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Artemis II is not safe to fly

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Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#601

Post by cubefox »

ACCount37 wrote: post #284
shadowofneptune wrote: post #276

A lot of the discussion overlooks or wishes to avoid an uncomfortable problem with the Artemis program: Artemis III's hardware will not be ready for the forseeable future. The program has had multiple shakeups so far. This is a program heading for cancellation. The flight risk is surely acceptable if this is not the first flight of many but the last.

You're saying that as if Artemis III is going to be the first time Artemis eats delays. What I'm seeing from Artemis recently is "good signs of life" rather than the opposite. They acknowledged that Artemis III is "system tests" rather than "a full landing", which gives it far better chances of happening before 2030. They're trimming the fat deposits from the program by removing things like Gateway or NRHO. They're p…

> This is more focus and ambition than what NASA had in actual literal decades.

No doubt, and most of that is due to Isaacman. But when the government party changes, they will replace him. Possibly again with a politician/bureaucrat like Bill Nelson, who is unlikely to similarly shake things up when necessary.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#602

Post by palata »

mmooss wrote: post #587
palata wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don't see how those things reconcile.

For one, and once again: those people spend most of their life knowing they won't access a position of power. White males who don't have the profile of the "dominant white males" are in a different position: they don't grow up knowing it, they have to realise eventually that they are just the kind of white males who gets power. And if they do, the risk is that they fall back to a whole life in a society that did not actively tell them that it wasn't their place, so that's still different from women or minorities.

> Humility in power had long been a fundamental American moral before that

It's not only humility, I thought we were using it as a way to say "the qualities that would make a great leader for the people".

And #metoo showed us pretty clearly that the white males in power decades ago were so often abusive that the only thing we can say is "well but it was a different time".

Today, if I look around me, those who get in positions of power are more often than not toxic. What they are good at is winning against their competitors, not building much. Once they have the power, they can attribute to themselves whatever was built by the people "below" them.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#603

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

dataflow wrote: post #577
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why are the astronauts willing to risk their lives There are a lot of funerals in chapter 1 of Tom Wolfe's book, "The Right Stuff". I suggest that some choice of profession come with a higher life-risk tolerance than others. "Accountants willing to risk their lives for the job" would be news. Firefighters, less so. Test pilots or astronauts, not much at all.

You're completely ignoring the nature of the risk. It's one thing to accept a risk of death because it's intrinsic to a noble job. It's a whole other thing to accept a totally avoidable risk that's only introduced due to management's self-interests getting in the way.

I agree, to the extent that those two categories are easily and clearly separable and not murky due to the nature of risk, and efforts to pass off one as the other.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#604

Post by pas »

gus_massa wrote: post #433
pas wrote: post #397

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.

I guess the conclusion is that the manned missions since the Moon landing were for Cold War reasons. (With that kind of mentality.) And when that ended they made even less sense.

For example when they had to go up to refill the wiper fluid on the Hubble in '93 it was no biggie, because as shitty as the shuttle was, it was at least reuse-minded, and there were regular missions (and budget for that). The ISS assembly coasted on the Clinton era budget surplus, but then it was evident that prancing in LEO is great for hijacking Soviet satellites, but not much else.

And compared to the Hubble the JWST was a classic Eminem mission (one shot, one opportunity ... no, wait! that's on Mars!), even if it took 5-10 more years than planned, it seems it was completely worth it.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#605

Post by sfn42 »

kortilla wrote: post #597
sfn42 wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you should be allowed to recklessly endanger your children. You can endanger yourself all you like, I couldn't care less but you don't get to endanger others even if you made them.

Do you think it’s okay for people to indoctrinate their own children with religion and other political views? Far more harm comes from that than tail risk elimination mandating car seats between 8 and 12 years. Would you be willing to make all new parents submit to frequent breathalyzers during pregnancy and after birth? Drinking is a massive factor in infant mortality at birth and SIDS.

I don't see a reasonable way to avoid parents imposing their beliefs on their kids so this point you're trying to make is pretty weak man. You're comparing a problem with a very clear solution vs a problem with no clear solution. You wanna take the kids away from all religious people and all people with differing political views? Good luck with that.

