground between reasonable safety regulations and progress. In the same clip, he mentioned not knowing of any group with as little influence on politics as business.

Dog convinces owner to let it off leash. The rhetoric that charmed Americans into letting down their guard, in miniature.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#516

Post by CWuestefeld »

sfn42 wrote: post #392
adamsb6 wrote: post #361

Earlier 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.

But sure everything would be better if any moron was allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.

Yes, I think that we'd all be better off if every person was allowed to have their own personal values, deciding what's more important to themSELVES, rather than piling on and trying to force every one into a one-size-fits-all solution.

For my part, I'd much rather have people wishing me "have a rich and fulfilling life" rather than "be timid and careful to maximize your time even if it's boring and unrewarding".

Sure, you can disagree with my priorities, but that's the whole point. We should each be able to have our own priorities.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#517

Post by pstuart »

Cpoll wrote: post #469
pstuart wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simplistic answer would be to ensure that incentives are aligned with safety and success. Then that leads to the evergreen problem of Goodhart’s Law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure). 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.

> Goodhart’s Law Useful to be sure, but it's easier to game something like LOC than it is to game "product made money" and "nobody died."

Agreed. My point was that it will forever be some kind of moving target and to expect a policy framework to guarantee "good behavior" is a mistake.

I emphatically believe that understanding the incentives of all the players is paramount because that is what will ultimately determine their behavior.

It would be cool if there were ways to have a "Game Theory Toolkit" that could be plugged into an organizations communications that could automate the defining and detecting of those unwanted behaviors.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#518

Post by enoch_r »

sfn42 wrote: post #505
enoch_r wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here's what I found doing a basic Google search: > Car seats and booster seats significantly reduce the risk of fatal injury in crashes by 71% for infants and 54% for toddlers (1-4 years old), saving over 11,000 lives in the US since 1975 > Booster seats reduce the risk of serious injury for children aged 4-8 by 45% compared to seatbelts alone. It's from the AI summary because it was the most quotable but the article…

See my comment summarizing the evidence as I understand it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47590700

What articles did you find, exactly? What primary evidence are they basing their claims on? Many of the numbers you'll find with a google search are unclear about what they're comparing to - I believe both of the fatality numbers above (71% and 54%) are relative to completely unrestrained kids, which is not the relevant comparison.

The 45% number I specifically discuss in the other comment, but every independently reproducible study using publicly available data has found much smaller effects, around 10-25% for minor injuries and no statistically significant difference in severe injuries.

To be clear, I'm not saying "don't use car seats," I'm saying that the evidence doesn't support mandating them through age 8 (or 12!).

Our kids would be much safer if we drove everywhere at 15mph - less convenient, but it would prevent many unnecessary deaths. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do anything in the world without risk. So we're forced to balance convenience against safety every day, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#519

Post by eqvinox »

gus_massa wrote: post #460
eqvinox wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And if it doesn't blow up due to heat shield failure, TFA (and its references) will be forgotten. 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…

I'm not super happy with the pattern of thinking in these numbers; arguing 1/100000 vs 1/100 for "accidents" is again a boolean thing. They probably had a very specific definition, which does make this viable, but we don't have that definition here. So the numbers are meaningless to us. And not having that definition, "accidents" is a sliding scale… e.g. I'm pretty sure astronauts injured themselves banging various bodyparts against various parts of the spaceship. That's technically an accident.

And in this concrete example — the heat shield isn't boolean either. I don't know how steep the gradient between pass and fail is, but it certainly exists, and it's possible they come back successfully but with it singed significantly outside expected parameters. (Even "less than expected" would indicate a problem here IMHO.) That does mean it's not necessarily a question of having enough boolean datapoints.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#520

Post by jonahx »

falcor84 wrote: post #484
jonahx wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and no other prior knowledge about success probability This phrase is misleading, as Laplace's Rule of Succession is equivalent to assuming a uniform Bayesian prior over all values of p. That is, before any experiments, a 50% chance of success. Depending on the situation, this may be roughly accurate or wildly wrong. You cannot appeal to this rule to resolve the situation.

Well, obviously if we have a better prior, then that's better. But assuming no other knowledge, and especially if we think that other people's priors could be intentionally misleading, this rule seems to offer the best estimate.

Generally speaking, you never truly have "no prior knowledge". Some relevant past experience, or "common sense", or something tips you away from "all probabilities are equally likely". I think this rule is rarely a best estimate.
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