Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Artemis II safely splashes down

cbsnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 475 posts

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#371

Post by Nifty3929 »

Someone wrote: post #325
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. Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle Do you have a link? I’m asking because it is very easy to make mistakes when comparing risks. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725961 translates that into “That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die.” If that interpretation is correct, given Artemis has a crew of four, that looks more like…

I'm pretty sure that the chances that one dies in a mission is nearly the same as the chance that they all die. Very high correlation approaching 1.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#372

Post by pdonis »

rvnx wrote: post #208
pdonis wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gu…

> It's a profession where you intentionally kill people

Not being an astronaut (or being a test pilot, for that matter). That's the context in which he was speaking.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#373

Post by mvkel »

I am trying hard to keep a positive attitude about this mission but I keep feeling like it's vanity marketing for America, more than science, or pushing the frontier. "Hey everyone, remember when we got to the moon FIRST? Good times." Ultimately, we did all of this a half century ago. The lasting impression is a reminder of how underfunded the space program has been all these decades. Why go to the moon again? The answer in the 60s was: because it's there. And that was enough. But now? Is it -really- a training ground for Mars?

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#374

Post by [deleted] »

j_bum wrote: post #174
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…

Thanks for sharing your article - very well written. I am stunned to see that LoC risk assessment. I kept wondering to myself over the past week, “will this be the last USA-supported human space travel if these astronauts don’t survive?” I’d have a hard time imagining the general public would support any future missions if they hadn’t survived. These astronauts are some elite humans. My respect for them is even great…

[deleted]

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#375

Post by johnbarron »

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…

Jared? Sounds familiar, is it a friend of yours? If yes should you not disclose it? The casual first name use basis is a tell. You wouldn't say "glad Bill is cooking something up" about Gates. This kind of parasocial familiarity with billionaires is how PR becomes indistinguishable from fan fiction.

Isaacman is a space tourist, not an astronaut. He is the CEO of Shift4 Payments, which processes payments for SpaceX. Musk, who spent hundreds of millions on Trump's campaign, got him installed as NASA administrator. That's not meritocracy, it's transactional politics. If you or I had billions, we could also buy seats on rockets.

"His own version of Gemini" is wild spin. Polaris was Isaacman paying SpaceX to fly him on SpaceX hardware. He had no engineering role, no mission design input. Calling it "his Gemini program" is like calling a chartered yacht trip "your naval program." Naming something after a historic NASA program doesn't make it one.

The risk decision process was theater. Isaacman reportedly had already decided Artemis II would proceed, then invited Dr. Charlie Camarda and others to a "transparent review" that was anything but.

When the conclusion is predetermined and dissenting experts are brought in for optics, that's not risk management, it's liability laundering.

On the 1-in-30 mortality figure, framing astronauts making it home as something to be "grateful" for, rather than questioning why we're accepting odds 3x worse than the Shuttle (which killed 14 people), is a strange way to celebrate progress...

We should be glad the crew is safe. We should also be honest that the person running NASA got there through financial entanglements with SpaceX, not aerospace credentials

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#376

Post by atonse »

mvkel wrote: post #373

I am trying hard to keep a positive attitude about this mission but I keep feeling like it's vanity marketing for America, more than science, or pushing the frontier. "Hey everyone, remember when we got to the moon FIRST? Good times." Ultimately, we did all of this a half century ago. The lasting impression is a reminder of how underfunded the space program has been all these decades. Why go to the moon again? The an…

Judging by the fact that almost nobody in the mainstream talked about this until a week leading up to the mission, and that it’s been 10+ years in the making, I doubt it’s some vanity thing.

I don’t see how anything as substantive like this can be seen as “vanity” (unless you mean to count that as a bonus).

It’s amazing to see NASA doing newer great things (Webb, Mars probes, all have been incredibly cool too, but manned stuff always hits a different note). Yes they’re way more expensive than SpaceX, I get all that. But it’s nice to see something so overwhelmingly positive and a true example of human ingenuity, collaboration, and bravery, that we need a lot more of that to remind us these days of the positive times we live in.