Should all parents submit to frequent breathalyzers? Tell me, how many parents, as a fraction of all parents, drink irresponsibly to the point where it significantly endangers their children?

Now compare that number to the fraction of parents who drive their kids around in cars. You're grasping at straws comparing apples and oranges.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#606

Post by enoch_r »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #553
enoch_r wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that car seat mandates (up to age 12 in my state) are good policy if the net effect is: - a small reduction in minor injuries, - worse childhoods and parenting experiences (difficult to quantify, but real), - and a few hundred thousand fewer children being born in the first place, - very few, if any, lives saved? If yes, then cool - but I strongly disagree. If no - then I think the evidence and details v…

In the hypothetical scenario where car seats have only downsides, then of course I’m against a mandate. There is a difference between cherry picking studies that back up your view point and how medical experts set policy though. Experts review all of the data, and ignore outliers like a paper published in a law journal that suggests car seats are the primary reason families have shrunk from having three to two kids s…

In this conversation, you have repeatedly referred to "all of the data" and "mountains of data," yet you have posted none. Meanwhile I have posted every major study on both sides of the debate! Your argument seems to be that:

- the experts have told people to use car seats

- experts wisely base policy on "all of the data"

- therefore, "all of the data" must support the claim that car seats save lives

If we're going to discuss the question of whether experts have set policy well or poorly in a particular case, then such a strong prior on "experts always set policy well and based on the best available evidence" kind of assumes the conclusion, doesn't it?

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#607

Post by DennisP »

pas wrote: post #397
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…

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…

But SpaceX launches manned missions, with a perfect safety record so far, plus a fantastic success rate for their unmanned Falcon flights. They "launch early, launch often" for their test flights.

The main reason NASA can't do that with Artemis is that every SLS launch costs at least $2 billion.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#608

Post by laughing_man »

enoch_r wrote: post #478
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your implied frustration at a relatively easy change backed by experts and mountains of data is another point in favor of > humans are so oblivious to safety

We have 4 kids. Before we had our 3rd, we needed to buy a new vehicle solely because we couldn't fit 3 car seats into the back of our old car. And when traveling with kids, carrying 4 gigantic car seats plus your other luggage is not exactly as easy as you might think! It essentially rules out solo parent travel with all 4 kids. Transferring car seats between two cars, or installing car seats in a taxi, is a serious…

Yep. As I understand it, there's no statistical difference between a car seat and a seat belt over age two. We've known this for a very long time, too. But it's easy to make an emotional appeal to do something to make the world safer for children, even if what you're doing doesn't make any difference.

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#609

Post by kqr »

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?

The STPA and CAST handbooks are available for free from the MIT Partnership for Systems Approaches to Safety and Security website. They are phenomenal.

http://psas.scripts.mit.edu/home/books-and-handbooks/

Re: Artemis II is not safe to fly

#610

Post by themusicgod1 »

pavlov wrote: post #211
rustyhancock wrote: post #209

To some extent I think since the challenger disaster trying to blow the whistle on safety issues at NASA has been romantacized. For me, so long as the information is transparently discussed with the astronauts they can agree or disagree. But the task is intrinsically extremely risky. It makes it very challenging for anyone to really know how to balance those risks. The peak outcome (modal, mean at least) is a good ou…

The Artemis program has cost over $100 billion so far. It doesn’t make any sense to spend that much money on something that’s still Russian roulette for the astronauts. If the purpose of the human risk is to let the agency accomplish more, then it needs to be reflected in the cost as a drastic reduction (so you can actually spend the money on doing more). Now Artemis is the worst of both worlds.

>It doesn’t make any sense to spend that much money on something that’s still Russian roulette for the astronauts.

Sure it does.

We've got billions of humans to spend on getting humanity out of its gravity well. We can and will spare a few more.

Getting humanity out of our gravity well is the most important task this species faces, along with stabilizing our use of the resources in this one. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/astronomical-waste/

If you're not willing to spend a few lives on this problem you're not serious about the problem.

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