Impressive mission but I feel it's not capturing the public attention because it's actually a step back from the mission 50 years ago when they actually landed men on the moon with tech that was orders or magnitude simpler and less powerful.
Artemis II safely splashes down
281–290 of 475 posts
Re: Artemis II safely splashes down
#282Wild 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.
I give you Apollo 16:
Re: Artemis II safely splashes down
#283Amazing, congrats! Why where they hoisted by heli and not ‘just’ sail to the mother ship (and hoisted there)?
Re: Artemis II safely splashes down
#284Earlier 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?
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…
Well said.
> We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new.
It's absolutely wild to me that we went from inventing flying machines to putting people on the freaking moon in the span of a human lifetime. What we've accomplished with technology in the last 500 years, let alone in the last century, is nothing short of remarkable.
But, yes, in the grand scheme of things, we're still highly primitive. What's holding us back isn't our ingenuity, but our primitive instincts and propensity towards tribalism and violence. In many ways, we're not ready for the technology we invent, which should really concern us all. At the very least our leaders should have the insight to understand this, and guide humanity on a more conservative and safe path of interacting with technology. And yet we're not collectively smart enough to put those people in charge. Bonkers.
Re: Artemis II safely splashes down
#285Impressive mission but I feel it's not capturing the public attention because it's actually a step back from the mission 50 years ago when they actually landed men on the moon with tech that was orders or magnitude simpler and less powerful.
I think it you ask the average person they're more surprised that people haven't been going to the moon for the past 50 years. In people's minds it's a solved problem and it's been boring for decades now. If supersonic air travel came back it would only interest people because of reduced journey times. But this doesn't even have anything that directly benefits people so they don't care.
Re: Artemis II safely splashes down
#286I had to explain to my wife and kids (not that I'm in this field, but I also have to remind myself) that we are able to pinpoint where the craft will land, when it will land down to the minute, because of ... just ... math. And we're able to get them there and back because of science. It all boils down to equations that describe the world accurately, and a way of experimentation, iteration, thinking that gets us all…
I'd add a caveat to this.
We can do this because of war.
We know where it will land accurately because that maths and physics has been sharpened with butt loads of data. Even the reentry blackout has links to war in Plasma Stealth[0].
That data was mostly obtained because we want to know where our ICBM warheads will land. And where the enemies ICBM warheads will land so we can work on the problem of shooting them down.
The Russian Kinzhal missile can hit targets at mach-10, with a plasma aura making it's terminal phase hard to track on Radar. But after some data was collected Patriot missile systems were able to intercept about 1 in 3 air launched Kinzhal missiles. Then minor terminal adjustments were introduced and interception fell to about 1 in 20. Now there's a constant cat and mouse game going on in Ukraine.
On the one hand that's a good thing, our combative efforts being sublimated into curiosity of the world.
On the other hand, we still put far more effort into furthering our ability to destroy the world.
Re: Artemis II safely splashes down
#287Glad 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?
Come on! No one is forced to get on the rocket. If you don’t think it’s worth it, don’t go!
From a social perspective, I would recommend to think of the average death per capita of an effort, which is effectively nil for Artemis (very few astronauts vs us population) compared to generating electricity with coal, which kills many annually.
Re: Artemis II safely splashes down
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
1 hour 29 minutes seems excessive to extract the astronauts; if any of them _did_ have a medical issue they'd be in for a long wait. The commentary said that the initial problems with the boats approaching Integrity was due to an unexpected swell. Unexpected, in the Pacific? Edit: all of the Apollo missions, except 8, had their stabilization collars inflated in under 20 minutes. With Integrity today it took nearly an…
I also like how they waffled on about how winching them up to a helicopter was the fastest option, when they obviously could have shaved an hour off the recovery time by simply having them step out onto the waiting boats! Having worked for various government agencies for a while I've learned to recognise the signs of the "We're following the procedure whether it makes sense or not, dammit!" attitude you get with larg…
I wondered about that. Winching someone who can barely walk and is wearing a spacesuit into a helicopter over choppy water is safer and quicker than parking them on a motor boat and sailing back to the mothership?
What was the real reason? Tradition? Lack of imagination? Photo opportunities?
The rest was great tho.
Re: Artemis II safely splashes down
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was wondering about that, so I looked up the heat shield issues. It seems like their solution was very defensible and there was every reason to believe it would work out just fine. The plan that did not work as they wanted had a new idea, a double re-entry, and when the results were concerning they backed off to using a traditional single re-entry. That seems like a legitimate fix?
Scott Manley went into the details in a recent video. The reason the heat shield failed was due to gas buildup inside the ablative material. This was due to the skip reentry profile they used, where the craft does a single skip (as in skipping stones) during reentry. The high bounce caused the shield to be heated enough that the heat penetrated the material causing gas release but not enough that the material ablated…
No doubt there are people looking at the heat shield right now and saying "Hmmm."
I am very curious about what they're seeing, and how well the get-it-over-with solution worked.
It was a bold move and the results will be fascinating.
Re: Artemis II safely splashes down
#290Earlier 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?
It honestly says something about how absurdly risk averse our society has become that an 1/30 chance of death is considered too high for a literal moonshot. You can advertise a 1/3 rate of slowly choking in vacuum and I bet you will still get a five mile long queue of people signing up for the mission. If you want a historical comparison, over 200 men left with Magellan on his voyage around the globe and only 40 retu…
Agreed, but people were often forced into those conditions. Or were forced to make an impossible survival decision.
Were Magellan’s men volunteers? For example, in the incident with The Wager, 1,980 men left on 6 ships, and only 188 survived. Men of the original men were press-ganged (kidnapped to crew these ships), and a lot of them were even taken from an infirmary and not in great health. And, of course, conditions were pretty terrible.
So yeah, we’re more risk adverse… and also a lot better at keeping people alive. I think most people would not have signed up for some of these really risky endeavors if they knew the true risk.