And the fact that we did this 50 years ago, at least to me, means I appreciate even more how we got it done with that age’s technology and knowledge the first time.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#377

Post by areoform »

ksymph wrote: post #346
areoform wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was funding really secure? It's worth breaking down what the "funding" means over here. As this is a depressing topic for me, I'm going to be a bit playful. :) The Saturn V's existed. Saturn V serial numbers were designated as S-5## where # is an increment from 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Launch_history SA-513 was repurposed from Apollo 18 to Skylab. SA-514 was meant for Apollo 19. They put it on disp…

Thank you for the in depth reply! You make a very good point, and the timing of Apollo 13 with the budget decision is pretty damning, I'm convinced. I will point out however that the budget was congressionally-mandated, and no funds were allocated for moon landings as they were in previous years; it would have been illegal to use funds dedicated to other areas for moon landings. Maybe I'm being overly pedantic here,…

No, that's a great point. Let me rephrase it, they couldn't go to congress in 1970 and say, "hey, we've got $2.3B in other parts of NASA, here's what we're happy to cut so that we can keep Apollo."

Apollo 18, 19 and 20 were cancelled in 1970. 3+ years ahead of Apollo 18. Apollo 17 didn't happen until December 1972.

The US couldn't plug this funding "shortfall" in 3+ years out of the many, many parts of NASA?

It's pretty clear that the decision to kill Apollo had been made. The money is just how they chose to do it so that the POTUS didn't have to go on record cancelling Apollo. There was no room for negotiation. POTUS and Congress had decided that Apollo needed to die and so it died. How it died was relevant only so far as to serve as a mechanism to save face.

    > the 'funding was secured' as in the article implies the decision to cancel the remaining programs lay with NASA leadership
Yes, you're right. I just don't know how else to put it. The capital outlays for the components of the missions had already been committed to ahead of time. The physical capital was present; the main cost of the missions; those assets existed / were in place. I don't know what the right language is over here.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#378

Post by antonvs »

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…

> I wonder sometimes if that’s another thing to toss in the Fermi paradox bucket

Here we are, half a century after the first moon landing, doing a flyby of the moon in preparation for landing and supposedly for establishing a base there that makes no sense. We’re not even close to being able to send humans to the nearest planets, and even if we did send people to Mars, in one of the most pointlessly dangerous and expensive missions in history, it’d be extremely unlikely to lead even to a base, let alone a settlement.

Yet with all that, people still talk about the Fermi paradox as though it’s a mystery.

It makes me think we’re really dealing with a kind of religious belief. Religion backfills reality with comforting fantasies, like life after death. In this case, the fantasy that there are much more advanced, interstellar spacefaring civilizations than ours elsewhere in the galaxy. This implies that humans too could one day become an interstellar species (with enough grit and determination and pulling back on the control stick and yelling, I suppose!) But somehow, mysterious effects prevent us from ever observing any evidence of this belief.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#379

Post by k33n »

rootusrootus wrote: post #96
mgfist wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we've all become to numb and jaded. This is the first moon mission in 50 years and the furthest any human has ever been from Earth.

Indeed, the world is so grim these days that I welcome even a little bit of relief, a little bit of hope for a better future.

Only the internet is grim. The actual world is better than its ever been.

Re: Artemis II safely splashes down

#380

Post by k33n »

throwaway290 wrote: post #260

With 1 in 30 chance of death can somebody help me understand why this had to be a manned mission?

It was essentially a dress rehearsal for next year's mission, which will result in an actual moonwalk. And then in 2028 we will go back for a second moonwalk and foundation delivery to start building an actual moon base. Artemis is a really cool and systematic set of missions that ultimately will result in a permanent human presence on the moon.
Post reply on HN