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Artemis II safely splashes down

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Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#71
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An error in any of the orbital math may have seen them flung out into space with no chance of recovery.

Orbits do not work that way

Anyone who has had hit period key once too many during Munar free-return in KSP knows it's exactly how orbits work...

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#72
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That speaker voice was a bit odd. Everything was perfect! At least one superlative every 5 seconds or so. I think that audio stream was designed to be POTUS safe.

If we're going to have a surveillance state, let's use it for superlative control - one dollar in taxes for every superlative you use in personal life; $0.01/viewer for each one you use in any live televised event. It's becoming a public hazard, we must act!

Agreed in principle. Let’s make things norminal, not superlative.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#73
Watching this, I can only describe it as holy. An incredible reminder of what humanity can do, and the beauty of our curiosity and the universe around us. I grew up learning that my great uncle was in Mission Control for Apollo; missions like this are what inspired me to pursue engineering in the first place.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#75

Announcer just said “we just reenacted” the last Apollo mission. So, yep. That’ll be used as proof-text that this was all staged.

I get that there are people who think the moon landing was staged, but are there really people who think rocket launches are staged? Because it's pretty easy to go witness one yourself.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#76

Glad that they're safe and sound. It's worth pointing out that this is the first extremely public, widely acknowledged high risk mission NASA has done in over 50 years. The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle. According to NASA's OIG, Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle. There genuinely i…

> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. This seems insane to me. That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before. That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die. That's the starting point? That's what we document as acceptable?

Yes, and the memories of Apollo are made rosy by hagiography. I even wrote an entire thing to explain why, https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-ri... (yeah, shameless plug, sorry - it's more for the citations than not. You can read the standards and reports I've linked to)

But if I'm allowed to repeat myself from elsewhere in the thread and the meat of the above thing,

It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved. Even with the Commercial Cargo and Crew Program (C3P), NASA has set the acceptable mortality threshold at 1 in 270 over the entire mission and 1 in 1000 on ascent / descent. If they could set it higher by gaming the math, they would. They can't.

We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. And no, Apollo wasn't much better either, at least 10 astronauts were killed in training or burned alive, as well as (far worse, because astronauts sign up for the risk) one member of ground staff.

People love to hate the Shuttle, and it ended up being subpar / fail expectations due to the political constraints NASA was under, but the Shuttle was a genuine advance for its time – a nonsensical, economically insane advance, but still an advance. If you look at the Shuttle alternative proposals / initial proposals as well as stuff like Dynasoar and Star Raker, you'll see NASA iterating through Starship style ideas. But those were rejected due to higher up front capital investment at the time.

The Shuttle is an odd franken-turduckling, because it was designed for one mission and one mission only. And that mission never happened. That cargo bay existed to capture certain Soviet assets and deploy + task certain American space assets and then bring them back to Earth.

And that's the bit that's hard to emphasize. The fact that the Shuttle could put a satellite up there, watch it fail, then go back up, grab it, bring it back, repair it, then launch again was an insane capability.

Was the program a giant fuck up at the end? Yes. But does that mean Artemis will be safer than the Shuttle? No. That's not how the energetics, time from civilization, acceptable risk profiles etc. work out.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#77

Wild that they manage to fly to the moon but still seem to be having those comms problems. Asking the astronauts if they’re really pressing the PTT button is wild.

Just like in the year 3000, we will still ask "Can you hear me?" in video meetings.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#78

Glad that they're safe and sound. It's worth pointing out that this is the first extremely public, widely acknowledged high risk mission NASA has done in over 50 years. The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle. According to NASA's OIG, Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle. There genuinely i…

> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. This seems insane to me. That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before. That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die. That's the starting point? That's what we document as acceptable?

You are comparing orbiting earth in a shuttle to a lunar flyby in a pod. Very different risk profiles.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#79

Glad that they're safe and sound. It's worth pointing out that this is the first extremely public, widely acknowledged high risk mission NASA has done in over 50 years. The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle. According to NASA's OIG, Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle. There genuinely i…

> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. This seems insane to me. That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before. That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die. That's the starting point? That's what we document as acceptable?

"As of 1 April 2026, there have been five incidents in which a spacecraft in flight suffered crew fatalities, killing a total of 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts.[2][how?] Of these, two had reached the internationally recognized edge of space (100 km or 62mi above sea level) when or before the incident occurred, one had reached the U.S. definition of space at 266,000 ft, and one was planned to do so. In each of these accidents, the entire crew was killed. As of April 2026, a total of 791 people have flown into space and 19 of them have died in related incidents. This sets the current statistical fatality rate at 2.4 percent."

[wiki link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...).-,During%20spaceflight,fatality%20rate%20at%202.4%20percent.)

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