Artemis II safely splashes down

Post by anon291 » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 3:14 AM UTC

Ifkaluva wrote: post #98

Can somebody help me understand why this does a water landing, like the old Apollo missions, instead of like the space shuttle that lands like a plane?

Post by anon291 » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 3:19 AM UTC

BitsAndObjects wrote: post #32

jrmg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

…and this is how the America I thought I knew growing up projected its influence upon the world.

Notwithstanding that this mission critically relied upon Canada, UK, EU, Japan, Taiwan, and contributions from many other countries.

Post by curiousObject » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 3:21 AM UTC

areoform wrote: post #104

trothamel wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a great article. Adding to it - Apollo 13 was a mission where 3 men should have died, but somehow didn't. If it had happened while the LM was on the moon, you would have had the CSM lose power, and then two men on the moon would have had no way to return home. (And for the shuttle design mission - my understanding is it was likely the ability to do a HEXAGON-style film return mission in a single orbit, befor…

Thanks! note - I can't verify any of the following, it's more - for lack of a better term - aerospace nerd fan theory at this point. Post-collapse, people think that the Buran justification was paranoia. But based on what I've read / seen (though this is getting hard to source, so I might be just good ol' hallucinating here), they weren't entirely wrong. The subtext around that large payload bay had to do with the So…

Post by seizethecheese » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 3:22 AM UTC

roughly wrote: post #163

areoform wrote: post #11

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…

Astronauts are, as a group, extremely risk loving. Every single person who signs up to go into space knows what they’re signing up for - they’ve spent their entire life working for the opportunity to be put in a tin can and shot into orbit atop a million pounds of explosives. There’s a very valid critique that NASA has become far too risk averse - we owe it to the astronauts to give them the best possible chance to c…

Post by Shitty-kitty » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 3:24 AM UTC

api wrote: post #154

zhoujing204 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 a…

2.4% is not bad given how new this still is and how extreme the speeds and energies are. Note that all the fatalities have been launch or landing related, not in space itself. Clawing out of this gravity well is tough. Make Earth a bit larger and you’d never get off it without something like NERVA or nuclear pulse Orion. I wonder sometimes if that’s another thing to toss in the Fermi paradox bucket. Many rocky planet…