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Artemis II is not safe to fly

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Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#581

Post by retroformat »

jessewmc wrote: post #355
chadd wrote: post #292

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…

As an aside, do you have any suggestions for "state of the art" reading on safety culture?

Although not especially “current,” Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies is a 1984 book by Yale sociologist Charles Perrow, which analyses complex systems from a sociological perspective. Perrow argues that multiple and unexpected failures are built into society's complex and tightly coupled systems, and that accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around. Several historical disasters are analysed. I read a newer edition published in 1999, and the author had added a chapter on Chernobyl, which turned out to be a textbook example of some Perrow’s theory (in particular, that adding fail-safes also adds complexity, thus not necessarily making for any more safety. The Chernobyl disaster was precipitated at least in part, because they were on a tight schedule to test a fail-safe system.) The book is fascinating and a good page turner, hard to put down. Perrow’s book is best combined with a reading of The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel Ellsberg.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#582

Post by fatbird »

notahacker wrote: post #257
antonvs wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you overestimate the effect that would have on the kind of people that most need that sort of humility. Look at what happened with William Shatner and Jeff Bezos when they came back from space. Shatner started to say something about what an impactful experience it was, but Bezos cut him off and was like “Woo! Partay!” and switched his attention to a magnum of champagne.

And if the actual U2 pilots (air force pilots and CIA operatives) had come back profoundly changed, someone might have cancelled the programme... Astronauts are regular smart people capable of making good and bad life decisions too.

I met someone a couple years ago who was a U2 pilot (which are still in active service). He'd flown F-16s until he reached the point in the promotion ladder where flying stopped, then switched to U2s to keep being a pilot. After hitting 20 years, he was taking his retirement and training to fly Grumman S-2Ts with CAL FIRE.

Very down-to-earth guy who knew what he wanted and made his choices. Didn't at all seem like the sort to find edge-of-the-atmosphere flying a mystical experience.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#583

Post by Vecr »

xnx wrote: post #576

I guess I'm glad that Kalshi and Polymarket don't seem to have betting pools on launch/return success.

Robin Hanson thinks they should. He makes a comparison to the (public company) Morton-Thiokol trading minutes after the shuttle explosion. Insider trading (allowed on future markets) would have let that price move before the explosion.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#584

Post by retroformat »

jessewmc wrote: post #355
chadd wrote: post #292

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…

As an aside, do you have any suggestions for "state of the art" reading on safety culture?

Other books I’ve much enjoyed, when your interest is in structural or other failures:

Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail by Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori, a wide ranging history of structural failures of various kinds, and their causes.

Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Drury Clark, which is a personal memoir from a senior researcher with many decades experience developing rocket fuels - he is the proverbial Rocket Scientist. Most interesting, and amusing (in a morbid way), is the quite different culture of safety “back in the day” of this somewhat esoteric engineering/chemistry field.

(okay, I'll stop now!)

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#585

Post by jdougan »

gus_massa wrote: post #476
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you just now learning about propaganda?

No, it's just strange that different parts of the same organization make oposite decisions for the propaganda.

Culturally they're not really the same organization. JPL has a different culture than Goddard, which is different than Marshall, etc.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#586

Post by jaggederest »

dabluecaboose wrote: post #510
gambiting wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Buran(soviet copy of the shuttle) could and in fact did fly completely unmanned. In a way it's a shame the collapse of the soviet union killed that program, because a crew less shuttle would have been a huge asset to have.

I'm not surprised more people don't know about the X-37, but it's in effect the distillation of the Shuttle program to a very effective vehicle: Crewless, reusable, cheap, and effective. Bureaucratic requirements and institutional jockeying largely ballooned the Shuttle into something it was never supposed to be.

Which is, regrettably, the same thing happening with SLS / Orion / Artemis

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#587

Post by mmooss »

palata wrote: post #563
mmooss wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we already have quotas and affirmative action for white (Christian) males. Not long ago and maybe still true, more Fortune 500 CEOs were named John than were women. Though the policy is sometimes unstated (not always, especially in private, and the current administration is pretty clear about it), I think the data on the outcomes is overwhelming and undeniable. I think also that gender or skin color doesn't m…

I didn't mean that it was because of gender or skin colour. What I meant, really, is that we select the people who get power in some way. And then we complain that people in positions of power are like that. My point was that there are probably a lot of "white old males" that just do not apply for positions of power, because they have learned all their life that they don't have the profile we usually select. And thos…

I get it. There are a couple of things I think about:

First, things weren't like this even 10 years ago. Humility in power had long been a fundamental American moral before that: All are created equal, the rejection of aristocracy, and the foundation of freedom and self-determination; freedom of religion and speech - nobody else should tell someone what to say or their religion; George Washington refusing to accept more power or a third term; the humility of leaders like Lincoln and Eisenhower and King; the supremacy of civilians over the military; the early New England culture and Henry David Thoreau; the required public humility of almost every president before Trump - nobody talked or behaved like him. I read a ~10 year old New Yorker article recently about the public humility of many Wall Street leaders in the 1980s, at least, who wore more modest clothes, built their houses with low fences, etc. The pioneers of the Internet who believed in openness and end-user control. I read something old about SV - from the early 2000s I think - a conference of CEOs, etc, and someone asked who flew in their own jet; the speaker remarked how embarassed many were to raise their hands.

The good news is, that moral existed for centuries and is part of the American fabric. We just need to be reminded of who we are and of what really made America great. (Yes, there were endless exceptions to it - in every person is good and bad, pride and humility - but today narcissism is embraced.)

> I didn't mean that it was because of gender or skin colour.

> I do believe that most women or people from minorities have a profile different from the typical "old white males" who are selected.

I don't see how those things reconcile. I think people in each group are, on average, just as likely to be corrupted by power, etc.

It's the power that does it; it's the most powerful drug, the Ring - until they have power, you don't know reliably how they will respond. Fewer non-hetero-males and minorities have power, so it may seem like they aren't corrupted by it.

'If you want to see someone's character, don't give them hardship, give them power.' The American elite are failing the country and the world.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#588

Post by minetest2048 »

retroformat wrote: post #579
gtowey wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy, put the manager on the actual mission.

Doesn't work. Remember the Titanic? Remember the British airship R101 (the "government" ship)? Both had their designers and higher ups perish in the subsequent maiden voyage disasters, right along with many/most of the innocent passengers.

And OceanGate in recent history

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#589

Post by eru »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #450
eru wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> Nothing stops you from doing this with manned flights except that it's not culturally accepted currently.

Trained astronauts are also really 'expensive'. In addition to the innate worth of a human (which you might chalk up to culture), there's also lots of opportunity costs of what the astronaut could otherwise do, and replacement cost of their training etc are pretty high, too.

> But maybe that changes as NASA will demonstrate with artemis 2 and 3 (which will then use another newly desiged heat shield).

It would arguably be better (or less worse) if they did this deliberately and designed the mission from the ground up to be pushed to failure and to learn as much as possible from that failure. Instead of just accidentally sacrificing people.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#590

Post by eru »

randallsquared wrote: post #352
TeMPOraL wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If doing it lowers the cost of earth movers and gets 20 other groups to each dig their own ditch, that's actually money well spent.

This is a typical argument for state intervention in the marketplace, but it is weaker if one makes different assumptions about the state of the market absent the intervention. In order to show that it was money well spent, you'd have to show that it's better to have more groups digging, and that there wouldn't have been enough diggers without GovDitch.

Well, also that spending on needless digging would have been the best use of the resources. Instead of spending on something more immediately useful (or leaving the money with the taxpayers).
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