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Artemis II safely splashes down

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Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#201

Post by WalterBright »

irjustin wrote: post #51
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…

> 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 cannot really determine what the risks are before trying something new.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#202

Post by tedd4u »

dingaling wrote: post #106
philistine wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d bet a million dollars that Orion will win every safety metric compared to the shuttle once it is retired. NASA deluded itself in thinking the Shuttle was safe. The reality is that the Shuttle was the most dangerous spaceship anyone ever built.

Artemis rides on extended versions of the same SRBs that made the Shuttle ascent so dangerous.

Yes, and the four RS-25 main engines on the SLS rocket (Space Launch System) are literally SSME's harvested from the shuttles (Space Shuttle Main Engine). Of course that means they are re-usable. So sad to see them plummet to the ocean floor. Perversely Rocketdyne is building cheaper non-reusable versions of the RS-25 for future missions.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#203

Post by tedd4u »

SoftTalker wrote: post #170
hkpack wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is about trends and perceptions - 70s were very hopeful, now with global problems - wars, climate, AI, uncertainty, what is growing is desperation. I definitely don’t envy kids that are born nowadays.

The '70s were not hopeful. Economy was terrible, Vietnam ended but still hung over the culture, Watergate, Three Mile Island, Iranian hostage crisis, cold war threatening to turn hot at any moment, double-digit mortgage rates.... and Disco.

Definitely not the 70's. I think the most recent age that might have counted as hopeful was really between the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) through the beginning of the GWOT (9/11/2001). So basically the 90's.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#204

Post by weird-eye-issue »

Gigachad wrote: post #137
bombcar wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analogies for these things like "hitting a golf ball into a hole in one 5,000 miles away" are always fun. I like starting from the fact that Ptolemy was able to get the accuracy of the "motions of the heavens" down so well that it took more than a thousand years to get observations that showed discrepancies. The math, it maths.

I feel like it’s “easier” with space math because there’s so little to interfere with the course. With a golf ball, the basic math is easy, but the slightest bit of wind throws it off way beyond the acceptable error, and you can’t model all the wind perfectly.

Not a great analogy because there actually is interference and golf balls aren't typically monitored and course corrected during flight

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#205

Post by WalterBright »

ksymph wrote: post #162
areoform wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 possibl…

Nice article, although I'm not so sure about this part: > There’s a reason why there wasn’t an Apollo 18, or 19 and 20. Even though funding had been secured, an executive decision was made to kill the program early, because LoC was inevitable. Was funding really secure? I believe that was the main sticking point; a quick search [0] seems to confirm this, and the John Young quote below backs it up: "Even if they’d had…

> one more known source of risk to eliminate.

How could they have eliminated that risk?

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#207

Post by birksherty »

simplyluke wrote: post #118
llbbdd wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think especially online there's a lot of emphasis on "everything is wrong". A mission like this is hard to ignore and highlights the bias. On the whole, despite setbacks, we continue.

If you want to dispel a bit more of the ever-pervasive online pessimism bias, read up on global rates of hunger the last time we flew to the moon (1972) vs now. The reality is, for all the problems we face today, there's no sane answer other than today to the question "when would you prefer to be born as a random person on earth"

Nope. Not from usa. I was born in 80s and would like to stay before 2000.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#208

Post by rvnx »

pdonis wrote: post #171
roughly wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My father, who flew combat missions for the Navy in Vietnam and then became a test pilot, told me after the loss of Columbia that if he had had a chance to make that flight and spend 7 days in Earth orbit, even knowing that he'd burn up on reentry, he'd have done it.

One way to see it:

  1) Eventually you will die, no matter what. It can be the most mundane thing. Slipping on a ketchup splatter can cause great damage for example.

  2) It's a profession where you intentionally kill people, so, that changes the calculation for your own risk.

  3) It's a unique opportunity.
(and potentially)

  4) Gives a sense of living / be in history books for his family.
So you have a possibility of a guaranteed exciting life for a death that you anyway will have, but doing something you love, it's not too bad.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#209

Post by WalterBright »

atherton94027 wrote: post #62
irjustin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

This was the farthest humans ever travelled from earth, even farther than apollo 13. Intuitively the farther you go the higher the risks are

Landing on the moon is enormously riskier than simply going further out.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#210

Post by willis936 »

ggm wrote: post #138
da_chicken wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than that, people today seem to be saturated with sarcasm. It's especially tragic with younger people who seem to have no experience with handling genuine sincerity. They laugh nervously at it, as if they're unfamiliar with how to handle someone saying what they actually think and feel.

It's fully scripted. The hokum is pre-planned.

The questions from the news agencies and their responses are not scripted. I encourage you to listen to the Q&As the astronauts and ground crew had during the mission and judge their character on that. You won't find any public figure / politician with any amount of media training that even comes close to their level of genuine humanism, humility, and professionalism.
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