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Artemis II safely splashes down

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Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#291

Post by DrBazza »

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?

Crossing the Atlantic and the discovery of the Americas? How many deaths were acceptable during that initial period of exploration? That’s where we still are with space.

And the atmospheric entry is still the same as 1969. Physics doesn’t change.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#292

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#293

Post by imtringued »

Teever wrote: post #272
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…

> It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved. That's not true at all. It is entirely within current technical and fiscal means to launch a much more robust and powerful craft that is capable of goign to the moon and returning with lower velocity by sending it up in pieces with Falcon 9 (Heavy) and assembling it in LEO before launchin…

Given current levels of technology, this would require docking with a series of space tugs. Not impossible, but Blue Origin is the only organisation working on this at a meaningful scale.

There was also Nautilus-X which never made it beyond the concept stage.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#294

Post by ErroneousBosh »

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…

> The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.

I think they did think of it as risky and acknowledge that it was risky, they just had a different tolerance for risk.

The Artemis mission is "more difficult" - you're firing folk way out into space and hoping you hit a fairly narrow channel where they swing around the Moon back towards you, and not just keep going straight on out beyond any hope of rescue, or biff it in hard becoming a new lunar crater. You've got to carry a lot more fuel, and a lot more technology. You're going to have them up there in a much smaller space than the Shuttle for a lot longer.

The Shuttle by contrast was kind of "proven technology" by the end of its life, and we really should have developed some new stuff off it. Columbia first flew in 1981 but "the keel was laid" as it were in 1975! Think about the massive shifts in technology between 1975 and 1981, and then maybe 1981 and 1987.

I remember someone saying in 1981 that their new car had more computer power controlling the engine than took man to the Moon (the first time round!), and my late 90s car has more computer power than took man to the Moon in the instrument cluster. Your car is probably a lot newer, and has about as much computer power as NASA had on the ground for the Apollo missions just to operate the buttons on the steering wheel that turn the radio up and down, in a chip the size of your fingernail, that costs the price of a not very good coffee.

The main failure modes of space travel have always been "we can't get the astronauts back down", "we can't get the astronauts back down at less than several times the speed of sound", or "the astronauts are now a rapidly expanding cloud of hot fried mince". What's changed is the extent to which we accept that, I guess.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#295

Post by jiggawatts »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #288
jiggawatts wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To play devil's advocate against my own argument: The nearest ship was about 5 km away, which is a decently long boat ride. In choppy waters with a small boat that could be less than ideal for someone who may be injured, weak from an extended stay in microgravity, etc. I assume the plan -- written months or years before the landing -- also had to factor in the possibility that the ships wouldn't have been so close. They did mention several times that the landing was unusually accurate, so it is entirely possible that their pre-planned helicopter ride would have made a lot more sense if they were, say, 20+ km away instead. You don't want dozens of people improvising the procedure in the middle of choppy waters with bad comms, so the best thing to do is to just follow the plan, even if it looks a bit absurd on camera.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#296

Post by adrian_b »

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.

Some parts of the US economy may have been terrible (perhaps due to the increased oil price, which became closer to the true cost of oil than that of the previous cheap oil, which was so cheap because it was basically stolen by USA), but in another parts of the world the economy was great in comparison with what followed after 1980.

Moreover, even in the US, the seventies were the greatest time for the electronics and computers industries, when the greatest amount of innovations have been made.

After 1980, there have been huge advances, but all of them were completely predictable, i.e. the electronics and computing industries settled on an evolution path that was well defined for a few decades, with very few surprises.

The seventies were much wilder, when much more diverse things have been tried (and many of those have failed) and they were surely hopeful, especially in their second half.

During the seventies, there were a lot of US companies that I liked and I was convinced that if I bought something from them that was mutually beneficial, because they really tried to make products that fulfilled as well as possible the needs of their customers, while ensuring a decent and reasonable profit for the vendor.

Nowadays there exists no big company in the entire world from which I can buy a product without feeling that this is an adversarial transaction, where they try as hard as they can to fool me into paying as much as possible for something that is worth as less as possible.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#297

Post by mrec »

pibaker wrote: post #236
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?

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…

Or the extreme casualty rates experienced by the (mostly very young) East India Company clerks in Calcutta. From Dalrymple's The Anarchy:

"Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and two-thirds of the Company servants who came out never made it back – fewer still in the Company’s army, where 25 per cent of European soldiers died each year."

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#298

Post by redman25 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #288
jiggawatts wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is 10 days enough to make walking difficult?

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#299

Post by throwaway132448 »

dehrmann wrote: post #238
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?

We stopped going to the moon because it's a vanity project. It's expensive, risky, and there isn't much more science to do or that can't be done by robots.

Hopefully this time we can keep going for what we can do for engineering instead of what we can do for science.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#300

Post by throwaway132448 »

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?

There are over 8 billion people on earth.
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